Page 88 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

THE MAID IN CHINA 75
Contrary to Shanghai, ‘home’ affords them a strong sense of belonging, and such,
evokes emotional identification; however, ‘home’ is also a place to go away from in order
to have a better future.
These seemingly contradictory feelings about the city and home are echoed by a
number of younger women working as part-time cleaners in Shanghai. These young
women talk about their homesickness, but at the same time remember with distaste the
ubiquitous muddiness of the village roads back home. The ambivalence that marks the
spatial imagination of these women seem to both articulate and embody an irreconcilable
tension they come to experience in the process of becoming ‘modern’. As objects to be
‘civilised’ and modernised, and as subjects who aspire to be modern, they articulate a
strong yearning for home but at the same time acknowledge the irresistible power and
seduction that modernity holds for them. The maid in each case has to negotiate a spatial
relationship marked by an essential inequality between the periphery and the centre.
Moreover, she is confronted with the (sometimes frightening, sometime exciting)
prospect of departing from her familiar space and arriving in unknown territory
Furthermore, the maid is constantly compelled to negotiate the desire and anguish of
being simultaneously ‘here’ and ‘there’, and the sense of loss brought about by the
displacement. As Chen Shuying said simply but eloquently, ‘Of course home is good, but
I have grown more and more used to the city.’

From translocal to local: New competition in the baomu
market

The profession of baomu, until recently, has always been an implicitly translocal practice,
involving women from rural, poor and peripheral regions travelling to metropolitan areas
for the prospect of making money or starting a new life in the city. As argued earlier,
these journeys of upward social mobility inevitably go hand in hand with spatial
dislocation and displacement. For this reason, ‘rural women’s presence in the city’, as
Louisa Schein succinctly points out in her discussion of the migrant body, ‘can serve as
dislocated signifiers of places’. This is because, as she argues, ‘places are not only
constituted by their location and physical features’, but also by the ‘specific, often
regulated, forms of bodies that inhabit them’ (Schein 2002:9). My own analysis of the
representation of the rural female body, on Chinese television and films, also suggests that
the body of the female peasant in an urban space is crucial to the narrative of modernity
and transnational capitalism, as it functions discursively to make class interests invisible by
erecting the familiar tropes of city versus country, tradition versus modernity
(Sun 2002b).
Once upon a time, the profession of baomu was considered the lowest in the job
market, since it was associated with servitude and docility. For many urban residents, to
become a baomu was to lose face (mianzi), and therefore it was usually a last resort when
other means of eking out a living were not available. From 1982 to 1995, there were
practically no local baomu in Beijing. Economic realities, however, proved to be a
powerful factor in bringing about the sea change. The monopoly of the baomu market by