People Politics

If you have ever spent any time with the Tai Tais (wealthy married women who don't work) of Hong Kong you will know that their favorite whine topic is their maids. We are so lucky in Hong Kong to have affordable (read: cheap, underpaid) legal domestic help, it sort of boggles the mind as to how bloody demanding they are. What boggles the Tai Tai's mind is how demanding their maids are. For a meager 3480HKD a month, it strikes me as a bit ungrateful to forbid it when your help wants to spend Saturday night out at her friend's place, or to stop working at 9pm instead of midnight.

I'm all for personal space and freedom, a little within the job and masses outside of it. The central crux, the tension surrounding control and cruelty toward each other in the maid-employer relationship is that the maid needs a job. The drama of your usual office people politics is magnified tenfold when it's put on a domestic level, when none of the verbal bitchslaps that are dealt ever leave the privacy of a home. We are all tied to our need for financial freedom, but I sometimes wonder whether I shouldn't just get my tubes tied and remove myself to a banana farm forever, so that I could avoid even a tenth of psychological warfare that goes on in any employer-employee relationship, when it turns bad. And everyone, everyone has one bad boss somewhere along the line. I think my bad boss was when I had this family friend employ me for a summer internship. He made me spend hours making an excel spreadsheet of the receipts of meals and taxi rides so that he could claim the expenses. I learned close to nothing that summer, and got paid next to nothing, so it was really all a boring waste of time for me.

Well, have wandered off topic... what I wanted to say was, I baked this pasta casserole the other day, and I felt bad because our new maid was only eating instant noodles for lunch. NOT that ramen hasn't been my sometimes meal of choice during my college years, when I felt like a bum who didn't want to cook anything more nutritious, but she's running up and down the stairs, scrubbing and mopping and washing etc and she needs her vitamins and minerals!!! She's been eating ramen and ONLY ramen, without veggies or meat or anything, for lunch every day for weeks! And, it's not like we're starving her, because we always have leftovers from dinner that are plenty nutritionally balanced, and before our family sounds like misers, let's just make clear that we love our leftovers. I eat them all the time. I bring them to the office for lunch in tupperware, stick it in the microwave for a couple o' minutes, fabulous. Especially stewed anything tastes really awesome the next day. Thing is, she won't have any of it. Our maid will not eat our leftovers for lunch like the rest of us. I just don't get it! If you've ever been to a Chinese restaurant, you'll know that all dishes are communal, nobody touches or slobbers over the food in the middle of the table, it's all aboveboard and doesn't really look like pig slop or anything!

Sorry, ranting... but, er, I felt like such a cad that day, I was making this yummy pasta (even though I too should have been eating the leftovers, but I love pasta, another college habit that I should be in rehab for) and I didn't offer her any. She went and cooked her tiny ramen noodles, and I confess I was a bit annoyed at her for not eating some veggies or something with her noodles. Maybe I was subconsciously trying to punish her for not eating leftovers by not offering her any pasta. Well. God sees everything, I suppose. I'll talk to St. Paul about it when the time comes.