Page 90 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

THE MAID IN CHINA 77
off’ employers and then vanishing. In contrast, local maids are bona fide residents and
‘easy to track down’ (zhi geng zhi di, literally meaning that one has ‘intimate knowledge of
their roots and background’).
The emphasis on fixed address in the selection criteria for a reliable and trustworthy
maid testifies to the double bind facing the wai lai mei maid. The maid from Anhui or
Sichuan has to leave home and remain mobile in order to be employable, but she is
deemed a less competitive and trustworthy ‘product’ than local maids because of her (dis)
location. In this sense, the Anhui or Sichuan maid—although the Sichuan maid has more
currency than the Anhui maid in Beijing—is in a way bearing the brunt of her place of
origin being perceived as a pre-modern and backward place, since she has less bargaining
power than her Shanghai or Beijing counterpart. The advantage of being local rather than
translocal is also evidenced in the fact that most domestic service recruitment agencies
with a transnational clientele usually favour local maids over wai lai mei.
Maids in Foreigners’ Homes, a popular television drama series screened in China recently,
for instance, tells the stories of three maids all working for foreigners (including people
from Taiwan and Hong Kong) living in an expensive suburb of Shanghai. One of them is a
wai lai mei, and the other two are local laid-off factory workers. Throughout the story, the
wai lai mei, a hardworking and honest young woman, is seen to have benefited from her
two friends, who patiently teach her ‘modern’ and ‘civilised’ ways of behaviour, the key
to gaining acceptance in the foreigner’s house. She is often told to leave behind her
‘unclean’ habits and ‘coarse’ manners of the countryside since she is now in the
transnational space of Shanghai.

Conclusion
The experience of leaving her village home and becoming a maid in the city has indeed set
the maid on an irreversible journey towards modernity Again, as an object to be ‘civilised’
by the modernisation process, and as a subject who aspires to become ‘modern’, the maid
displays a spatial imagination marked by contradiction and ambivalence regarding both
‘home’ and the ‘city’. In addition, although her primary goal of being in the city is to
make money, her work and life experience in the city also seem to have the potential of
enabling her to take on modern views regarding subjects such as equality, privacy,
freedom and individual rights. She is by no means, as many urban residents imagine, merely
the object of a civilising process, voiceless, inarticulate and reassuringly pre-modern.
This point having been made, it is also clear that although the baomu features
prominently as the pioneer of the nationwide rural-urban migration in the grand narrative
of economic development and modernisation, the work of the baomu, more than many
other ways of making a living, is subject to a regime of difference, marked along the lines
of gender, class and place. For an increasing number of families in the Chinese city, having
a maid—whether part-time or full-time live-in—is either an affordable and necessary way
of coping with the duties of a modern household, or a convenient and common way of
signifying one’s consumption power and social status in a modern society. The
professionalisation of the baomu, seen in the transformation from baomu to the domestic
worker, arose with the emergence of globalisation and the Chinese market economy In