Metonymic Figures: Cultural Representations of Foreign Domestic Helpers and Discourses of Diversity in Hong Kong

The number of households in Hong Kong that hire a Foreign Domestic Helper (henceforth FDH) has steadily increased since the early 1980s when the first short-term visas and work-contracts were issued to meet the growing demand for domestic workers. In the last population census of 2011, over 220,000 domestic households included an ethnic minority who was an FDH, that is, nearly 10 % of all households in Hong Kong. Notably, nearly 72 % of all households in Hong Kong with one or more ethnic minorities included an FDH (Hong Kong Government 2011, 11). In 99 % of cases, foreign domestic helpers are female (Hong Kong Government 2011, 20). They predominantly hail from the Philippines and Indonesia and in smaller numbers from Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. In 2013, there were around 320,000 FDHs, constituting around 3 % of the total population of Hong Kong and just under half of the territory’s total ethnic minority population (SCMP Topics). It is therefore evident, that any discussion of diversity in Hong Kong must consider this group, that is diverse in and of itself.

In Asia discourses of diversity have evolved from the juncture of complex historical, political, and cultural factors. Addressing multiculturalism in Asia, Will Kymlicka and Baogang He recognize the simultaneous need to “identify the legacies of precolonial and colonial traditions for managing diversity, their reinterpretation under conditions of postcolonial independence and globalization, their relationship to Western liberal models of multiculturalism and to emerging international norms of human and minority rights, and their long-term prospects” (Kymlicka and He 2005, 2). For best practice, they emphasize that universal human rights instruments and Western-derived rhetoric must be balanced with attention to “local traditions, national mythologies, regional practices, and religious doctrines” (Kymlicka and He 2005, 2). Moreover, as a means of nuancing the understanding and application of diversity in Asia, some analysts have proposed the concept of “vernacular communitarianism” (Chua, 2003, 175) to draw a contrast between the individualism and competitiveness often attributed, rightly or wrongly, to Western liberal-democratic political systems. As opposed to state communitarianism which may often function as a veneer for authoritarian forms of organization and control, “vernacular communitarianism” denotes the sense of obligation amongst people to their local community, be it religious, ethnic, or linguistic. Indeed, Daniel A. Bell and Nicola Piper draw upon such a distinction in their discussion of diversity and rights in relation to foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. They argue that rather than solely focusing on liberal-democratic conceptions of rights, it is important to consider an ingrained consciousness of Confucian ethics when examining the expectations of both migrant workers and employers. Discussing “best case” situations, Bell and Piper suggest a shift to focusing on mutual concern and caring rather than solely the more legalistically definable values of fairness and respect when assessing the situation of foreign domestic workers. Such a shift is dependent on a flexible concept of family attributed to Confucian values wherein ethical familial relationships may be extended to include nonfamily members (Bell and Piper 2005, 216, 218). Noting that in the context of domestic work, the employer-employee relationship takes place within the home, Bell and Piper acknowledge that “[i]f the concern is to improve the welfare of FDWs, the informal rules of engagement within the home are often just as fundamental, if not more so, than the set of rights guaranteed by law” (Bell and Piper 2005, 201).

With these important qualifications in mind, what does “diversity” mean in Hong Kong? As part of the process of establishing Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region of China, following the handover from British rule in 1997, and with the objective of clarifying the identity of the postcolonial and global Chinese city, Hong Kong branded itself as “Asia’s World City.” “Diversity” is one of the core values and attributes defined by the Hong Kong Government and is defined in the following terms: “Pluralistic and tolerant, Hong Kong has a rich culture and traditions, and a modern cityscape that contrasts with a rural landscape full of varied plant and animal life” (Hong Kong Government, “BrandHK”). As such, the concept of diversity in Hong Kong seems to relate equally to multiculturalism, cultural heritage, and bio-diversity. The connections made between the three dimensions of diversity in the city’s branding are quite bewildering and raise questions about the meaning and significance of diversity in Hong Kong identity, culture, and politics. While it may not be a concept that is carefully interrogated and delineated, the allure of diversity periodically catches the public imagination. For example, in March 2017, a police officer whose family is of Pakistani origin was hailed as a hero and became an overnight social media sensation, when he successfully prevented a man from committing suicide, by virtue of being able to communicate with him in Urdu. Ifzal Zaffar, the policeman, who reportedly speaks Cantonese, English, Punjabi, Putonghua and Urdu, is one of eleven graduates of Project Gemstone launched in 2013 as a mentoring programme for ethnic minority officers with the objective of recruiting greater numbers from the growing population of ethnic minority residents in Hong Kong (Blundy 2017).

Yet, the case of Zaffar, involving a young and photogenic figure in the public sphere is a success story for diversity whose energies are not reflected in most of the cases relating to Hong Kong’s largest ethnic minority population of migrant workers. A counteracting example that registers the tone and nature of public discourse on diversity in Hong Kong is an image from the New General Studies P3 textbook titled Living in Hong Kong (Figure 1) which went viral on social media in 2014. In a chapter titled “Racial Harmony,” students are asked to link occupation to ethnicity. The textbook is clearly based upon problematic ethnic stereotypes, particularly in the equation of “Filipino” with “Domestic Helper,” which shuts down alternative associations of ethnicity as well as gender and class variations. However, the primary school exercise does reveal the degree to which the domestic helper as Filipina dominates cultural representations of the foreign worker figure. This is related to the fact that, historically, the largest number of foreign domestic workers have come from the Philippines, although Indonesians now nearly equal Filipinos in the number of migrant workers to the territory (Hong Kong Government 2011, 17). A second satirical image (Figure 2) appeared during the public debate generated by the school textbook and contests stereotypes about ethnic minorities. It poses the challenge: “Which minority community is excluded from the census because they’re not real people?” (hongwrong.com, 2014) referring to the fact that the FDH is treated as an exceptional case excluded from normative census groups because foreign domestic workers are not granted citizenship no matter how long they reside and work in Hong Kong. The FDH is thus excluded from legitimated conceptions of Hong Kong identity, not to mention access to public housing, education, and political representation, and constitutes a disenfranchised class. Some analysts, such as Bell and Piper (2005, 213–214), astutely point out the ways in which equal citizenship rights can potentially harm the same group they are meant to protect as they would inevitably restrict the number of opportunities open to migrant workers and thereby impact negatively on their families in their sending countries. While this essay is not the place to debate the implications of this claim about the socio-economic dynamics of migrant contracts, it does aim to open a space for necessary exploration of the hazy concept of diversity in Hong Kong that underpins the socio-political discussion of the city’s culture and identity in relation to its minority population.

Figure 1:

Living in Hong Kong, book 6, new general studies P3 textbook (Educational publishing house ltd).

Figure 2:

The Hong Wrong sub-standard, http://www.hongwrong.com.

In this essay, I seek to uncover what is revealed about discourses of diversity in Hong Kong when we focus on the FDH. I present a varied set of cultural representations of FDHs, including a television programme and advertisements, a work of short literary fiction, online erotic fiction, news reportage on social media, as well as an example of multi-media artwork. Taken together, these examples constitute nodes in the cultural imaginary, that is, the thick fabric of interweaved cultural representations shaping private and public discourse and perception. I focus on the recurrence of metonymic techniques in cultural representations of the FDH. Simply put, I use metonymy to refer to representational techniques and ideological processes in which one element of identity or indeed one ethnic body is used as a substitute for another, for example, according to the school textbook mentioned above, Filipina for domestic helper or vice versa. As such, I argue that representations of the FDH are less about any particular individual or indeed less about any particular ethnic minority than about the anxieties, fears, and desires of the dominant culture which constitutes the substituted/ displaced/ hidden subject of the constructions of the other examined in this paper. As such, my analysis shows how the FDH becomes a critical figure around whom linked questions of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class circulate. I argue that in both the representations of the FDH figure and in the implications of these representational strategies for discourses of diversity in Hong Kong, what is revealed are questions and anxieties about gender, sexuality, and middle-class domesticity in the majority ethnic Chinese population of Hong Kong.

Analysis of metonymy very often occurs in the context of linguistic studies and Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda L. Thornburg’s emphasis that “Metonymy is a cognitive phenomenon—not just a figure of speech—with a considerable role in the organization of meaning” (2010, 236) is pertinent to my analysis within this essay. Postcolonial studies critic Homi Bhabha has articulated the most influential theory of metonymy in relation to the politics of representation within the context of the “ambivalence of colonial discourse.” Metonymic processes are key to Bhabha’s conceptualization of mimicry which, he argues, “conceals no presence or identity behind its mask” (1984, 129). In the complex circuits of identification and disavowal that determine colonial cognitive space, Bhabha finds that figures of mimicry are “the figures of a doubling, the part-objects of a metonymy of colonial desire which alienates the modality and normality of those dominant discourses in which they emerge as ‘inappropriate’ colonial subjects” (1984, 129). The unsettling power of mimicry resides in the “partial presence” or “partial vision of the colonizer’s presence” activated by metonymic processes of identification, representation, and meaning. As such, mimicry is “like camouflage, not a harmonization or repression of difference, but a form of resemblance that differs/defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically.” For Bhabha, the threat of mimicry arises in its revelation that colonial power is based upon a lack of essence, a lack of authorizing identity. Bhabha’s identification of the metonymic processes of “partial representation/recognition of the colonial object” and “authorized versions of otherness” (1984, 129) has proved to be highly influential in analyses of social and cultural hierarchies and power struggles in colonial and postcolonial spaces. I suggest that it is also useful for analyzing the energies, anxieties, fears, and struggles in Hong Kong as a postcolonial, global society, if we replace the colonizer and colonized other with the normative Hong Kong citizen and the foreign domestic worker. To substantiate this kind of correspondence, Chen (1994), for example, has used the notion of a “sub-empire” to analyze the unique and complex positioning of Hong Kong in Asia, foregrounding the territory’s status as a regional economic power that is able to draw upon the resources, including cheap migrant labour, of less developed countries in the region. In Chen’s formulation, Hong Kong stands as a primary node of power within a network of intra-Asian internal colonization.

While further comparison between former colonial hierarchies and current labour relations in Hong Kong is beyond the scope of this essay, I do intend to draw out the critical potential of analyzing metonymic processes in situations which depend upon unequal social, cultural, political, and economic positionalities. As such, I launch my analysis of the imbrication of the FDH in mainstream social and economic issues in Hong Kong through an initial focus on the television comedy sketch “I am Maria” (我係 Maria) which was broadcast for nearly a year in the late 1980s on the popular, long-running variety show “Enjoy Yourself Tonight” (歡樂今宵) on the terrestrial channel Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB).⁽¹⁾ The sketch portrays the trials and tribulations of Maria, played by Elvina Kong (江欣燕), a Filipina helper in a Hong Kong Chinese household. In an episode called “A Story of a Love Letter,” Maria reveals to her employer that she has a pen-friend, a Chinese man, who she is planning to meet. However, she has lied to this man and pretended that she herself is a tai tai (wealthy married woman) and has used her female employer’s name as her pen-name. Maria begs her female employer to swap roles with her so that she will not have to reveal her deception. Later, Maria’s male employer returns home with his friend to find the love letter written by Maria’s pen-friend and somewhat inevitably jumps to the conclusion that the letter is intended for his wife. When he asks Maria if his wife is having an affair, her misunderstanding of his questions leads to a false affirmation. When his wife returns, they have a spirited argument.

The sketch relies on a blunt stereotype of the inept, naïve, foolish, and wily Filipina that others have shown dominates cultural representations of the FDH. For instance, exploring the relationship between cultural representation and social practice up to the late 1990s, Cherry Law finds that representations of Filipina domestic helpers had an “overwhelmingly significant portrayal in newspapers” (1998, 65) rather than in any other medium. Law argues that such media portrayal constitutes an overrepresentation in the sense that portrayals were nearly always tied to negative depictions of crimes and court cases. Conversely, Law notes that positive images and portrayals of a variety of aspects of life were underrepresented. Overall, Law notes a lack of variation of representation in newspaper discourse as well as in visual media such as advertisements in which the Filipina maid is “always a dark-faced girl, [with] thick lips, with curly dark hair, and wearing a petticoat” (1998, 66). Indeed, Law argues that Maria establishes an “iconic” (1998, 67) image for the Filipina domestic worker.

In the television sketch, the stereotype that determines the representation of Maria is the source of comedy, including her absentmindedness and awkwardness, as well as her stilted Cantonese pronunciation and misunderstanding which creates a language barrier that serves to emphasize her cultural difference, the latter of which is represented by the dark make-up or blackface used as a visual signifier of her Filipina ethnicity (Figure 3). Laughter is also provoked at specific moments when Maria’s black make-up slips off onto the cheek of her Chinese suitor; when Maria orders her “Ma’am” around during the role-reversal; when Maria gets caught up in her lies and has to explain why she is “black” while her supposed “brother” is “white”; as well as the slapstick physical scuffle as husband punches wife and wife slaps husband back. Laughter in the “Love Letter” episode depends upon metonymic techniques of doubling and substitution as seen in the role-reversal and mistaken identity plots. The use of blackface itself depends upon metonymy in the form of racial parody. In the portrayal of Maria, humour is generated by the audience’s knowledge that the character of the maid is actually a Chinese actress performing as Filipina. The capacity of blackface to tease, entertain, and shock is shown when the slippage of black make-up onto Maria’s Chinese suitor’s cheek occurs—this moment is both tantalizing and disturbing, a sign of a transgressive pleasure as well as a tainting smear as skin meets skin, suggesting that such intimacy is problematic.

Figure 3:

“I am Maria” (我係 Maria) with inset of Elvina Kong (江欣燕).

Blackface developed as a theatrical practice in the highly popular minstrel shows of nineteenth-century America. In order to perform “black,” white actors would use burnt cork, greasepaint, or shoe polish to darken their skin and would wear woolly wigs and tattered clothes, reifying stereotypes of race and class (Figure 4). As Susan Gubar explains in Racechanges, her study of blackface in American culture, racial masquerade actually has little to do with real African Americans and instead “illuminate[s] the psychology of whites who have evolved through a series of oppositional identities predicated on black Others. The ‘black’ […] operates as a generic commodity constructed by the white imagination for white people” (1997: xv). The analysis of blackface as a commodity that reveals more about the dominant imagination rather than the minority it both figures and disfigures through representation is pertinent to understanding the use of this performative technique in the popular Hong Kong television show. This analysis urges us to consider how the use of metonymic techniques (blackface, role-reversal, mistaken-identity in the example above) to represent FDHs, reveals not the identity of the foreign maid but the anxieties, fears, and desires of the dominant culture with regard to issues including gender roles, socio-economic status, and the shaping of a disciplined and productive labour force. In the case of the “Love Letters” episode, the troubling laughter generated by the exploitation of ethnic stereotype is a diversion from gendered anxieties related to the potentially destabilising role of the woman in the construction of successful middle-class domesticity. Moreover, by presenting the threat of sexual transgression and domestic violence as farce, the sketch seeks to neutralise anxieties about gender roles in the transitioning social, economic, and political context of Hong Kong in the late 1980s.

Figure 4:

Advertisement for minstrel show in America. Library of Congress.

In 1984 the Sino-British Joint Declaration decided the future of the territory and initiated a critical period of political and socio-cultural transition. As Eliza W.Y. Lee explains, this period “led to the production of oppositional discourses on the real meaning of being Chinese and patriotic, and the proliferation of a local Hong Kong identity” and also “elicited discussion on what the postcolonial political system should be like, as issues of democratization, civil liberty, and social justice were reflected on” (2003, 13). Gender roles and relationships both exemplified and constituted currents of flux and transformation. As Lee recognizes, this period saw the rise of a local women’s movement as well as the class polarization of women due to the shift from an industrial and manufacturing economy to a financial and service economy. While educated middle-class women entered the workforce in increasing numbers, many working-class women who had provided the “cheap, unskilled, and flexible labourers that made possible the postwar industrial success” (2003, 6) were not able to adapt to the new economy and were effectively “redomesticated.” Yet, while the traditional patriarchal family had been declining since the 1970s—a trend registered by the rise of the nuclear family, the fall in the birth rate, and in the delayed age of marriage—research by the Equal Opportunities Commission in 1997 into gender equality in Hong Kong showed that “substantial gender inequality still exists in the household division of labour, employment, and community and political participation” (2003, 12).

As the role of women in private and public life continues to evolve and transform in the millennium, shaped by factors including the continual increase in women’s participation in tertiary education, connection to global women’s movements, and greater attention to the working conditions of foreign domestic workers, it is nevertheless surprising and revealing that metonymy continues to significantly shape cultural representations of FDHs in postcolonial and global Hong Kong. In order to understand this residual strategy, we can consider three television advertisements for commodities such as milk, insurance, and the maid as product herself. A Kowloon Dairy advertisement of 2012 plays up the ways in which maternal anxieties fixate on the FDH, both within the heart of domestic space as well as out and about in the public domain. In this ad, the plump, dark, curly-haired figure of the maid dressed in casual clothing, uses a more subdued form of blackface than “Maria” (Figure 5). Yet, the ad exploits the gendered division of labour which sees domestic work transposed from the mother to the maid. Anxiety arises from the mother’s perception that her role is substituted and her presence negated by the helper, for whom the child demonstrates unbridled affection. The crux of the ad is reached when the troublesome doubling of mother and maid collapses through the lure of the “simply tasty” milk which has the power to return filial love and maternal attributes to their rightful owner.

Figure 5:

Kowloon dairy advertisement, 2012.

Similarly, a 2014 Hong Leong Bank insurance advertisement is an homage to “Maria” with blackface, curly wig, and uniform intact and gauche behaviour retained. (Figure 6). In this advertisement, the same male actor plays both maid and employer, thereby constituting a further take on doubling. It is worth noting that following complaints this ad was reworked with a female actress, ironing out the racial and gendered transgressions of the original (Figure 7). Revealingly, when blackface is edited out of the new advertisement, so is the associated performance of clumsiness and cultural difference conveyed through the maid’s accented Cantonese.

Figure 6:

original Hong Leong bank advertisement, 2014.

Figure 7:

edited Hong Leong bank, advertisement 2014.

A final advertisement to consider, by Overseas Employment Centre in 2014, does not use blackface at all, but it does engage in the same kind of metonymic play through doubling and substitution that we have already seen and takes it to a new level (Figure 8). As the early morning sun shines on the iconic Hong Kong skyline, a uniformed contingent of maids is significantly positioned on the very walkways that are, in reality, occupied by FDHs on their rest days. Here, the somewhat robotic line of maids is replicated as far as the eye can see. In this advertisement, doubling or replication is a sign of professionalization. As they press the shirts of Hong Kong’s workforce, the maids’ diversity (i. e. ethnic, linguistic, age-related differentials) is ironed out to allow a desirable and reassuring litany of qualities—enthusiastic, diligent, meticulous, wholehearted—to arise. It is surely noteworthy that the metonymic techniques we first saw in “Maria” are in evidence in each advertisement, repeated and adapted, and thereby revealing insights into key constituents of diversity in Hong Kong, namely ethnicity, gender, and class. Taken together, the advertisements open critical space for an exploration of ethnicity through blackface; gender through the doubling and substitution of female duties and roles; and class through the sartorial marker of uniform, the division of domestic labour, and the professionalization of the maid.

Figure 8:

Overseas employment centre advertisement, 2014.

In her study of migrant workers in Hong Kong, Nicole Constable (2007) has drawn out significant connections between professionalization, discipline, self-discipline, gender, and sexuality that are pertinent to my discussion. Constable discusses the discipline and self-discipline involved in professionalization via Foucault’s (1995) theorisation of “docile bodies” and “covert discipline.” Covert discipline is a modern form that is more subtle and indirect than older forms, for example, that involved in slavery. Covert discipline focuses on the body and bodily practices and involves uninterrupted and constant coercion in order to produce “docile bodies.” In relation to domestic workers, Constable identifies covert discipline in lists of duties and work-related regulations issued by employment agencies rather than enforced by employers. For example, a domestic helper may be more inclined to keep hair short and refrain from wearing lipstick and revealing clothes if guided to do so in the depersonalized agency rather in the home of an employer. In many cases, discipline, whether imposed or self-initiated is related to constructions and perceptions of gender and sexuality, as the above examples suggest. I turn now to consider more fully how the figure of the FDH functions in explorations of gender and sexuality in Hong Kong. I will be tracing a thread that involves the doubling and substitution of gender and sexual roles through reportage in 2015 of domestic workers as sexual predators on news and social media sites, a short story in which domestic work takes on a sexual dimension, and an example of online erotica which fixates on the figure of the foreign domestic helper. In each case, the private and public disciplining of sexuality and gender is critically involved in the representation of the cultural and ethnic other.

In April 2015, Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, Executive Council member, Chair of the New People’s Party, and lawmaker, caused a stir when she made comments about foreign domestic helpers. In an article for Ming Pao (April 17 2015) which was also published on her Facebook page and her blog, she referred to complaints that she had received during her time as security minister from 1998 to 2003. Her Facebook post utilised the provocative questioning headline: “Lots of Filipino maids provide sex services to foreign men?” In her article, she reveals that “foreign women” in Hong Kong had complained to her that the government was “allowing Filipino domestic helpers to seduce their husbands.” Ip criticizes the international media for downplaying “the issue of a large number of Filipino maids being turned into sexual resources for male foreigners” while instead emphasising the misdemeanour of employers and the victimhood of foreign domestic workers. Ip’s comments came at the time when the case of abused Indonesian worker Erwiana Sulistyaningsih was in the news as her employer Law Wan-Tung was sentenced to six years in jail in February 2015 (Lau 2015). Ip’s comments were met with protest by a number of parties: the Philippine Consulate expressed its concern at her “unfortunate choice of words”; the Asian Migrants Coordinating Body rallied in front of the New People’s Party headquarters and demanded an apology while their spokesman, Eman Villanueva, urged the Philippine government to blacklist Ip as an “undesirable person”; Civic Party legislator Claudia Mo accused Ip of discrimination in a letter to the Equal Opportunities Commission and called for an investigation; Leo Tang, secretary of the Hong Kong Federation of Asian Domestic Workers Unions, said Ip’s comments showed she would do anything to get elected as Hong Kong’s next chief executive (ejinsight.com, 2015). In response, Ip stood by her words, demanding: “Why should I apologise? […] I have really received such complaints about the maids and I am only stating facts” (Lam 2015). Yet, she also sought to clarify her original words by saying that “I never [specified] who was ‘seducing’ whom in the article. The purpose of it was to show concern for those Filipino maids and pose a question as to whether they have been exploited” (Tsang 2015).

The damning equation of an entire ethnic minority socio-economic group with manipulative femininity at best and prostitution at worst is, of course, what caused public offense. However, there are other notable dynamics at work here. Ip’s comments involve a series of hierarchical antagonisms: the Filipina maid vs the foreign woman, as well as the implied Chinese female employer vs the foreign female employee, if we take her comments in the context of the Erwiana case. In both cases, these hierarchies suggest the nature of the gendered relationships that are at the heart of private life in Hong Kong households which hire foreign workers. These gendered relationships become a combative domain in which class inequality is rendered an attribute of ethnic difference. Moreover, with the idea that the government should somehow intervene in people’s marriages that Ip uses to explain the complaints she received, there is also a slippage between private and public worlds and the forms of exploitation and discipline related to each. Effectively, the figure of the foreign domestic helper functions as a breach between the private and the public whereby policies made in the public domain have an impact on the most intimate of relationships. The representation of sex as seduction in the private domain through the implied economic relationship of prostitution also problematizes the gendered labour of the ethnic minority as dishonourable, even to a criminal extent. In turn, this may feed into popular perceptions and stereotypes about foreign domestic workers that “enable” some employers to take regulation and discipline to the extreme of abuse. Also notable is the utilisation of this incident in political manoeuvring, both in domestic politics in Hong Kong as well as international relations between Hong Kong and the Philippines. This has fascinating parallels to the earlier case of the Manila bus shooting of Hong Kong tourists in 2010 and the impact upon government policy toward foreign domestic helpers, employer-employee relations, and perceptions of Filipina helpers (Lam, Siu, and But 2013).

In Ip’s comments, “foreignness”—foreign maids, foreign women, foreign men—becomes a medium through which to express anxieties about marital relations, private and public exploitation, and the circulation of different forms of gendered labour in Hong Kong. As such, the exposure of domestic strife in the lives of foreign people becomes a substitute for exploring tensions in the lives of Hong Kong people. In two examples of short fiction that centre on the figure of the foreign domestic helper, we can also see how this “intimate stranger” provides a substitutive body that allows examination of private domestic relationships and other’s subjectivity to be projected upon her. In both stories, as in the Ip episode, the ethnicity and socio-economic status of the domestic worker allow her gender and sexuality to become commodities that are exploited by her employers.

In a short story titled “Leng Lui is for Pretty Lady” (2009) by Malaysian-born author Elaine Chiew, we are introduced to Alina, the Filipina maid of the Kong family in Hong Kong. From the start of the story, we see the metonymic techniques that we are already familiar with from Maria, the advertisements, and even the Ip episode. Alina reflects:

While Mrs Kong’s castoffs have the potential to create a double in her hired help, a self-satisfying image that reflects the ma’am’s charitable impulses towards the maid, what the old clothing actually does is to foreground the lack of fit between the socio-economic status of the two women. Alina’s friend has picked up Cantonese slang and calls her “leng lui” or “pretty lady.” Alina is aware of the economic potential inherent in good looks yet chastises her friends who “cruise for gringos with white skin like sharks […] who will whisk them away to America or London” (2009, 10). Later, however, Alina herself must make a “choice between mute submission or being fired” (2009, 17) as her sexuality becomes a value-laden commodity in the Kong household.

At home with the Kongs, Alina becomes the receptacle of the secrets of domestic life: Mrs Kong drinks White Russians in the afternoon while Mr Kong hides his toenail clippings in a plant-pot. More seriously, Alina discovers that Mrs Kong is fooling around with the young man from the neighbourhood Chinese medicine shop, while Mr Kong, detached from his family, has developed a bizarre attachment to a turnip which he whispers to and even kisses. Her friend suggests to her that knowledge is power: “nothing bad happen to you now, you lucky because you know their secrets” (2009, 14). However, Alina’s intimacy with the private life of her employers does not in fact give her power because of her socioeconomic status. When Mrs Kong absconds on a holiday with her lover, Alina finds herself, by necessity of her role as domestic worker, becoming a substitute for the missing wife and mother, as she says, “I do what I can for the Kongs, who all look amputated as if missing an integral limb and can only hobble from place to place” (2009, 15). Finally, Mr Kong insists that Alina eat with the family, symbolically taking Mrs Kong’s place and in a surrealist comic turn he reveals that the turnip has stood in for his helper, performing an extreme metonymic function, as he has practised his romantic overtures covertly: “Yes, my darling, that turnip is you” (2009, 17). When Mr Kong attempts to kiss Alina, she fights back and at the same moment Mrs Kong returns. The debacle is then translated from the private to the public domain as Alina is sent to jail for the night and is made to realise that whether she likes it or not, she cannot escape the metonymy of pretty amah/ mistress/ prostitute:

In the jail scene, Chiew’s story juxtaposes layers of stereotype in order to show how they lead to the jarring consequence of Alina’s reality—a night in the caged, cold, cement cell. The next morning, however, Mrs Kong returns to collect Alina:

At the moment when she is claimed as a substitute by her female employer, an appropriation that is prompted by her male employer’s sexual needs that are displaced onto his wife’s double, Mrs Kong herself appears as a representation to Alina—a Chinese porcelain doll. While Alina finally gains full awareness of her place in the family, through a painfully won insight into her employer’s conjoined fears and needs, the story suggests through the juxtaposition of gendered and ethnicized stereotype, that both women are similarly trapped due to their positioning in the domestic household.

It is revealing of the pervasiveness of metonymic processes in representations of the ethnic and gendered other in Hong Kong that Chiew’s story can be compared to a story on an online erotica site where bloggers can freely post their creative work. In the story “Housemaid” (菲律賓女傭) a young Chinese male comes home one day to find the flat empty, or so he thinks. The young man lives with his father as his parents have divorced. The only other occupant of their flat is Tina, the Filipina maid. Tina, he says, “is no different from the other domestic helpers in Hong Kong, who are all thin and yet work very diligently.” Tina does have one difference though: she seldom smiles. This is a source of annoyance for the boy’s father, Tina’s employer, who hired what he believed was a smiling maid, another stereotype, from her application photo. The young man understands her unhappiness though: she is only a year or two older than him and far away from family and home. We can infer that he too experiences some of the loneliness of his broken family’s hired help. In the kitchen at home, the young man hears a sound coming from the maid’s quarters and peering closer he discovers: “a woman’s body lying on Tina’s bed […] she moaned, and I was sure that was Tina’s voice.” It is important to note here how Tina’s body and voice are presented as somehow separable from her. The young man spies on Tina pleasuring herself on her bed and is so overcome with desire that he goes to his room to do the same for himself. Suddenly, he senses a presence next to him, Tina of course, who proceeds to take his virginity. The power dynamics in this erotic fantasy are revealing: the young man recognises that Tina is giving him a “precious moment” yet she is also described as “smiling, just like a predator looking at its prey.” There are also darkly comic moments in which Tina’s doubled gender role as both sexual partner and domestic worker fuse. During the act, he refers to her anatomy using food imagery: “I stared at her dumplings and the berries on it. Tina knew me, so she climbed up and fed them to my mouth” and after the sexual act, “she was so thoughtful to even wash the bedcover for me.” Tina does not fail to provide her services in every sense of the word. Even when Tina is literally and figuratively “on top” in relation to the sexual act, she is still a figure of service, she “feeds” and washes and thereby retains her place in the labour hierarchy. At the end of the story, Tina declares “Congratulations. Finally, you are a man now” and the young man reflects that he has also given something of value to her for finally he sees her smile. This story is one of several examples of online erotica centring on the figure of the FDH but it stands out for the ways in which it presents how both maid and man are compensated for their loneliness through their discovery and sharing of illicit sexuality. As the young man is not the employer of the helper as such, his socioeconomic power, his age and sexual inexperience allow Tina to have a certain power, although it is partially expressed in negative terms of predatory behaviour not that far removed from Regina Ip’s portrayal of foreign domestic workers as sexual predators.

By way of a conclusion, I present a final example which powerfully conveys the complex set of metonymic configurations at work in cultural representations and perceptions of the FDH and helps us to see how metonymy urges us to make insightful connections that are vital in any diverse society. Five Tonnes of Homes and Other Understories is a mixed-media installation exhibited by Indonesia-born Australia-based artist Tintin Wulia at Art Basel (2016) in Hong Kong. The work is part of a larger project titled Trade/ Trace/ Transit which investigates “a close-knit socio-economical network of cardboard stakeholders, comprising multinational groups in the Central district” (Figures 9 and 10) (Encounters). Approaching the installation, spectators become participants, able to move under huge hanging compacted bales of cardboard arranged in a spiral. They may walk within an open circle of these cubes, seeing both the large-scale swathe of space claimed by the made objects as well as the detail imprinted on the surfaces of the boxes. Wulia spent a year tracking the transit of cardboard through Hong Kong, thereby linking two familiar sights in public space that underpin the city’s economy. The first is of the elderly collectors who push huge trolleys laden with cardboard to recycling sites for paltry profit and the second is of the domestic workers who create cardboard refuges on rest days when they occupy walkways, underpasses and other public space. For a Hong Kong resident, Five Tonnes of Homes presents images that are both familiar and invisible—their shock factor or their capacity to make us think is often lost through the repetition of everyday sight. It is only when art couples them together that the implicit themes of belonging, alienation, gender, and labour cohere and gain resonance from their mirroring or doubling in the lives of the two demographics. Described as “embodying the lived experience flourishing in accidental corners of a ravenous global economy” (Encounters), Wulia’s artwork indeed presents the “understories” and unexpected connections within Hong Kong, drawing together transnational representation (i. e. an Indonesian-Australian artist portraying Chinese/ Filipino lived experience), global wealth and industry (i. e. the art fair and the cardboard trade), and the contingent claims of the working poor and the migrant worker on Hong Kong space.

Figure 9:

Tintin Wulia’s five tonnes home, art of home, Art Basel (2016).

Figure 10:

Detail, Tintin Wulia’s five tonnes of of home, Art Basel (2016).