Page 89 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

76 WANNING SUN
migrant women from poor regions and provinces has recently ended, with the arrival of
the local baomu in the labour market.
The downsizing of state enterprises, as a result of the nationwide economic and
industrial restructuring, resulted in women workers in the city being laid off en masse.
These women, mostly in their early and late middle age, suddenly found themselves
jobless and with a family to support. Unable to compete with young women on account
of their appearance, because a youthful appearance is highly sought after in the retail and
hospitality industries, and too old to be retrained and re-skilled for other types of work,
many former factory workers, contemplated doing the ‘unthinkable’—that is, becoming a
maid in spite of the enduring social stigma associated with baomu. Though small in
number, local baomu in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities have became a noted social
phenomenon simply because this trend represents a fundamental shift in people’s values
regarding work, self-worth and money
In Professor Tian and his Twenty-eight Baomu, a well-known television drama series about
the life of baomu and her relationship to her employers, a professor has a bedridden
mother who is in need of constant attention. Professor Tian has at different stages
employed twenty-eight maids, but, for various reasons, each of these maids fails to
perform satisfactorily. Featuring prominently in the narrative of the recurrent arrival of
the new maid and the departure of the old one is the professor’s daughter, an unhappy,
laid-off factory worker who is portrayed as haughty, snooty and reliably ‘picky’ with each
maid Professor Tian hires. The last episode ends, poignantly if not convincingly, with
Tian’s own daughter appearing on his door-step, much to the shock of everyone in the
family, as the twenty-eighth maid, who, having been embarrassed by her own previous
‘status-conscious’ behaviour and her downward social mobility, decides to ‘turn over a
new leaf’ and serve her own family while getting paid for it.
Local baomu are known to have natural advantages over maids from elsewhere. They
have local knowledge and are believed to understand better the local ways of doing things;
they are mostly mothers themselves so are considered to be more experienced in
household matters and child-care; furthermore, since they are local residents, employers
do not need to provide accommodation. Because of these, local baomu command a higher
wage. In Beijing, a local baomu can expect to earn from 500 to 800 yuan, while a wai lai
mei baomu (a maid from outside the town) can only expect to make around 300 yuan. In
Shanghai, a local part-time maid or cleaner can expect to be paid 5 to 6 yuan an hour,
whereas her counterpart from Anhui can only expect around 3 to 4 yuan an hour.
Xu, a medical professional working for a foreign pharmaceutical company in Shanghai
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has a local maid. Most of her friends also have local maids. Xu told me that local maids
command a higher price, and they are not as easily available as Anhui maids. According to
Xu, there are several reasons for this discrepancy. Local maids are more ‘expensive’
because they tend to be older, more experienced with household work including
childcare, and more ‘reliable’. They are also thought to be more capable of running a
modern household, such as operating an automatic washing machine or programming a
microwave. Another reason for her preference of Shanghai maids is their local origin.
Anhui maids come from somewhere else, have no permanent addresses, and can leave
without a trace. Xu mentioned stories of maids from outside Shanghai stealing or ‘ripping