Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration 9780367279165, 9780429298714

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Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration

This book explores the politics of gendered labor migration in Southeast Asia through the stories and perspectives of Indonesian and Filipina women presented in films, fiction, and performance to show how the emotionality of these texts contribute to the emergence and vitality of women’s social movements in Southeast Asia. By placing literary and filmic narratives of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore within existing conversations concerning migration policies, the book offers an innovative approach towards examining contemporary issues of Asian migration. Furthermore, through rich ethnographic accounts intersecting with textual and visual analyses, the book unpacks themes of belonging and displacement, shame and desire, victimhood and resistance, sacrifice, and grief to show that the stories of Filipina and Indonesian migrant women don’t just depict their everyday lives and practices but also reveal how they mediate and make sense of the fraught politics of gendered labor diaspora and globalization. Contributing to the “affective turn” of feminist and transnational scholarship, the book draws insight from the importance and centrality of affect, emotions, and feelings in shaping discourses on women’s subjectivity, labor, and mobility. In addition, the book demonstrates the issues of vulnerability and agency inherent in debates on social exclusion, human rights, development, and nation-building in Southeast Asia. Offering an innovative and multidisciplinary approach to analyses of Asian migration, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian Studies, literary and cultural studies, film studies, gender and women’s studies, and migration studies. Carlos M. Piocos III is an Associate Professor at the Department of Literature and a Research Fellow at the Southeast Asian Research Center and Hub of De La Salle University, The Philippines.

Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series

The aim of this series is to publish original, high-quality work by both new and established scholars on all aspects of Southeast Asia. The Political Economy of Growth in Vietnam Between States and Markets Guanie Lim ASEAN and Power in International Relations ASEAN, the EU, and the Contestation of Human Rights Jamie D. Stacey The Army and Ideology in Indonesia From Dwifungsi to Bela Negara Muhamad Haripin, Adhi Priamarizki, and Keoni Indrabayu Marzuki The 2018 and 2019 Indonesian Elections Identity Politics and Regional Perspectives Edited by Leonard C Sebastian and Alexander R Arifianto Embodied Performativity in Southeast Asia Multidisciplinary Corporealities Edited by Stephanie Burridge The History of South Vietnam The Quest for Legitimacy and Stability, 1963-1967 Vinh-The Lam Singapore after Lee Kuan Yew S. C. Y. Luk and P. W. Preston Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration Carlos M. Piocos III For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routled ge-Contemporary-Southeast-Asia-Series/book-series/RCSEA

Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration

Carlos M. Piocos III

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Carlos M. Piocos III The right of Carlos M. Piocos III to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-27916-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-29871-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgment Introduction: Emotions on the Move

vi vii 1

1

At Home and Unhomeliness

19

2

Shame and Desire

47

3

Vulnerability and Resistance

76

4

Sacrifice and Social Heroism

104

5

Mourning and Movement

130

Conclusion: Affect and Activism

156

Index

169

Figures

1.1

Degrees of closeness and separation: The mother confronts the nanny in front of her son in Ilo Ilo (top) and the sister chastises her brother’s closeness to his helper in Still Human (bottom). Photo courtesy of Anthony Chen and Chan Siu-Kuen. 2.1 Queer scenes of intimacy: Rian holding hands with her girlfriend in Effort for Love (top) and “Daddy” Leo spending quiet time with “Mommy” Judy in Sunday Beauty Queen (bottom). Photos courtesy of Ani Ema Susanti and Kalyana Shira Foundation and Films, and Baby Ruth Villarama and Voyage Pictures. 3.1 Overcoming victimhood: Erwiana Sulistiyaningsih raising her fist as she meets the press after her legal victory against her abusive employer, February 10, 2015. Photo by the author. 4.1 Attachments to good life: Mameng looks at a returning Pinay DH in Balikbayan Box (left), Mercy looks at her baby’s diaper bag in Bagahe (middle), and Marie looks at a recruitment ad for domestic workers in Remittance (right). Photos courtesy of Mes de Guzman, Zig Dulay, ZMD Productions, Cinemalaya and Universal Harvester Inc., and Patrick Daly.

34

70 78

126

Acknowledgment

The first chapter of the book is derived in part from an article, “At Home with Strangers: Social Exclusion and Intimacy in Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo (2013),” published in Feminist Media Studies 19(5): 717–31. An earlier version of the last chapter appeared as “Why Mourning Matters: Politics of Grief in Southeast Asian Narratives of Women’s Migration,” in Kritika Kultura 33/34 (2019): 806–58. This book would not have come to fruition without the help and generosity of people who supported this project. I would like to thank Routledge for the opportunity to publish this work, especially Dorothea Schaefter and Alexandra Brauw for your support and generous advice in developing this manuscript. This book started as my PhD dissertation at the University of Hong Kong, and I would like to thank my supervisor, Ang Sze Wei. I am forever indebted to her mentoring, from her incisive reading of and critical feedbacks on my writing, to her valuable advice that shaped a better academic in me. I would also like to thank the professors who I had the privilege of working with and learning from in HKU’s CompLit department: Gina Marchetti, Esther Yau, Dan Vukovich, and Aaron Magnan-Park. Much thanks also to my PhD comrades in arms, Jason Coe, Tatu Laukkanen, Kate Waller, and Chloe Lai for being such wonderful fellow travelers. I would not have been inspired to write on this subject without the communities that adopted me in Central and Victoria Park every Sunday, the wonderful migrant women and men and their tireless advocacy and social justice work: Cynthia Abdon-Tellez, Eni Lestari, Dolores Pelaez, Edwina Antonio, Aaron Ceradoy, Rey Asis, Norman Caranay, Eman Villanueva, Shiela Tebia and to all the members of Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants, Mission for Migrant Workers, Bethune House, International Migrants Alliance, Indonesian Migrant Workers Union, and Likha Cultural Collective. I would also like to thank John McGee of Transient Workers Count Too and Jolovan Wham of Humanitarian Office for Migration Economics for giving me insights into their work in advancing migrant workers’ rights in Singapore. I would like to thank all the artists, writers, and filmmakers who saw the potential in this project and allowed me to dialogue with their complex works about the lives of Filipina and Indonesian migrant women: Ani Ema Susanti, Anthony Chen, Arista Devi, Baby Ruth Villarama, Erfa Handayani, Etik Juwita, Indira

viii Acknowledgment Margareta, Jose Dalisay, Jr., Juwanna, Maria Bo Niok, Mes de Guzman, Oliver Chan Siu-Kuen, Patrick Daly and Joel Fendelman, Rida Fitria, Susana Nisa, Susie Utomo, Tiwi, Xyza Cruz Bacani, and Zig Dulay. I would also like to thank the visual and performance artist Proceso Gelladuga II for allowing me to use his painting (Suit, oil on canvas, 48” × 60”, 2016) as the frontispiece for this book. I am also grateful to the wonderful scholars who have been very generous and encouraging, and whose admirable work on Southeast Asian cultural studies continues to inspire and motivate my own scholarship: Caroline Hau, Bliss Cua Lim, Melani Budianta, Jafar Suryomenggolo, Bomen Guillermo, Roland Tolentino and Roderick Galam. I am forever grateful to undergrad teachers from UP Diliman, who have, in their own ways, directed me to pursue a scholarly life committed to social justice: Edel Garcellano, Odine de Guzman and Ruth Pison. I am also privileged to have as friends these brilliant young scholars, artists, and activists who share with me a collective hope that our own little stakes in our craft and organizing work would make a difference in the future: Clara Iwasaki, Jason Coe, Jiaying Sim, Ella Parry-Davies, Rosa Castillo, Chester Arcilla, Jan Bernadas, Ron Vilog, RC Asa, Kenneth Guda, Joms Salvador, Christine Bellen and Kristian Cordero. Thanks also to other awesome friends who pull me back to the real world far from the hectic life of academe: Jayson Fajarda, Katrina Macapagal, Mykel Andrada, Paolo Manalo, Sofia Guillermo, K Alave, Piya Constantino, Ade Perillo, Ton Chaisrikew, Camsy Ocumen, Jericho Cadiz, and Myk and Sel Villanueva. I would like to thank De La Salle University and my colleagues at Department of Literature, Donna Mina, Dinah Roma, Jaz Llana, David Bayot, Ron Baytan, Shirley Lua, Gen Asenjo, and others, who have tirelessly given me institutional support and encouraged my growth as a teacher and scholar. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, Romy and Emy, and my five sisters and brothers, Roselle, Rommel, Jun, Romelyn and RC, who have always supported the choices that I have made and the passions I have committed to. Finally, I dedicate this to my interlocutor, life partner, and soul mate, Michael Balili, whose love, support, and sacrifices have been this book’s very conditions of possibility.

Introduction Emotions on the Move

Feeling Bad In his visit to Kuala Lumpur in early 2015, Indonesian President Joko Widodo talked about his discomfort and shame in talking with the then Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak after learning of the stories of their migrant women working in the country, which he describes as “heartbreaking” (detikNews 2015). This is why Widodo instructed his labor ministers to find a way of discontinuing their deployment of domestic workers in the future, as a sign that they still have “pride and dignity” as a nation amid the lamentable fates of their women abroad (Nazeer 2015). Three years later, this time in Manila, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte also referred to the many cases of abuse against Filipina domestic workers in Kuwait a “national shame,” which also prompted him to impose a deployment ban to the Middle Eastern country while also ordering the repatriation of Filipinos there as a show of national pride (Talabong 2018). Duterte justified these responses by saying that abuse against Filipina women abroad is an “affront against the Philippines as a sovereign nation” (Corrales 2018). These anecdotes show how feelings are so much imbricated in the political rhetoric of national and international policies that touches on labor migration, especially in regions which benefit from sending women as labor exports. What would usually be perceived as statistics of success—numbers of deployed citizens abroad and possible earnings from dollar remittances—are supplemented with, and sometimes, subverted by, stories of abuse and encounters with migrant women victims. These stories and encounters shored up such a “bad” feeling in both the Southeast Asian state leaders mentioned above that both of them felt the need to expel or at least manage “shame” through a show of pride in their proposal to stop sending domestic workers. As to how barring Indonesian and Filipina women from going abroad would help curb down the cases of abuse, enhance protection of migrant women, or, at least, appease their respective bruised national honor, both Presidents did not disclose. What both of them failed to mention is how their respective proposals for deployment ban—coming from the two countries that supply the most number of female care and household service workers not only within Asia but all over the world—not only disenfranchise women from taking on legal employment

2

Introduction

opportunities abroad but also make them more vulnerable to exploitation as it would force those of them who are determined to migrate to go through illegal channels (Nair 2015, Morales 2018). The hurt pride of Widodo and Duterte also seems to ignore the fact that their own elite and middle-class citizens are also treating their hired help in a similar fashion, or sometimes, even worse, as many babu and kasambahay [Indonesian and Filipino slang for domestic workers] are still unprotected by local labor laws, excluded from legal recourse and social welfare mechanisms, and rendered invisible in public discourse (Budiari 2015, Montenegro and Viajar 2017). Their firm resolve to rescue their women from exploitation through the deployment ban shows how the discourse of feminized vulnerability shores up paternalistic ideas of protection from both nation-state leaders. These incidents show how feelings intervene in public discourses and how the power of these political speeches derives from and is sustained and intensified by the expression of emotions: shame and pride, discomfort and dignity, and so on. Even though these feelings do not necessarily “gel together,” they cohere around political rhetoric and are deployed towards specific discursive ends. Unpacking how these emotions stick to the shaping of policies and examining their material effects on the lives of women who are subject to this emotionally charged rhetoric are crucial in understanding the ways the politics of gendered labor migration operates in Southeast Asia. Affect, Narratives, and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration draws attention to this complex interplay of emotions and discourses in the region, particularly in the field of women’s migration. To this end, this book aims to look into the stories of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore as a way of intervening into the dominant scripts that seek to portray them and represent their cause in public discourse and popular media. Just like how both Widodo and Duterte frame their country’s shame at the victimization of their women and deploy emotions to contain these anxieties, these literary and visual narratives that either focus on or are produced by Southeast Asian migrant women themselves put forward affective claims by portraying how they are affected by structural conditions of labor migration and how they affect the ways labor migration is understood in their home and host countries. The present work forwards an important contribution to the study of gendered migration by archiving and putting into high relief migrant Filipina and Indonesian women’s voices, sensations, sentiments, and sense-making of their own experience of border-crossing.

Women on the Move Indonesia and the Philippines are the biggest exporters of labor in Southeast Asia. There are about 12 million Filipinos and 6.5 million Indonesians working mostly as low and unskilled workers around the world, mainly in their richer neighbors in the East and Southeast Asia and the Gulf States (Migrante International 2013, Henschke 2014). Continuing the long history of Asian migration, Filipino and Indonesian migrants’ leave-takings depart from the old migratory tracks carved

Introduction 3 by their colonial past and instead follow the transnational labor circuits of new global world order. Moreover, Southeast Asian migration in recent decades has become largely feminized as most of the Filipina and Indonesian migrants are women entering household and care work in foreign shores. These new routes replicate the colonial legacies in the power dynamics of class, gender, race, and ethnicity but are recalibrated by the neoliberal restructuring of globalized care regimes. Both the home countries of Indonesia and the Philippines and the host citystates of Hong Kong and Singapore have their own histories of indentured household work, where women from the rural areas are hired by elite and middle-class households in more prosperous rural and urban centers (Locher-Scholten 1994, Lowrie 2016, Carroll 2009, Rafael 2017). However, historical shifts in the region paved the way for the contemporary border-crossing of women within Southeast Asia and continually inflect and reshape the internal and external class, gender, racial, and ethnic relations of nation-states and peoples in the region. Hong Kong and Singapore are part of the tiger economies in Asia Pacific that experienced an economic miracle in the 1980s because of the states’ active intervention in neoliberal adjustments and intensified participation in the global free market (Athukorala and Manning 1999). This has resulted in these city-states’ industries absorbing into the workforce their local women and middle-class mothers and wives, who were traditionally burdened with the unpaid labor of social reproduction. With households in dire need of feminized labor for child and elderly care and domestic services, the Hong Kong and Singaporean governments have started to seek out women from poorer neighboring countries as helpers and domestic workers (Yun 1996, Wee and Sim 2005). Around the same time, the failed authoritarian experiments in the Philippines and Indonesia had brought about domestic poverty and massive unemployment, which had increasingly propelled their citizens to look for opportunities elsewhere to survive (Silvey 2004, Gonzalez 1998). With the collapse of both Martial Law and Orde Baru [New Order], the succeeding democratic administrations of both nation-states would continue and intensify these strongmen regimes’ legacies of labor export programs. The Philippine government entered into the field of overseas workers deployment much earlier than Indonesia. As a result of the economic downside of the Martial Law regime, the country began exporting labor to mitigate the rising unemployment and fiscal crisis. Several decades of labor export have taught the Philippine state to craft and enforce programs that would more efficiently take advantage of the economic returns from migrant departures. Even though the country had been exporting women laborers to the Middle East, it was only in the late 1990s that Indonesia would seriously explore the path the Philippines had long taken. Adding to the many economic problems under Suharto’s New Order, the country was also hit hard by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which compelled the Indonesian government to seek new markets for overseas labor. As a result, more and more Indonesian women were pushed to go abroad, and the once Filipina-dominated demographic of migrant domestic workers in several host countries has significantly shifted. Hong Kong and Singapore,

4 Introduction for example, are two city-states where most domestic helpers since the 1970s have been Filipinas. Now, the labor market for household work in these two destination city-states is being shared equally by women from the Philippines and Indonesia. Hong Kong and Singapore are still among the top five destinations for Filipina and Indonesian migrant women, and both Filipina and Indonesian women occupy the two largest foreign workers population in both of these city-states (International Organization for Migration 2010). As of 2020, Singapore employed about 232,600 foreign domestic workers, half of which were Indonesians, followed closely by Filipinas (Ministry of Manpower 2020). In Hong Kong, on the other hand, there were around 370,000 foreign domestic helpers, half of which comprised Filipina women, while Indonesian women followed closely with 48% (Census and Statistics Department HK 2020). As the presence of Filipina and Indonesian domestic helpers increasingly becomes ubiquitous in these Asian global cities, they become necessary economic supplements for their homelands. Migrant domestic workers contribute greatly to Hong Kong and Singapore’s national economies. The child and elderly care services they provide accounted for a US$12.6 billion contribution or about 3.6% of their gross domestic product (GDP) in Hong Kong (Carvalho 2019), and US$8.2 billion or around 2.4% of their GDP in Singapore in 2018 (Wong 2019). For their home countries, on the other hand, Filipina and Indonesian overseas workers do not just mitigate the problem of domestic unemployment but also help buoy national reserves through foreign exchange remittances. In 2012 alone, for example, the dollar remittances of Filipino migrants amounted to US$21.39 billion, which is more than 10% of the country’s GDP, while Indonesian migrants’ remittances registered at US$9.2 billion or more than 1% of their GDP for the same year (Remo 2013, Anjaiah 2013). The Filipina and Indonesian migrants’ economic impact has compelled their own governments to consider them as heroes. In the official state rhetoric, mass media and popular culture, Indonesian migrant workers are called pahlawan devisa (foreign exchange heroes) while overseas Filipino workers are named bagong bayani (modern-day heroes) (Nurchayati 2010, de Guzman 2003). However, the optimistic projection of state narratives in their agenda for development through labor migration is constantly challenged by real-life stories of discrimination, abuse, exploitation, and even death faced by the migrant women abroad. Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers are relegated to the margins as guest workers in these city-states, marginalized and discriminated against because of their designation as mere household workers. The ways in which they are socially excluded structure their precarious conditions, making them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by everyone from their recruiters to their employers. Some of them find comfort in love, friendship, and fellowship with other migrants in host countries to circumvent the effects of social exclusion. Many of them suffer in silence and bear the weight of their suffering because of their obligations as mothers, wives, daughters, and citizen–breadwinners. And in cases of death, their bodies become sites of an emotional excess of pity and indignation; their lives, laid bare by their precarious border-crossing, are transformed into

Introduction 5 counter-narratives to migration’s economic promises. These stories portray how migrant women’s lives and deaths matter not only to their families back home but also to the nation-states that deploy them. And these real-life dramas are also some of the dominant themes that are repeated in the literary and filmic narratives of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers to represent their experience of discrimination and victimization, and their sacrifices for their home and homeland. This book examines the films and fiction on Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers by tracking the tropes of belonging and displacement, shame and desire, vulnerability and resistance, sacrifice, and grief in their narratives. There has been scholarly and advocacy research that talks about the various kinds of exploitation and human rights abuses that these migrant women endure. Some of these works also tackle migrant women’s economic and patriotic roles in nation-building and the development of their homelands, while some center on their experience of social exclusion and their grievable lives in their transnational fate-playing. Many of these scholarly works look into the emotions involved in women’s migration but not a lot of them problematize how these ethnographies of feelings proliferate in, and also sometimes function as supplements to, discourses of Southeast Asian migrant women’s role and place in their homeland and host countries. This book is particularly invested in understanding how these affective relationships with labor migration shape women migrants’ experiences and how their experiences get to be represented and understood in cultural texts. The stories by and about Filipina and Indonesian migrant women express emotions that not only reflect but are also responses to the underlying conditions that describe and prescribe their role in their homelands and their place in the host countries. By focusing on the articulations of feelings in migrant women’s narratives and their discursive effects, I argue that these emotions do not just expose the fundamentally problematic ways in which Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ lives are shaped by the politics of transnational household work. They also reveal the gap between how they make sense of their own experiences against the discourses that represent them as subjects of abuse or social exclusion and ideas that define their claims for social justice, nation-building, and development. Furthermore, studying how affects confound migrant subjectivity in the ways that prompt or preclude agency among Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers has deeper implications in gauging migrant women’s struggles and social movements in Asia. To account for the complexity of migrant women’s subjectivity at play in the cultural representation of transnational domestic work, this book compares and analyzes literary and visual texts across national, generic, and disciplinary boundaries. First, while this book draws comparisons between the experiences of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers, it also probes how their parallelisms and differences play up in Asian global sites—Hong Kong and Singapore—where the two migrant women groups form the largest contingent of foreign workers population. Second, while I refer to the abundant analyses on the migration policies of origin and destination states and the rich ethnographic accounts of migrant women

6

Introduction

in many scholarly works in social sciences, this study considers the growing body of literary and cultural productions on and by Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers as equally important social documents. These emergent cultural productions—such as the black-and-white photography of a former Filipina domestic worker–turned professional photographer in Hong Kong, Xyza Cruz Bacani, in her book, We Are Like Air; the short documentary film Mengusahakan Cinta [Effort for Love] (2008) from a former Indonesian domestic worker–turned filmmaker, Ani Ema Susanti; or the widely anthologized short story “Bukan Yem” by Etik Juwita, a former Indonesian domestic worker in Singapore—are aesthetic mediations and political interventions to the ongoing critical conversation on women and migration. By studying these literary and visual narratives, I expound how Filipina and Indonesian women’s emotions are embedded within the nation-states’ developmental strategies and the global politics of the labor diaspora, just as they are embodied expressions that contradict and complicate these discourses.

Affective Turn Affect, Narratives and Politics of Southeast Asian Migration is a contribution to the ongoing conversation on the “affective turn” of feminist and transnational scholarship (Ahmed 2004, 2010, Hemmings 2011). It draws insight from the importance and centrality of affect, emotions, and feelings in shaping discourses on women’s subjectivity, labor, and mobility, and the studies forwarded by this book are located and contextualized in Southeast Asia. Critical studies on emotion-work and global care chain have shown the ways emotions become forms of labor that are feminized, regulated, and privatized— that is, commodified—and how these kinds of emotional labor, like household and care services, have shaped today’s feminized global labor force by linking global sites where the “home and hearth” stretch transnationally as women cross borders to render domestic and care labor (Hochschild 2000, 2012, 2001). Other scholars, on the other hand, use the framework of intimate labor to expand the lens of looking at the kinds of relationships that emotional labor can structure and produce between the producer and the consumer of care and domestic work beyond its economic values and relationships (Boris and Parreñas 2010). While these feminist works have talked about how emotions can be studied both as a form of labor and as a structural relationship to work and economy, they have yet to explore how emotions are configured into the experience of border-crossing. Migration is very much a part of the globalization of emotion-work and intimate labor as it becomes a crucial process where the subjectivities of women are formed and transformed. Ann Brooks and Ruth Simpson (2013) argue that “economic migration is frequently conflated with emotional migration among women migrants” (8). Emotions are not just involved but are, in fact, weaved into the various processes of women’s transnational passages, from their motivations and aspirations to cross borders and their experience of displacement and uprootedness in foreign lands to the very nature of the work they render, which

Introduction 7 is usually characterized as intimate and emotionally bound—thus, feminized— labor as part of the global domestic and care industries. This is why in Brooks and Simpson’s work, which studies migrant women workers in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United States, their examination of the impacts of feminization in migration takes into account how feelings transform the way women see themselves in transnational contexts. Brooks and Simpson’s discussion of the intersection of emotions with gender and migration revolves around how migrant women workers’ subjectivity is changed in terms of identity and belonging through their experience of border-crossing. Their insights, along with the feminist works they refer to in their book, inform my own analysis through their emphasis on the gendered nature of both emotions and labor migration, and their focus on the emotional lives of migrant women. However, this book departs from the corpus of feminist studies on emotionin-migration because aside from the fact that I am using literature, films, and photography as primary objects of study, my attention to migrant women’s subjectivity has less to do with questions on identity and more to do with how their expressions of feelings interact with discourses of gendered migration. By using literary and visual narratives of migrant women, I consider affects, emotions, and feelings as a means by which not only identities but also the politics that sustain those identities are communicated and expressed. For example, an ethnography of emotions of migrant Filipina women can only typically describe how overseas Filipina mothers are left with “anxiety, helplessness, guilt, and loneliness” in taking on transnational parenting to their left-behind children (Brooks and Simpson 2013, 74). My interest is not so much in how the identity of motherhood changes through the process of gendered migration as in how expressing these “bad” feelings coming out of one’s incapacity to fulfill full maternal obligation becomes a way in which motherhood is understood and defined in transnational contexts. This is why films portraying these maternal anxieties, like Zig Dulay’s Bagahe (2017), illuminate insights on how certain representations of “anxiety, helplessness, guilt, and loneliness” not just characterize Filipina transnational heroines but also align and attune them into particular ideas about how it is to be a mother and a migrant at the same time. These suffering emotions are not just reflections of the reality of gendered migration but are also responses to discourses that sustain or subvert ideas about why migrant women feel the effects of migration in particular ways. This is why fiction and films about the experiences of migrant women are as much a part of this conversation on emotion and gendered migration as the ethnography on, and interviews of, migrant women themselves. These forms of cultural production are mediations and representations of migrant women’s experiences, and the feelings that these texts transmit through their circulation in print and screen also codify and reiterate how the affect of migration describes and prescribes the experiences of its subjects. Although affect, feeling, and emotion may sometimes seem interchangeable here, I am consciously deploying affect as a critical concept to highlight its distinctly structural and relational nature compared to feelings and emotions. I

8 Introduction invoke the Deleuzian notion of affect as a form of immanence that draws on the bodies’ capacities: “Affects are becomings: sometimes they weaken us in so far as they diminish our power to act and decompose our relationships (sadness), sometimes they make us enter into a more vast or superior individual (joy)” (Deleuze 1987, 60). Following this differentiation, emotions pertain to the state of being in a subjective experience of feeling, like sadness and joy. Affect, on the other hand, signify the intensities and potentialities of feeling sad or joyful that can either place the body within existing social relations or prompt her to go out into the world, into other forms of social relationships. While feelings can be referents to what affect can be, affect highlights the force-relations from “the body’s capacity to affect and be affected” (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 2). While I acknowledge the aspect of affect’s physiological and biological complexities which should be distinguished from and not simplified with the “emotional qualification” of language, rationality, and narration of an individual feeling-body (Massumi 1995, 88), I also agree with feminist cultural critics’ claims that overemphasizing affect over the sociality of emotion tends to devalue the effect of emotions in structuring social relations and discourses (Hemming 2005, Leys 2011). This, in turn, has deeper implications in deemphasizing the political work on emotions of feminist and postcolonial critics (Gorton 2007). This book follows the path set out by feminist cultural scholars that uses affect and emotions as means to understand social and political discourses, opening up my inquiry into not only the identities and signifiers of feelings and emotions but also, and more importantly, their possible effects. I study the literature and films of Filipina and Indonesian migrant women as means by which their bodies express emotions that also activate and move them to certain capacities. In my discussion of the short story “No Diamond in Diamond Hill,” by an Indonesian helper in Hong Kong, Arista Devi, for example, I look at the ways in which her experience of abuse and victimization are expressed in this narrative. To understand the protagonist’s pain as a mere feeling or emotion is only describing a private and singular experience. Framing it as an affect, however, recognizes and indicts the conditions, structures, and relationships that she is subjected to, while also demonstrating her capacity to affect others in her expression of this feeling. Affect in this way operates in senses of both being affected and affecting, as these literary and visual narratives illustrate not just how migrant women are affected but also how they affect prevailing discourses on labor migration. If affect is both condition and capacity, then the expressions of emotions in the stories of migrant women reflect how they mediate the structures of power or, more precisely, the experience of being affected by labor migration. Migrant women’s emotional relationships to their work as household laborers in foreign shores or to their duties as displaced women and citizen–breadwinners back home are the means by which they inhabit their particular structures of feeling (Williams 1977). However, even if these affective infrastructures condition their relationship to power, their feelings and emotions are not just expressions of being subordinated by it, trapped into reiterating and consolidating the discourses and commands of these social relations. They can also be perceived as ways in which

Introduction 9 they manage, and sometimes even break out of, dominant discourses that prescribe their everyday lives as domestic workers. Always on the verge of either becoming a form of subjugation or enabling agency, the effects of emotions can be best understood as manifest signs of negotiations from feeling subjects or affected bodies. Affects are products of this process of dynamic mediation within the forces and intensities of structures of feeling, compelling their subjects to react and interact with social structures and relations of power in their everyday lives (Sharma and Tygsrup 2015). In these ways, emotions also communicate the ways in which affected subjects transform power relations (Harding and Pribram 2004). This is why pursuing the ways in which affect takes on discursive effects is important for a cultural scholarship of migration.

Through Thick and Thin In The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed (2004) asserts that “emotions work as a form of capital since affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation,” which she terms as affective economy (45). In the same manner, I contend that emotions of Southeast Asian migrant women operate within an affective economy because they are repeated, circulated, accumulated, and consumed as narratives in print and visual media. These feelings are then appropriated, as they transmit and circulate, to align and orient them towards reiterating or transgressing particular discourses of labor migration. Affective economies not only “stick” to and attune bodies but also passionately align, attach, or discord them to social structures and power relations within an affective infrastructure (4). Ahmed (2010) further develops the way affect circulates as an economy through the metaphor of stickiness: “Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects” (230). Emotions are powerful because they are made to “congeal” and “cohere in a certain way” as they circulate through speech and texts and as they move and stick to bodies (231). Ahmed (2004) describes the method of tracking affect in cultural scholarship as a method of close reading that reveals and unpacks the emotionality of texts: “how ‘figures’ [of speech] get stuck together, and how sticking is dependent on past histories of association that often ‘work’ through concealment. The emotionality of texts is one way of describing how texts are ‘moving,’ or how they generate effects” (13). Deploying the stickiness of affect in examining the emotionality of migrant women’s texts, this book seeks to account for the complexities of the emotional lives of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore, as represented in their films, photography, and fiction. However, as my reading of these literary and visual narratives shows, the migrant women’s bodies in various states of being affected by conditions of labor migration—as marginalized, shamed, victimized, sacrificing, and grieving bodies—often respond affectively in quite contradictory ways. This is why I also wanted to interrogate the “coherence” of affect’s stickiness in the emotionality of migrant women’s texts because,

10 Introduction oftentimes, feelings do not necessarily “gel together,” presenting “mixed” emotions even as they seem to cohere as a discourse (Åhäll 2018). The feelings that surface in Indonesian and Filipina migrant women’s narratives are sometimes empowering, moving them to act towards something other than what they are experiencing. At other times, they are disabling, training them to be at home in their present subjugation. Most of the time, however, they are both enabling and disempowering, attaching them to disabling life conditions that also empower them with prospects of mobility and development. Because of the inherent contradiction in the emotionality of these texts, I want to build upon and extend Ahmed’s notion of the stickiness to also include in this conceptualization the fact that most texts present feelings that do not necessarily gel together, even as they sound and feel coherent, and this is part of the “messiness” that goes with the viscosity of affect. These conflicting qualities of stickiness reflect the “thickening” and “thinning out” of affects as they spread or are put into high focus in their circulation or movement in these texts. The unevenness of affect’s viscosity can be seen, for example, in Widodo and Duterte’s rhetoric that deploys shame, pride, and calls for dignity through the paternalistic logic of banning their women from working abroad. These “mixed” feelings seem to cohere in their speech, but they only appear or work to cohere as a political rhetoric by “spreading thin” and flattening the many layers of texts and narratives that both sustain and contradict their deployment of emotions in their respective statements. The feelings attached to protectionism of women silence out the palimpsest of stories and testimonies of the very subjects of this rhetoric, and this flattening of emotions clings and sticks to the bodies of migrant women as the material effects of travel ban intensify their vulnerability, whether they stay back home or cross the borders illegally. This is why going into the thick of migrant women’s narratives also allows cultural scholars to dive into the richness, nuances, and “thickness” of these texts’ emotionality. By privileging their voices and examining representations close to migrant Filipina and Indonesian women’s own experiences, this book tracks the “thickening” of the affect’s stickiness to expose the contending claims of feelings in shaping their narratives and understanding of labor migration. In my analysis of the feelings of belonging and alienation, shame and desire, patience and resistance, sacrifice and grief of migrant Filipina and Indonesian women which are invoked or animated in their cultural production, I call attention to the fact that their feelings often represent a contradictory understanding of how they experience and express displacement, sexuality, victimhood, and agency. Analyzing the thinning and thickening of the affective quality of women’s narratives of Southeast Asian migration is also mapping the possibilities and limits of what feelings can do in affecting the prevailing discourses of labor migration. They can neither provide easy solutions to the problems of migrant women’s social exclusion, victimization, and social struggles nor offer straightforward critiques of labor export policy, nation-building, and development agendas. What this examination of affect, narratives, and politics can do, however, is track how these discourses are sustained or transgressed by the affected bodies of migrant

Introduction 11 women as they move and participate in the transnational flow of labor and capital. And because emotions are so much imbricated in these movements and their entailing politics, following how affect thins and thickens as it sticks to texts and bodies that also move and mobilize into action remains to be a critical and compelling task in explaining why migrant women’s stories and feelings matter.

Feeling the Differences As part of analyzing the fraught ways feelings do not gel together, it is also important to confront and attend to the messiness of differences without flattening them in the thick of transnational comparisons. While this book endeavors to illustrate the parallel lives and fates of Indonesian and Filipina women, it also highlights and draws insights from the differences between them. The fact that most Indonesian migrants are younger, have less education, are predominantly recruited from rural areas, and are more likely to be first-time migrants compared to their Filipina counterparts has significant bearing on why they are perceived to be both more docile and vulnerable and why they are marketed and constructed as such. Most migrant Filipinas are older; many are college educated and are thus savvier and more assertive than their Indonesian counterparts. Since most of them are serial migrants (meaning, they have been into repeated migration cycles), they have already established deeper and wider social support networks in the countries of their employ, which results in better protection and better access to help from non-profit, civil, and advocacy groups. Another crucial difference between these two migrant groups, and also a significant aspect of how their subjectivities are formed, is religion. Religion is as much a part of this conversation on the subjectivity of Filipina and Indonesian migrant domestic workers as their experiences in transnational spaces. The majority of Filipina women in both Hong Kong and Singapore are Catholics, while Indonesian women are mostly Moslems in these city-states. In Islam, for example, particular Qur’anic teachings on moral ideas of gender have weight in how Indonesians understand their suffering in terms of shame and patience. At the same time, Catholic virtues have as much influence in shaping and circulating notions of sacrifice for the home and homeland among migrant Filipina mothers, daughters, and sisters. Even though I recognize and attend to the valences that both of these religions have in affecting and constructing particular experiences and feelings of migrant women, this book takes religion only in so far as explaining how religious ideas are shaped, reshaped, and marshaled by the nation-state to buff up their labor export policies and discourses. These differences also play up with the stories and emotions that surface from these groups. In many of the materials that I have archived and analyzed here, the stories of Indonesian migrant women gravitate towards narratives of abuse and exploitation. In fact, even when they are writing about experiences that are more complex and complicated than victimization, i.e. finding agency and voice, their narratives are marked by how vulnerable they are and their attempts to come out and find strength out of their vulnerability. This is in contrast to many of the films

12 Introduction about Filipina domestic workers in which, even though some of them are still experiencing abuse and exploitation, they are nonetheless portrayed as capable of finding and accessing help from their own network of support groups abroad. However, what I find most interesting is how their stories are marked by a different kind of suffering, one that is no longer about the kind of precarity that their Indonesian counterparts are confronting but are instead inclined towards their struggles of selflessly fulfilling their obligations to their family and to their nation. Moreover, even in the ways in which I have discussed these dominant threads in their stories in the following chapters, I also try to center on and close read complex narratives that counter the prevailing theme of suffering for Indonesian women and stories of sacrifice prevalent among migrant Filipinas. I attend to the everyday stories of falling in love, finding friends, and adapting to foreign cities as part of the complex affective worlds that these migrant women narrate, and as such move towards the thickening emotionality of their texts. My choice of materials for this book—which includes nine short stories, seven independent feature and documentary films, two novels, and one photography project—tries to account for these rich differences. The nine stories are written by Indonesian domestic workers who are part of the thriving literary culture called Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia or Indonesian Migrant Workers Literature. These nine short stories came from my other book project, where I collected and translated from Bahasa Indonesia to Filipino 26 of what I deem to be the best writings that emerged from Indonesian migrant women in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, culled from more than 20 anthologies of fiction published between 2006 and 2016 (Piocos III 2020). I present these nine stories here with my own English translation. I have also chosen a short documentary and art photography produced by Indonesian and Filipina women who used to work as migrant domestic workers but are now considered as prolific visual artists, Ani Ema Susanti and Xyza Cruz Bacani. These selected stories, films, and photographs present complex understanding of living abroad and dealing with foreignness, falling in love, and expressing desire and sexuality, finding their voice amid various forms of abjection, and dreaming and enacting other subjectivities and identities in their works. More importantly, these literary and visual texts are no longer just firsthand testimonial accounts of their intimate lives as migrant women workers but are already mediated by the aesthetics and craft of their chosen genres: fiction, documentary filmmaking, and art photography. Aside from these, I have selected award-winning cinematic texts from independent artists who are producing critically acclaimed work that present complex portrayals of Southeast Asian migrant women. I have chosen the works of Filipino filmmakers Baby Ruth Villarama and Zig Madamba Dulay, who have a mother or sister who had worked as a domestic worker abroad, making them familiar with the struggles of migrant Filipina women. Then, there are also foreign filmmakers whose intimacy to stories of Filipina women abroad are borne out of their own experiences, like Anthony Chen and Oliver Chan Siu-Kuen, whose independent feature films are drawn from their memories of growing up with a Filipina nanny in Hong Kong and Singapore, or through collaboration, like Patrick Daly and Joel

Introduction 13 Fendelman, who wrote their film from a series of sharing sessions with migrant Filipina helpers in Singapore, who they later on cast as their actors. This is, finally, what sets the stories written by Indonesian domestic workers apart from the films that are produced for and about Filipina domestic workers by artists and filmmakers. As can be gleaned from this book, I compare and contrast narratives that are written and produced by migrant women workers themselves, mostly Indonesians with the exception of Bacani, against those that are written for and on behalf of migrant women workers, mostly on Filipina women. This comparative study takes into consideration what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1990) exemplifies as the twofold meaning of representation as either proxy as “stepping in someone else’s place” or portrait as “self-representation” (108). This project attends to the difference and complicity between “speaking for” and “portraying” by setting the stories where migrant women speak for themselves against literature and art that speak on their behalf. This comparison has deeper implications in understanding how much of these stories about belonging and displacement, shame and desire, vulnerability and resistance, and sacrifice and grief come from the migrant women themselves against those that are imposed upon them. More importantly, it also shows whether or not the stories that they tell or those that are told about them either exceed and challenge or internalize and reiterate the dominant representations that seek to subsume the complexity of their everyday lives and struggles.

Chapters The book begins by examining the field of transnational domestic work as a complex structure of feeling where Filipina and Indonesian migrant women are welcomed and accommodated yet relegated as guest workers in foreign homes. By looking at the politics of hospitality, the chapter examines how the films set in Singapore and Hong Kong problematize the inherent contradictions of social exclusion in the lives and intimate work of migrant women in private and public spaces of these host states. In my reading of two films, Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo (2013) and Oliver Chan Siu-Kuen’s Still Human (2018), I look at the ways migrant domestic workers are simultaneously excluded and included along the logic of restrictive hospitality in Singapore and Hong Kong. However, the ways in which Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers carve their own place and sense of belonging by mobilizing intimate affects inside and outside their employer’s homes are ways in which they mediate the effects of and, in turn, transform the politics of social exclusion of their hosts. I supplement these two cinematic texts from Singaporean and Hong Kong independent filmmakers with a close reading of the short story “Penjajah di Rumahku” [Intruder at Home], written by an Indonesian domestic worker, Susie Utomo, and the visual analysis of the black-and-white photography of a former Filipina domestic worker, Xyza Cruz Bacani, in her book, We Are Like Air. Utomo’s story plays around with the power dynamics in the role reversal of the host and the guest while Bacani’s photographs capture the interweaving intimacies of the maids and

14

Introduction

the madams, the employers’ kin and left-behind families, and the larger societies of the home and host countries to bring forth new imaginaries of belonging out of experiences of displacement. The second chapter extends the discussion of intimacy by examining how Southeast Asian migrant bodies are subjected to feelings of shame by problematic discourses of sexuality in transnational spaces. Drawing from the rich short stories and films of and on Southeast Asian migrant women in Hong Kong and Singapore, I examine how the contested images of Indonesian and Filipina women abroad reflect the anxieties on their mobility, particularly heightened by expressions of shame according to the codes of morality and sexuality dominant in Indonesian and Philippine societies. Malu and hiya [Indonesian and Filipino terms for shame] illustrate the ways in which gendered moral discourses shape the fraught politics of labor migration. Shame not only reinforces several problematic gender and moral discourses imposed on migrant women’s bodies but also heightens their precariousness place in their home and host countries. I examine not just stories of sexual vulnerability but also narratives of Indonesian and Filipina migrant women taking on and expressing their sexuality as ways of challenging the scripts of shame and shaming, while embracing new subjectivity and agency. I analyze stories about falling in love and pursuing interracial romance with migrant men, in Erfa Handayani’s “Sopir Taxi” [Taxi Driver] and Maria Bo Niok’s “Cinta Murah di Bukit Merah” [Cheap Loves at Bukit Merah]; their risks and deliberation in participating in sex work, in Tiwi’s story, “Sebuah Surat di Penghujung April” [Letter at the End of April] and Patrick Daly and Joel Fendelman’s film, Remittance (2015); and stories of queer desire, love, and intimacy in short stories like Juwanna’s “Kerudung Turki” [Turkish Veil] and Susana Nisa’s “Tuhan, Aku Pulang” [Allah, I’m Home]; and documentary films like Effort for Love (2008) by Ani Ema Susanti and Sunday Beauty Queen (2016) by Baby Ruth Villarama. Through these representations of migrant Indonesian and Filipina women’s sexuality and also their own narration of their love, passion, and desire, they also mediate and come to terms with what counts as shameful. I contend that these stories present a more complex negotiation of their precariousness, as they exhibit instances of agency and mobility in expressing their sexuality that go beyond traditional gender discourses upheld back home and abroad. Social exclusion and shaming can have detrimental consequences and this is what my third chapter focuses on in my discussion of the affect of suffering in the stories of victimhood and exploitation written by Southeast Asian migrant women. Here I analyze short stories written by Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore and examine how these narratives portray precarity as a structure of feeling, depicting migrant women’s vulnerability and the ways in which they negotiate and narrate their agency under duress. I study how their testimonies and stories portray suffering and confound the issue of migrant victimhood, in Tiwi’s “Letter at the End of April” and Arista Devi’s “No Diamond in Diamond Hill.” Then, I connect this affect of patience to the writerly subjectivity developed in the art of fiction in my discussion of Indira Margareta’s short story, “Cahaya Untuk Penaku” [Light for My Pen]. I close this chapter with the close reading of

Introduction 15 Etik Juwita’s “Bukan Yem” [Maybe Not Yem], to discuss how Indonesian women reimagine vulnerability as a subjectivity and resource for agency and resistance. By looking at the tropes of patience in vulnerability and resistance, these short stories reveal how Indonesian migrant women are not only subjugated by the precarious conditions of their transnational labor but also made to feel responsible for their own suffering. I argue that feelings of victimization and patience in Indonesian migrant women are not just responses to the highly contingent and vulnerable conditions that Indonesian domestic workers encounter in their daily lives but also reflect their responsibility as migrant women conditioned by gendered moral and national discourses of their home and homeland. Collectively, these affects demonstrate how these women express their subjectivity and exercise their agency given their plight. More importantly, their stories illustrate a much more complex account of victimhood and agency that Indonesian migrant women confront and negotiate in their everyday lives by deriving power from the vulnerability and the virtue of patience. The fourth chapter picks up on the theme of suffering by looking at how, among Filipina domestic workers, stories of distress and agony are impinged with the value and veneer of social and economic heroism in the form of sacrifice. This chapter unpacks the discourses of sacrifice by studying how the nation-state and cultural texts make use of its meaning as suffering for others to describe and prescribe Filipina migrant women’s stakes in transnational labor. Reading sacrifice as a form of affective economy, I look at how ideas of suffering for the greater good in the Philippine state’s rhetoric and OFW films are reproduced and circulated as discourses of migration for development by hailing the figure of Filipina domestic helpers as virtuous and sacrificing mothers, daughters, and wives. While the Philippine state uses the discourse of sacrifice in advancing its tenuous nationbuilding project through labor export, Filipina domestic workers also perceive their ventures and suffering abroad as a way of challenging dominant gendered scripts of diasporic maternal sacrifice. These contending claims on the Filipina domestic workers’ role and stakes for her home and homeland’s development are depicted in independent films portraying migrant mothers and their cruel attachments to the good life fantasies of migration. In this chapter, I closely read Mes de Guzman’s Balikbayan Box (2007), Zig Madamba Dulay’s Bagahe (2017), and Daly and Fendelman’s Remittance (2015) to probe how these three independent films featuring migrant Filipina mothers and wives expose the contradictions of the nation-state’s appropriation of sacrifice from suffering for the sake of one’s family to sacrificing for the sake of homeland to sustain its aggressive warm body exportation as developmental strategy. By showing how the wagers of Filipina women for their own families are problematically attached to the Philippine state’s goals of nation-building, the films also expose the cruel entanglements that sacrifice constructs for the Filipina subjects of labor migration. This optimistic attachment of the nation-state to migrant women’s sacrifices is severed in moments of death and mourning. In the final chapter, I examine how the affective economy of sacrifice becomes politicized by grief in the face

16

Introduction

of a migrant woman’s dead body. Here, I look at how grieving over migrant women’s deaths transforms the idea of sacrifice as ways of claiming accountability to the nation-state that deploys its citizen–breadwinners. I employ critical discussions on mourning to analyze two Southeast Asian novels that present different responses to deaths of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers: Jose Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister and Rida Fitria’s Sebongkah Tanah Retak [A Lump of Cracked Land]. These literary texts present how mourning reproduces and circulates feelings of grief—pity, sympathy, rage, and reproach—that forge a community to either foster or forestall political action. My reading maps out how the bereavement over migrant women’s lives can lead to a more critical understanding of labor migration’s policies and discourses in the Philippines and Indonesia, opening the possibilities of social activism that not only transforms national community and but also transcends national boundaries among and between Filipina and Indonesian migrant women. The book concludes with a brief discussion of how emotions can be political and transformative. Here, I illustrate how emotions can become mobilizing forces for community-building, solidarity, and political action among Filipina and Indonesian migrant domestic worker’s organizations in Hong Kong and Singapore. By weaving migrant women’s political demonstrations and organizing work with the films and fictions that give voice and representation to the lives and struggles of Indonesian and Filipina women abroad, I explore how the emotionality of these texts contribute to the emergence and vitality of women’s social movements in Southeast Asia.

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At Home and Unhomeliness

Openings In April 2015, Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a non-profit organization advocating foreign workers’ rights in Singapore, released a controversial video entitled “Mums and Maids” as part of their #igivedayoff campaign for foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in the island-state. The advocacy video shows side-byside interviews of mothers and their domestic workers as each of them was asked one intimate detail about their child or ward before cutting into the children’s actual responses. It was the helpers who got the answers right. The ad ends with a note: “Let’s give domestic workers their legal days off” (TWC2 and Ogilvy and Maher Co. 2015). The video became viral, spurring thousands of views and shares among Singaporean netizens and stirring conversation in social media. Many of the positive reactions confessed how touched they were by this simple yet affecting depiction of the irony of employing a live-in maid in Singapore and also probably elsewhere in the world. Mothers are slowly becoming distant from their own children as the children become closer to the hired help. However, TWC2’s message also backfired as others felt that in its attempt to promote domestic workers’ right, the campaign had also shamed working mothers. These criticisms came from the video’s powerful yet problematic subtext that rests upon assumptions that domestic and care work is solely the woman’s responsibility and the threat of the kids growing closer to the maids justifies the need to give them day-off, not because it is their fundamental right as workers. The problems and responses raised by this two-minute clip demonstrate how the subjective realm of emotions and feelings often inform and arbitrate the ways in which the objective norms of rights and laws are understood and expressed in public discourse, especially in this line of work that is considered gendered and very intimate. Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers are able to enter the most intimate spaces of their host even though they are largely excluded by laws and social practices from fully integrating into the receiving countries. Inside these foreign households, however, migrant women form emotional ties with their employing families to circumvent the effects of isolation and social exclusion. The intimacies they create to find a sense of belonging in foreign homes and foreign cities

20 At Home and Unhomeliness can also serve to intimidate the hosts that welcome and accommodate them. This shows how the emotional lives of migrant women and the personal ties they form intervene into and complicate issues of social exclusion and belonging for FDWs. Through the critical conversations on hospitality and the debate of social inclusion and exclusion, I examine how both Hong Kong and Singapore, as host citystates, structure and practice their varying versions of calculated hospitality. In this section, I discuss how the practice of receiving and accommodating FDWs in both territories deploys ideas of social exclusion even and especially in the realm of intimate labor in discourses of citizenship, residency (and lack of thereof), and its policy of inviting and classifying foreigners according to the host state’s costbenefit calculations. Then I proceed to discuss its consequences by looking at the particularities of each of these city-states’ policies and the kinds of contradictions their practices of limited hospitality structure in migrant helpers’ living and working conditions. The paradox of intimacy and exclusion that frames the problem of hospitality in the discourse of transnational care and domestic work is evident in the visual and literary texts of and on migrant Filipina and Indonesian women in Singapore and Hong Kong. Anthony Chen’s (2013) Ilo Ilo and Oliver Siu-Kuen Chan’s (2018) Still Human cinematically portray how Filipina helpers straddle between the impulse to be intimate with their employers while being perennially kept out by their hosts, on the one hand, and the incongruous and paradoxical way Hong Kong and Singaporean employers feel about their guest workers, on the other. These two melodramas of finding intimacy inside a foreign household also expose how the problematic meanings impinged on domestic work as intimate labor support and sustain the exclusionary policies and practices towards FDWs in host societies. Migrant Filipina and Indonesian women’s own cultural productions productively interrogate these two middle-class directors’ filmic representations of this inherent intimacy and exclusion shaping FDWs’ presence and labor in transnational households. Cultural texts written and produced from the perspective and lens of Indonesian and Filipina migrant women—like Susie Utomo’s (2020) short story, “Penjajah di Rumahku” [Intruder at Home], and the black-and-white photographs of Xyza Cruz Bacani (2018) in her art book We Are Like Air—present nuanced counter-narratives to the two films in portraying simultaneous gestures of inclusion and exclusion in accommodating guest workers in Hong Kong and Singapore. These literary and visual texts not only contribute to the ongoing discussions on the limits of hospitality and the problems of social exclusion but also open up new imaginaries of belonging by portraying the inner worlds of helpers and their employers and representing the many ways intimacy and intimate labor transform the politics of welcome in foreign households in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Necessary but Invisible Labor FDWs are placed at the nexus of complex global processes, where they inhabit “the regime of labor intimacy”: a commodified sphere of intimate and private

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labor in the service of capitalist hyperdevelopment in many global cities (Chang and Lin 2005, 30). The economic boom experienced by both Singapore and Hong Kong in the 1980s has led to a neoliberal restructuring that has enjoined their citizens, including middle-class women, who were traditionally burdened with domestic work, to participate in formal economies and industries (Huang and Yeoh 1998). This industrialization process has not only absorbed the middle-class women who previously carried out unpaid domestic obligations but has also resulted in the dwindling number of women who were previously involved in paid household work (Chinese amahs and women from rural areas) (Gaw 1988). This setup has engendered both the island-states’ intervention in solving such a domestic problem by outsourcing women from poorer neighbors in South and Southeast Asia, formalizing domestic work as part of both the global cities’ needs to encourage continued participation of women in the formal economies, without sacrificing the reproductive sphere of both states (Chan 2005). Migrant household workers’ role is necessary for the economic and social life of Singapore and Hong Kong as they enable skill upgrade and professionalization of local women while stabilizing birth and marriage rates of these citystates. However, their insertion into the intimate lives of the receiving states’ middle-class households is largely seen as undesired. The prevalence of racial and classist stereotypes on foreign maids—seen, for example, in the popular use of the condescending Cantonese term banmui (Philippine girl) or “brownfacing” Chinese actors to represent Filipina domestics in TV commercials—reveals how locals perceive their inferior status as both workers and foreigners in these cities (Constable 1997, 77; Choi and Agence France-Presse 2014). These racist and classist ideas support certain practices of social exclusion, like barring FDWs access to certain establishments or the day-to-day derogatory treatment in certain places in the host countries (Grundy 2013). These expressions of racism and classism, however, are conditioned by the kind of hospitality that both destination states extend to guest workers. Hong Kong and Singapore invite and welcome predominantly brown-skinned women of poorer countries of South and Southeast Asia because they are both cheaper and ethnically different to their hosts. Filipina and Indonesian women are preferable because they are less expensive and they are easily distinguishable from the mostly fairer Chinese middle-class households that hire them (Wee and Sim 2005). This means that racial profiling is fundamental in this mode of hospitality, where migrant maids’ skin color and physical attributes serve as “racial boundaries” that mark her difference from, despite her proximity to, her employers (Lan 2006). Invited by the host country out of necessity, but largely excluded because of their perceived status and stereotypes, their needed but unwanted presence in these Asian hubs challenges and undermines the drummed up virtues of economic integration and social inclusiveness that both Hong Kong and Singapore project as cosmopolitan cities (Yeoh 2004, Law 2002).

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Social Exclusion Pheng Cheah (2010), in “Necessary Strangers: Law’s Hospitality in the Age of Transnational Migrancy,” describes the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of FDWs in these city-states as a form of “calculated hospitality.” The contemporary practices and discourses of globalization and cosmopolitanism have only exacerbated “the tension between the attraction and repulsion of the stranger” (35), which is especially salient in Hong Kong and Singapore, where “the project of cultivating human capital on which these host cities’ hyperdevelopment has been based is governed by a discourse of hospitality based on cost-benefit calculations” (37). In both of these territories, foreign helpers are received on a “use and discard” basis that relegates them to the position of being “included-out”: welcomed only to provide the host’s needs yet denied of the prospect of being fully integrated into their social fabric (Yeoh 2004, 9; Erni 2013). In Hong Kong and Singapore, women from the Philippines and Indonesia form a crucial segment of this underclass of migrant workers; yet both of these groups of migrant women workers are subjected to a range of policies that would guarantee their transience and deprive them of gaining a foothold in Hong Kong and Singapore. They have no access to citizenship, permanent residency, or right of abode, while their passes or visas are regulated by their work contracts. FDWs are usually granted two-year work permits which they can renew for as long as they want until they are 60 years old, subject to approval from these city-states’ immigration departments. Throughout their stay, they are prohibited from bringing their spouses and children with them. These exclusionary policies affirm how Asian tiger economies like Singapore and Hong Kong operate as “zones of exception” where “migrants become [an] exception to neo-liberal mechanisms and are constructed as excludable populations in transit, shuttled in and out of zones of growth” (Ong 2006, 16). These restrictive mechanisms of receiving and accommodating migrant helpers in both of these host cities’ private and public spaces not only illustrate the conditionality of the hospitality that receiving states extend to their foreign workers but also show how such conditions have negative consequences on FDWs’ everyday lives in the host countries. In Singapore in particular, aside from FDWs’ lack of access to citizenry and permanent residency, they are also excluded from the legal mechanisms that protect all the other workers in the island-state. Migrant helpers are not covered by the Employment Act that legislates standard employment terms like working hours, minimum pay, paid leave, etc. (Yeoh, Huang, and Devasahayam 2004). It was only in 2013 that the island-state has legislated a weekly day-off rule, but even then, survey estimates that only a third of the total population of foreign maids in the city-state enjoys either once-a-week or once-a-month rest days (Seow 2014). Since there are no standard contract and employment terms, Singapore’s “hands-off” approach only offers advice for hiring locals and recruiters on salary rates, accommodation, adequate food, and safety for FDWs (Ministry of Manpower 2015a). At present, the salary rates of migrant helpers

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in the country ranges from 310 to 550 SGD (220–400 USD) per month (The Singapore Guide 2015). Even though FDWs exist outside the legal framework of standard employment in the island-city, they are ironically subjected to surveillance and control from both their host country and their employers. The Singaporean government requires employers to post a security bond of 5,000 SGD (3,600 USD)—aside from the maid levy amounting to 300–450 SGD (220–335 USD) they also have to pay monthly—for each foreign helper they will hire (Ministry of Manpower 2020). The employers stand to lose the bond if they or their hired help violate the job contract. This makes the hiring of foreign helpers particularly expensive and prohibitive for employers, compelling them to protect the money that they have spent by making sure that their foreign maids will not break their contracts or run away from them (Yeoh, Huang, and Gonzalez 2004). These requirements are not just a means for the government to control the demand for live-in maids but also a way of enjoining employers to micro-manage their hired help, from constant monitoring and surveillance to deprivation of day-off. Unlike Singapore, Hong Kong has drawn rules and regulations concerning employment and living conditions of FDWs under Employment Ordinance. It has set terms in standard employment contracts that state the minimum allowable wage for foreign helpers, which at present is pegged at 4,630 HKD (600 USD) per month, fringe benefits like accommodation, health care, food or food allowances, guaranteed weekly day-off, paid statutory holidays, and annual leave (Ignacio and Mejia 2009). These standards are important because they remain as grounds which migrant women use to claim redress and seek grievance mechanisms when faced with problems with their employers. Moreover, Hong Kong, in 2013, repealed its imposition of 400 HKD (50 USD) monthly levy for employers hiring foreign maids, which started in 2003 because of recession. However, while Hong Kong’s legal measures are generally seen as more responsive to its migrant helpers, some of its policies mirror exclusionary modes of hospitality similar to those practiced by Singapore. Just like in Singapore, foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong are bound by their contracts and “conditions of stay.” In cases where they find themselves terminated, they have to go back to their origin countries after a grace period of two weeks (Wee and Sim 2005, 185). The Hong Kong government enforces this “two-week rule” to prevent migrant maids from “job-hopping.” However, these conditions of stay have inhibited migrant maids from leaving abusive employers and seeking legal redress in fear of losing their only source of livelihood, being repatriated with debts, and spending more for another cycle of deployment. Finally, their vulnerability is heightened by the mandatory live-in arrangement that FDWs in both Hong Kong and Singapore follow (Human Rights Watch 2005). They are placed to inhabit the same space as their bosses, dissolving the spatial and temporal boundaries of work and home throughout their stay as guest workers in both city-states. Because their work is inside their host’s homes, their experience of place is defined by “placelessness” just like their time for work and time for rest becomes indefinite and flexible inside the household (Parreñas

24 At Home and Unhomeliness 2008a, 19). These structural exclusions manifest in migrant household workers’ “nebulous sociolegal status and the ambiguous site of paid housework that renders maids especially vulnerable to poor treatment” (Cheah 2010, 43). With very few legal recourse and subjection to heightened control, these conditions of exclusion have intensified not only foreign helpers’ marginalization but also, and more importantly, their vulnerabilities as migrant women in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Intimacy and Intimate Labor Although FDWs are structurally alienated, their co-presence and incursion into the private and public realms of their hosts transform the social relations within these spaces where they negotiate their place and assert their claims to their employers and to the host states. As Guy Mundlak and Hila Shamir (2008) assert, even if the domestic and care worker “is required to leave her humanity behind at the border” when she enters the destination countries, “she is still expected to function in a fully humane and uninstrumental way to develop intimacy and caring feelings in the service she provides in the private home” (170). This is why it is important to look at how the dimension of intimacy interrogates the possibilities of hospitality in reading transnational care labor in terms of how it opens up alternative ideas of belongingness in these host countries. Wendy Sarvasy and Patrizia Longo (2004), in “The Globalization of Care: Kant’s World Citizenship and Filipina Migrant Domestic Workers,” look into how global care work that the foreign domestic workers administer reinscribes social and emotional relations inside the employers’ homes and in the host countries. By participating in the global care industry, migrant women are able to adapt and settle in global cities and perform “a form of cosmopolitanism from the bottom up” and “deterritorialized citizenship” by entering into a “universal community” of “global interdependence” based on “transnational relations that address daily care needs” (400–401). Even if they are displaced both in their home and in their host countries, FDWs are able to practice a “thick form of citizenship” that negotiates both of the policies and politics of the labor-sending and laborreceiving states (402). Their absence back home is mitigated by their remittances, on which their families and origin countries are dependent, while their presence in the host country highlights their necessity in supporting the receiving state’s industries by allowing their bosses to participate in formal economies. In these ways, migrant women “show how the household itself becomes a site of global democratic politics as individuals and states negotiate the relations of care” (403). Yet more than FDWs’ economic contribution, Sarvasy and Longo also emphasize how hospitality and the welcoming of guest workers into the intimate and open spaces of these cities bring about social transformation in the host states where they perform care and domestic work. The site of the household becomes a major site of intimacy where migrant women “stretch the intimate and interpersonal relations across nations” (393). As Michele Ruth Gamburd (2000) claims, aside from the circulation of labor and money that binds the families of both foreign employers and the migrant domestic workers, “[the] dynamics of social change encompassed

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not only economics but also, and perhaps more significantly, local and international patterns of love and affection” (187). In these ways, the transformative capacity of the intimate care and household labor extends to not only the economies of both labor-sending and receiving states but also, and more importantly, the emotional lives of both the migrant women and their employing families. While most scholarship on the affective dimension of migration has revolved around maintaining the affective ties in transnational parenting of left-behind children, very few of these studies look at how the rendering of care and intimate work for families abroad in itself is a way of extending familial relations even on non-kin foreign households (Asis 2005). Even though they are strangers, the live-in maids enter into the realm of affective labor in the private spaces of their employers and are inadvertently immersed into the immediate intimate relations of the household members (Gutierrez-Rodriguez 2014). Because of their work that entails “emotional closeness and personal familiarity” to their employers or their wards, their co-presence and care work as stay-at-home workers, even while only relegated as guests, entrench them in the process of building and transforming affective bonds with the families that employ and welcome them in their own homes and into their private lives (Boris and Parreñas 2010, 2). Even if these migrant women are non-kin inside the household, many of them regard their employers as family and, in return, are also considered by their employers as “part of the family” based on “family-like relationships” ( Asis, Huang, and Yeoh 2004). In fact, even receiving governments, like Singapore, emphasize the need for employers to include and integrate their guest workers into the family to achieve a harmonious working relationship inside the household (Ministry of Manpower 2015a). This reconfiguration of intimacy within the transnational family is an important part and consequence of their insertion into these private realms where they create a sense of belonging amid conditions of exclusion. Claiming that migrant women’s participation in care work in host countries opens up new ways of thinking about belonging, Sarvasy and Longo frame hospitality as an opening through which issues of world citizenship and cosmopolitanism can be rethought. Even though citizenship and belongingness are still grounded on the norms of laws and policies that the receiving state uses through its practice of receiving foreigners, the intimacy of foreign helpers can push the host state to adopt more embracing forms of hospitality to its guest workers. The role of migrant women in addressing the care needs and sustenance of the reproductive life of their destination countries, while also transforming the intimate and social relationships inside and outside the households, challenge “their hosts/employers to engage in new, more egalitarian relations across differences” (Sarvasy and Longo 2004, 409). Because of this, they assert that “the context of globalization of care requires extending guest workers’ right to visit to a workbased right to residency and citizenship” (408). Sarvasy and Longo are thus using the premise of intimacy of guest workers’ presence and labor as grounds from which they can, and should be able to, claim belongingness to the host country through citizenship and residency.

26 At Home and Unhomeliness However, this does not clearly materialize in the zones of exception that are Hong Kong and Singapore in a number of very concrete ways. Consider, for example, the judicial review for right of abode filed by Evangeline Vallejos, a Filipina domestic worker in Hong Kong for 27 years, a duration which is more than enough to fulfill the city-state’s Basic Law requirement. While she won her case in the Court of First Instance, the Court of Appeal and the Court of Final Appeal overturned the decision because her residency only serves to “fulfill the special, limited purpose for which they have been allowed in stay in Hong Kong in the first place, and no more” (Cheung 2012). These exclusionary laws that define Hong Kong’s hospitality bar foreign helpers from a work-based right of residency and citizenship precisely because their stay is limited only in fulfilling particular demands of the host society.

Thresholds of Hospitality While hospitality entails more than the forms of legal and social exclusion, migrant women’s intimacy and intimate labor do not immediately translate into a more open and unconditional state practice of hospitality. Intimacy and exclusion may seem contradictory, especially in how the predicaments of foreigners and strangers in the city are framed by structural alienation under law and in public discourse, but a closer analysis on hospitality could point to how these two opposing gestures work to shape and produce each other’s conditions. While forms of intimacy are usually seen as affective strategies of migrant women in circumventing exclusionary policies, Mundlak and Shamir (2008), in “Between Intimacy and Alienage: The Legal Construction of Domestic and Carework in the Welfare State,” point out how the intimate nature of the labor that domestic and care workers provide is also used to exclude them from legitimate claims of belongingness, either in the issue of acknowledging household work as work or in recognizing their stakes for permanent residency in the destination countries. In fact, the social and legal construction of their material conditions—living in with the employer where standards of labor do not apply with regard to work hours, minimum wage, etc.—reflect the social perceptions about the gendered dimension of domestic and care work as “inherently unquantifiable and intimate even when commodified” (168). Such assumptions rest on notions of intimacy that are “derived from the traditional conception of care work as a matter to be provided to the household by its women, without remuneration, and presumably as an expression of their love” (168). Even though transnational household service is paid work, vestiges of classic gender ideologies on unpaid domestic labor as an obligation borne out of intimacy are still in place. Therefore, the state’s refusal to legislate employment standards on domestic work like working hours, rest days, minimum wage, is not only coming from the fact that FDWs are excluded as informal employees in the city but also grounded in the nature of their work’s intimacy. On the one hand, the host country argues that formalizing domestic and care work as a legitimate form of labor that demands standards on remuneration is “putting a price on love and

At Home and Unhomeliness 27 care,” and on the other hand, the receiving state also reasons that the wide-ranging tasks of care and household work exceed “the economic and social calculations” that the legal standardization of labor sets with minimum wage, hours of work, and rest as applied to all other forms of work (168). In the context of Singapore, the argument of intimacy in the nature of domestic work can be seen in the “hands-off” approach of the government on standardizing FDWs’ contract and stipulating labor standards on their work hours and minimum wage (Yeoh, Huang and Gonzalez 2004). In Hong Kong, on the other hand, foreign helpers are not covered by the going rate of the statutory minimum wage that applies to all the other workers in the city (computed by the hour) and instead their wages are set by monthly rates, since the details of their work cannot be determined or calculated by the hour as they vary according to “personal” arrangements with the employer (Labour Department HK 2014). Both of these city-states’ positions on standardizing contract or compensation come from the perception that household work is a private matter between the guest worker and the employer. As such, it not only deploys ideas of intimacy as ways of excluding migrant women from standard labor rights but also leaves their contract or compensation at the mercy of their brokering agency and employers. From this, Mundlak and Shamir (2008) note that the intimate nature of domestic work and the state’s exclusionary mechanisms on foreign domestic workers are never mutually exclusive from each other but are in fact both implicated in producing the difficult conditions that live-in maids face: “Through this juridical perception of the migrant worker, alienage and intimacy are no longer opposites: instead they have been made to complement each other to achieve the instrumentalization of migrant careworkers, without eroding traditional gendered assumptions and state calculations” (174). Thus, even if the intimate care service that they provide is commodified, their role and place inside the household is still contrasted against the unpaid domestic obligations of their female employers. In the same vein, even if the intimate labor that they provide is an essential form of labor that sustains life and the economic vitality of their host city-states, domestic work is still denigrated as an informal labor that can be excluded from norms and rights that govern other types of work. In this sense, transnational household labor exposes how structural and material conditions of social exclusion sustain and support the problematic ways in which migrant women are welcomed, accommodated, and treated as intimate laborers in private households of their host states. This ongoing critical conversation on hospitality and migration becomes an inroad not only to discuss the practice of restrictive welcoming of guest workers in Hong Kong and Singapore but also to examine how they frame the material and social conditions of exclusion and intimacy among transnational domestic workers in these city-states. The calculated hospitality that is produced and bounded by both gestures of alienage and intimacy shows how complex the dilemmas are not only for the guest workers themselves but also for their hosts. This proves that it is insufficient to approach the problem either only on the basis of exclusion—by looking at how state policies and public discourses are exclusionary of foreign maids—or on alternative grounds of inclusion—by asserting that intimacy opens

28 At Home and Unhomeliness a way for social integration. Furthermore, acknowledging FDWs’ intimate labor and presence does not always lead to social inclusion but is sometimes also used to exclude them. The fraught issues that the limits of hospitality and debates on social integration of foreign domestic workers point to how intimacy and exclusion operate in much more complex ways in shaping the social and affective worlds or the structures of feeling of migrant maids, the families that employ them, and the larger society that receives and hosts them. To this, cultural texts that portray the intimate relationships that both bind and separate Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers to their Hong Kong and Singaporean employers in their bid to feel at home and claim their place in foreign households and cities might offer ways to unpack the politics of hospitality of gendered labor migration.

Stories from the Hosts Chen’s Ilo Ilo and Chan’s Still Human look into the intricacies and entanglements of relationships among live-in helpers and the hiring families to describe not only migrant women’s exclusion but also their incursion into the structure of feeling of Hong Kong and Singaporean homes. Ilo Ilo banks on that familiar scenario where “parents invite a stranger into their home and have them form a relationship with their children over a number of years; then when they decide they don’t need help any more, they send them home” (Rose 2014). This story is something very close to the filmmaker’s heart, as Chen himself confessed that Ilo Ilo was based on his own memory of growing up with a foreign nanny for eight years (King 2014). On screen, this translates into the touching story of Jiale’s (Koh Jia Ler) brief yet lasting bond with his Filipina maid, Terry (Angeli Bayani), and the anxieties that such intimacy animates for the young boy’s mother, Hwee-Leng (Yeo Yan Yann). This affective dynamic becomes the central arc of this Singaporean domestic drama that essays the coming of age of a young boy fostered by a “real sense of intimacy” from a stranger at home (Risov 2014). Still Human, on the other hand, portrays the same setup of transnational care work, but instead of a mother–child–helper relationship, it puts a spotlight on the vulnerable and often abandoned aging population. The comedy-drama feature centers around how an aging paraplegic, Cheung-Wing (Anthony Wong), finds another stake in life through the care and affection he receives from and reciprocates to his Filipina maid, Evelyn (Crisel Consunji). While Ilo Ilo was conceived from the Singaporean director’s childhood memories, Still Human’s inspiration came from an ethnographic observation from the Hong Kong filmmaker. Oliver Chan talks about how the film came about from her own discomfort in observing the intimacy and closeness of two people in her neighborhood, an old man in a wheelchair and his doting foreign helper: “Their interaction was genuinely sweet but I felt a bit uncomfortable” (Kerr 2020). This compelled Chan to reflect on where her anxieties are coming from, which led her to write and direct her first feature film which was granted with the prestigious First Film Initiative funded by the Hong Kong government (Halligan 2019).

At Home and Unhomeliness 29 Released five years apart, both debut films of rookie Singaporean and Hong Kong filmmakers became critical and commercial hits. Ilo Ilo became Singapore’s first feature film to win a Caméra d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival while also attaining commercial success within Singapore’s arthouse cinema. Still Human, on the other hand, won for Chan and Wong best director and actor trophies, respectively, in prestigious film fests like Asian Film Awards and Hong Kong Film Awards, and became the top grossing film in Hong Kong in the week of its release. These two films’ successes have put a spotlight on both Hong Kong and Singaporean cinemas in the global arena but also on a particular drama and a dilemma that emerge out of these two city-states’ care networks that seldom find nuanced depictions in mainstream media and films. Film critics have lauded both Chen and Chan’s masterful control of emotions and sentimentalism to render their subjects with complexity and human dignity. While they pointed out how Chen was able to poignantly portray in Ilo Ilo how “everyday life in Singaporean households can move us deeply” (Turan 2014), Still Human was able to represent “the invisible people” in Hong Kong, the disabled and the foreign workers, “without excessive drama and emotional blackmail” (Anomalilly 2018). The critical conversations around the two cultural texts reveal how affect as a film vocabulary is important not just in producing compelling films but also in fleshing out the nuances and the deeper structures of feeling of transnational domestic work that organizes the kinds of relationships it produces among its subjects: the FDWs and the families that welcome them into their homes.

Enter, Stranger Ilo Ilo begins with a scene showing a pregnant mother, Hwee-Leng, scolding her son. Set in the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the film’s opening sequence visualizes the drifting emotional relationship inside a precarious household: the young troublemaker who is obviously seeking attention from a mother who is too pregnant and too busy to care. The economic instability of the period is portrayed not only in terms of the unglamorous public housing where the Lim family lives (even while both parents are working full-time) but also through the apparent pressures the audience can feel from Hwee-Leng who juggles both domestic and economic burdens. As Terry enters into the private realm of the family as a stranger, she is immediately caught up in the emotional conflict and economic pressure existing within the Lim family. She soon discovers the complexity of being an “intimate foreigner” as she learns that she has to share the bedroom with Jiale. And as a guarantee that she will not run away, Hwee-Leng confiscates Terry’s passport for safekeeping. With the cramped space of the Lim household and the intimate nature of her work for the family, Terry is compelled to find her footing inside the house, even if she is still considered an outsider who must earn the trust of her employers and gain the affection of an obviously agitated child. Still Human starts on a similar path, showing Cheung-Wing coming out of his small and untidy flat in Hong Kong to fetch his new Filipina maid from a bus stop.

30 At Home and Unhomeliness Set in a more contemporary time than Ilo Ilo, the opening scenes set the emotional tone and economic and social setup at the heart of the film’s conflict. With the main protagonist waking up alone and unattended in his wheelchair, this sequence illustrates how the city-state has treated many of its disabled and aging working underclass population, abandoned by their own families and left by the state to fend for themselves in dilapidated public housing. As Evelyn meets her employer for the first time, she quickly realizes the borders she has to breach to warm up to the old, embittered man she is tasked to care for. Evelyn does not understand Cantonese while Cheung-Wing is unable to speak English. Even with her nursing degree coming particularly handy in caring for an aging paraplegic, this cultural barrier becomes the main source of tension between the two. Aided by a translation app on the cellphone, her employer talks to her and asks for her passport for safekeeping. Just like Terry, Evelyn has to find her bearings inside a space that does not feel like a home, with a foreign employer who seems reluctant to reach out. Ilo Ilo and Still Human dramatize the tracks of displacement and belonging of Terry and Evelyn inside the foreign households in Singapore and Hong Kong. The Filipina maids in both films have to feel “at home” with their foreign hosts even though their mere presence animates tension for members of the households they are working for. Terry is seen as someone invading Jiale’s personal space and intruding on Hwee-Leng’s domestic reign, while Evelyn seems like a poor alternative for the care of Cheung-wing’s family who have already abandoned him. These intricate emotional configurations of relationships build up the parallel dramatic tracks of the film while also rehearsing the complexity of hospitality’s mode of intimacy and exclusion in the lives of guest workers and their employing families.

From Foreign to Familiar The two films track the trajectory of Terry and Evelyn from being disoriented strangers in their respective employer’s house to becoming assimilated in its space alongside the development of emotional connection with their respective wards, Jiale and Cheung-Wing. Both films set up the two Filipina helpers’ feelings of isolation and exclusion through their use of the cramped spaces characteristic of public housing in Singapore and Hong Kong. In the first few moments of Ilo Ilo, Terry’s alienation is exemplified in a scene showing her shocked and distraught from witnessing, from the small kitchen window, a man jumping to his death in their neighborhood during her first few days of work. In this particular scene, the camera closes in on Terry’s face flooded with hard white light, exposing the trauma of her displacement. This same feeling of unhomeliness and isolation is also highlighted in Still Human during Evelyn’s first night inside her empty room at Cheung-Wing’s flat. With the scene cast in cool blue nightlighting, Evelyn photographs her dark room and posts it on her social media with a caption: “It is not a home, but a shelter.” However, both Terry and Evelyn knew that, to be able to survive and find their own place in Singapore and Hong Kong,

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they have to earn the trust and affection of their wards, Jiale and Cheung-Wing, respectively. In Ilo Ilo, Terry is seen trying to be patient with the mischievous boy even as he repeatedly ignores and dismisses her. She is only compelled to confront and admonish Jiale after the boy frames her for shoplifting in a store: “Listen, I don’t care if you like me or not, but your mom hired me, I’m here to do my work properly.” This reproach comes from an assertion that because the care she provides to Jiale is commodified, her work can be solely transactional and instrumental. However, because of the intimate nature of her work, Terry also knows that doing her work properly relies so much on whether Jiale likes her or not, or at least likes her enough that he will not cause trouble for her. Such negotiation entails that she is required to not only perform her job well but earn Jiale’s trust and affection in the process. A similar kind of negotiation happens with Evelyn and Cheung-Wing in Still Human. Distrust builds up between the two as Cheung-Wing constantly threatens his maid of dismissal for not understanding Cantonese while Evelyn pretends to act stupid to get away with not following her boss’ orders. As Evelyn tucks her male boss to sleep, a rattled Cheung-Wing requests his maid to get rid of a cockroach crawling by his bedside. Evelyn, trying to hide her smile, says, “Sir, I don’t want to get fired,” and waits for Cheung-Wing to promise not to fire her before obliging. This kind of bargaining also exposes the irony that sustains their setup, that no matter how intimate the labor is, it is still transactional. These moments in both films showing Filipina helpers bargaining with their ward—to trust them to make their commodified service work—reveal the internal tension within the setup of paid care labor. They uncover how feelings of liking and trust have to be earned even if the exchange of care is monetized. The helpers and their wards’ relationships turn around after both Jiale and Cheng-Wing meet with an accident, forcing the boy and the old man to further rely on their female carers’ help and presence. The two films similarly portray Jiale and Cheung-Wing’s opening up to Terry and Evelyn, paving the way for a mutual fondness to develop, in light-hearted moments showing the two women bathing their wards. The earlier feeling of isolation and alienation attached to the narrowness of space transforms into warm moments of shared vulnerability and intimacy. Shot with the same intimate camera gaze of medium close shot, the parallel scenes of Terry and Evelyn bathing Jiale and Cheung-Wing are framed in a warm soft lighting, highlighting the tenderness of physical and emotional connection. In Ilo Ilo, Terry and Jiale’s growing closeness is depicted in scenes following this pivotal moment, showing them changing clothes in front of each other or Jiale occasionally touching and sniffing Terry’s body and hair. In Still Human, on the other hand, Evelyn’s previous cold approach to looking after Cheung-Wing gives way to moments of bonding, as her rituals of massaging the old man, changing his clothes, and lifting him up from bed to his wheelchair are now interjected with humorous exchanges where the two mutually learn each other’s language, Cantonese and English. Both films show that intimate moments extend beyond the privacy of the homes. Their growing tenderness with each other is seen in everyday and mundane

32 At Home and Unhomeliness details like Terry walking Jiale to school while they casually chide each other’s strangeness or Evelyn pushing her aging boss in the wheelchair in public as the latter teaches her Cantonese phrases. These emotional connections are also revealed through significant events in their employers’ families: Jiale sits with Terry outside the reserved room for his family’s reunion on his own birthday, where he requests the maid to stand beside him for a family picture, and during Lunar New Year’s celebration, Evelyn is asked to sit with Cheung-Wing and his sister just like a family and on Evelyn’s birthday when her male boss gifts her with an expensive camera. In these moments, both Filipina maids’ worlds cinematically open up as the camera frames the public spaces in wide shots as Terry and Jiale walk from school along Singapore’s busy streets or as Evelyn rides at the back of Cheung-Wing’s mechanical wheelchair driving through Hong Kong’s steep sidewalks. The intimacy of both Filipina helpers with their wards also allows them to gain some familiarity with their place both at home and outside. In Ilo Ilo, Jiale brings Terry to the rooftop from where the man, whose suicide Terry earlier witnessed, jumped. The ward’s thoughtful gesture makes her confront her trauma and appreciate the foreign city through the boy’s eyes. In Still Human, Cheung-Wing’s gift gives Evelyn a new way of looking at her boss’ home city, as she photographs Hong Kong through a more empathic lens coming from a more assured sense of her place. Their closeness to their wards not just eases their work regimen but also gives them freedom in navigating the private and public spaces of the city. Intimacy brings the Filipina helpers a sense of belongingness, where they form a social network of friends and fellow domestic helpers while gaining mobility and control over their lives abroad. In this regard, these films depict not only the emotional bond of live-in maids to members of the host family but also how developing that intimacy helps them manage the anxieties of being structurally alienated and excluded in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Close yet Closed-off However, this kind of intimacy also shores up an altogether different response in another member of the family. In Ilo Ilo, the closeness that Terry develops with Jiale brings a growing sense of anxiety and jealousy in Hwee-Leng. The mother’s uneasiness shows up each time she witnesses how their live-in maid forges a kind of affinity and rapport with Jiale that she herself has never had with her own son. Moreover, her son also starts to prefer the maid’s presence. In these instances, Hwee-Leng seems unsure of what to feel about Terry seemingly invading her place in the house. However, the mother knows that she has to repress her mixed emotions if only to avoid affirming her own dismay and envy. After all, the things that make her both apprehensive and jealous of Terry—her intimacy with her son and her mastery of the household chores—are the very qualities that make her a good domestic and care worker for the Lim household. In Still Human, it is the male boss’ younger sister, Jing-Ying (Cecilia Yip), who feels the discomfort with her paraplegic brother’s fondness for the foreign helper. Already feeling estranged from her brother Cheung-Wing owing to his

At Home and Unhomeliness 33 meddling with her marriage, Jing-Ying has completely left the care of her now disabled older brother, who had raised her when they were young, to the commodified care of a Filipina maid. Her anxieties shore up and easily shift to anger as she witnesses the brother that she already rejected finding rapport and receiving affection and attention from a foreign woman, instead of her. Jing-Ying’s silent rage at Evelyn doting on her helpless brother also highlights the guilt that she tries so hard to disavow. The complexity of this structure of feeling that both Hwee-Leng and JingYing find themselves in comes from the fact that the helper is “frequently set up in opposition” as “the ‘other woman’ in the house” (Poon 2013). This kind of affective tension that the mother or the sister in the household holds reflects the deeply ingrained idea that domestic work is solely a woman’s burden. The uneasiness and distrust that Hwee-Leng feels about Terry and the guilt and envy that Evelyn animates in Jing-Ying illustrate how internalized this gendered ideology of intimate work is, even though both women know that the main reason they hired foreign helpers in the first place is precisely to relieve them of all the burdens they have to carry to maintain the economic and reproductive life of their respective families. The anxieties that arise from the structures of feeling confounded by relations of intimacy and exclusion in these two films clash in crucial moments as the characters confront the limits of the ties that bind them to each other. In Ilo Ilo, this happens in Jiale’s school after the boy is punished for punching his classmate for making fun of his fondness for his maid. Terry, who goes to school ahead of the boy’s mother, is seen pleading with the principal to reconsider her decision on expelling the boy from school. Amid her emotional pleadings, Hwee-Leng barges into the office, worried about her son’s newfound trouble but also embarrassed at what Terry is doing in front of the school head mimicking her. With the mise-enscene placing the two women at both sides of the frame while the boy stands at the middle, blurred as a foreground, Hwee-Leng finally declares to Terry that: “I’m his mother, not you!” The simplicity of this truth is also the most hurtful for both the mother and the maid. For Terry, this belies all the intimacy she has already established with her ward. It exposes the fact that no matter how close Terry is to Jiale, she remains an outsider who should have no business acting like a family in public. For Hwee-Leng, the need for such outbursts only proves her anxieties about her own maternal absence. Her statement confirms that she has indeed lost her reign over the intimate maternal sphere, and must stake her claims again by stating this very obvious fact. In Still Human, this is shown with the public confrontation between CheungWing, Evelyn, and Jing-Ying, with the scene framed with Jing-Ying at the far right of the frame squarely facing her brother and the Filipina helper at the other side. Triggered by the sight of her brother laughing intimately as Evelyn rides at the back of his wheelchair, whispering something to his ears in public, JingYing angrily insinuates in Cantonese that her brother is dating and sleeping with the maid. Unaware that Evelyn already understands the language because of Cheung-Wing’s tutoring, Jing-Ying reproaches her brother for choosing a maid

34 At Home and Unhomeliness

Figure 1.1 Degrees of closeness and separation: The mother confronts the nanny in front of her son in Ilo Ilo (top) and the sister chastises her brother’s closeness to his helper in Still Human (bottom). Photo courtesy of Anthony Chen and Chan Siu-Kuen.

as a lover, then shifts to English to crossly tell the helper: “Let me remind you that you are here to do your job!” This statement powerfully sets up the boundaries of intimacy that limit her commodified labor to her employer, Cheung-Wing, from extending into sexual or romantic affairs. Unlike the innocence of intimacy in caring for a young boy in Ilo Ilo, Still Human portrays the social prejudices that may arise from the “destined reciprocity of companionship” between a foreign maid and a male elderly ward (Ho et al. 2018).

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Finally, the realization of how unstable these intimate relationships are comes in the last few moments of the two films depicting Terry and Jiale, and Evelyn and Cheung-Wing together. In a scene in Ilo Ilo where Terry is attending to the bruises the young boy received from corporal punishment at his school, Jiale sees the picture of an infant who he presumes to be his maid’s own child and asks her: “You left the baby and went away to work?” To which Terry sarcastically answers: “So why did your mother get a stranger to look after her son?” In Still Human, this chain of care substitution is portrayed through video calls of Cheung-Wing’s distant family, his son and ex-wife, who are now living in the United States, and highlights how their absence in the aging paraplegic’s life is filled with the presence of Evelyn, who watches over her employer talking on screen to a son he sorely misses. These scenes illustrate the technology that facilitates the flow of “global care chain” implicated in child and elderly care networks (Hochschild 2000, Ortiga, Wee, and Yeoh 2020): Hwee-Leng leaves Jiale to Terry’s care and CheungWing’s family hires Evelyn to attend to their aging and disabled loved one while both women leave their own child and aging parents to another woman’s care, their female relatives. And no matter how temporary and unstable this setup may be, the reciprocity of care and affection that emerges from these relationships prove the importance of the migrant women’s place in this flow of intimacy and the flawed yet authentic bond that Terry and Evelyn share with Jiale and Cheung-Wing.

Coming Home to Unhomeliness Towards the end of both films, the stranger is dismissed from the household and let go to claim their place in the world. In Ilo Ilo, Terry, who has known and felt the instability of her employers’ financial resources, knows this is bound to happen and accepts being sent back home wholeheartedly. In this act of exclusion that is so final and definite, the film is still able to portray the family’s intimacy to Terry even while they are expelling her. Jiale, in a tearful farewell, snips Terry’s hair as a souvenir while Hwee-Leng gives Terry the lipstick, which she knows the maid has been helping herself with when she is not around, as a parting gift. Terry, in turn, leaves her tape player to Jiale, who in the film’s last frame is listening to a foreign song that Terry used to listen to get by with being displaced in Singapore. In Still Human, Cheung-Wing, who has encouraged Evelyn to pursue graduate studies in photography, helps her find a scholarship in New York. Evelyn has also helped in not just mending her employer’s strained relationship with Jing-Ying but also reconnecting the old man to his son, who has promised to stay with Cheung-Wing in Hong Kong during his summer vacation. In the film’s last moments, the screen shows the two of them strolling to the bus stop, with the foreign maid riding at the back of her disabled employer’s wheelchair in slowmotion. Before they part ways, Evelyn tries to return Cheung-Wing’s house keys, which the latter does not accept, implying that her former employer’s doors will still be open when she visits Hong Kong in the future.

36 At Home and Unhomeliness The two films’ penultimate moments represent how a stranger’s intimacy and exclusion is necessary in the sphere of social reproduction in Singapore and Hong Kong. The film tracks how the outsider needs to be at home with the host to sustain the household but, in the end, has to be sent away as soon as the families no longer need them or once they get better opportunities for upward social mobility. Their stay, however, no matter how transient, trespasses the structures of feeling of their hosts in such a way that they transform the affective worlds of the people they have cared and worked for. Ilo Ilo and Still Human attest to how migrant women transform the structures of feeling inside the private households of their employers. Their emotional bonds and the anxieties that their intimacy shore up dramatize the complexities of the affective dynamics of intimate labor that both support and sustain modes of exclusions inside the transnational household. These are important aspects of migration and transnational domestic work that exceed the limits of hospitality and its goals towards openness and social inclusion, something that can be probed further by looking at Filipina and Indonesian migrant women’s own portrayal of their lives and the relationships they forge with their foreign employers in their own words and images.

Stories from the Guests FDWs have been producing works that portray their own worlds as guest workers in Hong Kong and Singapore. Indonesian migrant domestic workers have been very active in publishing fiction under the rubric of Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia [Indonesian Migrant Workers Literature] while migrant Filipina women have used various artistic outlets, like street photography, to document their own lives abroad. Two of these Southeast Asian migrant domestic workersturned-artists are Susie Utomo and Xyza Cruz Bacani. Susie Utomo is one of the authors of Forum Lingkar Pena [Writers’ Circle Forum], an organization of Indonesian migrant domestic workers who have turned to creative writing to publish works for Indonesian readers. Utomo migrated to Hong Kong in 1999 to work as a domestic helper. After meeting with other Indonesian helpers who are also writing enthusiasts, she set up a group, where they hold weekly workshops during day-off and print their works in community bulletins. Her work as a writer and as an organizer extended to the publishing of an Islamic magazine for Indonesian migrants in the city, Cahaya Qu. Writing fiction has allowed her to earn enough money to leave her work as a domestic worker and focus solely on magazine publishing and community organizing (Cummins 2013). In “Intruder at Home,” Utomo writes about an aging and paraplegic Hong Kong madam who has to deal with the anxieties from her loss of control over her own body and household, while also feeling threatened by the intimacy and care of a foreign Indonesian helper, Atie. In this satirical story, Utomo displaces the maid’s subjectivity in favor of the impotent employer’s point of view to reveal also how Atie cleverly navigates the tension and animosity from her employer to find belongingness in a foreign household.

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Xyza Cruz Bacani, on the other hand, is an internationally acclaimed Filipina art and documentary photographer. Just like Utomo, she used to work as domestic worker, traveling to Hong Kong at the age of 19 to work for her mother’s employer for more than two decades. During her day-off, she walks around the streets of Hong Kong to capture and document intimate portraits of often invisible subjects in the city. Her tender portraits set in the grit of black-and-white photography, which she posts on her social media, caught the eye of established photographers in the Philippines and around the globe. This paved the way for her entry to the world as a visual artist and earning prestigious sponsorships, grants, prizes, and exhibitions from Fujifilm, Magnum Fellowship, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, WMA Commission, and Open Society Foundation. Today, Bacani has already left her previous employment as foreign maid to pursue a career as a fulltime photographer (MacDonald 2014). Unlike Utomo’s story, Xyza Cruz Bacani’s visual documentation of the closeness between her mother, who works as a domestic helper, and her middle-class employer in her book We Are Like Air, portrays how intimacy opens up the possibility of belonging and making Hong Kong a second home for FDWs, while also exposing the national, racial, and class divides that continue to shape her mother’s foreignness and excludability in Hong Kong’s biosphere, despite living there for more than two decades. Bacani’s intimate black-and-white portraits of her mother and their employer show the intimate ties that both bind and separate these two women, the madam and the maid, in a home setting that allows foreigners to live together like family but still not quite. These two cultural texts, authored and produced by migrant women themselves, intervene into and interrogate the various cultural representations about their life, love, and labor abroad by artists and scholars of migration.

Home Invasion “Intruder at Home” is written from the point of view of an elderly ward, an aging Hong Kong madam, who is paralyzed by a recent heart attack. In this story, the woman is portrayed as a bitter woman, left by her only son, who she struggled to raise on her own during her prime years, in the care of a stranger. The story opens with her talking about how much she hates the Indonesian maid, Atie, who her son just recently hired to take care of her. Powerless and immobile, she sees Atie as “penjajah” [an intruder or invader]. Her new foreign helper has already taken over her personal space, and seeing how Atie moves freely inside her own home while she is bound to her wheelchair makes her seethe in anger. The intruder in her house has also taken control of her life: “She likes prohibiting me in my own house: don’t do this, don’t that. Who does she think she is? I am the one who should say that to her, I am the one who should be obeyed in this house” (Utomo 2020, 61). Utomo plays around and reverses the power dynamics to reveal the intricacies of emotional dynamics in the everyday life of an employer and foreign helper inside the house by anchoring the story in the perspective of a disabled ward

38 At Home and Unhomeliness against an “unsuspecting” but self-assured Indonesian nanny. Despite the narrator’s disability, she tries so hard to regain her power in her own home. She shares that she tried to hurt Atie by slapping her with her still functioning right hand while her helper was feeding her. However, in her attempt to gain the upper hand, she is only confronted with further defeat. She is chastised by her own son after Atie calls him, and is warned that she will be left in a private care facility where she will be treated like “a mouse in a den of lions” and “no cries of ku long [respect for elders] would work for the attendants there” (64). Moreover, she feels more and more threatened as Atie parades a newfound self-confidence in front of her. She interprets Atie’s gestures of self-assurance as an affront to her weak position in the house: Back then, she would become so timid whenever I stared at her while she was eating. Now, it seems like she’s just trying to insult me by imitating cooking show hosts bobbing their heads when they tasted great food. So infuriating! If only I can reach her easily, I would have already pulled her hair. (63) After she tries to hurt her helper again, she is surprised not just by the way Atie is able to duck her slap but also by the look of defiance on her: “My arm hurts from the way she blocked my attack, but what hurt me more was seeing the silent rage in her eyes” (63). These very subtle forms of resistance from Atie illustrate this power reversal that renders the host of the house weak in front of a guest who intrudes and invades her domain. Aside from using humor from the narrator–protagonist’s melodramatic monologues to displace the tension in the story, Utomo also uses narratorial displacement by shifting the narrative from the perspective of the employer instead of the maid. Through literary displacement, Utomo is able to describe how power operates inside the private space, where little gestures easily translate as aggressions. As shown in these snippets of interaction, Atie is portrayed to be efficient in her work. She is already the fourth helper hired by the son for the mother, and she is determined to stay. She looks for ways to manage the hostility of her employer in mundane ways, and these subtle acts have effects on her madam. It manages to deescalate the conflict while also stamping her own individuality and dignity in front of her hostile employer. The literariness of displacing subjectivity here is crucial in portraying the subtle emotional dynamics of this intimate world. Fiction itself is a form of displacement as its “distancing” effect provides Utomo and other Indonesian helper–writers a space to reflect on, contemplate, and interpret their own everyday encounters with differences of class, race, gender, and sexuality abroad from their perspective as both domestic workers and literary writers. As Antariksa of KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (2016) states, “these written narratives are their attempts to engage with other forms of subjectivity as they continuously expose themselves to the distancing effects of the act of writing fiction” (22). In these ways, the literary aesthetics of taking on a new persona and imagining novel identities are ways for Indonesian migrant women to embrace a new subjectivity and enact their agency in writing.

At Home and Unhomeliness 39 Utomo takes this further by pivoting the narrative to a very complex employer. Instead of simply choosing between a hostile host and a friendly, kin-like employer, the story dives deep into the anguish of the woman to understand where her hostility and aggression are coming from. The narrator–protagonist here describes the various “penjajahan” or invasion and colonization she went through to gain freedom and love, only to be left feeling defeated at the end. Having lived through the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, she enlists all the people and forces who invaded her and intruded in her life: Oh God! What kind of world is this?! Haven’t I suffered enough already? I suffered when I was young when the Japanese troops came, memories of which are already blurry to me. Then I suffered marrying into a loveless marriage and in the hands of intruding in-laws. It was so difficult raising a son with a deadbeat husband. Now, it was so easy for the son I love all these years to abandon me as soon as he found a woman. Leaving me here, me, his aging, paralyzed mother, alone with this foreign sau cung [maid] whose only job is to intrude in my life. (62) The story then forces its reader to empathize with the woman, even though she is clearly in the wrong, and see her point of view. This presents a more intimate understanding not just of the inner workings of foreign employers who have to deal with personal issues of abandonment despite the hardships that they went through but also of the structural conditions of abandonment of the elderly population who have built the city from the ravages of its bitter past only to be left in the care of strangers. At the same time, readers also encounter Atie, who navigates this very tense household through her intimate labor, finding ways of expressing agency to find a foothold in the domain of her hostile employer. The story ends in humor, also as a narrative way of displacing conflict. The madam plots on convincing her son to get rid of Atie, when she notices that the helper becomes agitated whenever her mobile phone rings, and starts to dispense her medicines. She thinks that the mobile phone ringing would only mean that her helper is deep in debt, and she is getting calls from her agency. This is more than enough reason for her son to fire her, just as he had done with the three previously hired helpers. When confronted by the madam and her son, Atie denies the accusation. But as soon as her cellphone rings, the narrator–protagonists exclaims confidently that her son would find proof in her claims. The son and the maid look at each other, both realizing it is not a caller but the sound of alarm scheduling the madam’s medications. This leaves the narrator completely dumbfounded and deflated, as Atie says, “Oh, it’s actually time to take your meds, Ma’am!” in a tone that she recognizes as “sweet yet cutting” (67). “Intruder at Home” plays around with the power dynamics that operates in an employer–helper relationship while using the distancing effect of fiction and shift in point of view in narration to portray the complex dynamics of social exclusion and intimacy inside the private space of a transnational household. Utomo’s story does not simply project a black-and-white picture of exploitation, violence, and

40 At Home and Unhomeliness social exclusion or present a rose-tinted story of growing closeness and feeling at home. Through everyday negotiation and encounter, Atie has to find her voice and feel at ease in this foreign household and city while her madam has to come to terms and open up to this intruder or invader in her home.

Not Just Black and White Bacani, who was able to mount several successful exhibitions particularly about the lives of migrant Filipina workers, describes how coming up with images for We Are Like Air is “entirely different and particularly challenging,” since the story delves into the journeys of her own mother, Georgia, a Filipina helper, first in Singapore then in Hong Kong, which “involves revisiting the painful memories that my family and I have tried so hard to forget in the past 20 years” (Bacani 2018, 12). However, the painful memories here are narrated with the tenderness of black-and-white portraits across a 300-page book. Spanning through decades, these photographs not only bridge the distance of separation that migration and mobility brought to the Bacani clan but also explore the connections they forge with other transnational families—their employers and their fellow migrant workers in Hong Kong. We Are Like Air is a story of the photographer’s mother, Georgia, who became a domestic worker in Hong Kong in 1999. But it is also the story of the photographer, Xyza herself, the daughter who followed the footsteps of her mother seven years later to work with the same employer before becoming a well-known street photographer. After all, the reason why she became a photographer was because of her mother. In her rest days, Xyza snaps pictures of Hong Kong’s streets to become her mother’s eyes as the latter seldom takes her day-off from work. The book presents the intimate scene of mother–daughter reunion with a 2006 blackand-white photograph of Xyza and Georgia, taken by Mrs. Louey’s previous amah, with the mother smiling brightly at the foreground, content to finally have her daughter with her after living alone in Hong Kong for so many years, and the daughter smiling gingerly as she peeks from her mother’s back (13). We Are Like Air is also the story of Georgia’s deep connection with her employer for more than two decades, Mrs. Kathryn Louey. Through various images, the book essays the close relationship between Georgia and Mrs. Louey. “Each helper-employer relationship is unique and constantly changing” (29). On page 28, we see a photograph of Georgia in a maid’s uniform, standing at a banquet table she ornately prepared. On the next page, we see the same setting of the dining room, where Mrs. Louey sits with Georgia, in her casual clothes and no longer required to wear the uniform. The difference between the two pictures highlights the gap that the helper and her employer have already breached: “They have forged a friendship that cuts across social, economic and cultural divides … Many people wonder why my mother is still in Hong Kong, … Mrs. Louey is the reason” (24). Georgia’s stay with Mrs. Louey’s household for more than 20 years has developed into an intimacy that mirrors the “kinning” process involved in the long history of transnational elderly care relationships (Baldassar, Ferrero, and Portis 2017), as they now treat each other as part of their family: “Mrs. Louey

At Home and Unhomeliness 41 considers my mother her family, her little sister. My mother is worried about Mrs Louey all the time. Sometime she wonders if she can bring Mrs Louey back to the Philippines and take care of her there” (33). Bacani depicts these kin-like dynamics through the use of depth of field to mark not just the degree of closeness of the two subjects—the employer and her helper—to the camera and to each other but also the range and intensity of the rapport between Georgia and Mrs. Louey. In the photograph on page 25, Mrs. Louey, who stands a little farther from the camera, is looking at the scene outside the apartment from her big window; sitting on a couch with her back at the camera is Georgia, looking at Mrs. Louey. In another photo on page 32, the same silhouette of the regal Hong Kong madam sitting on a chair is seen from inside a room while Georgia’s figure is almost cropped at the edge of the picture, sitting outside the room watching over her employer quietly resting. We Are Like Air, however, is not just the story of Georgia and her family or of Mrs. Louey and her family alone. It is about how these two families become part of the complex interlocking worlds of transnational care work connecting households from miles apart, where the pain and trauma that absence may bring to one family can also mean happiness and relief to another family supplemented by a foreigner’s presence. These portraits of transnational parenting illustrate the intersections of distance and intimacy, exclusion and inclusion in the framing of transnational care worlds that connects families in Hong Kong and the Philippines. Bacani portrays the interconnecting intimacies of families in the flow of global child and elderly care chains through side-by-side photographs in six spreads essaying the family lives of the Bacanis in the Philippines and Georgia with the Loueys at Hong Kong. One picture, for example, reveals Georgia’s daughter, Sharila, celebrating Georgia’s granddaughter’s birthday on the left (48), while Georgia plays around with Mrs. Louey’s grandchildren on the birthday she helped prepare on the right (49). Another photo shows a dark silhouette of her husband, Villamor, playing with their granddaughter in a dimly lit room back home on the left (50), while Georgia plays with Mrs. Louey’s granddaughter on a bright Christmas morning on the right (51). Lastly, on either side are separate portraits of the husband and the wife, both lying in their beds looking at their cellphones, Villamor at their family home in Nueva Vizcaya and Georgia at her room in Louey’s apartment at Midlevels, separated by the edges of the photographs marking the distance between the Philippines and Hong Kong (57–58). By presenting these photographs near each other on facing pages of each spread, Bacani deconstructs the various dichotomized relationships of families, left-behind and receiving, absent and present parents, biological and non-biological kinning, involved in migrant care work. The worlds of the Bacanis and the Loueys might be divided by geographical distance and class and racial lines, but they are in fact so near each other, mirroring each other on a spread, separated merely by the narrow negative space between the picture’s edge and the page’s border. Finally, We Are Like Air is not just a story of the families, of the Bacanis and the Loueys, directly locked as source and receivers in the flow of intimacy and

42 At Home and Unhomeliness care work. It is also about the many other versions of families formed and created by migrant domestic workers in their movement and mobility across time and space. It is also a story of Emman and Lalay, both Filipino domestic workers, who formed their own family despite the odds and challenges of Hong Kong’s laws that discourage them from building their own more permanent home in the city since they are just there as domestic workers. Such a glimmer of hope for belonging and social inclusion is something that can be glimpsed in Bacani’s photograph where the couple holds their baby in front of the priest for the infant’s Catholic baptism (147). This is also a story of their employing families, who have vowed to support them, as shown in their “extended family” photograph at the church (149). The book is also the story of the chosen families that migrant workers built despite suffering from social exclusion, abuse, and exploitation. It is about the non-biological families that they found, outside of their own and beyond their employers that hire them. It is about the intimacy to a fellow stranger in a women’s shelter where the distressed and abused migrant women mutually give and receive comfort from each other’s stories and struggles of social exclusion (112– 119). It is about the families they forge among their own community and enclaves whenever they go out to the parks, walkways, and public spaces during their dayoff on weekends (128–137). These images of lives and labors of Filipina domestic workers in We Are Like Air form the rich mosaic of a story of migrant women navigating through the limits of hospitality that seeks both to integrate and to exclude them. While portraits of the abused Filipina helpers in a shelter and photographs of Southeast Asian migrant women in the public expose the many ways they deal with more extreme forms of social exclusion, Bacani is also aware how these stories are not completely estranged from her mother’s story, even with a very supportive employer: Foreign domestic workers do not have the right of abode in Hong Kong even for someone like my mother who has spent two decades of her life here. It will have to be in another universe where she can live with her family and still be looking after Mrs Louey. (33) Bacani’s awareness of the inherent excludability of her mother in Hong Kong demonstrates that no matter how close one gets to her host, her stay is still conditioned by the same mechanisms of social exclusion that marginalize her fellow migrant women in the city-state. However, her invocation of “another universe” also shows that migrant women actively intrude and intervene in these structural conditions of alienation through intimacy and intimate labor to bring about new images and imaginaries of belonging. The book ends on a present timeline, with a family portrait of the Bacanis, all accounted for in one frame, in front of their family home in Nueva Vizcaya. The picture of the family represents not just the many Filipino families that drifted apart and were displaced by migration but also the other families that they found, touched upon, and bonded with along their journey into the world, a family

At Home and Unhomeliness 43 portrait that depicts the varying degrees of intimacy and distance and the complex networks formed just by welcoming a stranger in one’s home.

Closing The possibilities and limitations of hospitality emerge as one closely looks at the structural and material conditions that delineate how open and, at the same time, excluding particular policies and discourses of welcoming and accommodating FDWs in Singapore and Hong Kong are. By examining the two films, Chen’s Ilo Ilo and Chan’s Still Human, the problems of hospitality manifest in the contradictory gestures of intimacy and exclusion that both sustain and subvert the problematic policies of social exclusion and, at the same time, the fundamentally fraught discourses on the intimacy of domestic work. In the private households of Singapore and Hong Kong, the two films depict how these forms of intimacy, of migrant women becoming close to their employers, negotiate the effects of social exclusion in the logic of their host state’s calculated hospitality. The cultural texts produced by Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers themselves—Utomo’s “Intruder at Home” and Bacani’s We Are Like Air—enrich the conversations around the politics of hospitality that the Hong Kong and Singaporean filmmakers portray. Utomo’s story narrates the intricacies of intimacy and exclusion between the helper and the employer in the inner world of a household. Her story exposes that even in a tense relationship where the host treats the guest with hostility, migrant women can express their agency in subtle everyday acts of intimate labor that help negate their marginalization in foreign homes. Bacani’s photographs, on the other hand, depict the interweaving intimacies of various families in the web of relations produced by global care work, where both social exclusion and integration that operate not just in the lives of FDWs and their employers but also in the lives of multiple families—the left-behind, the receiving, and the chosen and found ones—in FDWs’ own social worlds. These four cultural texts, both from the lens of Singaporean and Hong Kong hosts and the perspective of their guests, explore the ways discourses of hospitality affect and shape the lives of migrant women and how migrant women, in their everyday practices, breach the boundaries of welcome accorded to them. Pushing how far the hosts can be accommodating and inclusive of their foreign workers remains to be an important task in light of the material effects, and sometimes even brutal consequences, of social exclusion on the lives of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore.

References Anomalilly. 2018. “Film Review: Still Human (2018) by Oliver Siu Kuen Chan.” Asian Movie Pulse. Accessed May 20, 2020. Asis, Maruja B. 2005. “Caring for the World: Filipino Domestic Workers Gone Global.” In Asian Women as Transnational Domestic Workers, edited by Brenda SA Yeoh and Noor Abdul Rahman Shirlena Huang, 21–53. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Lmtd.

44 At Home and Unhomeliness Asis, Maruja Milagros B, Shirlena Huang, and Brenda SA Yeoh. 2004. “When the Light of the Home is Abroad: Unskilled Female Migration and the Filipino Family.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 25 (2):198–215. Bacani, Xyza Cruz. 2018. We Are Like Air. Hong Kong: Ada Wang and WE Press Company Ltd. Baldassar, Loretta, Laura Ferrero, and Lucia Portis. 2017. “‘More Like a Daughter than an Employee’: The Kinning Process between Migrant Care Workers, Elderly Care Receivers and Their Extended Families.” Identities 24 (5):524–541. Boris, Eileen, and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, eds. 2010. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care. California: Stanford University Press. Chan, Annie Hau-nung. 2005. “Live-in Foreign Domestic Workers and Their Impact on Hong Kong’s Middle Class Family.” Journal of Family and Economic Issues 26 (4):509–528. Chan, Oliver Siu Kuen. 2018. Still Human (淪落人). Hong Kong: No Ceiling Film. Chang, Kimberly, and LHM Ling. 2005. “Globalization and Its Intimate Other: Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong.” In Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances, edited by Marchand, Marianne H. and Runyan, Anne Sison, 30. London and New York: Routledge. Cheah, Pheng. 2010. “Necessary Strangers: Law’s Hospitality in the Age of Transnational Migrancy.” In Law and the Stranger, edited by Sarat, Austin, Douglas, Laurence and Umphrey, Martha Merill, 21–64. California: Stanford University Press. Chen, Anthony. 2013. Ilo Ilo (爸媽不在家). Memento Films International, Golden Village Pictures, Epicentre, Golden Scene, Media Asia. Cheung, Andrew CJHC. 2012. “Vallejos Evangeline Banao Also Known as Vallejos Evangeline BV Commissioner of Registration (Cacv 204/2011).” In Legal Reference System. 28 March 2012. Legal Reference System, 12 December 2015 2012. http://leg alref.judiciary.gov.hk/lrs/common/search/search_result_detail_frame.jsp?DIS=81019 &QS=%2B&TP=JU. Choi, Christy, and Agence France-Presse. 2014. “‘Blackface’ Advert Where Chinese Man Plays Filipina Maid Sparks Race Row in Hong Kong.” South China Morning Post. Accessed 13 March 2015. Constable, Nicole. 1997. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cummins, Anna. 2013. “Hong Kong Profiles: Susie Utomo.” Timeout Hong Kong. Accessed 23 January 2014. Erni, John. 2013. “There is No Home: Law, Rights and Being ‘Included-Out.’ Where is Home – Place, Belonging and Citizenship in the Asian Century,” Hong Kong Baptist University, 22 March. Gamburd, Ruth Michelle. 2000. “Nurture for Sale: Sri Lankan Housemaids and the Work of Mothering.” In Home and Hegemony: Domestic Service and Identity in South and Southeast Asia, edited by Kathleen M Adams and Sara Dickley, 179–205, 187. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press. Gaw, Kenneth. 1988. Superior Servants: The Legendary Cantonese Amahs of the Far East. Singapore: Oxford University Press. Grundy, Tom. 2013. “Can an Elevator Be Racist?” Hong Wrong. Accessed 15 March 2015. Gutierrez-Rodriguez, Encarnacion. 2014. “Domestic Work- Affective Labor: On Feminization and the Coloniality of Labor.” Women’s Studies International Forum 46 (1):45–53.

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Halligan, Fionnuala. 2019. “‘Still Human’: Hong Kong Review.” Screen Daily. Accessed May 20, 2020. Ho, Ken HM, Vico CL Chiang, Doris Leung, and Ben HB Ku. 2018. “When Foreign Domestic Helpers Care for and About Older People in Their Homes: I Am a Maid or a Friend.” Global Qualitative Nursing Research 5: 2333–3936. Hochschild, Arlie. 2000. “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value.” In On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, edited by Will and Giddens Hutton, Anthony, 130–146. London: Sage Publishers. Huang, Shirlena, and Brenda SA Yeoh. 1998. “Maids and Ma’ams in Singapore: Constructing Gender and Nationality in the Tansnationalization of Paid Domestic Work.” Geography Research Forum 18:21–48. Human Rights Watch. 2005. “Maid to Order: Ending Abuses against Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore. Human Rights.” Human Rights Watch 17 (10): 1–124. Ignacio, Emilyzen, and Yesenia Mejia. 2009. Managing Labour Migration: The Case of Filipino and Indonesian Helper Market in Hong Kong. Bangkok: International Labour Organization. Kerr, Elizabeth. 2020. “Still Human: A Film about a Domestic Helper, a Paraplegic—and Human Dignity.” Zolima Citymag. Accessed May 20, 2020. King, Susan. 2014. “'Ilo Ilo' Filmmaker Anthony Chen Recalls the Film’s Inspiration: Aunt Terry.” Los Angeles Times. Accessed 13 March 2015. KUNCI Cultural Studies Center. 2016. “Foreword.” In Afterwork Readings, edited by Para Site and KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, 17–25. Hong Kong: Para Site and KUNCI Cultural Studies Center. Labour Department HK. 2014. “Labour Legislation: Frequently Asked Questions about the Minimum Allowable Wage Ordinance, Cap. 608 Coverage.” Accessed June 3. Lan, Pei-Chia. 2006. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham: Duke University Press. Law, Lisa. 2002. “Defying Disappearance: Cosmopolitan Public Spaces in Hong Kong.” Urban Studies 39 (9):1625–1645. MacDonald, Kerri. 2014. “Taking Care of People and Pictures in Hong Kong.” The New York Times. Accessed March 18, 2015. Ministry of Manpower. 2020. “Employer’s Guide: Foreign Domestic Worker.” accessed 3 June. http://www.mom.gov.sg/passes-and-permits/work-permit-for-foreign-domestic -worker/employers-guide/paying-levy. Ministry of Manpower. 2020. “Foreign Domestic Workers Levy.” accessed 5 September. http://www.mom.gov.sg/passes-and-permits/work-permit-for-foreign-domestic-w orker/foreign-domestic-worker-levy. Mundlak, Guy, and Hila Shamir. 2008. “Between Intimacy and Alienage: The Legal Construction of Domestic and Carework in the Welfare State.” In Migration and Domestic Work: A European Perspective on a Global Theme, edited by Helma Lutz, 161–176, 170. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press. Ortiga, Yasmin Y, Kellynn Wee, and Brenda SA Yeoh. 2020. “Connecting Care Chains and Care Diamonds: The Elderly Care Skills Regime in Singapore.” Global Networks 1–21, doi:10.1111/glob.12281. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2008. “Perpetually Foreign: Filipina Migrant Domestic Workers in Rome.” In Migration and Domestic Work: A European Perspective on a Global Theme, edited by Helma Lutz, 99–112, 100. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing.

46 At Home and Unhomeliness Poon, Angelia. 2013. “Maid Visible: Foreign Domestic Workers and the Dilemma of Development in Singapore.” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 17 (1):1–18. Risov, Vadim. 2014. “A Real Sense of Intimacy”: Anthony Chen on Ilo Ilo.” Filmmaker. Accessed 13 March 2015. Rose, Steve. 2014. “lo Ilo Director Anthony Chen: ‘A Lot of Maids Have Forsaken Their Own Children’.” The Guardian. Accessed 12 March 2015. Sarvasy, Wendy, and Patrizia Longo. 2004. “The Globalization of Care: Kant’s World Citizenship and Filipina Migrant Domestic Workers.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6 (3):392–415. Seow, Joanna. 2014. “Some Bosses ‘Reluctant’ to Give Maids Weekly Day Off.” The Strait Times, 16 April. The Singapore Guide. 2015. “Hiring a Foreign Domestic Worker in Singapore.” http://the -singapore-guide.com/domestic-helper-agency-singapore/. Transient Workers Count Too, and Ogilvy and Maher Co. 2015. Mums and Maids. #igiveadayoff. Turan, Kenneth. 2014. “Review: Heartfelt ‘Ilo Ilo’ Slowly Builds a Powerful Emotional Connection.” Los Angeles Times. Accessed May 20, 2020. Utomo, Susie. 2020. “Penjajah di Rumahku [Intruder at Home].” In Mga Bantay-Salakay sa Loob ng Aking Bahay: Antolohiya ng Maiikling Kuwento ng mga Indonesian Domestic Worker sa Hong Kong, Singapore at Taiwan [Intruders at Home: Anthology of Short Stories of Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan], edited by Carlos M. Piocos III, 61–68. Quezon City, Philippines: Sentro ng Wikang Filipino [Center of Philippine Languages]-University of the Philippines Diliman. Wee, Vivienne, and Amy Sim. 2005. “Hong Kong as Destination for Migrant Domestic Workers.” In Asian Women as Transnational Domestic Workers, edited by Shirlena Huang, Brenda SA Yeoh and Noor Abdul Rahman, 175–209, 178. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Lmtd. Yeoh, Brenda SA. 2004. “Cosmopolitanism and Its Exclusions in Singapore.” Urban Studies 44 (12):2431–2445. Yeoh, Brenda SA, Shirlena Huang, and Theresa Devasahayam. 2004. “Diasporic Subjects in the Nation: Foreign Domestic Workers, the Reach of Law and Civil Society in Singapore.” Asian Studies Review 28 (1):7–23. Yeoh, Brenda SA, Shirlena Huang, and Joaquin Gonzalez. 2004. “Migrant Female Domestic Workers: Debating the Economic, Social and Political Impacts in Singapore.” International Migration Review 33 (1):114–136.

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Cautionary Tales When Indonesian diplomats visited Hong Kong in 2006, they were shocked by the “casual lifestyles” their women were flagrantly displaying in Victoria Park, a well-known destination for many Indonesian domestic workers during their dayoff. As one Indonesian consul claims: “If you go to Victoria Park on Sunday, you can see that some can be quite intimate. Some were turning to other women for comfort. Others were developing casual relationships with men from other races … There was a worry that it would reflect poorly on the country’s reputation among foreigners” (Ma 2006). This display of intimacy in public, for the Indonesian consulate, has become a cause of national shame, compelling them to conduct a five-hour “briefing” to guide their domestic workers about matters of morality and to stop their public display of intimacy (Bok 2013). A similar representation of migrant women’s sexuality was made a few years later by a Hong Kong legislator, who in her weekly column wrote that media outlets in the city-state should focus more on what she claims as several cases of Filipina maids seducing then later on having sexual affairs with their expatriate employers (Grundy 2015). These led several migrant groups to challenge the racist and sexist remarks, as many pundits pointed out that the lawmaker’s statement erases the vulnerability to physical and sexual abuse of migrant helpers in favor of victim-blaming and shaming (Lam 2015). Both of these Indonesian and Hong Kong officials’ reactions reflect the moral panic both back home and in the host city-states emerging from the kind of sexual lives that Indonesian and Filipina women are leading now that they are miles away from their families and country. Migrant Indonesian and Filipina women are considered heroes by their countries of origin since they are named as Indonesia’s pahlawan devisa [foreign exchange heroes] and the Philippines’ bagong bayani [modern heroes] by their respective governments in recognition of their economic impact in the development of not only their own households but also their homelands. However, these labels are always haunted by anxieties that interrogate these governments’ optimistic projections towards their migrant women. These tensions are manifested in how female domestic workers are also potential sources of shame, especially in the Indonesian and Philippine public sphere, when they become vulnerable

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victims or morally compromised women abroad, flagrantly flaunting their sexuality in public. These same moral anxieties on Southeast Asian women’s sexuality are also felt and expressed by their foreign hosts the moment they arrive in the destination countries. Inside private households, their sexuality is often muted and neutralized by their employers through surveillance and imposition of haircut, uniform, and decorum that serve to allay fears of “husband-grabbing” and to domesticate the threat of foreign helpers’ intimacy and sexuality to the host families, as is the case with Hong Kong (Constable 1997b). The receiving states also deploy mechanisms of monitoring and controlling migrant women’s sexuality, by enforcing biannual pregnancy tests and screening for sexually transmitted diseases for migrant women, as is the case with Singapore (Rahman, Yeoh, and Huang 2005). Despite the exclusionary policies and stigma attached to foreign domestic workers’ bodies, many Southeast Asian migrant women still express their desires and sexuality as they lead romantic lives and engage in sexual affairs with other migrant men and fellow female helpers in Hong Kong and Singapore (Ueno 2013, Sim 2010). These practices of intimacy in having heterosexual affairs with migrant men and homosexual relationships with fellow female foreign maids help manage feelings of isolation and marginalization in these city-states which perceive them as mere domestic workers. Despite the odds and stigma, falling in love and pursuing romance for many Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers are ways of reclaiming their body and enacting their agency through pleasure and desire. By actively pursuing intimacy, they also express their sexuality, going beyond their designation as mere household helpers in Hong Kong and Singapore. The visibility of Southeast Asian migrant women’s desire and sexuality animate moral panic, not just in their homelands but also in the host lands. In the optics of the Indonesian and Philippine states, gendered moral discourses intersect with “national” honor at the site of their bodies, while in the eyes of their Singaporean and Hong Kong hosts, their desires and sexualities need to be domesticated. These contested discourses on Indonesian and Filipina migrant women’s sexuality reflect the anxieties on their mobility, particularly heightened by expressions of hiya and malu [both Filipino and Indonesian words for shame] according to the codes of morality and sexuality dominant in the Philippine and Indonesian states and societies, enforced by their employers and imposed even among their own community in the host city-states. Shame and desire operate as affects of Southeast Asian women’s migration and they illustrate the ways in which gendered moral discourses shape the problematic politics of labor migration. By analyzing both the Indonesian and the Philippine governments’ rhetoric, mass media portrayals, and migrant Indonesian and Filipina women’s own texts and social practices, I argue that shame not only reinforces several problematic gender and moral discourses imposed on migrant domestic workers but also heightens their precarious role and place in their home and host countries. These dominant narratives of shame and shaming are interrogated and challenged by cultural productions on Southeast Asian migrant women, in the independent films about the intimate lives and sexuality of Filipina and

Shame and Desire 49 Indonesian migrant helpers and the short stories about love, romance, and sexual experiences in Hong Kong and Singapore, written and published by Indonesian domestic workers themselves. The craft of creative writing, specifically fiction, provides an avenue for migrant Indonesian women to narrate and mediate questions about morality and sexuality in ways that offer spaces to negotiate and challenge discourses of shame and shaming through their stories. These are exemplified in the narratives about their encounter of romance and intimacy with migrant men in Erfa Handayani’s (2020) “Sopir Taxi” [Taxi Driver] and Maria Bo Niok’s (2020) “Cinta Murah di Bukit Merah” [Cheap Love at Bukit Merah], their struggles of side hustling with sex work in Tiwi’s (2020) “Sebuah Surat di Penghujung April” [Letter at the End of April], and stories of queer desires in Juwanna’s (2020) “Kerudung Turki” [Turkish Veil] and Susana Nisa’s (2020) “Tuhan, Aku Pulang” [Allah, I’m Home]. These short stories show the diverse ways in which Indonesian domestic workers receive, mediate, and transgress the meanings of shame and the operations of shaming in their practice of sexuality in their everyday lives abroad. As a supplement to these literary narratives, three films depicting the intimate lives of Southeast Asian migrant women—Patrick Daly and Joel Fendelman’s (2015) Remittance, Baby Ruth Villarama’s (2016) Sunday Beauty Queen, and Ani Ema Susanti’s (2008) Mengusahakan Cinta [Effort for Love]—are analyzed to enrich the discussion of migrant women’s shame, desire, and sexuality. Remittance is a film that revolves around the struggles of Marie as a Filipina helper in Singapore. The quiet melodrama portrays the silent plight of migrant maids who are forced to work as bar girls and sex workers to earn enough money to send for their families back home and the little happiness in the romantic escapes with migrant construction workers who are as vulnerable and invisible as them in Singaporean society. Originally planned as a documentary, Daly and Fendelmen’s feature film came from the two director’s ethnographic work in Singapore and it cast mostly Filipina helpers as actors, where Angela Barotia, the lead actress who is still working as a helper in Singapore, won an acting plum in Brooklyn Film Festival (O’Brien 2016). The film is also a product of the two directors’ collaboration with their Filipina helpers cast, who shared their personal stories through writing workshops which developed into the film’s screenplay. Sunday Beauty Queen and Effort for Love are both documentary films that portray same-sex relationships of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong. While Villarama’s film mainly centered around the lives of Filipina helpers who join beauty pageants during their day-off, the “big-hearted” documentary touched on the intimate relationship of the pageant organizer, “Daddy Leo,” the butch lesbian Filipina helper and her partner (Lacey 2017). Lauded in various international filmfests, Sunday Beauty Queen was the first and only documentary film that was awarded Best Picture in the Metro Manila Film Festival. Effort for Love, on the other hand, is part of the critically acclaimed Indonesian omnibus film, Pertaruhan [At Stake], which tackles controversial themes of women’s sexuality, like AIDS, prostitution, female circumcision, etc. (Rony 2012). Susanti’s short documentary focuses on Rian, a divorcee and a single mother working as a

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foreign helper in Hong Kong, and her romantic exploits to maintain her relationship with a fellow Indonesian helper. The intimate stories of Indonesian and Filipina women are both close to Villarama and Susanti’s hearts. Susanti worked in Hong Kong as a domestic worker herself, before returning to Indonesia, finishing her studies, and becoming an award-winning documentary filmmaker (Retnaningdyah 2013). Villarama, on the other hand, grew up with a mother who used to work as a nanny in Hong Kong, which allowed her access to the wealth of stories and struggles of Filipina maids in the city-state, following her subjects closely throughout the four years of developing her documentary (Lee 2016). The themes of subscription and subversions of shame are central to these oeuvres, narrating how they deal with instances of shame and shaming in their daily lives and how they express their resistance to moral impositions on their body through fiction and films. These literary and cinematic works also reflect expressions of romance and desires in foreign domestic workers’ queer and interracial intimacies in transnational spaces. Through migrant women’s understanding of what counts as shame and shaming, I argue that their narratives present a more complex negotiation of their precariousness, as they exhibit instances of agency and mobility that go beyond traditional gender discourses sustaining the feelings of shame imposed by both their home and host countries. Malu and Hiya Shame is a particularly powerful affect in studies of both the Philippine and Indonesian cultures, and it has been the subject of groundbreaking cultural scholarship in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, classic ethnographic studies on “shameembarrassment” and the associated feelings of shyness and humiliation in the colloquial terms of Balinese lek or Javanese isin show how some of the major Indonesian ethnic groups are subjected to vulnerability in social interactions and performance of public etiquettes set by cultural and moral norms in their society (Geertz 1983, Rosaldo 1983). However, the term malu, a Malay word that has become part of Indonesian lingua franca, exceeds these abovementioned feelings as it goes beyond anxieties of public interactions and encompasses a sense of “failure” to live up to the moral norms of the Indonesian nation. Malu as a feeling can also be highly gendered as studies demonstrate how Indonesian women respond to shame and shaming with “self-restraint, reticence and withdrawal,” as opposed to their male counterparts, who are used to reacting with “aggression” when subjected to shame-inducing situations (Collins and Bahar 2000, 42). Just like malu, hiya [shame] in the Philippine context follows the same emotional trajectory of “embarrassment” but is also inflected by meanings of “timidity” and “sensitivity” that emerge from “a sense of inadequacy and anxiety” in “the need to conform with authority and social expectations” (Bulatao 1964, 426). Hiya is also regulated by dangal [pride/honor] informed by the gendered moral standards of Filipino society, as the violation of one’s embodied honor results in shame (Tabbada 2005). In both Southeast Asian societies, “hiya and malu are

Shame and Desire 51 considered as invaluable to the maintenance of individual honor and social order” (Caparas and Hartijasti 2014, 12). Shame’s effect becomes more pronounced as Indonesian and Filipina women cross national borders. In transnational spaces, the feeling of shame not just describes for them particular bodily responses to social situations but also prescribes them to follow social norms (Lindquist 2004, Aguilar 1996). Outside the optics of their state, their community, and even their own family, Indonesian and Filipina women’s absence in their traditional social spaces has shored up moral panic back home and in host countries. Representations of Indonesian migrant women in mass media and popular culture as wanita jalang [bad woman] or wanita tuna susila [woman without morals]—terms that are used to label prostitutes and single mothers—cast them as dodgy and disgraceful women who have forsaken the values of their family and nation once they get out of their kampung [home/village] and tanah air [homeland] (Constable 2014, Silvey 2013). The overt display of sexuality among Filipina domestic workers, just like their Indonesian counterparts, will result in them being identified with sex workers in receiving countries, even among their own migrant community. Among their fellow domestics, Filipina helpers “are faced with negotiating their sexual reputation and moral identity on which their physical and material well-being depends” (Chang and Groves 2000, 75). This results in mediating between either explicit display of Christian devoutness or vulgar demonstration of desire and sexuality, as they navigate the “saints versus prostitutes” dichotomy enforced by their own community in Hong Kong and Singapore. These labels suggest how Southeast Asian women are subjected to moral and religious ideologies that are conflated with gendered national fantasies enforced by the Philippine and Indonesian states. More than 88% of Indonesians are Muslims, while 87% of Filipinos are Roman Catholics (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009, National Statistics Office 2014). As migrant workers, they bring their religious beliefs and practices to their countries of employ. Of the 270,000 Muslims in Hong Kong, Indonesian domestic workers comprise more than half, while more than two-thirds of the 380,000 Catholics in Hong Kong are Filipina domestic workers (Ho 2015, Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong 2015). Studies in Singapore also indicate that Indonesian domestic workers are most likely to be Muslims, while Filipinas are highly likely to be practicing Catholics (Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics 2015). Islam and Christianity shape the ways that malu and hiya are enforced among Southeast Asian women, which Indonesian and Philippine governments marshal to construct idealized womanhood among their female labor exports. In the case of the Indonesian state, Rachel Silvey (2004) notes that “the state’s dominant vision of idealized femininity,” which weaves religion with nationalist fantasies of womanhood, “was translated into a migratory income-earning woman for the sake of the ‘national family’s’ goal of economic development” (253). Neferti Tadiar (2009) observes that, in the Philippine context, “overseas Filipina domestic workers become deployed in the public imagination as mere bodily synecdoche of a beleaguered nation” (105).

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Shame as a moral and affective transcription is most intense on women’s body. “Shame deforms and reforms bodily and social spaces,” as the body constantly attempts to adhere to and affirm a set of social and cultural ideal (Ahmed 2004, 103). Once a woman becomes a tenaga kerja wanita [TKW, female Indonesian overseas worker] or a Pinay DH [slang for Filipina domestic helper], she also becomes morally suspect since her body is always out of place and out of the gaze of Indonesian and Philippine nation-states and societies. They are constantly bound to the ideals of womanhood that are drawn by cultural, national, and moral scripts of being a good woman even if and precisely because they are not at home. These ideals that produce the affective border demarcating honor from shame are constantly regulating their subjectivity and body, which is reflected in narratives that portray their everyday lives abroad.

Shame in Sex Shame as an affect of mobility can be seen in many narratives of migrant Indonesian and Filipina women in Hong Kong and Singapore. In Erfa Handayani’s (2020) story, “Taxi Driver,” the protagonist develops an almost paternal friendship with a Singaporean taxi driver. In one of her off-days, she finds herself alone at a meeting place because her friend, a fellow Indonesian domestic worker, went out with her boyfriend without telling her. When the taxi driver texted and casually invited her to eat somewhere, she readily agrees. Because she completely trusts the old man, it took her some time to realize that the man is taking her to a shady guesthouse in Pasir Panjang. When she realizes this, she immediately protests and tells the man: Then why you bring me here? You said you want to bring me eat. We can eat but not in hotel, ok? I am not that kind of girl. I never go hotel before. Take me home now. I don’t want to go in! (93) As she is being brought back to the MRT to go home, she is suddenly subjected to the complex feeling of malu: “On our way, he was apologizing endlessly. I just shut up and felt upset. My heart was filled with mixed emotions: trauma, sadness, frustration and fear of losing the purity that I have been so fastidiously guarding” (94). This story attests to how the main character has already ascribed malu on her body even if she got out of a possible instance of shame. The Indonesian domestic worker is traumatized for being treated like a prostitute, being brought to a hotel and being offered money, which she throws back at the driver’s face at the story’s end. This anxious identification of possibly being immoral threatens her and she knows that her statement, “I am not that kind of girl,” is unstable because she could be easily perceived as such even by a person she trusts. The trauma of this sexual harassment then comes from the recognition that her kesucian [purity] is already contaminated by the possibility of losing it just as easily as she can slip into being a wanita tuna susila.

Shame and Desire 53 This story demonstrates how narratives of sexual victimization of migrant women sometimes end up becoming cautionary tales of what happens when one gives in to majikan genit [naughty/flirty boss], uncle kurang ajar [brash uncles], or foreign boyfriends for the people back home. Indicative of this is the casual but also ritual warning of sponsors and recruiters to prospective migrant women to never surrender to flirtations of male employers and strangers even if they like it, which is how sometimes many stories of sexual abuse are interpreted back home. As Carol Chan (2014) argues, the dangers of physical or sexual abuse of female migrant domestic workers, most of whom are required by laws in destination countries to live with their employers, are represented mostly in terms of female promiscuity and moral weakness, in allowing themselves to be tempted or seduced. (6956) This is how shame constructs what Chan describes as gendered moral hierarchies in the representation of Indonesian migrant victims. According to her, “the moral privileging of ‘successful,’ or ‘pitiable’ female migrants who are innocent, vulnerable, heroic, and/or selfless, produces their negative gender subordinates: immoral and ill-fated women who fall short of the ideal expectations of a mother, daughter, sister, and wife” (6959). In this schema, the moral distinction that pride and shame create among migrant women victims polarizes their narratives of victimhood in terms of those who are innocent and worthy of justice against those who are to be blamed and, thus, deserving of their ill fates. Malu can then be seen as the moral boundary demarcating who are the right and righteous subjects of migration and who are not. The possibility of a woman slipping into the other side is heightened as that moral border becomes permeable, particularly in public places abroad where domestic workers and sex workers abound and encounter each other. The anxieties of misidentification among women who are both out of place in migrant spaces transform the affect of malu as a discourse and as a discipline that they have to subscribe to or transgress. To further understand the complexity of how shame works among Indonesian women in transnational spaces, one can look into Johan Lindquist’s (2004) ethnography of Indonesian migrant women applicants and sex workers in Batam Island. Here, he portrays how malu is negotiated through veiling. For the migrant workers, “wearing a jilbab protects women from being approached by men, or of running the risk of being identified as a lontong or prostitute” (57). The practice of veiling among migrant women covers her from malu by morally signifying what she is not. In this sense, wearing jilbab is not so much a form of one’s religiosity but a performance of piety to separate her from prostitutes and shelter her from the social encounters of being misidentified as such. The above story and practices demonstrate the power of malu in castigating and disciplining Indonesian women to follow certain moral norms and publicly stage and validate their obedience, especially in spaces and circumstances where those moral norms are imagined to become so fluid that they seem so much easier to transgress. The strategies of moral distinction—from wearing a veil to openly claiming that one is not that

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kind of girl—reveal the power of malu as a consolidation of gendered moral and national codes on Indonesian women’s migration. The moral panic shored up by the expression of shame is problematic because these women subject themselves to a regime of control and discipline in the name of social ideals that are inflicted on their bodies as transnational women. The fear of falling into a life of disgrace as a TKW becomes a way of both subjecting them to control and discipline according to gender ideologies of their homeland and making their experience of vulnerability their own personal dilemma while they are in host countries. More than this, these ideas and practices also validate the stigmatization and, sometimes, even criminalization of sex work which nullifies the female sex workers’ suffering and victimhood as migrant women workers themselves. After all, a lot of the women who end up becoming prostitutes are former domestic workers who were, like them, victims of abuse and exploitation. Both domestic work and sex work function as feminized labor required in social reproduction, except that the latter falls out of the frames of what is considered moral and legitimate (Tadiar 1998). As in the case of how local economies operate, sex work only becomes a possibility when legal and “decent” work is impossible to secure. In this sense, both kinds of women share the same fate of displacement in their transnational context. As one of the authors of Forum Lingkar Pena, Pandan Arun, provocatively claims in a writer’s forum: “domestic workers and prostitutes are similar in that pride and poverty forced them to make tough decisions” (Grundy 2014). Seen in this way, transnational prostitution is just a result of migration’s promises going awry while also compelling migrant sex workers to still have to live up to those promises even if or precisely because it failed them. We can see how in Tiwi’s (2020) story, “A Letter at the End of April,” many Indonesian sex workers in Hong Kong mediate shame by keeping up with the rituals of remitting money to their families back home to maintain the guise that they are still working as domestic workers. Here, the main character is writing a letter to her husband to share her bitter experiences. She ran away from her employer and stayed at a shelter where there are many other runaways like her who could no longer apply as domestic workers in Hong Kong. In her letter, she confesses to her husband about how she ended up working as a sex worker just to survive without a job: “Dear, if I am telling you all of these in this worn out letter, it is because I want you to understand my fate, the fate that I shared with them” (23). She discloses to her husband how she and her other Indonesian fellows in the halfway house earn their living: Then how did they survive for months, even years, in Hong Kong without any source of income? Prostitution, that was their chosen path, my fellow domestics, my countrywomen who have the same burden as me. Almost everyone I know there have to support her family. And they could not afford to just stop sending money, even for a month. (21)

Shame and Desire 55 Later on, she will tell her husband how she has also joined them: “Once in a while, I join them in disco where they hang out to wait for customers” (21). This letter not only exposes the protagonist’s shame to her husband but also reveals how binding migration’s social ideals and promises are even to individuals who failed them. Even if they are already subjects of shame, they still have to perform the social ideals of migration as if they are not ashamed. For these “fallen” women in Tiwi’s story, part of their economic and moral responsibility is remitting money to their family, who are unaware of their source of income; they still have to perform the role of breadwinners for their loved ones and the money that they sent is the proof that they have not yet gone to the “other side.” In these ways, these narratives attest to how malu for migrant domestic workers encompasses not only the shame in embarrassing encounters of being misidentified as a prostitute but also the shame in not being able to earn money and send it to their family back home. The possibility of malu in having a morally compromised body exceeds not just the possible connotation of selling one’s body but also the prospect of not fulfilling one’s economic duties for one’s own hearth. This extends the meaning of shame to a prostitute not only in managing her practice of sexuality but also in making her body docile, flexible, and tolerant to suffering so as to ensure a stable source of income. Sex work in Tiwi’s story, “Letter at the End of April,” has to be contextualized outside the frames of gendered morality of shame and be perceived as ways in which Southeast Asian migrant women negotiate their positions of vulnerability in foreign cities. This is the track that Patrick Daly and Joel Fendelman (2015) followed in their film, Remittance, which presents a complex depiction of Filipina domestic workers’ participation in sex work while connecting it to their larger struggles of sustaining their families back home while negotiating hiya or kahihiyan [shame] in their exploits to earn financial freedom in Singapore. In Remittance, Marie (Angela Barotia) is introduced to the idea of side hustling as a sex worker in a casual conversation with her fellow Filipina domestics. In this scene, Amie (Yolanda Bermas) is teased for racketeering as a bar maid on nights to earn more atop her day job salary as a maid. After being told it is “bad” as it might cause her deportation from Singapore, she happily declares: “I’m not worried about that because I know how to play the game. And besides, it suits me. I am pretty,” while touching her face seductively. This leads the group to burst into laughter. In this light exchange, the film exposes that the group of Pinay DH holds no moral judgment about their friend’s involvement in sex work, framing the secret’s wrongness only in the legal sense as migrant domestic workers are prohibited from getting employment outside their contracts as helpers. The camera just focuses on Marie’s face, in the middle of this scene, showing a slight interest in Amie’s work as she herself needs extra income. Marie, as the film established, is hard-pressed financially since her family is demanding her to send them more money even though her salary is still being deducted by her agency from all the recruitment and deployment fees. The next scene shows Marie and Amie walking to a bar in full make-up and short dress. As the two women groom themselves inside the bar’s dingy toilet, the anxious Marie

56 Shame and Desire tells Amie that she does not think she can do it as she looks at her drained expression in the mirror. Amie takes off Marie’s hair scrunchie to loosen her hair down, and says reassuringly: All we have to do is convince guys to buy drinks. When they talk to you, just laugh. They really don’t care if you listen. Just nod and agree with them. You know how it is, men are very simple. And besides, no one in the Philippines will ever know. The scene ends with the image of Angela in the mirror, smiling for the first time, before she and Amie rush out to meet customers. Assured that what they are doing will not reach her family in the Philippines, Angela starts to loosen up as she ventures into the new world of this secret work, which she hides both from her family back home and from the family that hired her in Singapore. Moreover, Amie’s statement shows how migrant Filipina women’s work in bars seldom really involve sexual duties as stereotyped, and instead just focus mainly on providing feminine care while serving food and drinks, which facilitates business for the pubs that hire them (Suzuki 2011). As described by the narrator in Tiwi’s (2020) story: I just have to accept the drinks the men I sit with offer so that I can get coupons. One coupon for one drink, that’s the amount of money I’ll earn each night. It’s better this way. At least I don’t need to sleep with them. (21) The film then proceeds to run a montage of Angela, working as a household help on days and a bar maid at nights. This montage is interjected with scenes showing the protagonist secretly washing her attire for the night, sneaking out of the house at dusk and sneaking in at dawn, tucking the money she earned at the bar with the deducted salary she received from her employer before catching a quick nap and remitting the money on her day-off. This repeating montage shows Angela’s routine of sexualized labors—from domestic work to sex work and back—without exoticizing her or overtly sexualizing her body as a bar maid. If anything, the sequence visualizes the increasing exhaustion of the protagonist from working day and night non-stop to earn a little more to keep up with her economic obligations at home while keeping her life as a sex worker hidden from her family and her employers. The montage ends with Angela grooming herself in the bar’s toilet again, yet this time with another Filipina obviously younger than her. After a quick chat, Angela realizes that the woman is just 20 years old and has only started working as a bar maid a few days ago. Just like how Amie initiated her in this world, the screen shows Angela, taking off the woman’s scrunchie and telling her: “It’s better if you let down your hair.” This brief interaction shows the fellowship and care among migrant women involved in the business of club entertainment, a glimpse into how they share their vulnerability yet still manage to look out for one another in such simple gestures.

Shame and Desire 57 The next scene shows Angela singing a love song from a karaoke in front of an inattentive bar crowd, looking exhausted under the harsh neon lights. In the middle of her performance, she sees her male employer enter the bar, which abruptly ends her singing as she secretly sneaks out of the pub. While walking on her way to her employer’s house, she stumbles upon and steps into a Catholic church. The scene frames Angela, dressed in a skimpy red dress, walking to the altar. This scene shows how Angela, just like in Tiwi’s story, negotiates hiya [shame] from her Catholic guilt as she looks up to the altar as if walking back to the goodness of church in the moment of self-reflection. The feelings of shame and guilt are, however, presented only at the point where her secret sideline is almost revealed. It is interesting to note that the film presents no moral comeuppance to Angela’s involvement in sex work. True to Amie’s promise, Marie’s side hustle is never revealed to her own family or to her employers in the entirety of the film, never figuring in even as a thing that she regrets or as a burden of her guilt for losing her honor as a Filipina woman abroad. This is just something she has to do in order to keep up with the demands and economic pressure as a migrant woman worker. This is why she finds no reason to go back to the pub the moment she starts receiving her full salary. “Letter at the End of April” and Remittance show the inner lives, motivations, and emotional burdens of Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers who have to participate in transnational sex work in Hong Kong and Singapore in order to gain financial mobility abroad. While both protagonists have to deal with malu and hiya, as shown in one’s confession in a letter to a husband or in another’s moment of silent reflection inside a church, they also demonstrate how both protagonists challenge gendered moral conceptions of sex work by looking at it as part of their vulnerability as migrant women in foreign shores; as another form of sexualized labor that is never really different from paid domestic service; and finally, as another pathway for economic mobility. In the end, the shadows of shame trailing behind the mobility of Indonesian women expose how persuasive the gendered moral norms upheld back home and in host countries are. Shame affects these migrant women’s bodies as they follow gendered moral discourses of womanhood in transnational spaces in fear of falling away from its ideals. As these stories demonstrate, shame cultivates several practices, habits, and feelings that discipline migrant women’s bodies in their participation in overseas household labor or in their involvement in transnational sex work. However, these narratives also present the fraught ways in which Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers understand and mediate gendered moral conceptions of their body and work as domestic workers or even as sex workers. In challenging the force of shame and shaming, these stories present that Southeast Asian migrant women’s practice of sexuality and participation in sexualized labor are no longer cautionary tales that moralize and construct ideal womanhood among the ranks of Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers abroad. As migrant women explore their sexuality, express their sexual desires, and forge intimate

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relationships abroad, they also further confront and, in some instances, rewrite shame in their narratives of pursuing love and romance on foreign shores.

Bad Romance Out of isolation, homesickness, and also a newfound freedom to explore their sexuality, Indonesian and Filipina household helpers in Hong Kong and Singapore, who are most of the time confined throughout the week inside their employers’ homes, find comfort and solace in romantic and sexual relationships with fellow migrant women or foreign male workers of other nationalities during their offdays in public. Studies estimate that more than a third of Filipina domestic workers and almost half of the Indonesian domestic workers have migrant boyfriends in Singapore (Lim and Paul 2020), while a quarter of Filipina domestic workers and 40% of the Indonesian helpers’ population are involved in lesbian relationships in Hong Kong (Constable 2000, Sim 2009). These forms of intimacy “become ‘imaginable’ and popular” among many migrant domestic workers because they also provide “means of bonding under their unusual circumstances” (Sim 2009, 15). Having a migrant boyfriend or a girlfriend who is a fellow helper in Singapore and Hong Kong provides Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers with the “massage effect,” where affection, comfort, and love from fellow migrant men and women “contrast sharply against the harsh treatment she might suffer from her employers or her own family back home” (Ueno 2013, 45). In Remittance, we see how this kind of romantic relationship blossoms between migrants in Singapore and how this intimacy helps the protagonist deal with pressures and conflicts both with her employers and with her family back home. In the film, Angela tirelessly works as a helper on days and, at some point, as a bar maid at night so that she can send enough money to her family, only to find out that her husband has been cheating with another woman and her daughter got pregnant. With her own family at the brink of breaking up, she meets Jamal (Prem John), a Sri Lankan construction worker, and develops an emotional bond with the fellow migrant worker that provides her a welcome escape from her own problems. The film shows the growing tenderness between the two, starting from awkward flirting to comfortable familiarity and companionship. Immersed in her own personal issues, Angela at first sees the prospect of romantic attachments abroad as unnecessary distraction, which is why she ignores Jamal’s text messages and calls. However, when they meet again in public as Angela is coming back to her employer’s house from a grocery run, Angela starts opening up to Jamal about her personal issues back home. This leads to their fondness for each other as the film presents a montage of scenes of Angela and Jamal’s intimate bonding, holding hands while strolling in parks, and attending Filipino get-togethers in public as a couple. The film reveals a tender moment between Angela and Jamal where both of them share the goals they hope to gain in their migration to Singapore. Angela talks about her plans of starting a small salon business in their hometown in the

Shame and Desire 59 Philippines after she earns enough money from working as a domestic helper. This is why she is taking financial literacy workshops and seminars in their community center during her day-off. Jamal, on his end, says that after two years of working as a construction worker, he hopes to open up a marble export business in Dhaka. He says that he learned the ropes of the construction business by working for many years in Singapore. This scene ends with them walking to the harbor to view National Day festivities, with Angela’s head leaning on Jamal’s shoulder while the two of them look at the fireworks in the sky. The film portrays Angela and Jamal’s relationship as temporary. They know that their romantic fling is not just bound by their contracts in Singapore but can only happen in public spaces, when both of them are out of their employers’ gaze and surveillance. They also know that they both have left-behind families to take care of in their homelands. Yet, the film again does not portray this extramarital affair as immoral. Their intimate bond, while authentic, is after all temporary. And in that brief moment, as they are looking at the skies lighting up, the affection they share for each other is all they have to survive their grueling routines in Singapore. A Southeast Asian migrant woman’s decision to engage in heterosexual romance with a male migrant of a different nationality is brought about by economic, cultural, and moral considerations. For one, having an intimate relationship with a male migrant of the same nationality is practically impossible in a foreign place where most Filipinos and Indonesians are like them—female domestic workers. This is why, just like Angela and Jamal, heterosexual relationships abound between Filipina and Indonesian female and other male migrants mostly with South Asian, African, or Middle Eastern origins in Singapore and Hong Kong. Pursuing romance allows migrant women to claim their own body away from the grind of household work while also finding comfort and affection with a fellow vulnerable migrant. However, unlike their relationships, many heterosexual relationships also expose migrant women to further vulnerability and precariousness. Take for example the love lives of Indonesian helpers, Ovi and Sulis, in Maria Bo Niok’s (2020) story, “Cheap Love at Bukit Merah.” The story revolves around an unnamed narrator who reminisces about her fellow Indonesian domestic helper–friends in Singapore. One of them is Ovi, who was impregnated then abandoned by her Bangladeshi boyfriend, Vijay. As Ovi confides to the narrator: I was really reckless. I already told this to Vijay. He did not say anything and instead handed me this 1,000 bill. He told me to use it to get rid of the baby. But after that, I never saw him again. He doesn’t return my calls. He must’ve changed his number already. (110) Even with all of these, what the narrator cannot understand is why Ovi still loves Vijay: “For Ovi, it is not her pregnancy that is the problem, after all, she has done abortions before. What makes her sadder is that Vijay had abandoned her, along with his promise of marriage” (110).

60 Shame and Desire Unlike the love-scorned Ovi, Sulis looks at romance with a sense of adventurism and cold practicality. On the one hand, she perceives her heterosexual affairs as a form of economic mobility. The narrator describes Sulis as: really brazen. According to her, she has two boyfriends who she dates alternately. One for each week. One of them is Calvin, a Chinese and also a lady’s man. The other one is a Malay named Ivan. She tells me she does not really love any of her two boyfriends. The only thing she looks forward to is the 1,000 Singaporean dollars she receives from the two men each time she went out with them. (111) On the other hand, she also loves the dangers of having sex inside her employer’s home, which is generally forbidden for migrant helpers in Singapore. She openly flaunts her sexual conquests with her friends and tells them “with a crazy smile” how “she and her boyfriend made love in her room” while her employers, an old couple, were deep in sleep in the other room (ibid). Despite this, Sulis also starts to see the promise of keeping at least one boyfriend, and taking their relationship seriously. As she recounts to the narrator, she is beginning to think about accepting the Chinese suitor’s offer of marriage, even if she already has a family back in Indonesia. But at that moment, Sulis is still not bitten by romantic love and instead looks at the practical benefits of maintaining multiple sexual partners for money: Honestly, nothing will happen to me if I rely only on my salary as a helper in Singapore. That’s why I am doing this, even if I already have a husband back home, I keep my two boyfriends here. Yes, it’s big money, sis! (112) The complex love lives of Ovi and Sulis offer two different prospects of heterosexual romance in Bo Niok’s story. Ovi’s narrative highlights how the already vulnerable Indonesian helper in Singapore is made more precarious by her sexual relationship with a fellow migrant man who has exploited her affections, while Sulis uses her sexuality to gain freedom and financial benefits by having multiple sexual partners. While the narrator feels that both of them are committing mistakes that might endanger their contracts and their lives in Singapore while also risking their reputations back home, she does not shame or admonish either of her friends. Instead, she just intently listens to them with compassion, seeing how the quest for true love and connection came from how Ovi’s need for comfort and how the taste for sexual pleasures came from Sulis’ need for economic freedom. Romance offers different possibilities of belonging and mobility for these already marginalized women amid their harsh lives in Singapore. She understands that “all of them are just taking risks” and they know “the consequences of their actions and choices”; that’s why she just listens whenever they share their stories (ibid). While the narrator feels pity towards Ovid’s heartbreak and shock at Sulis’ promiscuity, she bears no moral judgment towards her friends’ choices in life,

Shame and Desire 61 but she asks why they still pursue love or at least seek sexual pleasures. The story closes with her thinking about why the prospect of love and desire is such a powerful force for the likes of Ovi and Sulis, even though it jeopardizes their position as migrant workers in Singapore: “Until now my questions remain unanswered. I was just looking at them quietly. Still finding answers to my questions” (113). Bo Niok’s ambivalent conclusion exposes the underside of pursuing heterosexual romances in foreign love, even without moralizing their fates or representing them as a “fallen woman.” Since most of these migrant men, like Vijay, are more economically disadvantaged (as blue-collar workers or asylum seekers) than migrant domestic workers in Singapore and Hong Kong and because many of them are also sexually aggressive, many of their prospective migrant girlfriends, like Ovi, end up becoming either a target for their economic needs (as foreign domestic workers have more stable income and work visa) or a means to fulfill their sexual needs (Sim 2009). However, not all of them are victims of the migrants from the opposite sex. Some of them find sexual freedom, mobility, and even agency in pursuing sexual pleasures, like Sulis, and are capable of “creating and then manipulating situations that will enable them to garner material and cultural capital through emotional and monetary relationships with foreign men,” like Calvin and Ivan (Manalansan 2006, 233). Pursuing romance for migrant women is definitely a risky venture. It can open a new sense of purpose and possibility for foreign domestic workers usually confined in their labor inside their employers’ homes, but in most instances, it can also result in abuse and further vulnerability. Afraid of the more shameful consequences of heterosexual interracial affairs (i.e. repatriation, or worse, unwanted pregnancy, rape, and sexual abuse), many female foreign helpers prefer the companionship and love of a fellow migrant woman as another possibility for intimacy and pleasure. This is why homosexual relationships are perceived to be a more secure and less problematic option for migrant women in these cosmopolitan spaces despite being a taboo in their home countries. In these ways, one can see how both kinds of intimacies, despite being generally ascribed with shame back home, become much more complex practices of sexuality in foreign cities because moral ideas about what makes them shameful are constantly interrogated and negotiated against their possible rewards and drawbacks.

Queer Love The Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers’ sexuality and intimacy in transnational spaces are contested sites, where such practices can be both wellspring of solace, comfort and agency for marginalized figures of migration, on the one hand, while also a source of shame, on the other. These ambivalent feelings of being shamed or made ashamed by acts of lesbianism and interracial affairs set against the transformative possibilities that migrant domestic workers experience in their sexual practices are reflected in their fiction.

62 Shame and Desire Take for example Juwanna’s (2020) short story, “Turkish Veil,” which portrays how Arda, an Indonesian household worker in Hong Kong, explores various sexual identities and enacts changing sexual desires, first to feel at home with Hong Kong’s modernity but eventually to find love in foreign shores. In the beginning, the main character, whose real name is Anna Ayatul Nisa, packages herself as a butch lesbian, dressing up and performing masculinity each day to get by in a foreign city. She describes her bricoleur fashion in the following words: I put on a long and thick T-shirt and ragged jeans torn at the knees, a trendy fashion in Hong Kong. Then, I added accents to my hair that was like a bird’s nest, a rusty yellow dye, European style. I did not forget putting on earrings at my left eyebrow and chin that made me look like an American gangster … I made do with what I can, keeping up with newest fad in crazy times. (147) This get-up gives Arda a sense of confidence and a feeling of pride because, as she says, “At least, people will not look at me as some kung yan [maid]. My rank rises up dressed like this. I am like a metropolitan gangster in a foreign country” (148). Arda’s performance of her sexuality through fashion transforms her into someone who is very much adapted to a cosmopolitan space, thereby circumventing the effects of shame attached to being a mere helper from a poor country. Dressing up butch is not just a sign of sexual transgression but also a mark of modernity and social mobility. She looks nothing like the hickish woman from some rural village in Indonesia typical of her kind in the city. Instead, she can pass off as someone who has adapted well to the street-smart fashion of the Hong Kong youth. But being a tomboi [masculinized lesbian] is more than just a set of clothing for the protagonist. She also plays up her ritualized masculinity to be desired by fellow TKWs. For example, Arda becomes aware of the power of her performed sexuality as she openly flirts with another Indonesian maid inside the train: She was standing right in front of a bustling crowd in the metro. Her flowing long hair and her face immediately caught my attention. The seductive smile on her face is tempting. I realized that I’m the center of her attention. I guess my 165-meter height and macho outfit has made me into a dream guy, despite being a fellow woman. (Juwanna 2020, 148) Here, Arda is consciously performing her sexual identity through her fashion and social behavior: enacting a version of masculinized lesbians who “dress up to capture a sense of carelessness, with what seems to be little attention to the attractiveness of their physical attire because it is ‘hip’ to be a ‘mess,’ underscoring their contrast with feminine women” (Sim 2009, 17). These performances of sexuality are “self-consciously constructed as an integral part of the performance of a role, newly developed and deeply implicated in an emergent sense of self and agency” (ibid). Ueno observes a similar pattern as many Indonesian women “who behave

Shame and Desire 63 like men” can be seen openly displaying their intimacy with a more “feminine partner” in Singapore. Just like in Hong Kong, Ueno also sees that this kind of alternative lifestyle and sexuality is becoming more and more open because most of the Indonesian domestic workers can only find time to be intimate with their partners during their off-days in public view. As a result, their “sexuality becomes not only of physical relationships in the private sphere but also has a performative nature in public sphere” (Ueno 2013, 56). In these ways, the meaning of shame in lesbian acts and same-sex relationships are continually negotiated and challenged by many Indonesian domestic workers like Arda. While lesbian presentation and acts of intimacy remain to be a source of shame and discomfort among the more conservative members of their community, the prevalence and visibility of this gendered performance and romantic attachments constantly challenge the traditional gender ideologies upheld back home and enforced in host cities. The modern cities where they work become sites where they can enact, explore, and practice new sexual identities that would continually contest the shame ascribed to alternative relationships. Furthermore, the public performance of lesbian sexuality, through fashion and open display of affection, offers ways for Indonesian migrant women to gain a sense of agency, where they can claim their own bodies and create new identities that will help them circumvent the effects of displacement and marginality in a foreign territory. As Sim (2009) argues, “the enactment of sexual choice in the direction of samesex relations among Indonesian women can be read as powerful” because such practices “resist, reshape and re-appropriate for women their own bodies” (14). However, the apparent sexual empowerment that Arda enjoys as a lesbian suddenly changes when she meets and falls in love with a man. The protagonist is set up by her aunt working as a domestic worker in Jordan to meet her employer’s son, Ammar Qawadeer, in the guise of picking up a package which she sent for Arda. Arda was at first struck by the handsome Jordanian young man who has greeted her by brushing his cheeks against hers. This “unexpected gift” which is a traditional greeting among Middle Eastern men, “sent electric waves to (her) brain and body” (Juwanna 2020, 149). This innocent gesture would leave such an impression on Arda, developing into a foreign attraction to the Middle Eastern guy that would make her question her own sexual identity: I glanced at Ammar’s face again who was standing right in front of me. I felt his strong charm. I like his jaw, chin, eyes, and all of his face. Ah, am I still sane? All my life, I have never fell in love with an Adam! I’m a genuine lesbian with a manly spirit … My spirit is male but my gender is female. (150) The sudden transformation of her sexual desire would continue in the story, as the main character ponders on this newfound, albeit alien, feeling: Why am I feeling this? I paused for a moment as I touched my cheek, I can still fell the friction in my cheek his rugged face when we touched cheeks.

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Shame and Desire Somehow I imagined what if we kissed, maybe his rough face would feel messy and painful against mine. Ah, why have I lost my head thinking about him this way … I was just busy stroking my cheek and imagining the touch of a man’s hands. “Have I fallen in love?” (152)

The vision of a liberated lesbian woman, from her fashion, demeanor, and control of her own body, would be replaced by the fantasy of heterosexual attraction that would render her passive to this alien desire. The very foreignness of Ammar’s maleness overpowers Arda’s ritualized machismo and transforms or, rather, reforms her back into heteronormative femininity. And to make her transformation into a “proper” woman complete, the protagonist discovers that her aunt has sent her, through Ammar, three Turkish veils in her aunt’s wish that Arda meeting Ammar would spark an attraction that would make her wear them. True enough, the main character has started throwing away her street-thug looks and has reverted back to being a good Muslim woman in the hopes of attracting and pleasing Ammar in their next meeting: I no longer have the earrings on eyebrow and chin. There was no longer necklace with a jagged bike pendant. I had put away all of these. My attire has changed to a blue floral Turkish veil covering my hair. Miraculously, I was transformed into a graceful and beautiful figure. I no longer looked like a mental hospital patient with my long tunic and baggy trousers, which I purposely bought for this new life. All seemed odd, but I beautifully wore them. (156) In the end, Arda chose to become Anna Ayatul Nisa again, leaving behind her femme fling and butch friends and changing back to performing the image of traditional Indonesian femininity for the love of a man she has just met. She plays up her womanhood by wearing a veil, loose tunic, and long skirt, even though she is constantly chastised and called out for looking like she has “just been circumcised” by her fellow Indonesian maids who have always known her as a tomboi: A burst of laughter came to them again. I almost wanted to punch them but I remembered that I have already changed. But despite all their laughter, harassment, humiliation, cornering, and embarrassing me, I’m sure … God is not laughing. (157) The story’s conclusion presents the protagonist’s determination to lead a new life as a changed woman. Her will, despite being shamed by her friends, is comforted by the religious certainty of her choice, something that she seems to have immediately adopted in her process of reforming back to being a morally upright Muslim woman. The didactic notion of morality has also transformed Arda’s motivation into a straight, proper lady: what was initially driven by a desire for a foreign

Shame and Desire 65 male has been changed into her submission to the morally sanctioned ideals of Indonesian womanhood. This theme of “fake men” reforming into “proper women” runs through Susana Nisa’s (2020) story, “Allah, I’m Home.” Like the imagery of veiling, the author used the idea of “home” or “returning home” as a metaphor of feminine redomestication for those who have “walked astray.” In this story, home is neither the literal repatriation nor the coming back from one’s own “place” in society but a religious metaphor for the moral reformation of women who have engaged in haram [forbidden] relationships. The story is told from the perspective of Kienan or Kie, a straight Indonesian woman, who professes to be “normal,” someone who has “never been attracted to anyone of the same sex” and whose desire is exclusively directed at “real men and not fake men” (168). However, she becomes fascinated with one of her tomboi friends, Regha, or Gha, a fellow domestic worker herself, who performs masculinity just like Arda in the previous story: You were also an ordinary woman. But your situation transformed you into a male woman. A tomboy, that’s the cool name for your kind. Your trademark look was torn faded jeans, a long chain hanging from your front pocket to your back pocket. And a white, long-sleeved shirt, not forgetting your close cropped shiny hair that smelled of Gatsby hair oil. Plus the red Nike shoes with colorful shoelaces. That really finished your look. (ibid) Kie and Gha’s deep companionship eventually blossoms and transitions into love. The protagonist later on realizes that the kind of solace she feels when she is with Gha has been something akin to her previous heterosexual relationship: “Only a month after we were introduced I felt so comfortable spending my day-off with you. It was a feeling that I had felt only when I was with my former boyfriend” (169). Kie later on narrates her own transformation from a plain, prim, and proper woman into a femme partner for Gha, while also detailing how their relationship has flourished in their performance of their respective sexual roles: Ever since that night we became lovers. We changed how we call each other. It was no longer Kie and Gha, but “papa” and “mama.” We were like two infatuated young people. The world was ours too. I no longer cared about the cynical looks from our fellow migrant workers who saw our public display of affection. My appearance also changed totally. I, who had never dyed my hair, began to cut and dye my hair in the style of Hong Kong artists to please you. I even changed my clothes and make-up. In short, I transformed myself from a simple, straightforward girl into a modern city chic. (170) This account reflects how in same-sex relationships, it is not just the butch lesbian lover, like Arda and Regha, who can gain the mark of modernity in their performance of lesbianism but also their femme lesbian partners. Kie’s engagement in

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alternative sexuality has converted her into a trendy woman who has adapted well to the cosmopolitan lifestyle of Hong Kong. Even though they are in a homosexual relationship, they have also enacted the familiar rituals of intimacy and endearment seen in heterosexual relationships. In these ways, their transgressive emotional bond has given her and Gha the power to defy, or at least disregard, the imposition of shame and the acts of shaming from their own community. No matter how empowering this relationship is for both Kienan and Regha, their queer transgression gets to be repressed and later on recuperated back into heteronormative conventions. Midway through the narrative, Gha suddenly dies from a mysterious illness. Kie, who is grieving alone in her room, finds a letter from Gha addressed to her, hidden in one of her pants, which the latter has apparently written a few days before her sudden death. In this letter, Gha explains to Kie why she has chosen to become a lesbian: I was born Sulastri. I am a divorcée with a nine-year-old son. I changed my identity and fully pretended to be a man because I wanted to forget the hurt I felt when my ex-husband ran away with my neighbor. I wanted to prove that I could live without men. This is why I plunged into this world for so long. (174) Regha’s decision to engage in homosexuality is a common motivation for many Indonesian domestic workers in both Hong Kong and Singapore. The disillusionment from men or their experience of abuse has driven several migrant women into the direction of same-sex relationships because it provided for their sexual and emotional needs without the pain and danger of falling into the trap of violence and oppression embedded in the patriarchal culture and values of heteronormative relationships (Sim 2009, Ueno 2013). In Regha’s letter, however, her conscience and guilt have overpowered her choice. She shares with Kienan how she has been dreaming about her dead father and her left-behind son telling her to “come home.” Her constant dreams of becoming both a disgraceful daughter and a negligent mother have made her feel guilty about her relationship with Kienan. To be able to “come home,” she decided to end her immoral acts, but as the story shows, she had died before breaking up with her lover. Towards the end of the letter, she also advises Kienan to “go home,” just like what she has set out to do before her untimely death: “Go back to being Kienan again, before you have met me … Forget Regha. I want you to remember me as Miss Lastri. May Allah still grant us forgiveness and bless us with a chance to return to Him” (Nisa 2020, 175). Here, “coming home” assumes different meanings underwritten by moral gendered ideologies. The conscience of hearth here is embodied by Regha’s father and her son, both figures of her left-behind duties, her gendered economic and moral obligations as a dutiful daughter and a responsible mother that she has strayed from when she became engaged in her alternative lifestyle abroad. Her idea of returning home, then, is shaped by the moral dictates of going back to what she was used to be—the good Miss Lastri. Even though transforming into a

Shame and Desire 67 butch lesbian has allowed her to escape things about that “home” that hurts her— her former husband’s infidelity. Finally, the morality of this decision in Regha’s mind is reinforced in her last words in the letter: this homecoming is also gaining “forgiveness” and a “chance to return to God.” However, as the story shows, death has come upon Regha the moment she decided to come home and reform her “immoral” ways. This is also what happens to Kienan towards the story’s resolution. Kienan has been haunted by Regha’s last words in the letter, asking her to “come home” like her and forget their forbidden affair. Fresh from her grief, she decides to abandon her friends (who are, like her and Regha, butch and femme partners) in the middle of their partying inside a disco, and leave all their aimless drinking and immoral coddling in public. The moment she steps outside the place of “sin,” she starts to feel dizzy and weak. She runs away from the red-light district until she arrives at a mosque nearby. She freezes and succumbs to the floor at the entrance after hearing the muezzin’s call: I spun like a windmill. My stomach rose, spewing the haram food and drinks from the folds of my intestines. I stumbled, swayed helplessly as though my bones and joints were hit by a sledgehammer. Tears welled unstoppably. I crawled begging for mercy. Then total darkness enveloped me. I tried to move but could not. I surrender to my fate if this is the end of my life … I felt the breeze caressing my face. I opened my eyes. Everything looked white. (176) The story concludes with both lovers dying, as the fatal consequence of their sinful lifestyles and sexual transgressions. Their transgression is so grave that they are punished, even if they have both decided to leave their forbidden ways and go back to the fold of righteousness, with Kienan literally spewing out all the sinful drinks and food she consumed and crawling back to the mosque to repent until her last breath. Nisa’s short story illustrates the cruel cost of straying away from the moral and religious path for an Indonesian woman abroad. For Regha and Kienan, even if they have decided to come home, they ended up dying because their moral reformation is a little too late. Although their passing can be read as coming into terms or becoming at peace with their tragic fates, particularly with how Kienan’s final moments are portrayed in the story, it seems like a steep price to pay even with their choice to disavow their “immoral” ways. This text then intends to not only inspire morally compromised women to tread the path of goodness but also show how returning to the moral righteousness of their patriarchal and heterosexist “home” needs to be done most quickly because the consequences for this kind of haram sexuality can be most fatal. Juwanna’s “Turkish Veil” and Nisa’s “Allah, I’m Home” show the dimension of morality, through shame, in configuring and reconstructing Indonesian domestic workers’ sexuality, especially by these protagonists who directly engage in potentially transgressive forms of sexual relationships. Both stories show how same-sex relationships are less than viable, if not improper and immoral, pathways to gain sexual freedom abroad, as they portray this alternative sexuality

68 Shame and Desire foreclosing back to heteronormativity. In the contrary, independent documentaries like Effort for Love and Sunday Beauty Queen offer a much more empowering imaginary of lesbian intimacies for migrant Indonesian and Filipina women abroad. Ani Ema Susanti’s (2008) short documentary, Effort for Love, focuses on Riantini or Rian. Deploying close-up and over-the-shoulder shots, the camera follows Rian’s daily life in Hong Kong. Rian is a divorcee and her ex-husband left her with a daughter back in their Indonesian village. A brief moment from the film shows her writing a dedication on the shoebox she is going to send to her daughter back home while professing maternal love. Rian is a good woman in the sense that she follows the script of the “good mother,” yet she also transgresses this role when she admits that she likes women. The film documents Rian’s romantic affair with a fellow Indonesian helper: we see her visiting her girlfriend while walking her ageing ward around their neighborhood, and during her day-off, we see the lesbian couple teasing each other while eating in a noodle shop and cuddling in Victoria Park. The intensity of their relationship is summarized in Susanti’s recreation of a karaoke video showing the couple kissing, offering flowers to each other, holding hands by the harbor, and strolling romantically in Hong Kong’s streets while Rian is singing a love song. Feng-Mei Heberer (2017) reads the intimate camera gaze that composes this karaoke montage of unbridled romanticism and sentimentality as a narrative tool that reimagines Hong Kong’s familiar imposing image of globalization and hyper-capitalism into an affective landscape for queer love and affection: Rather than telling us about the intimacy between Rian and her partner from a sober distance, then, the documentary shows itself overtaken by and being told through the affect of sentimentality that defines the protagonists’ intimate performance … It emerges as a narrative tool that inscribes an unrecognized social world into the hypervisible city of Hong Kong, itself a place defined by the tumultuous conjuncture of colonial histories, the intersecting forces of globalization and capitalism, and the pressure of a Chinese authoritarian state. (440) In this romantic performance, Rian takes on the role of tomboi when she sports a short haircut, wears a baseball cap, dresses up in oversized shirts and jeans, and acts cocky in the streets, while her girlfriend is seen as a diminutive femme partner, “so calm and natural, so soft spoken and innocent but mature in her ways,” according to Rian. While it may seem that “lesbian” Indonesian migrant women follow a Western model of queer sexuality, there are nuances in their practice of TKW’s lesbian intimacy. According to Rony (2012), “gay and lesbian communities in Indonesia do not just adopt the Western ideas of sexuality wholesale, but ‘dub’ them and make them their own” through practices specific to their contexts (166). Rian, for example, never sees any contradictions in her roles as

Shame and Desire 69 a dutiful mother to her daughter back home and gushy tomboy lover to her girlfriend abroad. In separate scenes, the film frames Rian professing her love to her daughter and to her girlfriend in the letters that she writes for both. However, she also recognizes that her intimate relationship is only momentary and can only exist in Hong Kong’s public spaces. In one of the scenes in the documentary, she describes the bond she and her girlfriend maintain: We made a pact. Our relationship is only here in Hong Kong. Back home, we will be just friends, or sisters even. We know that our relationship won’t be accepted back home. We don’t want to shame our parents. As long as we can have our relationship here in Hong Kong, we will go through with it. This provisional state does not make the relationship false but rather “troubles the moralizing narratives that separate ‘authentic’ and true’ social worlds from undesirable forms of life” by showing alternative spaces and imaginaries of intimacy that exceed identitarian notions of queerness (Heberer 2017, 441). The film, even as it shows the transitory nature of Rian and her girlfriend’s relationship, does not frame it through the moral lens of shame. They know that they can only express their love and alternative intimacy while they are abroad. While coming out is not an option, heteronormativity is also not “coming home” for them, unlike the two previous short stories. Even though they will probably revert back to being friends or sisters once they go back to Indonesia so as to escape shaming from their own family and community, their queer love is what makes Hong Kong “home” for each other, with their feelings for each other rendered on screen as genuine and legitimate at that moment. This is affirmed in the film by an interview with the shop owner of Abadi Store, a place where lesbian couples go to marry, as she asserts that: “Maybe this is unrecognized in other parts of the world. But this is a fact.” Rian’s practice of intimacy produces not just a counter-image to the proper womanhood sanctioned by the state and global capital but also shows that they create and reimagine alternative forms of sociality and sexuality, no matter how ephemeral and transitory they may be. The short documentary’s closing shows, in slow motion, Rian riding a bicycle with her girlfriend while a love song plays at the background. This scene signifies a kind of mobility driven by queer love and desire that, literally and figuratively, can only exist transnationally for migrant subjects. This tender and sentimental cinematic moment stamps the promise of enacting alternative images and imaginaries of sexuality and accepting the temporariness of affection and romance for women like Rian and her girlfriend. Just like, Effort for Love, Villarama’s (2016) film offers a powerful representation of how one can build home and find homeliness abroad through queer desire and sexuality. While Sunday Beauty Queen presents the various struggles of Pinay DH in Hong Kong who join in beauty contests during their day-off, at the heart of the film is Leo, the only queer subject and the one that ties in the story of the other women in the documentary. Fondly called by her fellow helpers as “Daddy,” she is established in the film as a tireless advocate of the

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Figure 2.1 Queer scenes of intimacy: Rian holding hands with her girlfriend in Effort for Love (top) and “Daddy” Leo spending quiet time with “Mommy” Judy in Sunday Beauty Queen (bottom). Photos courtesy of Ani Ema Susanti and Kalyana Shira Foundation and Films, and Baby Ruth Villarama and Voyage Pictures.

self-making project of beauty pageants in her ten years of organizing them in Hong Kong. Leo’s queerness as a T-bird [“thunder bird,” Filipino slang for butch lesbians] is made visible in the screen from her clothing, comportment, down to her intimate relationship with her partner, Judy, whom she calls “Mommy.” Her fashion choice of T-shirt, jeans, and rubber shoes and crew cut appropriates through queer desire the muted DH uniform of migrant maids imposed by their employers (Constable 1997a). More importantly, because she was allowed by her employer, who treats her well, to rent and live in her own flat, she is also able to live out the queer “imaginings of home” and home-making with her more feminine-looking partner, Judy (Lai 2017). The live-out arrangement here is crucial. As opposed to

Shame and Desire 71 the lesbian relationships portrayed in previous narratives where the possibility of creating a queer home is foreclosed since they can only practice their alternative sexuality in public spaces and outside their employers’ homes, Leo and Judy are able to live out their intimate queer homelife in the privacy of their own rented apartment. Villarama’s camera captures this intimate scene of queer home-making. After Leo’s busy day of juggling daytime work as a helper with organizing work for the community, she comes home to Judy, also live-out helper, with their dinner already prepared. While at the outset, this intimate homelife seems to merely reproduce binary modes of masculine–feminine dynamic of heterosexual coupling, these expressions and practices must be read as an “ongoing process of relating gendered positions to sexualities that are [made] malleable” by their transnational experience (Lai 2017, 910). As Amy Sim (2009) suggests, while these queer identities and practices are not always conscious “attempts at denaturalizing or re-idealizing heterosexual gender norms … they, on the other hand, express the dialectical tension between transgression and conformity that also represents experiences with crises in identity related to marginality” (16–17). In this way, Leo and Judy mimic a straight live-in couple while also simultaneously subverting its stereotypes because their coupling gives them a genuine home with each other amid the various experience of unhomeliness. Leo and Judy, as daddy and mommy to other Filipina migrants in Hong Kong, en-queer the practice of “making family” abroad. The intimacy they share inside their cramped apartment attests to the love that goes beyond their designations as domestic workers in Hong Kong or breadwinners of their respective left-behind families in the Philippines. Even though Leo and Judy are not as blatantly sentimental in their public display of affection as Rian and her partner, there is no shame or guilt about the untraditional intimacy and bond between the two. There is a sense of calm stability in the quiet affection of their companionship. While Leo is still counting tickets for the beauty contest she is mounting for the weekend, Judy is looking at her lover while answering Villarama’s question about their hectic private life: “No time for love since she started doing the pageants. But it’s not like I can just sit and watch when she is like this, so I’ll still help out.” There is no time for love because they express their love even when they are not together as the film shows the care and affection shared by the couple. For example, while Leo goes to her rounds to contestants, sponsors, and other institutional partners for her pageants, Judy is laboring over lettering and glittering sashes for the pageant. Their mutual exchange of love and support allows Leo to extend care to her fellow domestic helpers outside her homelife with Judy, and this is part of the ways in which they do and perform queer love for each other. In the end, these narratives open up new ways of mediating and eventually challenging impositions of shame on alternative sexualities of migrant Indonesian and Filipina women. Unlike the symbolism of the veiling in “Turkish Veil” or the metaphor of homecoming in “Allah, I’m Home,” which both impart religious and cultural ideas in which shame reforms and disciplines transgressive women’s bodies back to propriety and deference to moral norms, Effort for Love

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and Sunday Beauty Queen give glimpses of the unbounded promise of queer love that can become a home away from home for Southeast Asian women. As Martin Manalansan Manalansan (2006) points out, queer stories that represent and “highlight a desiring and pleasure-seeking migrant subject, radically reposition and reexamine heteronormative premises in gender and migration” (243). By introducing and intersecting queerness in desire and sexual expressions to discussions of Indonesian and Filipina helpers’ subjectivity and agency, these films also reconstruct ideas of shame and shaming that are usually grounded on heteronormative ideas about womanhood, family, and the labor of social reproduction. Whether it is temporary, as in the case of Rian and her partner, or a little bit more stable and enduring, just like what Leo and Judy have, queer love exposes how desires and sexuality can challenge shame for migrant women who are constantly shamed because of their sexualized bodies and labor.

Desiring Defiance Shame may be a powerful affect that constantly orders women to discipline their bodies in transnational spaces, but these narratives show that Indonesian and Filipina domestic workers do not just assume and receive this emotion and the discourses that inform it. As these fiction and films attest, they also constantly mediate, challenge, and sometimes subvert shame and shaming in their daily lives. These narratives reveal that confronting malu or hiya is a complex process where they constantly negotiate the gendered ideas of morality attached to their bodies and sexualities while also living up to the many demands and pressures of being a foreigner and a woman abroad. This is why fiction and films that describe and portray their sexuality, love, and desire already defy the gendered moral frames of shame. While stories that depict their involvement in sex work or interracial affairs and queer romances are still subject to shame and shaming, these narratives take shame no longer as a social and moral benchmark to be followed but as a normalized condition that intensifies their suffering or as cruel dictates that regulate their own freedom and agency to reclaim their bodies. By feeling shame and challenging why they have to feel ashamed, these narratives also allow them to question their practice of sexuality and challenge the moral and religious dictates that prescribe their sexual expression and punish their sexual transgressions. The ways in which migrant women not only feel ashamed but also respond to the discursive effects of shaming have important implications in understanding victimhood, especially those kinds of violence that are inflicted on their bodies. These stories represent how they continually construct and reconstruct their sexual identities in transnational spaces, as they explore and narrate various expressions of their bodies and sexualities in their precarious and vulnerable lives as migrant women.

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Heberer, Feng-Mei. 2017. “Migrating Intimacies: Media Representations of Same-Sex Love among Migrant Women in East Asia.” Sexualities 20 (4):428–445. Ho, Wai-Yip. 2015. “The Emerging Visibility of Islam through the Powerless: Indonesian Muslim Domestic Helpers in Hong Kong.” Asian Anthropology 14 (1):79–90, 81. Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics. 2015. Home Sweet Home? Work, Life and Well-Being of Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore. Singapore: Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics. Juwanna. 2020. “Kerudung Turki [Turkish Veil].” In Mga Bantay-Salakay sa Loob ng Aking Bahay: Antolohiya ng Maiikling Kuwento ng mga Indonesian Domestic Worker sa Hong Kong, Singapore at Taiwan [Intruders at Home: Anthology of Short Stories of Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan], edited by Carlos M. Piocos III, 147–158. Quezon City, Philippines: Sentro ng Wikang Filipino [Center of Philippine Languages]-University of the Philippines Diliman. Lacey, Liam. 2017. “Review: ‘Sunday Beauty Queen’.” Point of View Magazine. Accessed 9 June 2018. Lai, Francisca Yuenki. 2017. “Sexuality at Imagined Home: Same-Sex Desires among Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong.” Sexualities 21 (5–6):899–913. Lam, Jeff. 2015. “Regina Ip Apologises for Comments about Filipina Maids in Hong Kong.” South China Morning Post, 24 April. Lee, Maggie. 2016. “Busan Film Review: ‘Sunday Beauty Queen’.” Variety. Accessed March 25, 2018. Lim, Nicole, and Anju Mary Paul. 2020. “Stigma on a Spectrum: Differentiated Stigmatization of Migrant Domestic Workers’ Romantic Relationships in Singapore.” Gender, Place & Culture 1–23. Lindquist, Johan. 2004. “Veils and Ecstasy: Negotiating Shame in the Indonesian Borderlands.” Ethnos 69 (4):487–508. Ma, Raymond. 2006. “Envoys to Help Maids Navigate Moral Maze.” South China Morning Post. Accessed 13 March 2015. Manalansan, Martin F. 2006. “Queer Intersections: Sexuality and Gender in Migration Studies.” The International Migration Review 40 (1):224–249. National Statistics Office. 2014. Philippines: In Figures 2014. Quezon City: National Statistics Office. Nisa, Susana. 2020. “Tuhan, Aku Pulang [Allah, I’m Coming Home].” In Mga BantaySalakay sa Loob ng Aking Bahay: Antolohiya ng Maiikling Kuwento ng mga Indonesian Domestic Worker sa Hong Kong, Singapore at Taiwan [Intruders at Home: Anthology of Short Stories of Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan], edited by Carlos M. Piocos III, 167–176. Quezon City, Philippines: Sentro ng Wikang Filipino [Center of Philippine Languages]-University of the Philippines Diliman. O’Brien, Rob. 2016. “Making Film Stars Out of Singapore’s Domestic Workers.” Medium. Accessed January 20, 2020. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. 2009. Mapping the Global Muslim Population: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Muslim Population. Washington: Pew Research Center. Rahman, Noor Abdul, Brenda SA Yeoh, and Shirlena Huang. 2005. “Dignity Overdue:’ Transnational Domestic Workers in Singapore.” In Asian Women as Transnational Domestic Workers, edited by Noor Abdul Rahman, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Shirlena Huang, 233–261. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish.

Shame and Desire 75 Retnaningdyah, Pratiwi. 2013. “Ani Ema Susanti, a Returning Domestic Worker, and a Film Director: Overcoming Poverty through Education.” Doing Literacy. Accessed March 20, 2020. Rony, Fatimah Tobing. 2012. “Transforming Documentary: Indonesian Women and Sexuality in the Film Pertaruhan [At Stake] (2008).” In Women and Media in Asia: The Precarious Self, edited by Youna Kim, 159–176. Basingstroke: Palgrave McMillan. Rosaldo, Michelle. 1983. “The Shame of Headhunters and the Autonomy of Self.” Ethos 11 (3):135–151. Silvey, Rachel. 2004. “Transnational Domestication: State Power and Indonesian Migrant Women in Saudi Arabia.” Political Geography 23:245–264. Silvey, Rachel. 2013. “Overseas Female Labour Migrant (TKW or Tenage Kerja Wanita).” In Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity, edited by Eric Harms and Johan Lindquist Joshua Barker, 152–154. Honolulu: The University of Hawai’i Press. Sim, Amy. 2009. “The Sexual Economy of Desire: Girlfriends, Boyfriends and Babies among Indonesian Women Migrants in Hong Kong.” [PDF]. http://r4d.dfid.gov.uk/PD F/Outputs/WomenEmpMus/Sim_Sexual_Economy_of_Desire.pdf. Sim, Amy. 2010. “Lesbianism among Indonesian Women Migrants in Hong Kong.” In As Normal As Possible : Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong, edited by Yau Ching, 37–50. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Susanti, Ani Ema. 2008. “Mengusahakan Cinta [Effort for Love]”. In Pertaruhan [At Stake]. Indonesia: Kalyana Shira Films. Suzuki, Nobue. 2011. ““Japayuki,” or, Spectacles for the Transnational Middle Class.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 19 (2):439–462. Tabbada, Emil V. 2005. “A Phenomenology of the Tagalog Notions of Hiya and Dangal.” In Filipino Cultural Traits: Claro R. Ceniza Lectures, edited by Rolando M. Gripaldo, 21–56. Washington: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy. Tadiar, Neferti. 2009. Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press. Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. 1998. “Prostituted Filipinas and the Crisis of Philippine Culture.” Millennium 27 (4):927–954. Tiwi. 2020. “Sebuah Surat di Penghujung April [Letter at the End of April].” In Mga Bantay-Salakay sa Loob ng Aking Bahay: Antolohiya ng Maiikling Kuwento ng mga Indonesian Domestic Worker sa Hong Kong, Singapore at Taiwan [Intruders at Home: Anthology of Short Stories of Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan], edited by Carlos M Piocos III, 19–24. Quezon City, Philippines: Sentrong Wikang Filipino [Center of Philippine Languages]-University of the Philippines Diliman. Ueno, Kayoko. 2013. “Love Gain: The Transformation of Intimacy among Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 28 (1):36–63. Villarama, Baby Ruth. 2016. Sunday Beauty Queen. Manila: Voyage Studios & Solar Pictures.

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Precarious Picture At the start of 2014, a photograph of an emaciated and bruised Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, an Indonesian helper in Hong Kong, became viral on social media. The picture—which was first posted on Facebook by a fellow tenaga kerja wanita [TKW, female Indonesian overseas worker] sitting beside her at the boarding gate at the Hong Kong International Airport—spread so fast and wide that before the end of the day Erwiana was already headlining the news stories of local and global media outlets. The image of her gaunt and beaten body became the site and evidence of accumulated bodily harm and suffering and, in turn, incited an explosion of affects: shock and pity—not only from people in Indonesia and Hong Kong but also across the globe. Former Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudyohono aired his outrage at the apparent brutality Erwiana suffered at the hands of her employer while expressing disbelief because cases like this hardly happen to their TKWs in the city-state (Gatot 2014). Hong Kong authorities, on their end, said they were taking the matter seriously but were nevertheless stunned because incidents of physical abuse among foreign helpers are rare in the territory (Lo 2015). However, an earlier study by Amnesty International reveals that what happened to Erwiana is not as isolated as both Hong Kong and Indonesian officials claim it to be. In fact, cases like this are not just rampant, according to them, but also made prevalent by both governments’ policies on sending and receiving migrant workers, which has continuously exposed many Indonesian women to widespread abuse and exploitation (Amnesty International 2013). At the heat of the issue, thousands of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong marched out to the streets, decrying Erwiana’s fate, claiming justice on her behalf, and calling on crucial reforms in their own government’s labor export policies and Hong Kong’s discriminatory rules for migrant household workers (Siu 2014). Celebrated as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential Figures of 2014, Erwiana was thrust into the spotlight as she became not just a powerful symbol urging other victims of abuse to come forward but also a rallying cry for thousands of domestic workers from Southeast Asia living and working precariously in the cosmopolitan cities of their neighboring countries (Mam 2014).

Vulnerability and Resistance 77 Erwiana has become the embodiment of a potent narrative of suffering and victimhood for migrant women across the globe. In her widely publicized trial, her graphic detailing of the series of harrowing bodily torture she endured at the hands of her employer was transformed into a compelling account of what it means to suffer and to speak on behalf of those who suffer. The testimony of her ordeal set the stage for what Nancy Cooper Cooper (1997) calls as “transnational mega dramas”: emotionally charged narratives of migrant victims that move and disrupt public discourses around the world. Although there are hundreds of abuse cases and labor complaints filed routinely by foreign domestic workers at Hong Kong’s Labor Tribunal every year, “visible” cases bearing signs of accrued physical injuries, such as this case, become so powerful that they do not only legitimize justice and human rights claims but also reveal tensions on how the affect of victimhood organizes rhetoric of indignation and blaming in public debates (Tan 2014). For example, one of the criticisms of Indonesian activists against their government revolves around shaming its officials for being “impotent” in protecting their own “woman’s honor” (Azka 2014). Protesters and media pundits who sympathize with Erwiana in Hong Kong have called her employer names such as a “monster” or “torture employer” because of her alleged psychotic cruelty and inhumane sadism (Chiu and Lo 2014). While both forms of reproaches are probably well intentioned and most likely meant to be sympathetic to the victim, they expose the tenuous and contradictory ways in which feelings of vulnerability and violence are deployed. On the one hand, the indignant indictment of state negligence supports discourses on intensifying the state’s claim on and control of women’s bodies under the guise of protection; on the other hand, incendiary accusations cast solely on the perpetrator treat incidents like this as aberrant cases of pathological cruelty. Both criticisms elide the complex and inherent structural conditions that not only reinforce problematic national, cultural, and sexual scripts on women’s bodies but also allow their plight to happen and continue in the first place. Erwiana’s case might be extreme, but it is definitely not exceptional, as other less prominent cases and stories of abuse among migrant women workers show. If popular and sensational depictions of victimhood relegate these cases to invisibility, it is not because they have less discernible corporeal signs that affirm their agony but more so due to the fact that their suffering has been structured as everyday and ordinary in the global order of domestic work. Transnational household labor’s structural conditions have shaped precarity into their daily lives and labors to the extent that their private encounters with distress and pain are theirs alone to manage and deal with. This understanding of victimization in their narratives points to a more complex operation of how feelings of vulnerability and violence are deployed to buttress ideas that consign blame and accountability to the already suffering migrant subjects and subjectivities. As my reading of foreign domestic workers’ short stories demonstrate, these narratives illustrate how Indonesian migrant women are not only subjugated by unjust life and work settings of transnational household service but also compelled to feel that they are somehow blamable for their own

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Figure 3.1 Overcoming victimhood: Erwiana Sulistiyaningsih raising her fist as she meets the press after her legal victory against her abusive employer, February 10, 2015. Photo by the author.

dire situations. These contradictory feelings of vulnerability and accountability for their own vulnerability shape how they maintain and/or overcome their suffering and complicate the politics of victimhood and resistance in terms of how they affectively express their subjectivity and exercise their agency within the cruel logic of globalization. This is why looking at affects that animate narratives of suffering is important, because they not only highlight how rampant these silenced stories of victimization are but also sustain and subvert discourses that perpetuate the cruel fates of migrant women workers like Erwiana. In this way, vulnerability can be reframed not just as depictions of subjects’ exposure to violence, abuse, and exploitation but also as a condition of possibility for their voice and action. Vulnerability is not a prima facie condition where precarious subjects, like Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, are represented as devoid of voice and agency but the very ground for resistance (Butler 2016). What does it mean to narrate one’s experience and resist from the perspective of vulnerability? To answer this, I examine the short stories written and published by Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore and problematize their depictions of everyday victimhood and agency by reading the ways in which they articulate their feelings from their lived experiences as migrant women workers.

Vulnerable Voices One of the interesting effects of Indonesian diaspora in recent years is the emergence of Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia or Indonesian migrant workers

Vulnerability and Resistance 79 literature. In just a short span of a decade, a considerable number of novels, short stories, and poetry anthologies written by Indonesian domestic workers have been published and disseminated within their community in host countries. There are several curious features that these writings exhibit. For one, it started in Hong Kong and most of the literature being published until now is still from TKWs in Hong Kong (Suryomenggolo 2011). The authors of these stories have only started writing and crafting their literary skills after they have become migrant workers (Suryomenggolo 2012). Some claim that the emergence of Indonesian migrant workers’ literature could be because of the receiving state’s relatively “hospitable” conditions seen as conducive for many of the helpers to follow and pursue other persuasions outside their work in their employers’ households (Murniati 2014). But it is also primarily due to the growing organizing work and community building that Indonesian women in Hong Kong have started since more than a decade ago (Lestari 2013). Nevertheless, their writings are fast becoming a staple in the Indonesian literaryscape as other TKWs in Singapore, Taiwan, and other countries begin to write and publish their own stories as well. There are literary practices that sustain the growth of and interest in Indonesian domestic workers’ writings. Many of these writers first publish their stories in Indonesian community magazines in Hong Kong (Cummins 2013). Some of the authors actively post their writings on their own blogs or on online writing communities, where they get feedback from their readers. Independent publishing houses in Jakarta, Jogjakarta, and Bandung then pick up and publish their manuscripts; some are distributed in local bookstores but most of these works go back to where the novels, stories, and poems were written (Murniati 2012). In Hong Kong, for example, members of the writing group circulate and distribute their books at Victoria Park during off-days. Some of their books are also available for loan or for possible purchase in many of the perpustakaan mobil [mobile library] scattered all over the park. These are transient reading spaces set up by Indonesian migrant women themselves during their day-off, where their fellow domestics can borrow and read the books that they haul inside the park in their suitcases (Ginger 2015). The writing groups also hold their own literary festival where they showcase their publications to fellow domestics and other Indonesian readers (Grundy 2014). From time to time, they would hold writing competitions where they would recruit new authors from the pool of domestic worker–participants to harvest new materials to publish in their anthologies (Adib 2008). Since most of these migrant women are new to the craft and have no prior training in creative writing, they only learn the conventions of literary fiction through their community whose members are, like them, mostly initiates to the literary world. They learn to write by self-practice and by studiously revising their work with the help of their community. While Indonesian authors and literary critics find the novelty, at the very least, of this emerging genre and the kinds of works it continuously produces, Sastra Buruh Migran’s place in the Indonesian literary canon is still in question. As Suryomenggolo (2012) observes: “Indonesian domestic workers’ writings are often left out from discussions within established

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literary circles and their works are not even listed in the catalogues of public and university libraries in the country” (216). While some of Indonesia’s prolific middle-class authors find problems in their works’ aesthetic quality and literariness, many of them sympathize with the difficulties and challenges these women had to go through just to be able to write and share their stories (Iswandono 2010). Though many of these domestic worker– writers have relative freedom and support from their employers in this kind of creative pursuit, others have to steal time or hide their writing from their bosses’ attention. Some of them write under a dim bed light in the middle of the night, while some compose drafts in between their household chores or while looking after their wards. Posed with these challenges, these domestic worker–writers persevere in learning and practicing the craft of creative writing because they want to share their stories to their fellow migrant workers, who experience the same kind of things that they have gone through in their lives as migrant women. This makes their writings pedagogical in many ways as a literary genre, because it not only teaches migrant women workers the craft of fiction as they grapple with finding a form that would document and disseminate their personal stories but also educates fellow TKWs about ways of dealing with their own problems and anxieties related to being a foreigner, a domestic worker, and a woman displaced and marginalized in their country of work. For Southeast Asian migrant women, this practice of testimonial writing is also important, and at some point, necessary, especially when they are encountering any work-related problems. Community organizers and support groups in Hong Kong, for example, would encourage foreign domestic workers to keep a diary or journal as these writings could then be used as evidence just in case they file cases of abuse and labor complaint later (Mission for Migrant Workers 2013a). Indonesian migrant women’s writings, however, depart from the kind of life-stories and narratives used as testimonies by domestic worker claimants and their caseworkers in Hong Kong, because they are written in the genre of fiction. And because these writings stand as short stories and novels, Suryomenggolo (2012) notes that this is also what separates Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia from the dominant literary genre of epistolary among Southeast Asian migrant workers, for example, the collected letters written by Filipina and Burmese workers in East Asia and the Middle East. Even with this difference, most of the published stories retain their autobiographical quality. Most of their fictions are written from the first-person point of view and revolve around the authors’ own everyday experiences, inviting readers to peek into their intimate lives as migrant workers (Sawai 2010). Because some of the stories are still very personal and sensitive, sharing their experiences may expose some of them to shaming from their own community or may threaten their relationship with their employers. This is why many of the domestic workers– authors still use pseudonyms when they publish their work. As fictions bordering on testimonials, the phenomenon of Indonesian migrant literature is itself contradictory. While most of these works reflect the ways in

Vulnerability and Resistance 81 which these women have suffered, the fact that they have already written and published these experiences attests to an overcoming, to some degree, of those sufferings. Most of their stories revolve around their trauma from their previous employers and the ways in which they endured their ordeals. Many stories also deal with the racial, class, and sexual discrimination they encounter on a daily basis in a foreign land. Some of the narratives talk about finding their own community, adapting to a new culture, forging friendships, pursuing love and romance abroad, encountering conflicts with other fellow domestics, and coping with other problems like homesickness and isolation (Suryomenggolo 2012). In my analysis of short stories here, I read how the experience of suffering and the expression of its feelings are not just individual reactions to but also products of the very structures that set the conditions of vulnerability for TKWs. At the outset, their work conditions can be described as precarious because of their social exclusion as guest workers in foreign lands: they are bound to live inside their employers’ homes, which exposes them to abuse and exploitation, extended hours of work, and tasks that are beyond what their standard job contracts state (Mission for Migrant Workers 2013b). Their labors and lives are effectively given over to circumstances that are highly contingent, while being bound by their contract to employers and debt to their recruitment agencies. Such precariousness, however, is heightened by various other discourses that set up their vulnerability as foreigners, women, and domestic workers in their countries of employ. This structural condition is what Judith Butler (2009) describes as precarity, not just to describe how bodies are fundamentally “exposed to violence” in as much as it is always at the “risk of becoming the agency and instrument of it as well” but also to describe how they are framed within “politically-induced conditions” where precariousness is intensified and exacerbated, or “in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (25-6). While Butler’s theories of vulnerability come from a very different context, I find the notion of precarity helpful in thinking about how it can also describe not just the precarious conditions of Indonesian domestic workers but also the complex interplay of national, cultural, and sexual discourses from both their home and their host countries that sustain and deepen their experience of precariousness. These articulations of suffering are responses to and products of their daily negotiation with particular conditions that exposes them to violence and victimization. Yet, Butler also qualifies that vulnerability can be a tool for resistance. In “Vulnerability and Resistance” (2016), she warns that framing vulnerability to women’s bodies usually ends up fixing them “in a political position of powerlessness and lack of agency” (24). This assumption not only dehumanizes vulnerable groups, stripping them of the capacity to speak and act for themselves, but also encourages a paternalistic logic of rescue and redemption within the rhetoric of human rights discourse and legal regimes. In this light, she offers a different way of thinking about vulnerability, not “only as victimization and passivity, as invariably a site of inaction” but also as “a resource for resistance” (Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay 2016, 1).

82 Vulnerability and Resistance It is through this conception of vulnerability as an integral vocabulary of resistance that I frame my readings of Indonesian migrant women’s writings. In my discussion of these works of fiction, I will explain how these narratives of victimhood reflect not just the way they are affected by the precariousness of their working and living conditions but also the discourses that move and compel them to bear these kinds of feelings even while suffering. Overwhelmed by forces beyond their control, these migrant domestic workers endure their suffering by invoking patience to withstand and last through their precarious living and working conditions, while some of them openly find ways to vocalize their resistance to conditions that make them vulnerable. Thus, these stories of suffering are pedagogical: sometimes they teach the migrant worker to just suffer and endure, while at other times they make them understand the cause for their suffering and enable them to fight back. Tracking how feelings of suffering, patience, and even defiance work in these stories is crucial in understanding Indonesian migrant women’s experience of victimization and the prospects for its resistance. I unpack these ideas on victimhood and offer a more complex account of Indonesian migrant women’s subjectivity and voice, even in and precisely because of their conditions of precarity, by reading how vulnerability and resistance, silence and speech, and inaction and agency operate in their narratives of suffering.

Brokering Vulnerability The migration industry in Indonesia and the burgeoning labor market for domestic workers overseas have broadened the opportunities of Indonesian women to go abroad for work. These conditions have created a kind of gendered migration industry in the country which favors women over men in Indonesia. As opposed to their male counterparts who have to pay the fees upfront to their recruitment agencies to able to go abroad, Indonesian women can access debt-financing schemes where fees on their placement, training, and departure are shouldered by their recruiters and lending agents, which they can pay in installments while they are already working abroad (Lindquist 2010, 127). Because of these conditions of gendered mobility, transnational household work has become a path towards economic mobility for many women coming from lower income households. Most of the Indonesian women who get to be recruited are from poorer rural areas in Java and a majority of them have only finished secondary education. While official statistics say that most of the TKWs fall within the age range of 18–35, some non-profit migrant organizations suspect that many are much younger than their falsified documents present (Migrant Care n.d.). This dominant profile of Indonesian migrant women has, however, earned their group a particular reputation of being passive and inexperienced domestic workers abroad. While these characteristics underlie their vulnerability as foreign workers, they are also considered marketable traits for their labor brokers and employers. In host countries, while Indonesian migrant women are widely perceived as hard to communicate with and slow in picking up instructions and

Vulnerability and Resistance 83 mastering household routines, they are also seen as loyal to their bosses and uncomplaining. Hong Kong employers, for example, deploy ethnic-based assumptions among foreign domestic workers where Indonesians are seen as “less smart” and “simple-minded” compared to the “savvy and outspoken” Filipinas, but they are also “less organized,” meaning they will not be causing too much trouble (Constable 1997, 16). This racial stereotyping is also present among Singaporean employers who see Indonesian women’s “naiveté” as advantageous for household tasks that are “repetitive, boring and menial” as opposed to smarter Filipinas who would usually complain when asked to do these things (Huang and Yeoh 1998, 21). Filipinas, who are usually older and have higher levels of educational background, as English serves as the main language of instruction, are seen as Westernized, adaptable, and self-assured nannies. Their notoriety for assertiveness and arrogance, however, turn off lower middle-class employers who find them cunning, always complaining, and insistent on their rights as foreign workers. According to Pei-Chia Lan (2006), in contrast to the Westernized Filipinas, the stereotype of Indonesians conjured up images of docile women trapped in rural village with Muslim conventions. They are characterized as the traditional other, who is “obedient, loyal, slow and living a simple life,” and therefore “naturally suited to hard work and no days off” (77). These nationality-based stereotypes are part of the “production of thick ethnicity,” where particular perceptions on skills and docility of certain ethnic groups of foreign domestic workers are maneuvered and promoted by recruiters and agency “to position their product in the stratified labor market” (68). This process also demonstrates how recruiters and labor brokers use ethnic stereotypes to promote a particular type of indentured worker to fit certain employers’ needs and preferences within the market of transnational household labor. These strategies of finding a market niche among competing ethnic groups of foreign maids are as true in Hong Kong and Singapore, as Constable and Huang and Yeoh point out. The assumptions of backwardness and, at the same time, obedience of TKWs are often highlighted in how they are brokered as cheaper sources of sheer labor power who would work silently and dutifully even in unfair and unlawful conditions. These attributes have made them particularly vulnerable to abuse, exploitation, and deception from their sponsors and recruiters back home and their placement agents and employers in both Hong Kong and Singapore compared to their Filipina counterparts. Because of this setup, the Indonesian state was compelled to implement measures to enhance their women exports through skills and job training that would supposedly protect their women exports from being duped and maltreated when they go abroad. Much of these state-sponsored protective mechanisms take place in a government-approved pre-deployment process: from the recruitment and selection of potential migrant candidates down to their vocational training in hundreds of private complexes in Java.

84 Vulnerability and Resistance Unlike prospective Filipina migrants who do not have to undergo mandatory training but have only need to pass technical examinations, the Indonesian government requires all their migrant women applicants to go through at least 600 hours of education and job training at private recruitment centers. These programs usually include instruction for cleaning Westernized homes, using modern household equipment, caring for the elderly and children, and gaining basic knowledge on the language of the prospective host countries. Upon completion of their training, migrant domestic worker applicants must pass a competency test for skills and relevant language and obtain a certificate from the National Education Standards Agency (Amnesty International 2013, 108). Only then will they be placed for deployment and be allowed to work abroad. In many cases, the paternal logic of protection in the deployment, training, and recruitment programs often breed victimization and further vulnerability among Indonesian women. Even though Indonesia’s labor brokering processes, especially its mandatory pre-deployment skills training, are designed to safeguard TKWs from abuse and exploitation by enhancing their capacities and skills, the narratives of Indonesian domestic workers tell a very different story. Take, for example, Tiwi’s (2020) “A Letter at the End of April,” where the protagonist describes how her mandatory training has not only failed to prepare her for working in Hong Kong but also made her vulnerable to her employer: I left as a new migrant worker, with no experience at all. I was packaged as someone they can hire at a very cheap price … Right from the recruitment agency, we were trained to remain silent and obedient to our employers. We, migrant workers, were always hailed as foreign exchange heroes, but there was never a time in our several months’ stay in training center and shelter when we were taught of labor laws. We were not educated of the laws governing our rights and the state obligations to us, and how we were protected as foreign workers. (20) This story demonstrates that the ethnic-based stereotypes on TKWs as loyal and obedient, even though harder to teach with household chores, are a product of labor brokering’s conscious act of sustaining and packaging their docility and unpreparedness. While they are trained in important basic skills, many Indonesian migrant women in their stories also claim that they are not informed about basic labor laws and rights that govern them in Hong Kong and Singapore. They claim that their recruiters and agents also deprived them of essential information and materials like the contact information of the Indonesian consulate and the many support groups and organizations that would help them in moments of crisis. Arista Devi’s (2020) story, “No Diamond in Diamond Hill” also talks about how Indonesian migrant women are actively left in the dark about workers’ rights, starting from the pre-deployment process in training centers: “In all those months that I stayed with my training center back home, we were never taught how to find

Vulnerability and Resistance 85 solutions to the kinds of problems that we will most likely face once we’re already abroad” (17). Instead of actually protecting them, the mandatory skills training of recruitment agencies in Indonesia and their partner placement agencies in host countries only become controlling mechanisms that domesticize Indonesian migrant women to become passive workers once they land on foreign shores. Thus, these forms of skills development only train them to become subservient domestic helpers who would not question the orders of both their employers and their brokers. It is these assumptions of their docility and their lack of skills that are used to justify why TKWs end up becoming victims of abuse and exploitation in foreign households. “There is [a] tendency to blame the domestic helpers” for what they are suffering because most of them are always immediately presumed to be “stupid, unskilled and worse still, so recalcitrant that they are untrainable” (Angraeni 2006, 203). In many of the depictions of victimhood in mass media both in Indonesia and overseas, the migrant victim’s young age, low educational attainment, and rural background are cast off to portray their image as innocent and, ultimately, simple-minded women, which in turn explains why they easily fall prey to abuse and deception from their recruiters and employers. These kinds of representations are then used to prop up problematic policies of furthering women’s protection by the Indonesian government and private labor brokers that are premised on their assumed vulnerability and backwardness, like the extensive mandatory training back home for Indonesian women applicants. These solutions not only limit or make difficult Indonesian women’s access to migration but also completely overlook the ways in which migratory processes, most of the time, have conditioned, packaged, and marketed them on the basis of their vulnerability as naïve and passive household workers in the first place. In fact, Indonesia’s labor brokering process through licensed private agencies only serves to intensify the precarity of Indonesian domestic workers by entrapping them in debt-financing schemes (Silvey 2004). The pre-deployment skills training has become an economic burden since this adds up to the charges and fees that they have to repay later on. The prospect of migrating might have become easier for many Indonesian women since they can avail financing from their recruiters or third-party lending agencies without having to shell out large fees upfront unlike their male counterparts. But this setup has also bound them to debts that they have to repay while working abroad. In many cases, this has prevented TKWs from breaking from their contracts even when they are facing grave problems with their employers. Many of the researches done by non-profit groups for migrants in both Hong Kong and Singapore show that Indonesian women face higher placement fees and incur larger debts, which they have to recompense through salary deductions for a longer period of time. In comparison, Filipina domestic workers are not required to undergo any skills training and are protected by “no placement fee” policy enforced by the Philippine government (the recruiters can only charge a service fee which is shouldered by the employer), even though there are still recruitment

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agencies who illegally charge placement fees. In a survey by Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), it was found that between 2002 and 2006, Indonesian women were made to pay exorbitant placement fees to secure work in Singapore, on an average 360 SGD (255 USD) higher than what their Filipina counterparts paid in the same period (Transient Workers Count Too 2006, 19). This also means that Indonesian helpers face longer periods of salary deduction to repay their debts, which usually takes two months more, on average, than the fixed six-month deduction for their Filipina counterparts (20). The same trend applies to Hong Kong, as according to a study conducted by Amnesty International in Hong Kong, Indonesian migrant women are more likely to be trapped in debt cycles where they have to pay steeper placement and recruitment fees compared to other foreign domestic worker groups. About 85% of the Indonesian respondents in their survey were charged with placement fees amounting to HKD 21,000 (USD 2,710). This is HKD 7,560 (USD 975) more than the statutory limit set by the Indonesian government on placement fees, which is pegged at HKD 13,436 (USD 1,730) (Amnesty International 2013, 24). This is so much higher when set against the Hong Kong law on the maximum amount of placement fee the agencies can charge, which is only HKD 401 (USD 52). Consequently, on average, it takes an Indonesian migrant woman seven months of salary deductions to finish paying off all these charges and fees. The debt problem that Indonesian migrant women face, which primarily originated from their government’s complicity to private recruiters’ labor brokering schemes, has only served to heighten their conditions of vulnerability. Many TKWs end up being trapped in unjust contracts and problematic working conditions with their employers just so they can finish paying all their debts in installments with their placement and lending agencies. Both studies in Hong Kong and Singapore reveal that there are more cases of Indonesian helpers compared to Filipinas who are more likely to be paid less than the going rate for foreign domestic workers, overworked, and deprived of a mandatory day-off. In Singapore, for example, 80% of TWC2’s Indonesian domestic worker respondents in a 2011 survey complain of having no day-off, while about twothirds complain of heavy workload, lack of rest, and physical or verbal abuse by their employers (Transient Workers Count Too 2011). In Amnesty International’s 2014 survey, on the other hand, half of the Indonesian domestic worker respondents in Hong Kong say that they are paid below the minimum allowable wage set by the government (which is at HKD 4,010 [USD 517] per month). More than half of them say they do not have a regular day-off, while two-thirds of all respondents claim to have experienced some form of physical and verbal abuse from their employers (Amnesty International 2013, 119).

Pedagogies of Patience In Tiwi’s (2020) narrative, the protagonist talks about how the accumulated debts from her deployment and recruitment have led to her underpayment. Yet, she

Vulnerability and Resistance 87 initially thinks that it is only natural since most of her fellow TKWs, who are fresh recruits, also experience it: Yes, I am underpaid. And I could not refuse it, or else my first employer will terminate my contract. I thought it was a normal thing. Almost all of the prospective migrant worker like me, newly recruited from the village without any experience, get the same level of salary below the standard rate set by the Hong Kong government. (20) This twin problem of debt cycle and underpayment also reflects in Arista Devi’s (2020) story as her protagonist narrates that: After seven months of working—without receiving any cent because my salary goes straight to my agency—that was only the time that I realize that I am only getting 1,800 Hong Kong dollars every month. Back then, I did not know that I can file a complaint for underpayment, because that was against the law. Even then, I already knew that something is not right because that was only half of the month salary stated in the contract that I signed, and that amount was also never reflected on the receipts that I was asked to sign every month. (17) Because their debts have bound them to their contract, many Indonesian domestic workers endure these problematic working conditions just so that they will not incur more debts and secure a better job contract from another employer later on. Tiwi’s (2020) protagonist narrates how she was exhausted and depleted from working long hours by her previous employers: Just imagine how one will be able to last being forced to work non-stop for 18 hours every day. Back then, I can only sleep for two hours just to meet my employers’ demands. They seemed to be happy every time they can think of ways of making their maid suffer. I lost almost four kilos of weight in just one month of working for them. It’s like going through diet without drinking any health supplement. (22) Devi’s (2020) story also details the narrator’s routine inside her employer’s household to portray the difficult working conditions she faced on a daily basis. Think about what I do every day: I prepare breakfast, clean the whole house, bathe the dog, and attend to my employer’s infant while cooking dinner. I also clean their cars and then go for groceries. All of these I do on repeat for seven days, every day of the whole week. My waking hours have all been eaten by house chores. The 16 hours of my daily work have never

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Both protagonists reveal that aside from being trapped in debt, underpayment, and working for long hours, they also do not have rest days. Isolated inside foreign homes and faced with various kinds of work-related distress, fortitude and endurance become virtues that TKWs have to learn for them to last through unjust circumstances. This is why for many migrant women involved in this kind of labor, domestic work is perceived as a “patience industry,” which affectively highlights the necessary qualities these women must cultivate to be able to bear and withstand the structural conditions of their precarity (Castel-Branco 2012). The Indonesian/Malay word sabar is usually translated as patience. However, there is a linguistic difference in these two words, as sabar means not only being patient but also having “self-control to stay calm in the face of suffering” (Goddard 2001, 661). This signifies how the idiom of sabar or kesabaran already denotes self-discipline and forbearance under great duress. More than 88% of Indonesians are Muslims (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009); and the virtue of patience is also deeply rooted in their religious teachings: The Koranic saying Allah sentiasa bersama dengan sabar orang-orang (“Allah is always with people who are patient”) is prevalent and often quoted just like the saying Sabar separuh daripada iman (“Being patient is half of faith”) … Moslems view personal misfortunes and suffering as tests from God, an attitude that is linguistically reflected in common collocations such as menuji kesabaran (“testing one’s patience”) and mencabar kesabaran (“challenging one’s patience”). (Goddard 2001, 661–2) In religious education and training, women have a particular relationship with the virtue of patience. Most of the Moslem Indonesian domestic workers who went to Islamic boarding schools or pesantren as part of their basic education are taught the importance of kesabaran, defined as “patience in the face of adversity” and are reminded to constantly practice this virtue in their everyday lives (Doorn-Harder 2006, 98). As migrant workers, they bring their religious beliefs and practices to their countries of employ. Indonesian domestic workers comprise more than half of the 270,000 Muslims in Hong Kong (Ho 2015), while a survey states that Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore are most likely to be Muslims (Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics 2015). This religious training on being patient would become important in managing their daily strife and struggles on foreign shores. In many of these stories, invocations of patience are usually affectively expressed as taking in suffering and charging it to experience as important part of their personal development as transnational domestic workers. Sometimes, forbearance also takes the form of silent suffering. In Tiwi’s (2020) story, she

Vulnerability and Resistance 89 reveals how she consciously tries not to speak out even though she experiences ill-treatment from both her employers and her recruiters: That is why I was very obedient to my first employer despite their maltreatment. I don’t have any day-off, they forced me to sign fake payslips, and they make me do tasks that are outside the contract that I have signed. I just accept this all without saying anything, even when my female employer accused me of stealing her jade necklace. My recruitment agency even cheated me by not giving me my termination pay. In all of these, I did not complain. (20) Devi’s (2020) protagonist, on the other hand, narrates how her male employer, who was recently fired from his job, would spend time crafting strange rules and penalties for little errors to burden his helper every day. Faced with daily torment inside the household, the main character vents out her frustration privately: “I tried finding strength within me and just cried silently in the bathroom to shed the burdens in my heart” (71). She decides to just be patient and bear with the hostile working conditions. She exercises this fortitude, reminding herself that this will be over in a few more months or so. In her mind, she counted the “days and nights for all those nine gruelling months” she was with her employer (70). Since her suffering is bounded by the duration of her contract, the main character’s counting of days until her contract ends demonstrates her practice of patience that guarantees the best way out of suffering so long as she can outlast it. In this story, patience also takes on a temporal quality, of taking and relying on time’s passing in resolving a personal distress. The idiomatic expressions among Indonesians that are closely related to patience include sabarlah sikit [slowing down a bit] or sabarlah [slowing down] (Goddard 2001, 663). Interestingly, the “course of action” advised by the migrant women’s brokers and agents when TKWs are facing abuse is similar: go slow. This strategy is usually an Indonesian migrant worker’s last resort when she finds herself constantly abused and victimized by her employer but does not want to run away because she is bound by contract and debt. Going slow means dragging the task to the extent that their abusive employer would find it impossible to retain her as helper and would just release her (Angraeni 2006, 91). Patience then takes the form of agency through a willful decision; it becomes an act that bears with the present in the hope that something better looms on the horizon. In these ways, becoming patient, by enduring the present, helps Indonesian domestic workers in moments of individual crisis. The affective mediation of their suffering through notions of endurance not only enables them to last through their contracts but also orders how they perceive their experience inside the household. In these two narratives, feelings of patience come out from the ways in which Indonesian domestic workers negotiate their vulnerability and victimization inside foreign households. No matter how passive these may seem, patience affectively expresses a form of agency that demonstrates they are not just blindly tolerating

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their experience of victimhood but instead making the most out of their dire situations to face their individual crisis. In the act of enduring their suffering, they can resolve their problems and pay their debts in full while finishing their job contracts in the hope of finding a better employer, much more bearable working conditions, and, perhaps, also success in their bid for a better life later on. However, these two stories also present how suffering can take a toll on one’s body and even patience has its limits. When Devi’s (2020) main character complains to her agency and expresses her desire to break her contract, she is told that she is being too impulsive with her decision. To this, she answers back: “Was I even thinking? I’ve thought about this day and night for nine long months. Was that not long enough yet?” (70). This assertion of how long she has been enduring her employer’s treatment already attests to her persistence and the conviction of her decision. When her agency still demands that she endure more, she fights back and threatens them, saying that she would look for other agents if they refused to release her from her employer: “In fact, I did not know any information about other agents. What occurred to me back then is, when there is no one else to rely on, then I should dare rise up and fight to help myself, whatever it takes” (72). Devi’s narrator realizes that patience is not always the solution. She has to find a different affective resource and reorder the way she perceives her worth as a worker to end her suffering. Towards the end of the story, she begins to question the worth of her labors: “If there is no diamond in Diamond Hill, why am I still holding on?” (72). This selfreflection is not just a question of the value of her suffering as a foreign domestic worker in a hopeful place called Diamond Hill. It also refers to the ways in which she begins to challenge her affective attachment to ideas of success that have been accorded to her venture abroad and questions why she is holding on to the hope that something will come out of her suffering. Just like Devi’s narrator, Tiwi’s (2020) protagonist also breaks away with the precarious promise of patience by running away from her employer. Once she gets out of her employer’s house, she realizes that she needs to find a way to protect herself as a migrant domestic worker when she finds a new employer. Knowing that she cannot rely on her recruitment agency, she joins an organization to learn how to fight for her rights and stand up for herself: I try to study the laws that was not taught to me. I also talk to those like me, who are willing to listen and understand the pitiful conditions we share. I explain to them that we have rights as human being. I join demonstrations to fight for justice and equality. (23) The protagonist uses her own vulnerability as a form of agency, in finding ways not only to patiently endure her suffering, but also to ultimately come out of it. Her recognition that her vulnerability is not just her own but rather something she shares with her fellow migrant women workers, supported by migration brokering institutions that further their vulnerability, has directed her to action for reclaiming her subjectivity by joining an organization. In this way, her vulnerability becomes

Vulnerability and Resistance 91 a resource which allows her not just to fight for her own rights as a migrant worker but also to enable fellow Indonesian helpers also to face their shared victimhood. These two short stories illustrate how narratives of vulnerability and victimization are not just imbued with patience but are also ways for Indonesian migrant women to find their voice and agency. Patience then can be pedagogical in that sometimes it teaches them to bear with their suffering and bargain for time with fortitude to last them through unjust working and living conditions, but sometimes, it also exposes the limits of their endurance and opens up new routes into finding ways to end their suffering through action. As they narrate these experiences of suffering, they also intervene in discourses of victimhood that frame them as passive victims, while also finding their own voice and claiming new subjectivities in their writings.

Coming into Writing Writing is a form of archiving for many Indonesian domestic workers as “they write fiction as a strategy of endurance and taking back time” (Juliastuti 2020, 12). In times of distress, writing can be a practice of what can be deemed as transformative patience for Indonesian migrant women, where they can recreate their own experiences of suffering as literary works that record their intimate lives inside households and fabricate worlds from their own experiences through fiction. Indira Margareta, in her story “Light for My Pen,” presents the power of fiction and the agency in writing even from a place of vulnerability. In Margareta’s (2020) narrative, the protagonist first describes her challenges of juggling her duties as a domestic helper with her ambition as a writer: Back then, it was so hard to write. Even if I have free time, it is still not easy to finish a short story. Almost all my time is spent in taking care of two kids, then add my tasks of cooking, cleaning and grocery runs. Most of the time, I finish all my work by night. (3) She talks about how, despite the backbreaking work, she joined a writing group with fellow Indonesian migrant women, whom she meets at Victoria Park during her rest days. She also shares that she invests in her writing by using her savings to purchase a laptop, something that may seem like a luxury for TKWs like her. While the work is hard, the narrator does not complain as she can still find time, albeit too little, for writing. After all, she gets along well with the family she is working for, especially her female employer, who treats her like a sister. This harmonious working and living environment, however, suddenly became hostile when her male employer’s mother arrives and stays with them. She narrates her dynamic with the old woman as: There is always something wrong with whatever I do in her eyes. Even if I follow her order down to the letter, while she is looking over my shoulder, she will still see something wrong. She does not feel contented even if she

92 Vulnerability and Resistance sees how I tried to execute the tasks that she asks of me in the best way possible. The worst part about it is that she keeps on harping on his son how hard it is to live under the same roof with a surly daughter-in-law and a stupid maid. (4) This setup exposes the main character to sudden vulnerability, as she encounters daily aggressions from her employer’s mother, who repeatedly looks down on her labor and presence inside the household. In her times of suffering, she seeks relief through writing fiction: I run to my laptop each time she disparages my work in this household. I have already published several short stories in Hong Kong, some of them even read by people from other countries. It is in writing that I find refuge each time I’m belittled in this cramped apartment. My work lightens because of my writing, it makes me forget about the grave intrusions of Nenek [the old woman]. Suddenly, her hurtful words have no effect on me because I am able to finish work that is far from her overpowering gaze. (5) It is important to see how creative writing becomes a space where the narrator both archives and relieves her bad experiences as a TKW. Through the act of fiction, she reverses the painful effects of verbal abuse by making it a resource for her writing, which helps her endure the hostile environment she is trapped in. Moreover, through fiction, she is also able to develop a new subjectivity as a writer, far from the demeaning gaze that sees her merely as a “stupid” maid. Her newfound identity as a writer modernizes her into someone who is not bound merely by her household service, while also counteracting the stereotypes of uneducated and dumb maid pinned on her by her employer’s mother and the larger society that frames her vulnerability (Winarti 2011). Yet, her subjectivity as someone who can craft worlds through her own words has to be kept secret. She does not want the old woman to find out that she has a laptop or else she would be suspicious of where she got the money to buy one. Moreover, she knows that she would be chastised for wasting electricity and even her own time, since she is supposed to spend all her hours doing household chores, as that is what she was hired to do. Therefore, she has to keep her writing a secret: This is why I type my stories in darkness. It is so hard finding each letter in the keyboard in the dark that is why it takes a long time for me to even finish a sentence. I have to write at night time while everyone is asleep. I know that the old woman will make a scene and will run her mouth to my male employer once she sees that I am up late at night. In order to write, I let my laptop rests on my belly while I slowly and quietly type my story at dawn while the whole house is asleep. (Margareta 2020, 4)

Vulnerability and Resistance 93 The challenges that the narrator describes only reveal her determination to write despite the risk of being found out, reprimanded, or, worse, dismissed by her employers. Writing, even from a precarious position, becomes a space where she can “persist in not fulfilling other people’s expectations of what one’s life should be,” “a room of one’s own” where she can be a published writer and not just a maid (Isabella 2016). In these ways, Indonesian migrant women’s writing is not just a literary genre but also a “narrative strategy” that can open moments of mediation, contestation, and even “disruption” within their subjectivity through the complex process of finding their own voice and portraying their social worlds through their own forays into literature (Viswewaran 1994, 62). The protagonist’s secret, however, is revealed when her male employer’s mother discovers her laptop. The old woman makes a big issue about this discovery and complains to her son about their helper’s possible crimes. With the laptop as evidence, the old woman accuses her of stealing money and ramping up their electricity bills. Faced with such adversity, the narrator waits for the repercussions of her ambitions of being a writer. She remembers her recruiter’s reminders of the things that she should not do in her employer’s home and fears that writing in her laptop constituted a transgression so grave that it was not even spoken of in her recruitment agency’s orientation. It has to be noted that for many migrant domestic workers, writing does not immediately guarantee agency. In a position of vulnerability, writing potentially poses risks. Take for example, Arista Devi, the pen name of Yuli Riswati, who wrote the story that was analyzed previously. Riswati was deported to Indonesia by Hong Kong authorities in December 2019 for practicing citizen journalism and covering the Hong Kong protests in their community newspaper, Migran Pos (Juliastuti 2020). While Hong Kong’s Immigration Department claimed it was a case of overstaying, the department has also denied the fact that Riswati’s employers had already extended her work contract until 2021, which is a normal arrangement for visa extension (Siu 2019). In Margareta’s story, the narrator states that owing to the fact that the old woman who hates her has a relative working for Hong Kong’s Immigration Department, fake accusations could be easily used to justify firing her and repatriating her to Indonesia, just like what happened to Riswati. But for the story’s protagonist, the confrontation with her male employer about her laptop does not take place. Instead, her female employer calmly talks to her the morning after to verify her mother-in-law’s accusations. Here, the narrator frantically tries to explain why she has a laptop, but she cannot speak Cantonese well. In her panic, she shows a page from the Indonesian-language community magazine in which one of her stories was published. Even without understanding any word from the page, her female employer’s face glows in awe and pride as she sees the narrator’s name printed on the paper. Contrary to the anxieties harbored by the narrator, this discovery prompts her employers to fully embrace her double life as a writer. Over a special dinner, her employer gifts her with a USB lamp so she can write better at night time. They also ask about her published works and display her awards from writing

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competitions in her migrant community in their living room, as if the whole family has won with her. Moreover, her dynamic with her male employer’s mother also changes. There were no more insults and “she no longer said a word about the laptop or the electricity bills” (Margareta 2020, 8). Recognizing that she is no longer a mere maid but also someone who has talent in writing, the previously hostile environment changes for the better: From then on, the fear completely vanished from my heart and I felt like my soul is free. Like water, the support of my employers washed away the dread in me. One time, my male employer lends me his antivirus program for my laptop while my female employer taught me how to save file or troubleshoot errors in my computer. I felt that the once despicable household became harmonious with the family I am working for. (8) Margareta’s story reveals how writing, even from the place of vulnerability, opens new possibilities for Indonesian migrant women, where they can gain alternative imaginaries for their lives as TKWs in Hong Kong. Writing then becomes a form of agency where they record and transform their multiple experiences of vulnerability into fiction and disrupt their everyday lives through creative writing as they navigate and negotiate their precarious position in the household. Just like Margareta’s protagonist, they can find their own voice in creating works about their lives, complicating and confounding representations of Indonesian migrant women through their writings and personal narratives while also demonstrating how one can find agency and resistance in vulnerability.

Agency in Vulnerability Etik Juwita’s (2020) short story illustrates how one can use vulnerability as a resource for resistance. Juwita’s widely anthologized “Maybe Not Yem” is perhaps one of the best writings that have come out from the archives of Indonesian migrant workers’ literature. Originally published in Jawa Pos, a leading national daily in Indonesia, her work was selected as one of the 20 best short stories under the category of Golden Pen Literature Award of 2008 (Retnaningdyah 2013). “Maybe Not Yem” narrates the fortuitous meeting of an Indonesian helper from Singapore, returning for a vacation to her hometown, Blitar, with an intriguing fellow TKW coming home from Saudi Arabia, “Yem,” who in the story claims is “not really Yem.” The story tracks their journey from the infamous Terminal 3 of Soekarno-Hatta International Airport to their home villages, and their encounters with unscrupulous scams that prey on the dollars brought home by innocent migrant women returnees. It is through the two women’s contrasting ways of resisting repeated victimization in their journey home that the story illustrates how one can derive agency from vulnerability. The story is set in a cramped van transport service, where the narrator uncomfortably tries to endure the ride in silence while almost all of the other passengers,

Vulnerability and Resistance 95 returning Indonesian helpers like her, are already sound asleep. The story opens with the narrator hearing an intriguing statement from a woman she does not know: “Would you believe it? I have a friend who really placed her employer’s baby inside a washing machine before she flew home!” (177). The narrator finds these words and the woman who spoke them terrifying, leading her to avoid striking further conversation with her. This, however, is practically impossible as they are trapped inside the small and slowly moving van service. It did not help that the woman, who introduces herself as “Yem” to the narrator, keeps on prodding her, even after seeing she is already jittery from her story, whispering in the narrator’s ear that she herself has “mixed rat poison to the milk for [her] employer’s baby” (178). The narrator, of course, is not able to believe that a TKW like her can do such despicable things. In their exchanges, she strongly contests the truth of the strange woman’s claims: “How can you make up such horrible stories?” I asked her. “That’s impossible. I don’t believe you?” “That’s because you don’t know.” “You’d get death penalty for killing a baby.” “How, then, did my friend get away with it?” “Because it’s not true,” I insisted. I realized that I have just raised my voice. “You’re still young. How would you know? Do you know that nobody knew her real name? Do you know that she used a fake address?” “I maybe just twenty-two, but I’d know when I am being lied to.” “If so, why are you so bothered and scared? Afraid of a lie? You’re being funny, young one.” (178–9) This brief repartee exposes to the narrator how different the strange woman is from her. When Yem offers her more stories, since they are the only passengers awake in the van, she vehemently declines. To reassure her that her words are all lies, she convinces herself that the woman probably has lost her wits, judging by her physical appearance: In my mind, I estimated that she must be around 40 years old. Her cheeks are already sunken, and what probably used to be her shiny set of white teeth are now yellowish. Her nails are unevenly cut, just like somebody from an asylum. She looks like someone who went sleepless for nights due to a gambling addiction because of her eyebags. Though, she is thin, her breast looks like it’s already sagging, just like many parts of her skin. Maybe she’s really crazy. How stressful! (179) The narrator realizes that Yem is so different from her. She looks old, drained, and depreciated, probably because of what she experienced abroad, while the narrator

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looks fine, looking at the watch her employer has gifted her, along with the other material perks she has received from her benevolent boss. Her suspicions are somehow confirmed when Yem shows her swollen toe, which she claims was crushed against the table’s leg while she was serving dinner to her employer. The ensuing exchange only reveals further the distance between the working conditions they had experienced as domestic workers: “Did you see a doctor for that?” “Sure, with whose money?” “From your employer.” “Right, and then what, no food for the whole day?”

(180)

Realizing that the woman she pegged as crazy might be telling her the truth, the narrator recognizes the suffering Yem may have endured abroad. Her difference to the woman she is talking to is further highlighted by the fact that she had a good employer who treated her well and that her workload in the house was relatively light. Moreover, she starts to reassess the strange woman’s earlier claims as she is reminded of how her fellow TKWs in Singapore had also done similar things in secret to spite their cruel bosses, like mixing piss in their drinks. This revelation of Yem’s victimhood and vulnerability also opens the narrator’s heart to the strange woman: Even though it was awkward at first, I began asking her questions. It was there that I learned that she was a divorcee who had been left by her husband. She worked for just over a year to an oil magnate in Saudi Arabia who had three wives and ten children—with her as the sole maid for the large family. As much as I could, I tried avoiding the topic of the baby and the rat poison. Everyone else was asleep. (181) The narrator and Yem both represent the contending fates of Indonesian migrant women’s fate-playing abroad. The narrator is among the success stories, gaining upward mobility and a sense of modernity, while Yem stands for the failures of attaining the precarious promise of migration. However, even though the strange woman seems to be victimized, the way she articulates her experience also contradicts the image of a pathetic victim impinged on her. Instead, she looks at her vulnerability with cold practicality, seeing how she tries to navigate through her suffering just to be able to go home. This is further revealed in the ensuing challenges the women in the van face as various agents try to scam them out of their hard-earned money abroad. As the women embark on their journey home, they are lured into various schemes. In the first instance, their driver and conductor have locked them in an office with their passports to scam them into exchanging with exorbitant rates the foreign currencies that they have brought home. In the second instance, they are

Vulnerability and Resistance 97 trapped in a house and are forced to buy additional travel insurance, which is supposed to cover their trip outside Jakarta. These instances of money-making fraud target TKWs like the narrator and the strange woman as they represent the promise of migration’s upward social mobility. Even at the airport, their presence animates both envy and ridicule as they seem to parade the material wealth they gained abroad, with their chic fashion, flashy gadgets, and a new sense of pride in the way that they stride in airport terminals (Silvey 2013). However, the promising image of modernity they uphold is coupled with stereotypes of their backwardness and innocence. Perceived as somebody who possesses economic mobility but is also naïve enough to throw away money, migrant women returnees have become victims of infamous scams, starting from the airport until their arrival to their home villages. In the story, it is interesting to examine how the scammers frame their moneymaking schemes to the narrator. In the money exchange bogus, the cashier, who looks at the narrator “like a cat looking at a dried fish,” says that their business especially caters to migrant workers, and that, since there is a lot of counterfeit money circulating, while other money exchange counters charged premium fees, they are “just helping out… not forcing anyone to do anything,” and that exchanging money with them is for “[their] own good” (Juwita 2020, 182). In the travel insurance scheme, on the other hand, the insurance agent presents a grim, but possibly made-up, scenario to convince the narrator to pay for non-existent coverage: We’re from insurance agency. The insurance you paid at the airport, Miss, only covers you for travel within Jakarta and West Java. Beyond that, we are no longer liable. Just yesterday, there is a car filled with domestic workers like you who were robbed in Brebes. Everything was taken and the women were raped. We are only asking for an additional five hundred thousand rupiah—this also foots the cost for the driver and the conductor. But it’s still up to you. Which do you prefer, Miss, spending a little more for your safety or be robbed or raped on the highway? (183) Both of these scams operate under the guise of protecting migrant women from vulnerability. This paternalistic logic highlights victimhood and exploitation to supposedly prop up their agency and forward their interest and safety, only to further victimize and exploit the already vulnerable subjects. This is the danger of patriarchal notions of protectionism that discount suffering only to intensify it (Butler 2016). This paternalistic framing of vulnerability structures the journey of Indonesian helpers, like the narrator and Yem, who go through processes that claim to protect them, right from the time of preparing for their deployment abroad until they go back to their homes in Indonesia. While all the other women in the van fall victim to these schemes, both the narrator and Yem are able to slip through both the scams. The narrator uses her wits to ward off the scammers. In the money exchange scam, she claims that

98 Vulnerability and Resistance she has already remitted all her money to her mother before flying home, even though her money, worth SDG 3,000, is safely tucked inside her purse. When the cashier asks about the receipt to verify her claims, she says that she already lost it, before shouting that she wants to go outside the office since she has no money to exchange. With the travel insurance scheme, she presents an elaborate lie to the agent to scare him off: We are in Bekasi, right? If it’s not too much of a hassle, Mister, can I use your telephone? It’s just that my brother, Mister, works with Depok Police. I don’t have money with me, but maybe he can pick me up here, since you can no longer guarantee my safety. (Juwita 2020, 184) Through street-smarts and keen observation, the narrator is able to use her voice and agency to escape being preyed upon by unscrupulous businesses. She would, however, discover that Yem, just like her, has also managed to escape from being ripped off. At first, she is convinced of Yem’s reason that since she was already victimized by her Saudi employer, she has no money to give, only to realize that she is precisely using her helplessness to get away from these schemes. When asked whether she exchanged her money as they walk out of the money exchange office, Yem says that she has no cash with her and that her employer is just going to send her a check for her last salary. Thinking that she was telling the truth, both to the money exchange teller and to the group of women in the van, the narrator asks Yem why she believed in her employer’s promises. However, the truth about Yem’s statements becomes clear when the narrator talks to her in the van, after getting out of the scheming travel agency: “Did you pay?” Miss Yem whispered to me as we went on our trip. “No. How about you, Miss?” “Then, do you still believe that I don’t really have any money with me?” “Oh, sorry.” “And they think they are the smart ones! Those assholes!” she swore. (184) This brief exchange illustrates how Yem cleverly gets out of the schemes by using her vulnerability as a resource for her agency. Feigning powerlessness to convince both scammers that she has no money to offer for their schemes, she is able to project her victimized image in her fate-playing abroad to protect her from further vulnerability and from being ripped off again upon her homecoming. Unlike the narrator, who uses her wit and intelligence, Yem plays the pathetic and dumb victim stereotype to prove that her intelligence is superior. Through language, she is able to fabricate the truth and expose, and at the same time exploit, her vulnerability to gain a different kind of power and identity (Sawai 2012). In this way, she is able to enact a different kind of subjectivity,

Vulnerability and Resistance 99 aware of her precarious position but deploying it as a means of gaining agency and control. This revelation, however, does not widen the gap between the narrator and Yem; instead the secret shared by the two women forges a solidarity between them: My companions fell asleep again as we ventured through the dusty highway. I was silent because Yem was also silent. Looking at the scenes passing by my window, I couldn’t believe that I was back in my homeland. A lot of things have changed in just a span of two years. Many people’s hearts have turned into asphalt. Their faces have turned into asphalt, also. They act as if they’re made of asphalt. All black, without conscience. (Juwita 2020, 184) These passages show how the narrator’s encounter, not just with the scheming agents of businesses supposedly catering to the interests of returning TKWs like her but also with Yem, has revealed to her how she is as vulnerable as Yem, exposed to the same structures that continually prey on their precariousness to gain money. As Yem advises her before disembarking from the van: “You take care. There’s a lot of things you still don’t know” (185). Even though she has become modernized and has gained relative mobility and freedom as a success story, she is still subject to the same structural conditions that further the other migrant women’s vulnerability. This has ruptured the veneer of migration’s promises of modernity, not only to her but also to the country that gains from her and her fellow migrant women’s successes and failures abroad as pahlawan devisa. More importantly, seeing that her fate is no different from that of Yem has reconstituted her notion of solidarity. In the silence of their shared secret, she starts to recognize the power and agency in Yem’s vulnerability. Towards the end of the story, when their shuttle service reaches Yem’s home, the narrator tries to finally get to the truth out of the strange woman. She hurriedly asks her whether or not she really mixed rat’s poison in the baby’s formula. However, she only gets a cryptic reply from a smiling Yem: “I am not Yem. I’m a free woman, after all, right?!” (185). This final statement from Yem, who is maybe not Yem, makes her stories ambiguous and completely unreliable, from her claims about poisoning baby’s milk, her experiences with the oil magnate boss with a large family, up to the tale of her friend, whose true name or whereabouts is never revealed. With a beguiling smile, “Miss Yem (who is also not really Yem) did not say yes. Just an uncertain answer. Only uncertainties” (185). In concluding the story with ambivalence, Yem enacts the vulnerability in her identity that destabilizes certitudes about victimhood and powerlessness to project an “agency without a name” (Sawai 2012, 50). This form of agency, which derives its power from using both vulnerability and challenging the reliability of paternalistic notions of protection, opens up new possibilities of understanding the complex dimensions of narratives of victimhood and resistance in migrant women’s writings.

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Learning to Last In my discussion of Indonesian migrant workers’ literature, I explore stories of victimhood to illustrate how they are affected by structural conditions of labor migration and, at the same time, how they respond to discourses that position them as precarious subjects of migration. By focusing on evocations of patience of Indonesian migrant women in Tiwi’s “A Letter at the End of April” and Arista Devi’s “No Diamond in Diamond Hill,” I probed into how gendered migration industry has conditioned the precarity that these women endure and deal with in their everyday lives. This close reading of Indonesian migrant women’s fiction also maps out the affective expressions of suffering to confound and politicize ideas on migrant victimization, where their patience teaches them how to last through their precarious working and living conditions or lead to them to stand up for themselves and fight for structures that induce their vulnerability. In my discussion of Indira Margareta’s “Light for My Pen” and Etik Juwita’s “Maybe Not Yem,” I demonstrated how vulnerability can be a ground for resistance in their writings. These stories reveal the ways writing from a position of precarity can open new subjectivities, where Indonesian migrant women gain agency as their fiction enact forms of language out of vulnerability, enabling silence as speech and ambivalence as identity, to demonstrate their agency and resistance. No matter how ambivalent their resistance may be, their narratives account for the complex ways in which they challenge their representation as pitiable victims of migration and interrogate in paternalistic ideas that sustain and further their victimhood. Unraveling the fraught dimension of what Southeast Asian migrant women feel towards being victimized and how they write and speak about these experiences is important in understanding how they make sense of and deal with their experiences of suffering, especially if those experiences are precisely induced and read as sacrifice towards attaining the migration’s elusive promises of success and development for their own homes and homelands.

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Vulnerability and Resistance 101 Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. 2016. “Introduction.” In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, 1–12. Durham: Duke University Press. Castel-Branco, Ruth. 2012. “Organizing the ‘Patience Industry:’ Profile of a Domestic Worker in Maputo, Mozambique.” WIEGO Workers’ Lives No. 3. Accessed 21 January 2015. Chiu, Joanna, and Clifford Lo. 2014. “Torture' Employer Linked to Alleged Abuse of Five Different Hong Kong Maids.” South China Morning Post. Accessed 21 January 2015. Constable, Nicole. 1997. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cooper, Nancy. 1997. “In the Wake of Flor and Sarah: Analyzing the ‘Mega Dramas’ of Transnational Dilemas.” Proceedings International Conference on Women in the AsiaPacific Region: Persons, Power and Politics, National University of Singapore, 11–13 August 1997. Cummins, Anna. 2013. “Hong Kong Profiles: Susie Utomo.” Timeout Hong Kong. Accessed 23 January 2014. Devi, Arista. 2020. “No Diamond at Diamond Hill.” In Mga Bantay-Salakay sa Loob ng Aking Bahay: Antolohiya ng Maiikling Kuwento ng mga Indonesian Domestic Worker sa Hong Kong, Singapore at Taiwan [Intruders at Home: Anthology of Short Stories of Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan], edited by Carlos M Piocos III, 69–74. Quezon City, Philippines: Sentro ng Wikang Filipino [Center of Philippine Languages]-University of the Philippines Diliman. Doorn-Harder, Pieternella van. 2006. Women Shaping Islam: Reading the Qur'an in Indonesia. Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Gatot. 2014. “SBY Marah Atas Penganiayaan TKI Erwiana di Hongkong (Susilo Bambang Yudyuhono Angry Over Abuse of Indonesian Domestic Worker Erwiana in Hong Kong).” Sayangi. Accessed 23 January 2015. Ginger, Sam. 2015. Sunday Girls: The Mobile Library. Hong Kong. Goddard, Cliff. 2001. “Sabar, Ikhlas, Setia - Patient, Sincere, Loyal? Contrastive Semantics of Some ‘Virtues’ in Malay and English.” Journal of Pragmatics 33:653–681. Grundy, Tom. 2014. “HK Literary Festival Panel: The Help, Their Stories.” HK Helpers Campaign. Accessed 14 January 2014. Ho, Wai-Yip. 2015. “The Emerging Visibility of Islam through the Powerless: Indonesian Muslim Domestic Helpers in Hong Kong.” Asian Anthropology 14 (1):79–90, 81. Huang, Shirlena, and Brenda S. A. Yeoh. 1998. “Maids and Ma’ams in Singapore: Constructing Gender and Nationality in the Transnationalization of Paid Domestic Work.” Geography Research Forum 18:21–48. Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics. 2015. Home Sweet Home? Work, Life and Well-Being of Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore. Singapore: Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics. Isabella, Brigitta. 2016. “A Room of One’s Own.” Inside Indonesia. Accessed 18 September 2016. Iswandono, Donny. 2010. “Mega Vristian: Poems from Afar.” Jakarta Post. Accessed 21 January 2013. Juliastuti, Nuraini. 2020. “Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Writings as a Performance of Self-Care and Embodied Archives.” Parse Journal 10:1–30. Accessed 15 July 2020. Juwita, Etik. 2020. “Bukan Yem [Maybe Not Yem].” In Mga Bantay-Salakay sa Loob ng Aking Bahay: Antolohiya ng Maiikling Kuwento ng mga Indonesian Domestic Worker sa Hong Kong, Singapore at Taiwan [Intruders at Home: Anthology of Short Stories of

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Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan], edited by Carlos M Piocos III, 177–186. Quezon City, Philippines: Sentro ng Wikang Filipino [Center of Philippine Languages]-University of the Philippines Diliman. Lan, Pei-Chia. 2006. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham: Duke University Press. Lestari, Eni. 2013. “Learning to Lead: Against the Odds, Indonesian Domestic Workers Have Achieved Real Change in Hong Kong.” Inside Indonesia. Accessed 23 January 2013. Lindquist, Johan. 2010. “Labour Recruitment, Circuits of Capital and Gendered Mobility: Reconceptualizing the Indonesian Migration Industry.” Pacific Affairs 83 (1):115–132. Lo, Clifford. 2015. “Police Contact Other Maids Allegedly Beaten by Erwiana’s Boss.” South China Morning Post. Accessed 23 January 2015. Mam, Somaly. 2014. “Time’s 2014 100 Icons: Erwiana Sulistyanighsih, the Migrant Worker Who Fought Back.” Time Magazine. Accessed 23 January 2015. Margareta, Indira. 2020. “Cahaya Untuk Penaku [Light for my Pen].” In Mga BantaySalakay sa Loob ng Aking Bahay: Antolohiya ng Maiikling Kuwento ng mga Indonesian Domestic Worker sa Hong Kong, Singapore at Taiwan [Intruders at Home: Anthology of Short Stories of Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan], edited by Carlos M Piocos III. Quezon City, Philippines: Sentro ng Wikang Filipino [Center of Philippine Languages]-University of the Philippines Diliman. Migrant Care. n.d. “Profil.” Migrant Care. Accessed 5 December, http://migrantcare.net/ profil/. Mission for Migrant Workers. 2013a. Know Your Rights Plus/Pahami Hak Anda Plus (Versi Bahasa Indonesia). Hong Kong: Mission for Migrant Workers Lmtd. Mission for Migrant Workers. 2013b. Live in Policy Increases Female FDWs’ Vulnerability to Various Types of Abuse. Accessed 3 June 2015. Murniati, Tri. 2012. “An Anthology of Migrant Workers’ Short Stories: Beyond Identity, Expectation and Reality.” Konferensi Internasional Kesusasteraan XXII.” Univesitas Negeri Yogyakarta, 7–9 November 2012. Murniati, Tri. 2014. “Indonesian Migrant Writing: A Trace on Indonesian Diaspora Narratives.” International Conference in Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Department of Malay-Indonesian Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul Korea, 14–16 May 2014. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. 2009. Mapping the Global Muslim Population: A Report on the Size and Distribution of the World’s Muslim Population. Washington: Pew Research Center. Retnaningdyah, Pratiwi. 2013. “Etik Juwita, Tulkiyem, and Bookmark-Turning Cheque.” Doing Literacy. Accessed March 20, 2020. Sawai, Shiho. 2010. “Ambivalent Marginality: Literary Activities of Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong.” In Religion, Identity and Conflict Proceeding of Postgraduate Workshop, 11–22. Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Sawai, Shiho. 2012. “Linguistic Vulnerability of a Female Maid: A Short-story Entitled “Maybe Not Yem”.” Consortium for Asian and African Studies, University of London, London, February 16-18, 2012. Silvey, Rachel. 2004. “Transnational Domestication: State Power and Indonesian Migrant Women in Saudi Arabia.” Political Geography 23:245–264. Silvey, Rachel. 2013. “Overseas Female Labour Migrant (TKW or Tenage Kerja Wanita).” In Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity, edited by Eric Harms and Johan Lindquist Joshua Barker, 152–154. Honolulu: The University of Hawai’i Press.

Vulnerability and Resistance 103 Siu, Phila. 2014. “New Employee Abuse Victims Emerge as Thousands March for Justice for Erwiana.” South China Morning Post. Accessed 21 January 2015. Siu, Phila. 2019. “Immigration Officials Deport Indonesian Domestic Worker Who Covered Hong Kong Protests as a Citizen Journalist and Was Arrested for Overstay.” South China Morning Post. Accessed May 20, 2020. Suryomenggolo, Jafar. 2011. “Indonesian Female Migrant Workers and Their Narratives.” Newsletter: Center for Southeast Asian Studies 64: 1–31. Accessed 23 January 2013. Suryomenggolo, Jafar. 2012. “Building Workers Solidarity in Hong Kong: Indonesian Overseas Domestic Workers and Their Narratives.” 동아연구 63권:198. Tan, Carol. 2014. “How Dewi Became a Litigant: Migrant Domestic Workers as Litigants in Hong Kong.” Southeast Asia Research Centre Working Paper Series, No. 153. Tiwi. 2020. “Sebuah Surat di Penghujung April [Letter at the End of April].” In Mga Bantay-Salakay sa Loob ng Aking Bahay: Antolohiya ng Maiikling Kuwento ng mga Indonesian Domestic Worker sa Hong Kong, Singapore at Taiwan [Intruders at Home: Anthology of Short Stories of Indonesian Domestic Workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan], edited by Carlos M Piocos III, 19–24. Quezon City, Philippines: Sentro ng Wikang Filipino [Center of Philippine Languages]-University of the Philippines Diliman. Transient Workers Count Too. 2006. Debts, Delays, Deductions: Wage Issues Faced by Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore. 1–32. Accessed 5 December 2015. Transient Workers Count Too. 2011. Fact Sheet: Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore (Complaints and Abuses). Accessed 5 December 2015. Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Winarti, Agnes. 2011. “Breaking Stereotypes.” Jakarta Post. Accessed 20 April 2015.

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Suffering that Counts As part of the holy week celebration in 2014, former Philippine President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III delivered a televised Lenten address for Filipinos at home and abroad. In his speech, he extolled his administration’s “righteous path of governance” while exhorting Filipinos to learn to sacrifice, that is to “willingly accept life’s hardships” because “just like how Jesus Christ faced intense suffering to give us the chance to live forever, our sacrifice will have a positive contribution that will benefit the majority” (Sabillo 2014). Whether owing to its intention or bad timing, his Lenten message was received badly by many Filipinos, particularly the overseas Filipina workers (OFW) who had been harboring deep-seethed feelings towards the President’s handling of many of their concerns (Corrales 2014). The call to sacrifice is not new for many Filipinos who are forced to go out of the country as part of their duty as bagong bayani or “new heroes.” It is in fact no less than Noynoy’s mother and former President, Corazon “Cory” Aquino, who first deployed both the term, bagong bayani, and the discourse of sacrifice in her 1988 speech in front of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong to laud their economic contribution to the country (Republic of the Philippines Presidential Management Staff 2002). However, her son’s recasting of the same rhetoric has been received in a bad light considering the mounting discontent of Filipinos abroad towards various controversies hounding his administration, which erupted towards the end of Noynoy’s tenure, a few months after his sacrifice speech. In 2015, Noynoy Aquino’s popularity among OFWs significantly dropped due to two controversies: the proposed random inspection and taxing of balikbayan boxes, the crates of keepsakes and souvenirs migrant Filipinas send to their leftbehind families, and the alleged incidents of laglag-bala or planting of bullets in the luggage of departing OFWs in the country’s main international airport (Francisco 2015, Viray 2015). These two corruption scandals targeting OFWs and the material symbols of their sacrifices—the baggage of leaving their loved ones behind and the gifts they send back to their kin to display their love despite their absence—have incited an uproar among many Filipinos abroad. OFWs have posted demo videos either packing garbage in balikbayan boxes to spite customs

Sacrifice and Social Heroism 105 officers or locking their luggage and wrapping them with intricate cover to prevent airport personnel from planting bullets (Doyo 2015, Rappler Social Media Team 2015). Perhaps, the most concerted response to Aquino’s mismanagement of OFWs’ concerns is the “Zero Remittance Day,” a call from various migrant Filipino organizations from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East to halt remittance flows as protest. The goal of the campaign is for OFWs to withhold sending money to relatives for one day as a way of leveraging the economic returns of their sacrifices to enforce policy changes from the part of the Philippine government. According to migrant leaders, their call for no remittance demonstrates “OFWs’ unity and collective action against any and all moves by the Philippine state to scam us and treat us as nothing but milking cows,” and to prove to the government that OFWs are “worth much more than the dollars, and the balikbayan boxes, we send” (Santos 2015). Clearly, sacrifice may have different meanings to those who call for it and those who are subject to such calls, and the President’s message and the OFW’s responses only reveal how something that may seem so culturally familiar can be invoked and received differently in public discourse. While the presidential address domesticizes the discourse of sacrifice to justify their policies, while enjoining its citizens at home and abroad to do more for the nation, the responses of many migrant Filipinos to invocations to endure suffering and contribute more also reveal how OFWs become sacrificial lambs towards their country’s development. And these contestations towards the meaning of sacrifice between the government and its diasporic subjects center around the material consequences of OFWs’ social heroism, in their luggage that symbolizes their separation from their families, and in the money and gifts that they send back to their loved ones. The discourse of sacrifice shapes the itineraries of the departures and arrivals of warm-body exports and the returns of their fate-playing abroad in cash and goods. As the Philippine government benefits from the constant outflow of migrant bodies, mostly women, and the inflow of capital from these departures that infuses national coffers, OFWs respond by questioning how much their own government values their suffering by withholding the returns of their sacrifices. While suffering for Indonesian migrant women is structured by conditions of precarity that reveal the insidious ways in which national, cultural, and sexual scripts shape their complex understanding of victimhood, the Philippine nation-state’s labor export policy has consolidated aspirations for development and modernity in ways that suture and reconcile, however tentative and unstable, the taking in of suffering as economic optimism for female OFWs through the discourse of sacrifice. Sacrifice represents an aphoria in understanding labor migration, where nation-building and developmental narratives can be both buttressed and unhinged by national, cultural, and sexual discourses that interpellate migrant’s suffering as both economic and moral forms of exchange. As a form of an affective economy, one that circulates moral and, at the same time, economic value for OFWs, sacrifice is the condition of suffering for and on behalf of others that also promises something in return, the hope of a better life afterwards.

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Sacrifice can then be imagined to be both disabling and enabling conditions— something that puts them in situations where they may suffer but, at the same time, sustain and give value to their suffering. This double bind can be seen in how sacrifice materializes itself as primarily an affective attachment to an economic promise framed within the discourse of migration-for-development, in the forms of their baggage, remittances, and balikbayan boxes. The trope of sacrifice in the context of labor migration tracks the ways in which national, cultural, and sexual discourses produce and shape the various and varying discourses that sustain, for better or worse, the migrant Filipina women’s relations to the Philippines as a nation and as a state. The nation-state deploys the discourse of sacrifice in shaping the problematic relationship of OFW women to their transnational labor, which is reproduced in culture through the genre of OFW films. The mainstream Philippine cinema spectacularizes the state’s discourse of sacrifice by projecting on the silver screen the fantasies of developmental optimism in migrant Filipina women’s sacrifices. As counter-narratives to dominant visual texts that celebrate sacrifice, I examine independent OFW films that portray how the migrant Filipina women redefine and rethink what it means to suffer and sacrifice in the context of transnational labor, namely Mes de Guzman’s (2007) Balikbayan Box, Zig Madamba Dulay’s (2017) Bagahe, and Patrick Daly and Joel Fendelman’s (2015) Remittance.

Nation-State Strategies The Philippine state’s discourse on sacrifice in labor migration emerged out of its difficult negotiation with counting on migrants for their economic contributions while, in return, accounting for their well-being and interests. The state’s tenuous nation-building project—which was, on the one hand, dependent on OFW remittances while, on the other hand, incapable of ensuring OFWs’ welfare—has been the crux of various state strategies that shape and support their labor export policy initiated by Ferdinand Marcos during the 1970s. Originally thought as a stop-gap remedy to economic woes during Martial Law, labor migration has eventually become a permanent solution that has driven more than 10% of the Filipino population to mostly abhorrent working conditions abroad (Gonzalez 1998). It was only after a decade of implementing Marcos’ labor export policy that his successor, Corazon Aquino, started reaping the economic rewards of the steady rise of overseas contractual work. What was supposed to be temporary has become a lasting solution, as labor migration not only provided jobs but also continually augmented household incomes and funded trade deficits through the OFWs’ foreign exchange remittances. By then, overseas work had expanded across the globe and extended into the demand for care and domestic service, making the formerly male-dominated demographic of overseas work increasingly feminized (Eviota 1992). As more and more Filipina women depart to take on jobs that also expose them to abuse and victimization, concerns about the compromised working conditions of Filipinos abroad and the growing social cost of migration taking its toll on their families back home arose.

Sacrifice and Social Heroism 107 So when Cory Aquino named OFWs as bagong bayani or “new national heroes” in her speech addressing Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong in 1988, the state also deployed a rhetorical strategy that would not just contain the discontent but also mask the lack of protective mechanisms for its citizens abroad. The Philippine government would later ritualize this naming through various programs like Overseas Filipino Month, Bagong Bayani Awards, and “heroes’ welcome” at the Manila International Airport for returning OFWs during the Christmas season. The result of the Philippine state’s strategy of promoting overseas work through its bagong bayani discourse is evident in the number of Filipinos who have pinned their hopes on migration’s promises. To date, there are 12 million Filipinos who are working abroad, according to the Department of Labor and Employment, which may rise up to 15 million if the undocumented and illegal migrants are included. These numbers translate to about one-fifth of the country’s labor force and the money they send back to their families accounts for 10% of the country’s GDP (Migrante International 2013). In 2018, OFW remittances hit an all-time high at almost USD 32.2 billion, a figure that competes only with countries with the largest migrant populations, like Mexico, China, and India (Lucas 2019). This form of capital inflows not just spurs domestic consumption but also buoys the country’s currency and cushions the national economy from economic shocks of global crises (like the Asian financial crisis during the late 1990s) (San Juan 2009). The significance of OFW money to the Philippine economy has compelled scholars to celebrate OFW remittances as “direct aid” to their families, fueling developmental “multipliers” in terms of educational and economic benefits to their relatives and communities back home, which can potentially create structural changes, promote good governance, and disrupt traditional feudal ties and class relations at home (Asian Development Bank 2013, Tusalem 2018, Aguilar 2014). Other scholars and activists remain skeptical about these narratives of developmental optimism by pointing out the “dependency syndrome” on migrant remittances at both the national and the household level and its effect on local human resources (i.e. deskilling, “brain drain,” and domestic job crisis) and basic industries (weakening of agricultural and manufacturing sectors) (Dimzon 2005, Africa 2008). What is arguably the most consistent and predominant counter-narrative to migration and development are the actual stories of the precarious and neglected lives that a majority of the Filipina migrants lead abroad. Starting from the high-profile case of Flor Contemplacion, a Filipina domestic helper executed in Singapore in 1995, migrant groups have pointed out that about 3–5 OFWs return to the country in coffins every day, while 92 more are in death row, along with hundreds of other cases of physical, sexual, and verbal abuses of mostly Filipina women abroad (Migrante International 2015). It is in this tableau of possibilities that the state’s naming of bagong bayani, and the entailing notions of sacrifice and social heroism, is most powerful as a discourse, because it does not just extol the virtues of leaving but also sets its

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expectations. Sacrifice in migration promises a better life without denying the risks and dangers. As a state discourse, it propels labor export policy as a developmental strategy even while it admits its costs and shortcomings. The bagong bayani label works because of the discourse of sacrifice that sutures and bridges the state’s problematic nation-building efforts to deploy its citizens as workers abroad even with limited capacity to protect them (Encinas-Franco 2013). In these ways, OFWs are seen as heroes because they can commit to a life of agony and danger for their families, even when the state cannot and will not protect them once they leave the country, which only fortifies the dimension of sacrifice in the transnational context. The strategy of naming OFWs bagong bayani is dynamic and productive precisely because the values, responsibilities, and obligations—themselves expressions and regimentations of ideas of sacrifice—that come with it need to be cultivated and developed through the nation-state’s official discourses on nationalism and citizenship. Bagong Bayani and the discourse of sacrifice endow the state with the power not just to marshal OFWs into the act of nation-building but also instill moral citizenship that molds them into flexible laborers, while disciplining them to regularly remit money (Guevarra 2010, Rodriguez 2002). Bagong Bayani animates the cultural interplay of Catholic ideals of selfrenunciation with Philippine nationalist history, as the ethics of sacrifice shores up the heroism of Jose Rizal with the martyrism of Ninoy Aquino that inspired the popular EDSA Revolution (Ileto 1985). Sacrifice as a framing of suffering has deep roots in Catholic teachings, which deploys the Passion of Christ as a powerful image of self-renunciation and martyrdom for around 87% of Filipinos who are Roman Catholics (National Statistics Office 2014). As migrant workers, they bring their religious beliefs and practices to their countries of employ. Out of the 384,000 Catholics in Hong Kong, 160,000 are Filipino non-residents, most of whom are Filipina domestic workers (Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong 2015), while a survey in Singapore claims that a majority of Filipina domestic workers are practicing Catholics. This conflation of martyrism and heroism is then recasted by the feminized figure of Cory as a suffering widow, whose power was “predicated on the logics of suffering and sacrifice,” from which “the notion of pity rather than equal rights [is used] to legitimate claims to power and moral certainty” (Rafael 2000, 212). So when Cory gave the tag of Bagong Bayani to Filipina domestic helpers in Hong Kong, the discourse of sacrifice was set against the experience of overseas work, which by this time had become increasingly dominated by women: with the “the DH, the invariably female domestic worker, who has served as the predominant figure of Filipino overseas contract workers” (Tadiar 2004, 114). Sacrifice provides the affective dimension of transnational labor that shapes the gendered moral economy of the name bagong bayani for many OFWs, mostly women, who have to endure pain and affliction in their devotion not only to their family but also to the whole nation. As “overseas employment is valued as a form of secular pilgrimage in a quest for economic bounty and life experience” (Aguilar 1996, 11), the religious

Sacrifice and Social Heroism 109 underpinnings of sacrifice are refashioned as an “affective economy” (Ahmed 2004) that sustains the relationship of OFWs to migration and nationalism. Bagong Bayani operates within the “economy of sacrifice” of OFWs, “where the state’s ability to send-off their human labor is contingent upon them cultivating a certain idea of what it means to suffer” (Bautista 2015, 9). OFWs’ plight is then important in this economy because while their suffering is discursively packaged as the unfortunate but necessary costs of pursuing a greater good, the state’s evocation of sentiments of pity and empathic solidarity with those who suffer, further reiterates the nobility of their overseas deployment even when dangers of such occurrences recurring remain real. (10) Sacrifice can thus be understood as being able to appreciate agony on behalf and for the sake of loved ones because of the economic promise of what going abroad means for the migrant and his or her family. The affective economy of sacrifice translates suffering into a form of investment towards optimism for a “good life” and discourses of migration portray it as a developmental strategy. Laurent Berlant (2011) calls this “a relationship of cruel optimism” which “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). The OFWs’ immersion in and commitment to overseas work and the hanging or clinging on to its economic possibilities is a form of “an optimistic attachment that involves a sustaining inclination to return to the scene of fantasy that enables [one] to expect that this time, nearness to this thing will help you or a world to become different in just the right way” (2). Mobility offers this kind of “life building” fantasies as part of the “cluster of promises” that one’s fate-playing abroad brings (Coates 2019). A discourse of sacrifice that enacts the optimism of labor migration is cruel not because social mobility and success are mere fantasies, as many stories of thriving or just plain surviving of Filipina migrants attest. But such successes and adjustments not only come at a cost but are themselves products of problematic hopes that migration builds. Overseas work as a “scene of fantasy” signifies that it becomes “the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaus about how they and the world ‘add up to something’” (Berlant 2011, 2). Analyzing migrant sacrifice as a form of cruel optimism is neither to discredit nor to invalidate the hopes of many OFWs pinned on migration as a way of personal and familial development, but to discuss and track how such optimistic attachments are problematic, at best, and ultimately cruel. I demonstrate how cruel it is by tracking “the dramas of adjustment” in cultural productions that inquire into why migrant Filipina women “stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear costs abounds” (Berlant 2011, 3).

Spectacles of Sacrifice The cruel optimism inherent in the sacrifice of bagong bayani has been reproduced and projected countless times on the silver screen. Philippine mainstream

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cinema has produced dozens of commercial films about transnational labor beginning from the early 1990s. From this emerged the genre of OFW films, which “revolve around the experience of migrant workers, before, during, or after their stay in another country,” and the constant filmic productions of such transnational stories have been consolidated as a “national assemblage produced by the local industry to the logic of profitability and overdetermined mode of address, [as] its main emphasis remains to be the domestic market and its extended audience comprised of Filipinos abroad” (Campos 2014, 627). Even though films came out sporadically about Filipina immigrants and itinerants as early as the 1980s, several OFW films depicting the tragic fate of migrant women, particularly those who are contractual domestic workers who fall prey to abuse and exploitation, were released during the 1990s. The spectacularizing of female sacrifice is seen in how mainstream film productions, like Star Cinema, have produced blockbuster hits that not only narrate the lives of OFWs but are also consciously marketed to them and their left-behind families, with movies like Anak (2000), Milan (2004), Dubai (2005), Barcelona (2006), etc. (Tan 2018). OFW films also demonstrate the shift in the cultural representation of Philippine migration from fantasies of First World settlement and global citizenship before the 1990s to the melodramas of suffering OFW mothers in the later decades (Capino 2010). With a Filipina domestic worker as the usual protagonist, the OFW film genre affirms how the Filipina domestic workers have become “the new cultural figure in the national experience” (Tolentino 2009, 433). Most mainstream OFW films utilize the conventions of melodrama, as the stories revolve around domestic themes of home and family life disrupted by suffering and sacrifice, since these films are “premised on dramatizing and visualizing the impact of diaspora on the Filipinos’ everyday lives in and out of the Philippines, and its narrative possibilities and cinematic profitability are invested on pains, dangers, and traumas” of migrant Filipina women who suffer in their duties as good wives, mothers, and daughters of their home and homeland (Campos 2014, 628). OFW films, as a genre, then become a part of the “Philippine reproductive fiction” in deploying the “diasporic maternal” as projections of sacrifice and social heroism, replicating myths of bagong bayani while also containing the inherent economic and social crisis in the country (Marte-Wood 2019, Suarez 2017). By melodramatizing their suffering as a form of both maternal and nationalist sacrifice, mainstream OFW films are able to extol the Philippine state’s official discourse on migrant work, in particular, its celebration of migrant workers as ‘new heroes,’ and the neoliberal policy that ties the backward economies of foreign-dominated nations, like the Philippines, to cheap-labor export and dependence on import.” (Raymundo 2011, 561) New cinematic productions from the underground have, however, started to challenge this discourse of bagong bayani in OFW films. Independent Filipino films in the last decade have produced imaginaries of Filipina migrant domestic

Sacrifice and Social Heroism 111 workers in Hong Kong and Singapore that critically expose the cruel optimism of what it means to sacrifice in the context of labor migration. With this, the rise of independent digital filmmaking in the Philippines has not only ushered the Third Golden Age of Philippine Cinema but has also generated counter-narratives that are critical of the developmental optimism pinned on labor migration by the Philippine government (Beller 2008). Mes de Guzman’s Balikbayan Box, for example, centers on the everyday struggles of left-behind children of a Filipina domestic worker in Hong Kong. Known for his social realist portrayal of rural Philippines, de Guzman’s OFW film is set not in the cosmopolitan destination states, as most mainstream OFW films are, but in the abject poverty of a poor village buoyed by transnational mobility’s good life fantasies among left-behind families. Screened in various international festivals, this independent feature visualizes the desperation of the kids and the people around them, who continue to hold on to the hope of being lifted out of poverty by their OFW parents and loved ones, despite the overwhelming reality of those failed promises. By doing so, the film not only portrays the social cost of migration but also grimly looks at the cruel attachment and dependence that labor migration promotes not only to OFWs but to their loved ones at home. Inspired by his sister’s forays as a domestic helper in Hong Kong, Zig Dulay captures the many burdens that migrant Filipina women carry in their departure from and return to their homes and their homeland in Bagahe. Dulay’s independent OFW film has been screened and awarded with best film and best screenplay trophies in several international filmfests, most notably at Vesoul, Asiatica, and the Asia Independent Film Festival. Bagahe fictionalizes a true-to-life case of a migrant woman who leaves her newly born child inside an airport toilet. Instead of delving into the gendered moralizing of a sacrificing diasporic maternal figure, the film depicts the abuses and exploitation an OFW woman has to endure in the face of a homeland that frames her as a failure with regard to the ideals of bagong bayani. Finally, Patrick Daly and Joel Fendelman’s Remittance delves into a migrant Filipina woman’s expectations of and frustrations over the stakes of her sacrifice abroad on her return to her family. Beyond representations of migrant woman’s sexuality and desire abroad, as discussed in the second chapter, Daly and Fendelman’s ethnographically inspired feature film also portrays and rewrites the cruel optimism attached to the life-building project of migration as a Filipina domestic worker from Singapore comes home to her hometown only to see her family breaking apart despite, and even because of, her sacrifices. However, the film illustrates that this is not the social cost and the burden that the diasporic mother has to bear as part of her duty as a bagong bayani. Instead of just enduring her suffering in silence, the OFW wife and mother challenges the script of sacrifice and displays her agency by steering her life and what’s left of her family towards survival. These three independent OFW films represent ways of rethinking the naming of bagong bayani and the inscription of sacrifice to the experiences of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore. By challenging the script of

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sacrifice—where the OFWs’ material heroism is symbolized by their baggage as they leave and return home or by the balikbayan boxes and remittances they send back to their families—these three filmic texts affectively expose the cruel attachments to the cluster of promises of migration by shoring up the costs of sacrifice that their nation-state exacts from Filipina women in their border-crossing.

Disposable Gifts Mes de Guzman’s (2007) Balikbayan Box takes on the theme of Filipina migration, but it focuses not on the people who leave but on those they leave behind. In this way, it conjures a different image of sacrifice, one that does not ask its spectators to appreciate the melodrama of OFW sacrifice and the lengths to which migrant women go to give their families, especially their children, a better future. It rather questions what is being sacrificed in the elusive pursuit of the good life fantasies purported by developmentalist accounts of labor migration. The film centers on three children, brothers Ilyong (Renante Huerte) and Junjun (John Jason Lozares), whose mother is a domestic worker in Hong Kong, and their friend Moymoy (Emil John Dela Masa), whose mother is about to leave for Hong Kong as well. The film consciously presents, almost in a documentary-like manner, how the three children struggle to get through the day without the flagrant dramatics of blaming their mothers who have left or are about to leave them. Ilyong, Junjun, and Moymoy do not long for what might have been in their present experience of childhood. Their sense of desperation is in the everydayness of the crises that they have to face. In this sense, Balikbayan Box is not a melodrama of migration’s social costs but, using Berlant’s term, a “drama of adjustments.” It visualizes the frantic ways people hold on to approximations of migration’s promises of economic mobility but not to the promise itself. It is in this way that this film challenges the predominant idea of sacrifice and the prospects of economic returns it entails by dramatizing the cruel effects of how children and their families are sacrificed and are demanded to adjust to what remains of the failed hopes of mobility and progress of labor migration. To know precisely how much this movie avoids melodrama, one need only to look at one of the protagonists, Ilyong. In a scene where he is indolently looking at the expanse of dried up fields outside their house, his younger brother sits beside him and bombards him with questions he’d rather not answer. While some may read Ilyong’s silence about his mother in this scene and throughout the film as some form of resentment at her absence, the narrative does not show any trace of what could be suspected as hatred. What the film shows instead is an older brother trying not to think of his mother in order to resist relying on hopes that his mother’s diaspora represents. His reluctance to answer the barrage of questions from his younger brother shows how much he tries to avoid falling into the trap of hoping for the economic mobility that his mother’s departure should have already provided for the two of them. Junjun’s questions mark those promises—moving into the city, their mother finally coming home, the faraway city of Hong Kong

Sacrifice and Social Heroism 113 that they could visit—which for Ilyong makes thinking about them “a pain in the ass.” He refuses the nagging puncture that his younger brother opens up because he knows that it could be much harder to delude himself about their mother’s pledged packages, remittances, and even return that would make their going back to school or relocation to the city possible. Instead, he looks at the reality of the landscape before him to remind himself of how overwhelmingly poor and bare his and his brother’s present lives were. The setting that Ilyong is looking at is a cruel tableau of failed promises. Their small village somewhere in Nueva Ecija, Central Luzon, where the film is based, is a place where communities used to depend on the abundance of rice fields for sustenance. This is now an already distant memory that these children never had. At present, their familiarity of their village is limited to a scene of “lifetimes of disposability”: landscapes of dried up paddies and abandoned houses, with few thriving neighbors who have family members with more successful migration stories to tell and boast through their concrete houses, fenced lots or some minor business, quaint retail stores and small food stalls (Pratt, Johnston, and Banta 2017). Clearly, modernity and development as labor migration’s “multiplier effects” have not reached the part of the world where Ilyong and Junjun lived. Overseas work has instead created a different track of upward mobility for some of these poor peasants to pursue, compelling them to abandon those livelihoods that once sustained most of them. This anticipation for economic success hovers over the whole village, in the lingering presence of well-constructed abodes and minor business ventures, and the sporadic arrivals of chic OFWs, drawing in good life fantasies that their community could be so much more. This holds true even if those scenarios have remained elusive and out of reach for most of them, even to these boys whose mother is already an OFW. Even the use of Balikbayan Box as the film’s title exposes how much the optimisms pinned on their neighbors’ mobility are failing these subjects. The title alludes to those boxes containing canned goods, delicacies, clothing, and other imported wares that OFWs shop and accumulate abroad over months before sending them through freight companies to their families back home. Even though balikbayan boxes have become parcels of goods that can also be bought in the country, sending off these packages has become ritualized as their deliveries in the far-off backwoods of the countryside have become ubiquitous, because they allow OFWs, in their absence, to re-enter into Philippine society via their gifts as proxies (Alburo 2005, Camposano 2012). These boxes have become markers of familial love and the generosity of the migrants, gifts that approximate intimacy to a future marked by upward mobility and development (McKay 2012). But the balikbayan box in this film becomes a symbol of cruel attachment to migration’s life-building fantasies, serving as a metaphor for a deferred, rather than the actual, arrival of that promise, always out of reach for the protagonist. This is why Ilyong, instead of waiting for something that may or may not arrive for them, sets his eyes on what’s before him each day instead, looking for things he and his brother could take and sell in the market to survive through their daily encounter with abject poverty that has become so ritualized it is no longer

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lamentable for them. In another conversation of the siblings with Moymoy and his parents over dinner, the viewers start to understand Ilyong’s hard resistance to depending on their mother’s promises. Mameng (Moymoy’s mother): Has your mom been sending you money? Junjun: She’s been sending money through uncle. But not so often. Mom said that life is also hard there. Badong (Moymoy’s father): Maybe your uncle’s so greedy. He always goes to the beerhouse. Mameng: Why don’t you write to your mother? Tell her what’s happening? Junjun: I don’t know with Kuya Ilyong. He doesn’t want to write to Mother. If I could write, I would have asked Mother to buy me shoes! Throughout this exchange, Ilyong is focused on eating his free dinner, unmindful of his younger brother sharing these details with their friend’s parents. Between the two brothers, it is clear that Junjun is still holding on to the promise that something will come out of their mother’s sacrifices, that some form of her mother’s return, a package, a letter, some money, will arrive for him and his brother. He holds on to this hope of what could approximate a good life (going to school, moving to the city, new shoes, some cash) even though he knows that their mother’s promises will indefinitely be deferred because of the hard life she herself is facing abroad. Ilyong, on the other hand, is the pragmatic realist, someone who evades romanticizing how good life might be if their mother keeps her word. Instead of being hung up on the maternal commitments that are always already purloined, he looks instead at the ways in which he and his brother can hold on to something that is within their reach to survive their “bad life.” He sees what is in front of him, their dreary neighborhood or the free food, as resources for living and getting through their everyday that is replete with crisis. The normality of crisis that structures the everyday lives of these children is similar to what Laurent Berlant (2011) describes as “crisis ordinariness.” This happens when crisis ceases to become “exceptional to history or consciousness but [is a] process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories of navigating what’s overwhelming” (10). Precarity has structured the uncertain futures of people “dedicated to moving towards the good life’s normative/utopian zone but actually stuck in what (might be called) survival time, the time of struggling, drowning, holding onto the ledge, treading water—the time of not-stopping” (169). In this film, the ordinariness of crisis has compelled Ilyong to adopt a hardheaded view of life in the impoverished landscape of the rural Philippines that at first may seem to be totally stripped of optimism but is actually optimistic in that it allows him, even given the dearth of resources, to coast through the ritualized poverty or the present crisis that never stops for him and his brother. Throughout this film, Ilyong teaches Junjun, and also Moymoy, who most of the time tags along with them, what they would do to overcome their shattering present. In the morning, they would catch some small fish or shrimp in the river or scavenge for food in the abandoned houses of OFWs in their village, or steal fruits

Sacrifice and Social Heroism 115 or root crops from their neighbors, and sell everything at the market at noonday. And before dusk settles in, they would go to the “Betamax House,” where they would watch bootleg Hollywood action flicks. After watching, they would go home crossing the dried fields, where the two younger boys would talk about and adulate foreign action heroes, upon which Ilyong would cruelly admonish them for their ludicrous fantasies. Their daily experience of pirated screenings of action movies is not aspirational but rather a much-rewarded respite at the end of the day to contain the anxiety of going through the same habits of survival. Ilyong knows this fully well and reminds the two young kids to snap out of the lull created by the kind of life that is projected but nonetheless trapped in the screen as they head home. This prompts the viewers to realize that this is no Cinema Paradiso; it has none of the nostalgia or the urge to look back on some glossy yet irrecoverable past, making the experience of present crisis a catalyst for some sort of realization and loss of innocence. This is not a drama of coming of age or rude awakening, but a tragic performance of adjustment and repetition, where distant films do not induce anything except rest, a whiling away of time to look past the present that taxes them. Although these are heartbreaking routines of living on—of “treading on water without drowning”—that are being consumed by viewers, they are not really dramatic. The repetition of these children’s survival tactics as everyday and ordinary has stripped these rituals off of any exceptional quality of poverty to make it an event for this filmic narrative. Berlant calls this mode of persisting under crisis ordinariness as situation tragedy, to describe the pervading sense of tragedy in routinized crisis that is portrayed without ostentatious drama in these survival narratives: [It is] the marriage between tragedy and situation comedy where people are fated to express their flaws episodically, over and over, without learning, changing, being relieved, becoming better, or dying … In the situation tragedy, one moves between having a little and being ejected from the social, where life is lived on the outside of value, in terrifying nonplaces where one is a squatter, trying to make an event in which one will matter to something or someone, even as familiar joke. (Berlant 2011, 176–7) Just like how characters in hyper-exploited and desperate conditions resemble a normal life, the three protagonists of Balikbayan Box repeat their rituals of living on with very little variation. For example, what they could not scavenge from one emptied house, they would steal from their neighbors. In all of these acts of surviving, play and risk become almost indistinguishable for these young boys. While they frolic in the river, it also serves as their source to earn something for the day. The houses they scavenge are safe places where they trespass to gather what they can, as long as these spaces are abandoned. If not, they would find themselves being pursued by neighbors from whom they have stolen some fruits, a chase from which they would also derive some form of amusement. Danger provides excitement, as they would sometimes venture into one of the fenced lots

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to steal some root crops they can sell at the market, hoping that the armed guard is deep in his drunken sleep. In situation tragedies, play and risk defines the rituals of survival: “Play allows a sense of normalcy, though while risk tries to make some headway in the impasse: play is the performance of an interruption without risk” (170). This confluence of play and risk is also present in the survival habits of de Guzman’s three boys, which only illustrate the contingency and precariousness of the act of treading water without drowning in situation tragedies; it would prove to be fateful for them towards the end of the film. Unlike the three children, it is mostly the adults in the film who are bound up and hung up on migration’s developmental promises as their way of living on, even if clearly these fantasies have failed them and made their lives much more devastating than that of the three boys. Two of the most tragic characters in the village are Tiagong Kirat (Cris Villanueva), the guard of the fenced lot, and Nana Minyang (Ermie Concepcion), the owner of the “Betamax House.” Both of them hold on to what remains of the failed project for a good life that their loved ones tried offering them as a form of sacrifice. Even though their cherished properties, these little things that they have, constantly remind them of failures and betrayal, they cling on to those products of sacrifices, materialized as a small piece of barren land or a trifling business venture, as if these are matters of life and death. Even if both Tiagong Kirat and Nana Minyang are dejected figures in migration’s failed projects, these two characters remain to be a source of envy in this community. Like the three kids, older men trespass Tiago’s lot to steal some root crops, just like Moymoy’s father, Badong, who was the one who taught the young boy to do some stealing in the first place. Nana Minyang, on the other hand, is hated and called greedy behind her back. The fact that what they have is still something of envy for the people in the village proves how much optimism the community has accorded to their beloved one’s departures abroad. Even if they are tragic symbols, they remain to be among those who are fortunate to receive the material rewards of their loved one’s sacrifices, just like the other more successful left-behind families of OFWs living in their village. One of those people who still see a promising life blessed by OFW sendings is Momoy’s mother, Mameng (Rona Montebon). And how can she not when she makes a living as a cleaner and a laundrywoman for more well-to-do families with OFW members in the village. In one of the first few scenes in the film, the viewers see Mameng washing clothes in the river with another old woman when a fashionable young lady arrives with two men trailing behind her, carrying her heavy luggage and huge balikbayan boxes. The returnee then rides a small boat to cross the river, while the old woman beside Mameng points out that the one who just arrived is some neighbor’s daughter who is an entertainer in Japan. The two women stop in the middle of their laundry work to stare at the woman until she reaches the other side of the river. Then, Mameng looks at her son playing with the two siblings. This scene illustrates how promising the OFW’s presence and her goods are, passing by to abruptly distract the dreariness of their village and

Sacrifice and Social Heroism 117 infusing the neighborhood with dreams of upward mobility, even if these are still elusive and have never been accessible, at that point, for Mameng. The film reveals how entranced Mameng is by the elusive OFW fantasy by showing how determined she is on becoming an OFW herself. She goes through the rounds of cleaning the houses of wealthier neighbors and washing their clothes to earn enough money for her placement fee. This is because her drunkard husband, Badong, has wasted the money she set aside for her airfare costs. She constantly applies with the local sponsor, hoping that she would be allowed to borrow money that she could pay once she starts working overseas. She works hard and hopes to be able to leave, even though she knows that she might just be repeating the fate of Ilyong and Junjun’s mother, seeing that Badong is no better than the two boys’ uncle and she would end up paying more than she would owe the agency, making it hard for her to send enough money for her husband and son. Mameng is the only figure in the film that performs this gendered moral script of sacrifice. She solely supports her family and tries to give Moymoy whatever spare coins she has earned for the day just so her boy can go and watch a movie. In one scene, the viewer sees Mameng stealing a toy truck from one of the richer houses that she services but hesitating and actually returning a piece of jewelry she plans on pinching. In these moments, the film portrays Mameng’s self-renunciating role as a mother, someone who can deprive herself of good things but has to provide his son an approximation of what a good childhood could be, a toy and some coins to spare. Her idea of sacrifice allows her to dream of a better life for her son even in such cruel circumstances, which makes leaving abroad for work and letting her husband take care of Moymoy a much better option because it brings her nearer to that good life fantasy she covets from her well-off casual employers and neighbors. Just like any other scenario of cruel optimism, migration for Mameng can also be seen as a prospect where “the promise of familial love” conveys “an incitement to misrecognize the bad life as a good one” (Berlant 2011, 174). Her maternal gifts to Moymoy—some stolen toys at present or some remitted cash in the future—compels her son to depend on the same good life fantasies that the possibilities of mobility can provide. But such hopes that Mameng clings on to also pitilessly crumble towards the end of the film, without her knowing. In the climax of the film, on one fateful dawn, Ilyong and Junjun steal Nana Minyang’s bamboo coin bank and end up killing the old woman during their tugof-war over the money. Ilyong is injured and spends time in the fields until morning, while his younger brother attends to him, crying and grieving at the fact that they have killed an old woman for some spare coins. Ilyong reproaches and tells him, “She deserves it, she’s so greedy!” In another part of the village, we see Tiagong Kirat looking at the dead body of Moymoy, whom he accidentally shoots while the boy is stealing in his lot. Terrified of what he has done, he tries digging a grave but his lot’s ground is too hard for his shovel. He ends up putting Moymoy’s body inside one of the empty balikbayan boxes and tries to cross the river with the corpse. Out of panic, he gets caught up in a struggle over paddle with the boatman, leaving the box and the young boy’s body on the boat floating on its own.

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In the film’s closing frames, we see Mameng washing clothes in the river with an old woman who asks her when she is leaving for Hong Kong. Mameng answers with a smile: “Maybe next month! Good thing Madam Santos agreed to deduct my placement fee from my salary.” The two women are beaming with the news until they notice a boat floating with only an empty box in front of them. The film closes as the boat heads toward the screen, with Mameng looking baffled from afar. The film’s final moments visually perform a powerful critique of migration’s promises and the kind of sacrifices that are viciously demanded of people to be nearer and intimate to those good life prospects. The film challenges the moral worth of one’s fidelity and attachment to developmental prospects of overseas work by illustrating how holding on to it also compromises all the characters’ moral stances. After all, in the scenario of pervasive crisis, one feels compelled to do things in order to survive. But even in this morally unstable and highly contingent community, their survival still entails latching on to things that are both life-building and debilitating. For Mameng, she still clings on to such promises and is determined to leave to work overseas, even though she knows that she may just be repeating and perhaps even aggravate the “bad life” that she is all too familiar with, from how her son’s friends turn out, and with how her husband is behaving at present. But the smile that she shares with her old neighbor pictures hopefulness that things might just turn out for the good of her son. After all, there is always a chance that her fate could fare better and her sacrifices can at last provide her son the good life fantasy that she desperately holds on to. But there is no way of knowing how far her sacrifices can take Moymoy towards the scenario that she fantasizes about now that her only child is hidden lifeless in a box drifting away from her. This film’s final frame shifts the dominant image of OFW sacrifice into an almost literal portrayal of what the demands of the life-building prospects of development in migration sacrifices. Finally, the remaining protagonists–children have again survived without fully drowning, at least until the film ends. Whether the two minors would pay for their crime or not, the course of their daily habits in their situation tragedy may not change so much. Whatever happens, whether they stay, leave, or are put somewhere else, they would still have to perform their survival routines as they are still trapped within the harsh regimes of adjustment of a failed good life project of migration. Junjun would probably still hope for what could be the nearest good life scenario from their mother’s promise, while Ilyong has altogether let go of all of its possibilities, and would instead still make the most with what they have with their bad life. At any rate, the fate of these two children shows that the cruel thing about the ideals of sacrifice when faced with crisis ordinariness is that it still asks its subjects to do cruel things either to themselves or to others. As this film brutally demonstrates, some do this to survive while others to affirm that a good life is still coming their way. Whether one chooses to sustain or subvert it, the scripts of sacrifice in overseas Filipina work attaches its subjects, both the OFW and their loved ones, to a relationship that in the last instance is cruel.

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Excess Baggage Zig Dulay’s (2017) Bagahe opens inside a cramped airport toilet, with the camera acting as the point of view of an unknown and unseen passenger, who the audience senses only as a woman from what can be heard of her deep and panic breathing. Before it cuts to a homecoming scene where a migrant Filipina domestic worker, Mercy Agbunag (Angeli Bayani), joins her whole family preparing for a feast celebrating her return. But the party abruptly ends, as police investigators suddenly appear, whisking Mercy away for a short inquiry about the curious case of a newborn baby left in a bin inside an airplane toilet. From here, the film takes it audience to a meandering narrative that portrays the ways Mercy carries the excess baggage of a sacrificing mother who is also bagong bayani. Bagahe does not dwell on the backstory of Mercy abroad but only actively hints at her suffering from the many scenes portraying her dazed, confused, and pained expressions from her present isolation. Instead, it which closely tracks the cruel processes of bureaucracy, surveillance, and intrusion of public opinion— involving police forces, legal system, religious support, social welfare system, and mass and social media—for the crime of child abandonment. After being taken into custody and ruthlessly interrogated by police investigators, Mercy is subjected to an intrusive medical check-up to prove that she has recently birthed a child, before being handed over to a women’s shelter where she is routinely subjected to various moral regimes of bodily discipline through social welfare monitoring, psychological consultations, and even religious confessionals. In all of these scenes, Mercy denies the alleged crime, despite the various state agents exacting the truth from here. As their final attempt to force her into confession, the social welfare officers set her up with a meeting with a state senator who promises her that her secret will be protected while she advances her fight in a high-profile case. Her confession does not bring Mercy any reprieve or relief as promised, but has instead brought her further humiliation and ordeal as the female senator plays her case up on national TV to advance her political career. The film uses the slow and immersive cinema that details all of these various processes that continually strip Mercy of her dignity. In this way, this intrusive documentary gaze frames the audience to appropriate the same invasive prying that requires ways Mercy to take on the burden of sacrifice that a diasporic maternal figure like her is asked to carry, whether abroad or at home. This technique also demands its spectators to carry the weight of emotional heft that the protagonist is silently carrying, as it intimately focuses on Mercy’s face registering various emotions of bewilderment, guilt, and unknowable pain from her secret suffering. This intrusive camera focus, at one point, even gets to be replicated to mirror the various ways the state and the Philippine public monitor and morally adjudicate migrant women’s bodies. In one scene, the female police investigator looks at the video-feed from the CCTV installed inside the room where Mercy is held. Structured like the folding-in of mediatized screens into the form of endless mirroring in a mise-en-abyme, the audience sees in the silver screen the policewoman

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who observes through her computer screen her suspect, Mercy, who is also looking at her cellphone screen to talk to her family. Through the various levels of gaze, this scene performs the predatory infrastructure of surveillance on women’s bodies that watches over their body and sexuality to buttress the gendered script of their sacrifice. However, Mercy rejects any easy judgments under state surveillance as she does not easily fit into the categorization of either a criminal or a victim. After all, her silence can be interpreted as both an active denial and a muted trauma for the onlooking state agent. On the policewoman’s monitor, Mercy performs the rituals of a diasporic maternal figure. Just as she was accustomed to doing when she was away working abroad, she dutifully calls her son and her mother on her phone while also asking about the whereabouts of her husband while in police custody. She enacts the dutiful roles of the self-renunciating daughter, mother, and wife, capable of dispensing care despite the fact that she herself is in dire need of care and empathy. This is how the fiction of reproductive labor produces the diasporic mothering work as a “life lived in someone else’s hands,” contingent on the vitality and sustainability of her home and homeland (Alipio 2019). This performance of maternal martyrism does not make sense for the policewoman, as it does not cohere with the body of evidence: a disavowed newborn infant. That is why the policewoman grills Mercy into confessing a day after, only to be met by the latter’s pained silence: “How could you leave an innocent child in the garbage? Why aren’t you speaking? Are you ashamed? Ashamed of yourself? At other people? Towards your own child, you don’t feel any shame?” The centrality of the abandoned child is a crucial issue in determining her culpability or victimization. For the policewoman, the DNA results linking Mercy to the baby is a solid enough evidence of the crime. So much so that, even towards the end, when Mercy is forced to reveal her terrible secret that she was repeatedly raped and abused by her employer that resulted in her pregnancy, the female investigator still demands justice for Mercy’s “crime against God.” Despite her moral righteousness, her line of questioning demands a closer inspection as it exposes the many contradictions of sexual reproduction for Mercy, whose labor of social reproduction is exported by the state and interpellated as social heroism. Migrant women’s bodies and sexuality are closely monitored by both home and host countries as unregulated and undisciplined foreign women’s bodies represent anxieties of their mobility, an unwelcome incursion to the bios of the receiving state and a symbol of disgrace and failure for their origin countries. Pregnant migrant women or babies born out of place animate moral panic as they represent the failures of the social and economic ideals of migration (Constable 2015). In this way, pregnancy reveals the cruel optimism of migration. It represents the result of gendered vulnerability and precarious labor of migrant women, while also becoming the very object that attaches them further to life-building prospects of their mobility, committing them to further self-renunciation to atone for the shame of failing from the migration’s cluster of promises (Constable 2014).

Sacrifice and Social Heroism 121 For Mercy, the infant stands for the trauma of sexual abuse that she endured abroad and the shame attached to not living up to the promise of her mobility. However, she is still bound to carry this shame because the script of sacrifice for migrant motherhood obliges her to fulfill the melodrama of her maternal heroism. In this way, the infant born out of place represents the cruel consequences of the cluster of promises of her fate-playing abroad. It stands for her precarious labor but also the continuing cross she has to bear, in spite of her own suffering, as a migrant woman. The film painstakingly portrays how refusing to dispense maternal sacrifice by denying the bagong bayani narrative in withholding the reproductive labor, in Mercy’s act of leaving her newborn in the garbage, comes at a dear cost (MarteWood, 2019). This is why, towards the end of the film, the social welfare center that shelters her also forces her to reunite with the baby she has already disavowed. Already raped and abused abroad, Mercy’s private suffering becomes the subject of interrogation, moral lecture, and public gossip and speculation on motherhood and migrant sacrifice. In all of these ordeals, the audience only sees her silently suffering in the face of external forces that seem to be larger than her. However, the film does not completely strip her of agency as she is able to find a voice to indict her “advocates” of further burdening her. After Mercy witnesses how her case is turned into a media frenzy by the politician she trusted to advocate for her, and after learning that her social welfare workers are complicit to her further suffering, she realizes that she needs to speak up. When one of her case workers visits her to instruct her to eat and sign her case forms, she suddenly throws a tantrum, throwing the paper and shouting at her case worker: When I say I don’t want to, I really don’t want to. Everything you say, I follow. “Mercy do this at this hour, do it in that place. Mercy take off your clothes, bend over, turn around, spread your legs …” You make me do so many things, I’m so tired. So, when I say I don’t want to eat, I really don’t want to eat. I trusted you. You promised to help me. You said you understood me. This seemingly random outburst is important as it marks Mercy’s coming to terms with her voice and agency by finally telling the people surrounding her what she really wanted. This rant reveals her conviction against the script of sacrifice, detailing the things that she followed only to be further harmed and humiliated by the very people and state agents that are supposed to protect and advocate for her. It also signals a shift in the blame, as Mercy talks to the screen, questioning the value of her suffering and why she has to suffer more, she points at the people who promised to empathize and take care of her. In this speech, Mercy also talks back to the voyeuristic camera that performs the infrastructure of gaze that surveils, regulates, disciplines, and punishes her already suffering and traumatized body. Her resistance to do what is told and her talking back, at the last instance, are not passive acts of defiance but an indictment to the various mechanisms that burden her with the weight of gendered heroism and martyrdom that she is obliged to carry as an OFW woman.

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The closing moments of the film offer an ambivalent ending to Mercy’s tribulations. The protagonist is brought to the shelter where her abandoned baby is being taken care of. In this sequence, Mercy furtively cries as she holds her baby for the first time since abandoning her newborn in the airplane bin. While her social workers are busy celebrating the occasion with the press as their guests, she spends some time with her baby alone, silently caring and even breastfeeding her child once it starts crying. When two social workers take her infant back to the Children’s Center, she sits alone on a bench outside the ruckus of party that the women’s shelter organized for her. The last frame shows Mercy looking at the diaper bag, left beside her on the bench, as the sound of a departing plane ranges on in her mind, too loud that it spills non-diegetically in the background. The film concludes with this conflicting maternal image of Mercy, both a doting, self-renunciating mother and a deeply traumatized migrant woman who can no longer endure any more suffering. In this ambivalent ending, Mercy transgresses the simplistic projection of a diasporic maternal figure who is willing to sacrifice and suffer for her kin and the country by refusing to carry the excess baggage of bagong bayani. By representing how OFW are made to bear the cross of their country’s labor export program, Bagahe unpacks the burden of cruel optimism on migrant Filipina women who have to perform the scripts of sacrifice even if they are already suffering. Mercy, in the end, represents the ambivalences in Filipina domestic workers’ performance of reproductive labor that ultimately exposes their lives, given over to contingency and violence, where the morality and heroism of their sacrifice no longer hold out any promise.

Remittance Pittance Just like Mercy in Bagahe, Daly and Fendelman’s (2015) film portrays a mother who eschews and questions the scripts of sacrifice impinged upon migrant Filipinas. My discussion in the second chapter illustrates how Marie (Angela Barotia) in Remittance both maintains and manages to challenge the gendered moral ideology inscribed in her role as bagong bayani. The protagonist in this film, after all, both sacrifices for her loved ones and withholds something for herself, selflessly slaving away for others but also pursuing her own interests, desires, and life-building dreams. Marie, as a migrant woman, fulfills her duty as a diasporic maternal figure, rendering “transnational hyper-maternalism” in her mothering-away duties to her teenage daughter and two young sons because of the absence and neglect of her husband (Tungohan 2013). She does this even if she is burdened with her own job caring for her employers and their children in Singapore. She even secretly works as a bar maid at night just so she can send enough money for the increasing financial demands of her cheating husband. While this secret puts a stain on the moral veneer of her gendered migrant acts of sacrifice, her involvement in prostitution is the very condition that allows her to fulfill her economic heroism. More importantly, it also reveals how she creatively improvises her self-lending labor of social reproduction—from domestic work to sex work—in a highly contingent

Sacrifice and Social Heroism 123 and precarious transnational field. When she discovers her husband’s philandering ways, she resolutely declares her wish to annul the marriage over the phone. This is despite the fact that she herself harbors a romantic fling with a Sri Lankan construction worker while in Singapore, which she secretly continues even if she is already back in her hometown in the Philippines. By withholding her double life as a bar maid and her affair abroad from her family without guilt or shame, she satisfies while also subverts the script of diasporic maternal sacrifice. This is why her return from her tour of duty is also ambivalent in terms of judging it as a success or failure. In Singapore, Marie was able to find happiness in her work and in her personal life during her day-off. Aside from spending time with her boyfriend, Jamal, she also busies herself attending free financial literacy seminars and cosmetology courses offered by NGOs to migrant domestic workers on their day-off. She is able to keep money for herself, from the tips she earns as a bar maid and some portion of her salary, which is enough to fund her planned beauty salon business once she returns home. However, despite having a good working relationship with her bosses, she is forced not to renew her contract after learning that her daughter is pregnant. She feels so disheartened as part of the reason for her sacrifice is to ensure that her daughter earns a degree to advance in life. As she confides in her friend, Amie: “That stupid girl. Getting pregnant now. One semester and would have be done with her studies.” Her eventual return to and reunion with her family is then marked by success, with enough savings, a newly earned savviness for business start-up, and a newfound freedom from a cheating husband, but also tainted by the failures from her daughter’s pregnancy and her whole family breaking apart. Here, the cluster of good life fantasies of Marie’s mobility is both propped up and demolished, with the daughter frustrating her dreams for her but also propelling her to pursue her own business which is her dream for herself. The lifebuilding promises of migration allow migrant mothers like Marie to clutch on the cruel optimism of upward social mobility that promises to end, and also starts, migratory ventures. Migration for Marie is both enacting the cruel optimism of her sacrifice to attach to a good life fantasy through their children’s education and her own entrepreneurial ventures. In investing in her daughter’s education as a nurse, she both enacts the dream of a life better than hers while also inducing the fate same as hers as this investment also paves the way for her own daughter’s possible future as a transnational care giver or migrant nurse. In investing in a business venture in a fledging rural community, she inducts a dream of possibly staying on with her children, even though their village is so poor for her planned business to flourish. Both of these scenarios build up the promise of breaking the cycle of “lifetimes of disposability” through education and surplus entrepreneurship, while also setting this vicious cycle forward because of their highly contingent and precarious lives (Pratt, Johnston, and Banta 2017). Despite the grim chances, Marie assures her own daughter, who is deeply guilt-stricken from forcing her mother to return despite having a good break in Singapore. She tells her: “We’ll find a way.” As the camera focuses on her face, there is no false optimism in her expression, only a grim determination for

124 Sacrifice and Social Heroism survival. Even as she dispenses maternal care and continues to extend herself towards her children, Marie does not delude herself with quick and flashy dreams of success from her sacrifice and meager savings. In fact, there is a quality of cold pragmatism in how she deals with things. In one scene, she brings her daughter to a dingy, abandoned property where she plans on repurposing for her hair salon. Knowing how bad the shape of the place she bought for her dream parlor is, she declares to her bewildered daughter: “I’ll start with this space. If it goes well, I can expand. Or maybe open a branch in town.” This is followed by several scenes of Marie’s creative improvisation to start up her small business: talking to a friend who also owns a hair salon to buy old equipment for her own shop, in between attending to her very pregnant daughter and accompanying her in her medical check-ups. Exposing the downside of migration’s developmental optimism, Marie performs how migrant Filipina bodies are deployed for “feminization of survival,” where “whole households and whole communities are increasingly dependent on women” like her “for their sustenance and living on” (Sassen 2000, 506). She is determined to do this without her husband, Edwardo (Paolo O’Hara), who tries repeatedly to woo her back; probably because Edwardo is more than aware that his survival is also dependent on keeping his breadwinner–wife, whom he kept cheating on. In one scene, outside the churchyard after Sunday Mass, Marie’s husband tries to softly prod her to come back to him with their daughter so that the family will be together again in one roof. Marie immediately rebuffs Edwardo’s invitation. When he tries to belittle Marie by telling her she cannot do it herself and that she needs him, Marie sharply shots back: I need you? Didn’t I have to leave and get work because you didn’t have a job. And now you’re telling me that I need you? What can you do to help me? Even now, you still don’t have a job. She is so determined to be separated from her husband despite the mounting social pressure from her community, who gossip about her probable extra-marital affair abroad even though her husband’s infidelity is an open secret. Her own family also pressures her to hold on to her marriage. After the above confrontation, Marie’s mother deploys her own maternal martyrism to lecture her daughter about being a good mother by going back to her husband. After revealing to her that Marie’s father also used to have a mistress, her mother says that she stayed on in her marriage because of Marie and her siblings. After all, her mother says: “How can you teach your children about family, if you and your husband are living separately.” But Marie’s decision is final as she firmly replies to her mother: “Ma, that’s not fair. He’s a drunk and a womanizer. You know he wasn’t good to me.” It is perhaps this fantasy of good life with a family intact which became the first thing that Marie became disillusioned with. In fact, she realizes that her marriage was already broken long before she ventured forth to work as a domestic worker abroad. She senses her husband’s infidelity but only decides to annul her marriage once and for all after her own daughter witnesses Edwardo’s open cheating

Sacrifice and Social Heroism 125 while she is in Singapore. As she develops a newfound subjectivity abroad, she realizes her worth and decides how much of baggage her own husband is to her. She knows that her family’s disintegration is not the social cost of her mobility, and not her fault by a long mile. This newfound agency complicates the maternal sacrifice that Marie exhibits. She will do anything for her children, but she is not a martyr, so she is very much willing to let go of her husband. Marie’s emotional independence, however, is secured by the money she has been keeping for her own business. When she finds out that her husband had stolen it from her, she immediately confronts her husband: Marie: What did you do with my money? Edwardo: Your money? Your money? Where did you get your money? Why was it that when I asked for money for the house, the kids, the taxi, you said you didn’t have any money. Marie: That money … that was for Rosa and I. And you spent it on your mistress. Edwardo: Son of a bitch! What is it you want? How many times do I have to say sorry? You want to know where your money is? It’s right there, I spent it fixing your taxi. Isn’t that what you wanted? Marie: Who gave you the right to do that? Edwardo: Who? I did. I am your husband. Or did you forget that while you were in Singapore? Marie: You’re just my husband on paper … nothing more. It is important to see how Marie declares her own agency here, not just in declaring her independence but also claiming from her husband the money she earned from her own sweat. In this emotional exchange, Marie disentangles her own dreams for her own savings from her husband. The taxi, which she owns but her husband drives, is her husband’s dream and exercise of mobility. This is the same thing she funded that her husband used to cheat on her. The money she earned abroad is for her own stability, and for her pregnant daughter. This is the money that she secretly stashed away to build up her own aspirations and dreams that would allow her to live independently of her husband. The act of withholding remittances here is powerful because it redefines Marie’s maternal sacrifice that is different from the gendered martyrism and selflending that the nation-state encourages. Claiming the money as hers and not her husband’s right is important as it stamps her agency in reclaiming the fruit of her sacrifice and deciding who benefits from it. This withholding of one’s labor for oneself is not an act of selfishness but also an act of sacrifice, a pathway for her independence from a bad marriage and a possible way out for her and her children from the vicious cycle of poverty. Even though the money she kept from her husband is taken away from her, she still resists, subjecting herself to go back to the arms of an abusive husband and to the same regimen of domestic suffering. In this emotional confrontation, Edwardo raises his fist and threatens to punch her, but Marie stares at him dead in the eye. The fantasy of the good life with Edwardo is long gone, and the loss of all the

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fruits of her ventures abroad because of this failed promise only exposes the cruel optimism of her marriage. With all her savings stolen by her husband, Marie’s dream business does not materialize. Instead, towards the end of the film, the audience see her become a laundry woman, like Mameng in Balikbayan Box, with her supposed-to-be hair salon transformed into a makeshift laundromat. She is in a much dire place as compared to before yet Marie shows no bitterness. She makes do with what she has to provide for her daughter and her newborn granddaughter, extending herself again as a migrant mother. Yet, she is not a saint as she is willing to do it on her own, without the help of a husband who will bring her more suffering. Finally, even though her dreams were foiled, the film’s last moments portray her as somebody who does not stop dreaming of a way out of her and her children’s lifetimes of disposability. While delivering clothes, she spots a recruitment agency office, pauses for a little while to look at the ad outside. Then she goes on her way to delivering the laundry before the screen blacks out. This ambivalent ending opens up Marie’s present as “a space of abeyance” or “a soft impasse” which foretells several possible pathways for her (Berlant 2011, 230). Will she migrate again, hoping that this time it will be a success or will she just stay, hoping to earn enough to later on fund her dream business? Whatever it is, Marie’s life choices tell her not to pin her hopes on one bet. And even if she continues living the life for someone else, she already knows how to withhold for herself even as she sacrifices for others.

Sacrificial Lambs The films in this chapter map the ways in which the affective economy of sacrifice makes meanings out of the suffering of migrants and their families in their pursuit of the good life from overseas work. In looking at the ways that the discourse of sacrifice is credited and discredited in three independent OFW films,

Figure 4.1 Attachments to good life: Mameng looks at a returning Pinay DH in Balikbayan Box (left), Mercy looks at her baby’s diaper bag in Bagahe (middle), and Marie looks at a recruitment ad for domestic workers in Remittance (right). Photos courtesy of Mes de Guzman, Zig Dulay, ZMD Productions, Cinemalaya and Universal Harvester Inc., and Patrick Daly.

Sacrifice and Social Heroism 127 these cinematic representations bind and unbind the Philippine state’s claims on its migrant citizens through its call to sacrifice and the OFWs’ self-understanding of their stakes in their transnational labor participation. The nation-state’s rhetorical strategies of social heroism and its representations in these filmic texts illustrate the fraught relationship that the dominant script of OFW codifies, one where migrant Filipinas are compelled to offer themselves and slave away in the logic of global capital to economically relieve their families, which the nation-state partakes and latches on to promote its labor export policy. The three diasporic maternal characters in Balikbayan Box, Bagahe, and Remittance represent three different responses to the script of sacrifice inherent in bagong bayani. Mameng holds on to migration’s life-building promises even though her son has already met his ill-fate inside a balikbayan box even before she goes to her tour of duty. Mercy, faced with the punishment for refusing to follow the script, realizes the excess baggage of maternal sacrifice impinged on her by her home and homeland. Marie recognizes the limits of the promises of her migration and tries to survive on her own despite the landscapes of poverty in front of her. In their narratives as OFW women coming to terms with their lifetimes of disposability, we see how their precarious lives slowly unravel the cluster of promises peddled by their nation-state which benefits from their mobility. As these films expose their precarity, they also deconstruct and challenge the gendered moral script of what it means to suffer and find value in their suffering, as they try to survive despite the fantasy of a good life crumbling before their eyes. It is in this discursive strategy that the cruel optimism in the self-renunciation and martyrdom of overseas Filipina women for a better life becomes always already tethered to the nation-state’s labor export policy and nation-building project. In the same way the state’s call to sacrifice and social heroism for the nation is always caught up with migrant Filipinas’ self-understanding of the worth of their endeavors abroad for their family. The extent of the viciousness of this cycle can be seen in stories of migrant Filipinas’ deaths and the kinds of emotional responses the tragic fates of their sacrifices animate in moments of bereavement.

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Sacrifice and Social Heroism 129 Ileto, Reynaldo. 1985. “The Past in the Present Crisis.” In The Philippines after Marcos, edited by R. J. May and Francisco Nemenzo, 7–16. London: Croon Helm. Lucas, Daxim. 2019. “2018 Remittances Hit All-Time High.” Philippine Daily Inquirer. Accessed 30 April 2019. Marte-Wood, Alden Sajor. 2019. “Philippine Reproductive Fiction and Crises of Social Reproduction.” Post45 1. Accessed July 24, 2020. McKay, Deirdre. 2012. Global Filipinos: Migrants’ Lives in the Virtual Village. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Migrante International. 2013. “SUMA: Summing-Up of the State Migrants under Aquino (2010-June 2012).” Migrante International. Accessed 13 November 2013. Migrante International. 2015. “Summing-Up of the State Migrants under Aquino (2010– 2015).” Migrante International. Accessed 5 September 2015. National Statistics Office. 2014. Philippines: In Figures 2014. Quezon City: National Statistics Office. Pratt, Geraldine, Caleb Johnston, and Vanessa Banta. 2017. “Lifetimes of Disposability and Surplus Entrepreneurs in Bagong Barrio, Manila.” Antipode 49 (1):169–192. Rafael, Vicente. 2000. “Your Grief Is Our Gossip: Overseas Filipinos and Other Spectral Presences.” In White Love and other events in Filipino History, 204–228. Durham: Duke University Press. Rappler Social Media Team. 2015. “Isang bala ka lang: Netizens decry 'laglag-bala' Incident.” Rappler. Accessed March 20, 2018. Raymundo, Sarah. 2011. “In the Womb of the Global Economy: Anak and the Construction of Transnational Imaginaries.” Positions 19 (2):551–579. Republic of the Philippines Presidential Management Staff. 2002. The Aquino Management of the Presidency: Her People’s Emissary. Manila: The Office of the President. Rodriguez, Robyn. 2002. “Migrant Heroes: Nationalism, Citizenship, and the Politics of Filipino Migrant Labor.” Citizenship Studies 6 (3):341–356, 347. Sabillo, Kristine. 2014. “Aquino to public: Learn to Sacrifice.” Philippine Daily Inquirer. Accessed 17 April 2014. San Juan, Epifanio Jr. 2009. “Overseas Filipino Workers: The Making of Asia –Pacific Diaspora.” The Global South 3 (2):99–129, 118. Santos, Tina G. 2015. ‘Zero Remittance Day’ a Success, Says Migrant Workers Group.” Philippine Daily Inquirer. Sassen, Saskia. 2000. “Women’s Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival.” Journal of International Affairs 53 (2):503–524. Suarez, Harrod. 2017. The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Tadiar, Neferti. 2004. Fantasy Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Tan, Katrina Ross. 2018. “Spectacularization of Overseas Work in Filipino Commercial Films.” UPLB Journal 15 (1):152–161. Tolentino, Rolando. 2009. “Globalizing National Domesticity: Female Work and Representation in Contemporary Women’s Films.” Philippine Studies 57 (3):419–442, 433. Tungohan, Ethel. 2013. “Reconceptualizing Motherhood, Reconceptualizing Resistance.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 15 (1):39–57. Tusalem, Rollin F. 2018. “Do Migrant Remittances Improve the Quality of Government? Evidence from the Philippines.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 3 (4):336–366. Viray, Patricia Lourdes. 2015. “Customs Issues New Memo Banning Inspection of Balikbayan Boxes.” Philippine Star. Accessed May 28, 2017.

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Mourning and Movement

Mourning Matters On March 2015, news of the impending execution of Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipina domestic worker jailed in Indonesia, hit the Philippines. Mary Jane was convicted of smuggling drugs five years ago in Jogjakarta, a crime punishable by death in Indonesian laws. Amid the widespread outrage on Indonesia’s unforgiving stance against drug traffickers and the global outpouring of sympathy towards the foreigners in the death row, Mary Jane stood out among the line of high-profile drug felons sentenced to death by firing squad. Her story circulated in mass and social media, depicting her not as a drug mule but as a victim of human trafficking. In her testimony, she claims that out of her desperation to provide for her two small sons, she was lured by a promise to work in Jogjakarta by an illegal recruiter just to be duped into carrying a piece of luggage stashed with two kilos of heroin (Veloso 2015). Hers is a tale familiar to many Filipinos, a story of a sacrificing mother who has to leave home for her family only to suffer abuse from employers or deception from recruiters. In the months leading to her execution, activists and sympathizers in the Philippines poured out into the streets, protested their government’s negligence, and stayed through nights of vigil, lighting up candles, and offering prayers to save Mary Jane from death. Mary Jane’s case and the mass rallies that ensued reminded the country of a national event of mourning two decades ago. Flor Contemplacion, a Filipina domestic worker in Singapore, was convicted of murdering a fellow Filipina helper and the latter’s four-year-old ward and was eventually executed by hanging. Both Mary Jane and Flor were perceived to be virtuous victims rather than hardened criminals and their punishment was seen as unjust and too severe. Just like Flor, Mary Jane languished in a cell in Jogjakarta for years and her case has only caught public attention a few months before her execution. Just like Flor, her story has spurred public outcry among thousands of Filipinos, targeting not only the Indonesian justice system but also their own government’s neglect and apparent apathy to the suffering and sacrifices of their own modern-day heroes. While there have been uncanny resemblances to the 1995 execution of Flor, Mary Jane’s case took an interesting turn of events. Unlike Flor’s passing that has

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only spurred mourning on a national scale, the outpouring of grief for Mary Jane has exceeded national borders. It was not only Manila that mourned her imminent death, as Indonesian activists and sympathizers have flocked to the streets of Jakarta and flooded their President and Attorney General’s social media accounts with messages, tagged with #BiarkanHidup (“#LetLive”) to ask their own government to spare Mary Jane from the firing squad (Sorot Jogja Editors 2015). Even migrant Indonesian women joined their Filipina counterparts and led the protest rallies in front of Indonesian embassies abroad. Eni Lestari, a domestic worker and activist in Hong Kong, questioned Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s judiciousness by making an emotional statement: “How can our government appeal to save 279 Indonesians in the death row in the Middle East if we ourselves are executing innocent migrant workers?” (McBride 2015). Erwiana, an Indonesian helper who was maltreated and abused in Hong Kong a year ago, also spoke to the media in Jogjakarta and identified her own struggles with the Filipina maid, saying, “I could have been Mary Jane … Like me, Mary Jane was forced to become a migrant domestic worker because of poverty, because of a commitment to support her family, because she had no other choice. Like me, she suffered abuse. Like me, she almost died” (Sulistyaningsih 2015). Unlike what happened to Flor, however, the strong showing of support and sympathy for Mary Jane did not fall unto deaf ears. Mary Jane, handcuffed, blindfolded, and about to walk into the line of fire, was granted a temporary reprieve at the eleventh hour and was escorted out of execution fields. While Philippine President Aquino personally talked to Indonesian leader to request for clemency, President Widodo himself maintained that it was the Indonesian women activists who convinced him of keeping Mary Jane alive for the time being (Kwok 2015). Mary Jane’s deliverance from death was received with celebration in Jakarta. Human rights advocate and migrant activists have used her case to also advocate for other migrant women on death row and repeal death penalty in the country (Gutierrez 2016). As of this writing, Mary Jane still languishes in an Indonesian cell waiting for the resolution of her trial against her illegal recruiters in Manila that could potentially reverse her conviction (Galang 2017). Mary Jane’s story not only mirrors the cruel fate of Indonesian migrant women in death row abroad, most of whom are victims of abuse and human trafficking themselves. It also reveals the pitfalls of the country’s inhumane approach to drug trafficking in Indonesia. Mary Jane’s death sentence, and migrant women and activists’ mourning of her fate, has then shored up emotions that speak about how Indonesian women identify with the kind of suffering that Mary Jane went through and how her life and death matter in their own struggles at home and elsewhere in the world. It was a completely different story in Manila. There was a sea change of opinion from jubilation to hatred, after Mary Jane’s mother, Celia Veloso, made public her complaints against the Philippine government’s negligence that put her daughter’s life at risk. The mother’s blaming of the Aquino administration became the center of a Twitter storm, as the hashtag #SaveMaryJane was changed into #BitayinNaYan [#ExecuteHerNow] and #FiringSquadforCeliaVeloso. This sudden mood swing shows how the Filipino public lost sympathy for the Veloso

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family’s plight because of their apparent lack of utang na loob [debt of gratitude] to the former President Aquino’s efforts, who earlier claimed victory for having saved Mary Jane despite Widodo’s statements in local and international media (Inquirer Social Media 2015). The pity and compassion of many Filipinos, who previously grieved for Mary Jane’s fate and commiserated with her family’s distress, have been displaced by hostility shown in how they shamed the Veloso family’s lack of appreciation and in the ways they blamed Mary Jane’s own culpability for her dire situation. Some of the most vitriolic comments on social media even go as far as saying that she deserves to die because she is guilty anyway, either as a drug courier or as an illegal migrant. Consider, for example, a comment from an overseas Filipina worker (OFW) on a column calling Mary Jane the second Flor Contemplacion: “How can you compare a drug mule to a legal domestic helper (Flor) falsely accused of murder? Mary Jane is not an OFW and to imply that she is one is an insult to all OFWs like myself who legally pay our dues to the government and who never complain that we have to leave our families behind while we work abroad” (Pagaduan-Araullo 2015). This kind of retort, characterized by a deep disdain for alleged drug-related criminals and a blanket dismissal of their basic human rights, uncannily mirrors the disturbing mood in the Philippines a couple of months after, as the newly minted administration of Rodrigo Duterte advanced its bloody drug war among the country’s poor (Gavilan 2016). As the killings of suspected drug pushers and users surge, around 13,000 deaths as of the last count, human rights activists lament how majority of Filipinos are either silent or relieved about the piling bodies in the wake of the Duterte’s aggressive “Peace and Order” campaign against drugs (Sambalud 2017). As one Filipino writer abroad frustratingly opines: “Who will mourn for those killed who have been similarly judged guilty without due process?” (Francia 2016). The unsettling endorsement of Filipino netizens on “cardboard justice,” and their incapacity to mourn for the victims of extrajudicial killings because they deserve their fate, reflects the cruel responses towards Mary Jane and her family’s struggles. Mary Jane’s life, her death sentence, her narrow and temporary escape from mortality, and the contradictory responses among Filipino and Indonesian publics illustrate the complex politics of mourning in labor migration in both the Philippines and Indonesia. Her case and the reactions it generated show how death, or its possibility, among Southeast Asian migrant women can animate feelings that may intervene into how their struggles and social movements are understood in the public sphere. The unfolding of events surrounding her fate and the feedbacks it spawned show how grief functions as an affective economy of labor migration. Mourning produces emotions that may sometimes question the nationstate’s rhetoric of economic heroism by grieving over the loss of, or the possibility of losing, lives sacrificed in the name of home and homeland. In the face of death, mourning works to politicize the lives and feelings of migrant women like Mary Jane by calling forth the stakes of both of these countries’ wager for development through their own labor export policies. As Mary Jane’s case shows, mourning

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moves people to grieve as a community by binding them according to the collective pathos of national identity or shared suffering and sacrifice. The conflicting responses that Mary Jane’s case has sparked among Filipino and Indonesian publics, however, also speak about the political limits and radical possibilities of mourning in Southeast Asian migration. For many Filipinos, some of whom are OFWs themselves, mourning for migrant women like Mary Jane has to be premised on seeing her life worthy of public condolences. The nation has to see her virtues as an overseas Filipina within the gendered moral and national frames of labor migration. For pity and sympathy to turn into rage and reproach by implicating the nation-state for the kind of sacrifices these migrant women go through, the nation has to recognize her goodness and suffering. In short, Mary Jane has to prove that she deserves to be mourned. If she is morally suspect, disobeyed any rules, bypassed the proper channels of migration, or lacked gratitude, she is thus seen as deserving of her suffering and ill fate. However, the kind of responses that Indonesian women and sympathizers have for Mary Jane’s fate exceeds these national and gendered moral frames, as they identify with her mortality not on the basis of the morality of her sacrifice but because of her suffering and the kind of struggles she faces as a migrant woman. They see in her a way of speaking about their own fates, their own woes and sorrows in the field of transnational labor migration. And their mourning for her is not contained by questions of the legitimacy of sacrifice or her virtues as a woman and as a displaced citizen of her own country. They are not completely bounded by national limits and politics of what Mary Jane represents but instead imagined themselves outside these kinds of territorial identifications. I focus on this particular problem of mourning in the politics of overseas work in the Philippines and Indonesia to contend that the affective economy of mourning circulates contradictory discourses that maintain and challenge gendered moralistic and nationalistic assumptions on labor migration in Southeast Asia. First, I will discuss how mourning works as an affective economy by examining critical readings of mourning as a political affect that describes and prescribes the precarious lives of Southeast Asian migrant women. I explore how nationalist grief reproduces and circulates emotions of pity and sympathy or rage and reproach that politicize their deaths as indictment to the nation-state that deploys them while also stripping them of voice and agency by representing them as powerless victims. To this end, I look at how mourning can be a political resource by looking at suffering and vulnerability as an impulse for radical identification in Southeast Asian literature on women’s migration. I track the limits and possibilities that the work of mourning performs in contemporary Filipino and Indonesian novels of Jose Dalisay’s (2008) Soledad’s Sister, and Rida Fitria’s (2010) Sebongkah Tanah Retak [A Lump of Cracked Soil], respectively. These two texts are different in genre and style: the Filipino novel is a faux-detective story where a woman, aided by a cop, follows the trail of her migrant sister’s mysterious death abroad; and the Indonesian novel is a novel inspiratif [inspirational novel] that, instead of a didactic or moralistic tale,

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presents a rousing story of a migrant women’s political awakening. Despite these differences, they portray the deaths of Filipina and Indonesian domestic worker characters differently, while also illustrating how such representations lead to very different responses to these deaths. The two novels demonstrate the limits and the possibilities of mourning for migrant women’s lives within and beyond the territorializing gendered moral and national discourses of migration. Dalisay’s novel depicts how grief is suspended and effaced when an OFW transgresses the gendered moral codes of being a migrant woman. By portraying how Soledad’s struggles are silenced and how her remains are completely lost in the narrative, Dalisay illustrates how these discourses disallow grieving over the deaths of overseas Filipinas because their moral transgressions make their lives unworthy of bereavement. Soledad’s demise is devoid of mourning because her life of suffering is seen as her penance for her past indiscretions, nullifying her sacrifice for her sister and son, and making her just one of the casualties of overseas work’s fateplaying. The novel rehearses this by depicting how Soledad’s life literally disappears with her name and identity substituted, the cause of her death kept secret, and her body a subject of endless search by her sister throughout the novel. Fitria’s novel, on the other hand, opens up a completely different way of thinking about mourning by portraying how an Indonesian domestic worker, Ijah, who is morally suspect herself, begins to be unbounded by gendered moral and national expectations as a migrant woman. This allows her to see her fellow migrant women’s struggles as a point of identification and a source of grief. The novel depicts the protagonist’s political transformation, from someone who looks at her sorry fate as something she deserves because of her lack of virtues, to someone who identifies with other women’s struggles as their shared fate in their precarious border-crossing. This transformation can be seen in how she articulates her grief over a fellow domestic worker who she barely knew, but whose struggles she identifies as her own, and whose death she took as her own cause to advance their shared claims on human rights and worker’s dignity.

The Work of Mourning One of the most prominent cases where the death of an overseas Filipina has summoned a massive crowd into mourning to expose the cruel politics of the country’s labor export policy was the hanging of Flor Contemplacion. Flor was a Filipina domestic worker in Singapore who was arrested in May 1991 and confessed for the murder of Delia Maga, another Filipina maid, and the latter’s four-year-old ward, Nicholas Huang. Although she retracted her earlier admission saying she confessed under duress, she was sentenced to death after the trial judge found her previous testimony credible. She languished in jail for more than four years with little to no support from the Philippine embassy in Singapore. The Philippine government only took an active interest in her case in the weeks leading to her execution, as a reaction to the growing public uproar in the country. After rejecting two new testimonies supporting Flor’s innocence, and refusing to

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grant the then Philippine President Fidel Ramos’ repeated pleas for clemency, the Singaporean government pushed through with Flor’s hanging on March 17, 1995. Her death drew thousands of Filipinos out to the streets and brought the whole nation into mourning. Hordes of people protested in front of the Singaporean embassy in the Philippines, some of them even went as far as burning Singapore’s flag. Thousands more joined in a series of mass demonstrations decrying the Philippine state’s criminal negligence of not only Flor but also the millions of OFWs she represented. Flor has become an icon for the plight of OFWs who have been for years toiling and suffering silently from discrimination and abuse in foreign countries of their employ. She was elevated into a national symbol as her funeral wake pulsated with overflowing grief, pity, anger, and indignation from the droves of Filipinos who attended her body being laid to rest. This event has been a crucial cornerstone in the discussions on Philippine labor migration, particularly on how it bared and contested the country’s continued reliance but at the same time abandonment of its own people abroad. Vicente Rafael (2000) explains that the surge of nationalism towards Flor’s remains came from how her narrative of sacrifice, as a bagong bayani, marshal the “power of pity” and “moral certainty” that is reminiscent of the suffering of the country’s many martyr-heroes (212). Her innocence tied to her agony as OFW endows her with the moral ascendancy of a national hero, even in and precisely because of her submission to her fate in the hands of foreign powers. “That Contemplacion was a woman, and that OFWs by virtues of their subordinate position to foreign employers come across as feminized within nation-state formations further reinforced the sense of public pity and outrage” (214). Flor was raised into the stature of a national hero because she is a good mother who has suffered for her family and her country as her fate in the Singaporean gallows became the extent of what she can and has offered for her home and homeland. Through grief, her body was welcomed and reclaimed by her homeland and her fate becomes the country’s story in the time of uneven globalization and aggressive warm-body exportation. Flor’s ultimate sacrifice became another kind of patriotism that served to contradict and challenge the very rhetoric of bagong bayani that the government uses to buttress its labor export policy, and her death was able to speak for, and in behalf of, the nation in mourning. Pity becomes the uniting affect in the nation’s encounter of the marks of ordeal and torment on Flor’s remains. Her body, seen in light of deference and submission to external forces, has become the testament to the pitfalls of sacrificing for the country, and it has drawn in pity and sympathy from onlookers. As a way of giving voice to the dead, pity engenders outrage and indignation through the mourners’ act of looking and speaking on behalf of the dead. “Expressing pity for the dead is heeding their call; but it also entails speaking in the dead’s place, articulating the pain that is traced on their remains” (220). The pity of the Filipino public who have witnessed Flor’s corpse was thus transformed into anger articulated through reproach and blaming. In this public display of resentment and finger-pointing, the image of Flor’s sacrifice corporealized in her mutilated body

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becomes a way of claiming accountability from the nation-state and its systematic overseas deployment. Pheng Cheah (2006) emphasizes the power of blaming and reproach in the act of mourning over Flor in bringing forward important reforms in the country’s previously inhumane approach of aggressive warm-body exportation of women. Focusing on issues of human rights of migrant domestic workers in Singapore, this mourning inspires a social movement that attempts to humanize the largely dehumanized field of overseas work. Because Flor has become a symbol for both the dehumanized migrant labor force and the victimized nation in the global process, mourning for her has collectively inspirited the Filipino community with the power of reproach or finger-pointing: “As the Filipino people became metamorphosed into a collective subject that demanded accountability from and sought to inspirit the state, there was a scramble both within the state administration and in society to deflect responsibility by pointing a finger at the inhumanity of other parties” (236). Mourning is a humanizing pedagogy since it not only reveals to the living their deplorable conditions but also teaches them to blame the institutions of power that condition those suffering. The accusatory gesture instigated by the grieving public has pushed the Philippine government to rethink policies and diplomatic relations with countries where they deploy Filipina women, which has also rehumanized receiving states such as Singapore, which has since vigorously prosecuted cases of abuse and violence of foreign domestic workers. It is important to note that reproach here is not only directed to Singapore. The public mourning of Filipinos has more importantly placed blame on and implicated their own government for its criminal negligence. Flor’s case did not just awaken national sentiment but also pushed for concrete reforms for the protection of many migrant women: the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995 on the local scale and the Magna Carta for Domestic Workers from the International Labour Organization’s Convention for Decent Work for Domestic Workers at the global stage. This humanizing effect of mourning is also a nationalizing moment because it binds the Filipinos, overseas and at home, to rally around an appeal to humanize the labor that their community offers to the world. “Such humanizing pedagogy is also a popular-nationalist counter-Bildung that asserts the humanity of ordinary Filipinos against the directives of official Bildung, especially its tactics of development through labor exportation” (236). In this grief work, Flor’s sacrifice became not just the consequence of the demands of the Philippine state to suffer for the sake of family and nation. It has become a way of claiming back what the state should offer and provide to its OFWs in return. In both Rafael’s and Cheah’s accounts, the act of mourning becomes an affective economy that appropriates Flor’s life of misery and sacrifice and projects her death as a nation’s collective loss, the fatal casualty in the Philippine state’s ventures for development via labor migration. However, both of them also see the limits and the problems of this kind of mourning as a resource for political action and social change. For Cheah, this type of grief work is inherently inadequate because any attempt to humanize Flor and the migrant women workers will only

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fall within the terms of global capitalism and development, which is fundamentally inhumane. For example, blaming the Philippine state for abandoning Flor in the hands of foreign powers is also demanding the state to deepen and expand their management on migrant women workers’ lives (Cheah 2006, 237). This can be problematic as those who fall out of the purview of this intensified biopolitics, like those who cross borders illegally or those who do not follow government regulations, will be deemed undeserving of protection and aid in times of distress. This is why women like Mary Jane cannot blame the government because, as many other OFWs argue, she chose to be trafficked in the first place. Rafael, on the other hand, sees that the kind of politics that nationalist grief work espouses is constrained into appeasing the excess of emotions of pity and rage; thus its results are meant to contain these feelings that mourning produces more than offer long-term solutions. Flor’s death brought very little political changes such as brief diplomatic spats between Singapore and the Philippines and little reforms for OFWs’ protection. This was so because “both Singaporean and Philippine government seemed inadequate referents of nationalist rage,” and Flor’s death is clearly a consequence of a much deeper and systematic dilemma of uneven global flow of capital and bodies (Rafael 2000, 222). Both of these accounts point to how the politics of mourning is territorialized by nation-state discourses on migration. Rafael shows how this grief work’s effects are bounded and negotiated within and between nation-states, and the act of blaming and reproaching the implicated governments can only assuage the excess of identification to Flor’s body by consoling the living through limited gestures of reforms. This is also why the demand for the protection and safeguarding of human rights in the act of grieving over overseas Filipinas’ lives, as Cheah claims, can only produce results that revolve around intensifying the nation-state’s claim and control towards women like Flor. While both of these readings are accurate, I argue that the problem in the political impulse of this kind of mourning also resides in how Flor’s death became grievable in their accounts through national self-recognition. The very discourses that made Flor’s death a legible and legitimate source of national grief are also what contain the political possibilities of mourning. Judith Butler (2006) talks about how public mourning and obituary can become not just “an act of nation-building” but also a means of marking which lives are worth grieving and which lives are not: “Obituary can be the means by which life becomes, or fails to become, a publicly grievable life, an icon for national selfrecognition, the means by which life becomes noteworthy” (34). For example, while the public mourning after the 9/11 attacks has allowed American citizens to grieve over their loss, that grieving would never account for the lives outside the frames of American self-recognition: “If 200,000 Iraqi children were killed during the Gulf War and its aftermath, do we have an image, a frame for any of those lives, singly or collectively? Is there a story we might find about those deaths in the media? Are there names attached to those children?” (34). The predominant practice of mourning is bounded by moral and national discourses that establish what lives are marked grievable and noteworthy.

138 Mourning and Movement For those deaths that exist outside these frames, their narratives are illegible and their lives become impossible to grieve: “It is not just that a death is poorly marked, but that it is unmarkable. Such a death vanishes, not into explicit discourse, but in the ellipses by which the public discourse proceeds” (35). In this territorializing gesture of nationalist mourning that Flor’s life only becomes markable and remarkable because she was portrayed as a bagong bayani. This iconization of her suffering into a narrative of sacrifice makes her worthy of public mourning; that she has died even though she followed the dominant script of a selfless mother and law-abiding overseas worker for her family and nation, makes her not only deserving of pity but a source of indignation from the Filipino community in grief. In making Flor’s life grievable within the frames of national self-recognition, her suffering can only be understood as a moral basis to reproach the Philippine state. While this is important, it also effaces the complex structures and conditions of labor migration that produces Flor’s grievability. Her narrative of suffering only exists to legitimize her sacrifice and make her worthy of public mourning. By containing Flor’s life within the narrative of national sacrifice, public mourning does not just misrecognize suffering as a naturalized and necessary experience of labor migration, instead of being symptoms of uneven global structures that conditioned her vulnerability as an overseas Filipina worker. It also reinforces problematic discourses that delineate which migrant women’s lives matter and which ones’ deaths deserve to be mourned by the nation. This mourning that also acts as nation-building is framed by gendered moral discourses; to be mourned, she must follow and perform the script of a self-renunciating woman for her family and for her country. Those whose mobility and morality do not subscribe to these frames of national self-recognition, like Mary Jane, become unmarkable and ungrievable. In reconsidering other forms of grief work, Butler proposes an alternative way of thinking about mourning that lies outside the frames of public self-recognition but on one’s fundamental bind to another through vulnerability. Developing her thesis on precariousness and precarity, she argues that mourning exposes us to our own dispossession and exposure to others. Grief reveals how we are “given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in the lives that are not our own” (28). She conceptualizes how grief dislocates one’s subjectivity: because to grieve is to “be beside oneself” with rage or pity or passion, and as such makes the subject vulnerable to the other in a constitutive relationality or in that “primary tie, or primary way in which we are, as bodies, outside ourselves and for one another” (27). From this, Butler puts forward a different kind of politics of mourning: one that “tarries with grief” or “maintains grief as part of the framework of politics”: “To grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics, is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself” (30). This movement towards a form of mourning that identifies with suffering more than sacrifice is important in radicalizing narratives of grief in Southeast Asian migration. The life and fate of those who do not fit this bill of a virtuous migrant woman, like Soledad in Jose Dalisay’s novel, Soledad’s Sister, are rendered

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unmarked and ungrievable, because their stories are common and ubiquitous in the continued warm-body exportation of women in the Philippines. Ijah, the protagonist of Rida Fitria’s A Lump of Cracked Soil, disrupts this idea of public mourning through national self-recognition by showing how grief can also come from identifying with a stranger’s suffering, and seeing in others’ death her own vulnerability and precarity. Resisting the gendered moral and national frames that interprets the death of a migrant woman, this Indonesian novel demonstrates how tarrying with grief and identifying with other people’s struggles can lead to a more transformative politics of mourning in migrant women workers’ narratives.

Suspending Sorrow Jose Dalisay’s (2008) Soledad’s Sister is important because it is one of the very few mainstream novels that write on the subject of labor migration and its present effects in the country. The novel, shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007, revolves around Aurora, or Rory, claiming the remains of her sister, Soledad or Soli, who is a domestic worker in Hong Kong, then in Saudi Arabia. The book is a faux-detective novel, setting up a quest for the protagonist to try to make sense of the mystery surrounding the death of the protagonist’s sister by enlisting the help of Walter, a police detective. But the story ends without accomplishing this pursuit because the traces and clues that point to what really happened to Soli remain unsolved as her corpse stays missing until the novel’s closing pages. The novel begins with a wooden casket arriving in Manila International Airport with only a manifest marked with the name “Aurora Cabahug.” A chapter through the novel, with the box unclaimed and languishing for days inside the airport’s warehouse, a telegram in search of the nearest kin reaches Walter, a policeman stationed in the small town of Paez miles away from the airport. The bearer of the name turns out to be very much alive, belting her heart out as a singer at a local karaoke bar. The woman in the box is her sister Soli, who used Rory’s name to get to Saudi Arabia to work as a domestic worker because her passport is blacklisted when she is in Hong Kong. From here starts the main narrative arc of the novel. The dead body conjoins the fate of the two characters, Rory and Walter, in a long and lonely trip to claim the wrong Aurora Cabahug and finally grieve for her properly. In their travel from the countryside to Manila, the readers get to know Rory, the surviving sister, who is claiming the remains of a sister who has long drifted away from her, and Walter, who is returning to the memories of the city that brought him so many misfortunes. In between their almost uneventful journey are the interludes and side trips to Hong Kong and Jeddah, where Soli’s stories of flight and the mystery surrounding her death slowly unravel. Soledad’s Sister displaces grief in the face of a migrant woman’s death. The novel’s style of “deceptive simplicity” and “breathless restraint” is a fresh take on OFW stories that are usually saturated with sentimental storytelling in popular movies (Lacuesta 2013). However, the use of restraint here is more than just a literary device to portray OFW heroines in a new light. It also works in suspending

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grief and silencing Soli’s life of suffering, which can be seen in how the novel evades confronting her dead body through this literary strategy. The moment tears are about to burst in the narrative, a plot twist is set up to dislodge them, dispersing sorrow and rendering Rory’s mourning mute and deferred until the last pages. It is through this conscious deferral of bereavement that this novel offers a way of imagining how to deal with the loss of this kind of itinerants whose lives are not as virtuous and exemplary to worth a public mourning. Mourning is repressed in this novel through the theme of double displacement—in dislocating bodies and identities of the already uprooted subjects of labor migration. Soledad has used her sister’s identity to secure another passport because hers was blacklisted from something that she did as a domestic worker back in Hong Kong. This is why it took so long before her body was claimed because she used her closest remaining kin’s name. Moreover, as another instance of cruel body switching, the vice consul in Riyadh unintentionally swapped the papers of Soledad with that of the scheduled homebound corpse of another dead OFW. It is because of how these corpses and identities become interchangeable, either due to bureaucratic ineptitude or due to the scheming or illegal tactics of migrants themselves, which makes those who were left behind, like Rory, unable to properly grieve for their losses. The novel thus shows how impossible it is for Rory and others to mourn if they cannot even identify their loved ones’ remains, much more so than relating to the suffering of these itinerant bodies. In the novel’s opening chapter, the author describes how these unfortunate cases of misidentification affect how families become unable to mourn for their dead by focusing on the security officer, Al Viduya, in charge of the airport cargo warehouse. Al is used to ostentatious display of grief from family members claiming their loved ones’ coffin. The regularity of this kind of encounter with death has allowed him to overcome grief, as the officer in charge of signing the release of the hearses and bringing the families to their beloved’s remains on a daily basis. His ideas on the reality of death go against the clichés of cinematic mourning: It was strange how outside of the movies, grief could be so particular … And, Al was convinced, you could grieve only so much. He had lost his only brother to tuberculosis five years earlier; he shed tears at the hospital for three minutes, then took a jeepney back to work. (8–9) The everydayness of death for Al has made him immune even to his own loss and this imperviousness to melodrama has made him detached and efficient in his job. By imposing the reality of death and the refusal to console, he is helping the family move on: “They usually whined when he said ‘the body’ but he believed that it did them good to come to terms with the terrible facts, the better to prompt their faith in another life” (10). Death becomes routinary in the ways these casualties become both unmarkable and unremarkable. The arbitrariness of death can be seen in how the novel illustrates not just the replaceability of bodies and identities but also the uneventfulness of their obituaries.

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The family that Al receives, for example, only learns about their father’s demise when it was mentioned in passing in a radio program. This encounter not only sets up the fact of the ordinariness of OFW deaths but also reinforces how their deaths’ mundanity has rendered the act of bereavement almost impossible. As it is, there are around 600 OFW deaths a year or three to five coffins landing everyday on Manila International Airport (Migrante International 2013). Most of these cases are classified as deaths due to mysterious and unknown circumstances. As the novel also describes in the first chapter, it is impossible for someone like Al, and the other diplomats, attaches, clerks, and pen pushers that facilitate these homecomings, to mourn each and every one of them together with their hysterical families, much more feel sorrow for their mysterious casualties. It was worse for Soledad, as the only person who can grieve for her could not even bring herself to tears. In the novel, the readers are given enough details on how Rory is unable to properly cry for her loss, from the moment she heard the news to the time they pick up the hearse, and even after traveling back with her dead sister’s remains in a van for a few hours. The narrator’s description of her reaction to the news Walter delivered is worth noting: The news he bore had stunned her, could have driven her to her knees, but that was still her territory and she had barely come down from her performance, and while Mama Merry had opened her arms wide to receive her grief, Rory has simply hung her head, touched a hand to her brow and said, “Oh my sister, oh my sister” before turning aside and stepping briskly into the shadows—as if she would turn again and break into an unbidden, heartrending encore. (137) The narrative goes on to describe Rory’s self-consciousness and how it prevents her from acting out several clichés of mourning. While her sister’s death all the more gives Rory the license to break out into a heart-wrenching song of sorrow for the spectators in the karaoke bar, she seems incapable of carrying out an outburst. Even when they are picking up Soli’s body at the airport warehouse, she is made aware of others’ expectation of her to perform this spectacle of bereavement: The thought crossed her mind: that’s my sister in there, and she’s very, very dead … [She] slid into her seat, still tracked by what she felt were manyfingered eyes. Then she thought she understood what they had been looking for: they wanted to see her cry, to throw herself on the coffin, to demand that the boards be ripped off with a crowbar so that she could see her dear sister’s blackened face and cringe in horror before wailing and thrashing about like a stuck pig. (121) Tears would only come to Rory much later, when she and Walter are eating at the stop over on their way back to Paez. However, this is not triggered by Soli’s death

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or even her memory of her sister. She weeps because she realizes that she is now alone. When Walter asks her where her other family members are: A flood of hot tears welled quickly in her eyes, and Rory realized how those wet emotions had been gathering all day just millimeters below the surface of her skin, waiting to be summoned by the slightest provocation or excuse. She felt a sudden need to run out to the van and touch the crate, to reconnect with Soledad in some tangible and physical way; it was the show that she had denied those roughshod men just a while back but no longer could. (136–137) But the awaited moment of grief does not happen. As soon as she steps out of the restaurant, she finds out that the service van where her dead sister was in has been robbed. What Rory has been summoning up all this time, the drama of an outburst, has been erased by this clever cruel plot development. By the time Rory is able to cry, it is no longer about her sister or her general loss, but because of the ludicrousness of the situation she finds herself in. And Soli’s body by this time would be sinking deep in a river somewhere in the city. Until the book’s end, Rory is able to neither cry nor grieve for her sister. This deferral of mourning is not just because of these series of unfortunate events in the narrative. As the reader gets through the novel, they realize that Rory’s incapacity to mourn for Soli comes from the fact that she has never really knew her sister. “Soli had, if truth be told, always been more of a maid than a sister to her [Rory]” (107). The only thing that she knows about her sister is her natural capacity for care and domestic duties, as she shares to Walter why her sister kept on going abroad to work: “It was all she did—take care of people—although she was very smart, certainly more than I was, except that she didn’t go to school, and I did” (74). To understand Rory’s incapacity to cry for her sister, one must also know why Soli’s life is ungrievable in the first place. The novel not only sets up situations that refuse to melodramatize death and its victim but also portrays Soledad as a woman whose death would never have summoned mourning or would move people, much less her younger sister, to weep for her wasted life. In the chapters that reveal Soli’s life abroad, the readers will get to know that it was not just her fate that is unexemplary but also her morality. Aside from faking her passport just to be able to get out of the country, Soli is morally suspect and the choices that she made in her transnational passages made her somehow deserving of her fate. In the novel, Soledad is portrayed so much unlike the typical cinematic OFW heroines who hold exemplary moral virtues. Yet interestingly, her character is still depicted against ideas of morality as an overseas Filipina, not out of her sacrifice and martyrdom but from her guilt and penance. Through flashbacks, the readers learn about the tragic fire that killed the sisters’ parents and little brother, an event for which Soli has silently blamed herself after she forgot to turn off their gas stove. This remorse is all the more aggravated by the fact that Soli was left

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unscathed by the fire, while Rory, who saved and dragged her out of it, suffered a minor burn: Soli wished, in an anguished prayer beyond words, that she had suffered more, that she had died instead of them and so would not have had to account for every fraction of every second that it took for her parents and her brother to burn and blacken beyond recognition … “Why not me?” she would cry for years afterwards, “Why not me?,” injuring herself in so many ways, seeking something more palpably painful than the throbbing within her chest. (95) This overpowering guilt negates any virtue that can be accorded to Soli’s suffering or even her fated death. But what is more interesting is how this self-reproach conditions not only her capacity for suffering but also her desire to suffer more in forms that are corporeal and violent. It is as if her tragic past that animates her deep-seated guilt is a form of conditioning for further suffering, driven by sadomasochistic desire for pain, discipline, and submission. Her profound guilt is disciplinary as it orders her life of piety and devotion. As Rory observes, Soli leads a “compulsive and crippling piety”: “She never complained and took everything that came her way … she was happy and content with her uncomplicated life, spent in service and daily rosaries and litanies and sundry devotions to saints” (104-5). Although both sisters share the tragedy of surviving, only Soli would accept its penance. She would stop schooling to let Rory continue hers, and she would lead an obscure life dedicated to household chores and looking after the sister who both saved her from the fire and constantly reminded her of her guilt. It is this same moral logic of guilt that renders Soledad’s motivation to suffer further by leaving as a domestic worker. Her labor then is a way to exact forgiveness for herself, which renders her suffering not as a sacrifice but as a lifelong penance that she has to pay, not out of virtue but out of sin: It was God, after all, who had driven her to Hong Kong, on the promise that two years of uncomplaining labor would suffice to pay for all her sins up to that point, if she saved all she could and sent the money home, four-fifths of it to her sister and the rest to the village priest, Fr. Kureishi, the same man who had seen their parents’ gathered ashes to their graves and who had given her his private blessing on her departure. (99) The novel also depicts maltreatment of a domestic worker in the household, but only to highlight Soli’s piety, and even efficiency, in taking in suffering as a way of her atonement. In Hong Kong, she was hired to take care of an elderly whom she calls Nai Nai. Part of her work efficiency is being able to take in abuse from her ward: “Nai Nai mewled and hissed when they left, and then she took her anger out on Soledad—who, as ever, merely wiped the spittle off her arm and hummed

144 Mourning and Movement her songs of praise while she tugged at Nai Nai’s soiled sheets and blankets” (108). Although Soli was not caught up in an extremely abusive working environment, the novel describes how she was dehumanized precisely because of the efficiency of labor she developed out of her bodily conditioning for suffering. Even Hedison, her employers’ only son, perceived Soli’s strangeness as part of her docility as their maid: “Sometimes Hedison imagined that there was something wicked or even demonic in the brown woman’s distracted look, in the soldierly efficiency with which she cleaned up after Nai Nai” (110). It was, of course, Hedison’s strange fascination to this foreigner in his apartment that fatally sets up Soledad’s surprising transgression. More than her proclivity to suffer because of guilt, what makes Soledad morally ineligible as an OFW heroine is her openness towards, and even anticipation of, Hedison’s sexual advances. These kinds of sexual attacks are pervasive because there are conditions, like the mandatory live-in arrangement, that make female domestic workers vulnerable to abuse from their employers. Interestingly, these very same conditions stirred Soledad’s ambivalent freedom from her lifelong guilt. While Soli, who has no previous sexual or romantic relations, does not exactly lure Hedison into sex, she certainly finds religious justification for the act: Soledad listened, and began hearing other things—her own heartbeat, the rush of blood to her extremities, Hedison’s pacing, the exhalation of the living room sofa as he sat on it, and again his rising and pacing, his lingering at her door. She could hear the questions in his mind, the half-spoken answers in hers: “I saw you in your room. I saw what you do in there. I think about it sometimes, but I don’t know what to think about it … God makes everything happen, that I’m sure of …” She lay in her bunk, her coarse breath drawing itself out like a thread on the point of breaking. When the door opened and she could feel his feline presence at her feet, she inhaled just sharply enough for him to know that she knew he was there, without sending him away. (112–113) Soli would later reveal that she more than welcomed Hedison, and for the first time, she feels liberated from guilt: “Years later, Soledad would remember that moment, and she would marvel at her boldness and the complete absence of guilt on her part. Hedison could not look at her for days afterwards, but Soledad herself had felt released from an inner bondage” (153). This sexual tryst with Hedison would repeat in the novel. Soli gets pregnant and she will be sent home because of her promiscuity. Soli returns to Paez with a blacklisted passport and a baby in her womb as consequences of her daring act of freedom from guilt. After delivering her baby, she tries to get out of the country again using Rory’s identity to work in Saudi Arabia. She departs, leaving her baby with Rory. She dies mysteriously of drowning in Jeddah after going out with a fellow foreign maid she works with inside a Saudi prince’s household. The novel completely leaves out the details of what really happened with Soli after she went out of their employers’ house to

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meet men in the park during their day-off. What it shows though is Soli’s thought at the prospect of going out of her employer’s house: A hot flush rose to Soledad’s cheeks. Of course she had thought of men, and sometimes the memory of the boy Hedison’s palms on her haunches stirred her in her half-sleep, but that episode has served its purpose … But then again, like the sand that periodically rose into a raging cloud above the desert heat, Soledad’s vagrant longings lifted her up above that corner, that room, that walled compound. (190) And this desire to sin again, or commit the same transgression as she did with Hedison, is what would lead her to her death. In the novel, her death is classified as a mystery. In Jeddah, as the witnesses suggest, she could have been a runaway maid fleeing from her employer to flirt with strangers, or perhaps a prostitute on the side, or a rape victim. In any case, the talk about her death is concluded with a note that she should have never been out in the public anyway. It is in the mystery of what she was doing there in the first place, more than the fact of murder and foul play, that renders her death regrettable, but also probably well-deserved and not worth pursuing for the authorities. It is in this unknowability of what really happened that all the more leaves doubt to Soledad’s morality, making her death in the end ungrievable in Manila, as it was in Jeddah. Obviously, she had suffered continuously until her death but because her suffering is seen as not just her reparation for her past sins but also a fate she deserves for the sins she repeatedly commits, her miseries cannot be recognized as something worthy to be mourned. Her suffering in the end is effaced in the novel. Instead of virtue, her labors are a plea for forgiveness and her death is destined by her moral lapses, of slipping back to sinning all over again. It seems finally that only death can redeem her from her severe self-atonement, which reminds the readers of her fervent wish to suffer earlier on in her life. But even her death could not be redeemed by any form of grieving. We can see this dissolution of proof of suffering even in Soledad’s corpse. The marks sustained by her body, which are a testament to her suffering before dying in water, are effectively erased “by the damage that seawater, sun, and scores of little fish teeth had done to this woman’s face. If anyone had known her, they would not know her now. If she had a name, they would need to find it somewhere else” (192). And the little identifying marks that were left on Soli’s body will completely disintegrate and disappear with water in her second drowning, when the car thief accidentally drives the van out of the bridge. “In the agitated water of a creek in the northern Pasig, the bubbles began to form around the sunken wreckage, anchored by another weight. It would take another three days for the bodies to rise among the reeds … And then, connected by umbilical nylon, arose the gas-leavened casket of a woman’s body, broken free of its wooden cage of the fine primordial mud” (179). Thus, mourning for Soledad is effectively deferred ad infinitum even right at the last page of the novel.

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In Soledad’s Sister, one can see how the novel suspends grief through the use of restraint. The novel consciously attempts to defer the work of mourning for Soli. More importantly, in trying to restrain the excess of melodrama, the novel also consciously depicts a different OFW heroine, whose suffering is carried out not through the moral economy of sacrifice and pity but within a different moral economy of guilt and penance. In short, Soli’s life becomes ungrievable because she deserves her suffering. What results from this inability to mourn can be seen in Rory’s uncritical embrace of the promise of labor migration despite her sister’s fate. She still clings on her dream of making it big abroad, upgrading from singing in a lowly karaoke bar in Paez, to performing for the G.I.s in Saipan. The problem with Rory’s dream is not so much her determination to become an overseas Filipina herself but her inability to grieve for her sister that has made her incapable of thinking about the dangers and the highly contingent life that will come with that choice. Knowing Soledad’s suffering and struggles both in Hong Kong and Jeddah could have helped her understand what awaits her in Saipan. But she never learns this lesson because she never mourns. Instead, she clings to the promise that perhaps if she crosses the border the right way, she will not end up in a coffin like her sister. In the novel’s attempt to dispel grief work, what it ultimately effaces is the suffering embedded in Filipina lives overseas. The problem that restraint exposes as a device is its capacity to contain and repress the telling of structures of suffering that these itinerant women endure as subjects of uneven globality and transnational labor. Soledad’s Sister is a testament to how the ubiquity of OFW deaths can render a nation incapable of grieving. This poses problematic ways of imagining particular experiences and fates of OFWs. After all, that structures that condition these deaths and suffering exist and that these cases are everywhere and everyday are part of this reality. These facts, however, must never numb the nation from grief or alienate its people from other migrant women’s suffering even though their stories of flight are not as exemplary or virtuous to deserve the name bagong bayani. Ultimately, identifying with suffering is still important in transforming the cruel conditions that cause these losses. The novel exposes the ways in which mourning becomes deferred for overseas Filipinas like Soledad who transgress the gendered moral and national codes of their roles as OFWs. It shows, through its portrayal of Soli’s moral lapses, how the politics of mourning in the Philippines is, in essence, problematic: it will never account for the kind of suffering that women like Soledad have gone through because they are not worth telling. In the end, grief will only come to those who earn it. Unfortunately, women like Soledad who choose to migrate illegally and disregard the moral regimes as mothers, wives, daughters, and citizen–breadwinners do not count for grieving. Since nobody identifies with the suffering of those who deserve death, women like Soledad, who cannot even make her own sister cry for her passing, will not move the nation into mourning. The gendered moral and national frames of mourning are politically inhibiting as they both erase suffering and reinforce problematic conditions on what makes Filipina lives grievable and moving enough to inspire social movements

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in the Philippines. This is why identifying with suffering would be a more radical basis for mourning as it opens up the political promise of grief work for migrant women. Rida Fitria’s novel illustrates how an Indonesian domestic worker’s experiences have allowed her to find a different way of understanding her and others’ grievable lives. By identifying with the suffering and vulnerability of a fellow migrant woman, whom she barely knew, the protagonist in the novel offers a more transformative politics of mourning.

Shared Suffering A Lump of Cracked Soil is part of the growing cultural production of Indonesian migrant worker’s literature, which I have discussed in the second chapter more extensively. The novel is written by Rida Fitria, writer, activist, and wife of Aak Abdullah Al Kudus, the founder of Serikat Buruh Migran Indonesia [Union of Indonesian Migrant Workers] in East Java. As the author explains in her introduction of the book, their involvement in migrant workers’ advocacy is crucial to the inception of the novel. The author’s experience in social justice work inspired the story of Khadijah, or Ijah, an Indonesian domestic worker in Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong. Through Ijah’s struggles, Fitria not only tracks the transformation of an Indonesian migrant woman from being a powerless and self-blaming victim to an empowered and compassionate advocate of her fellow domestic workers. She also presents how the protagonist’s understanding of her own suffering is linked to the precarious lives of her fellow migrant women, which become an important political impulse in advancing their claims. Towards the end, Ijah’s grieving for a fellow domestic worker, whom she barely knew, becomes her and other activists’ platform to forward their fight for social justice and migrant workers’ dignity. Through this, A Lump of Cracked Soil offers an alternative politics of mourning for Southeast Asian migrant women. The novel at first portrays Ijah like how Soledad was depicted by Dalisay in his novel. Ijah is as morally questionable as a woman: she was expelled from a household in East Java where she was working as a maid because she had an affair and bore the child of her male employer, Wiro. This moral lapse has become both a sin that she would be punished for and a sign of her weakness and vulnerability. When her mother chastises her for committing adultery: “What can you do? You yourself are incapable of keeping your own honour. Your own pride,” she realizes how her whole being is reduced to her past mistake: “She did not know that her self-worth has now been completely destroyed just because she lost her virginity and bore a child” (Fitria 2010, 15). In an attempt to redeem herself from her disgraceful life in her village and provide for a son she now has to raise on her own, she goes to Saudi Arabia to work as a domestic helper. But she soon discovers that the struggle to prove her worth to her family and neighbors back home is never easy. For one, her duty as the only all-around helper for a three-story mansion in Ta’if is demanding and exhausting: “The six months of Ijah’s life working inside Baba Khalid’s big house was filled

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with non-stop, backbreaking labor. She could not complain nor allow herself to get sick. For a maid like Ijah, both of these are forbidden in this place” (29). Aside from these hardships, her female employer would also constantly berate and physically harm her each time she fails to do what her lady boss wants. During these times, Ijah is made aware of her weakness: “Ijah can only cry, unable to fight against this injustice” (28). Her powerlessness inside the house can also be seen in how she becomes an easy prey to her employers’ sexual advances. In the story, Ijah is sexually assaulted and almost raped by her employers’ son, Majid. She is only able to ward off the young boy by threatening to humiliate him in front of his mother and father. While she has successfully resisted Majid’s attempts, it is interesting to note what she felt after the incident: Why does her past come to haunt her now, in that very moment when she is already feeling down and sorry for herself? She thought she has already paid for the sin of being with Wiro by suffering a disgrace back home. That past keeps on coming back like a nightmare even if she has already atoned for it. (35) In her mind, her past moral transgression is still haunting her, and the young boy’s sexual assault is only part of the punishment that she still has to endure to be forgiven. Ijah’s shame from her past is so powerful even though it was only borne out of her naïve faith to a married man’s promise that she would become his second wife, right next to her lady employer. Yet because of that unfulfilled vow, she ends up living a life of disgrace back in her hometown, and that sin still defines her being even if she is now miles away from her village. What is worse is that she perceives this young boy’s attempted rape as karma, as penance for the shame she has brought upon herself. Her suffering in Saudi Arabia is thus part of the moral order which she not only has no power to overcome but is also something she deserves. In all of her tribulations, Ijah is still able to last through her first tour of duty in Saudi Arabia. She goes back home, hoping that her two years’ worth of savings will permanently lift her family from poverty. But she soon realizes that the money she earned in Ta’if cannot cover their daily needs, let alone securing a better future for her three-year-old son. Thus, she is forced to go back to being a domestic worker, only this time in Hong Kong. Choosing a different destination does not, however, change her situation. Her life with her lady employer in Causeway Bay is much like the one she had in Ta’if, if not worse, as she is overworked and subjected to harsher physical harm by her female boss: Ijah worked so hard it is already taking toll on her health just so she could follow her employers’ orders. However, instead of gaining sympathy, more brutal abuse befell on her …There are times that Ijah would give her a wrong item only because of misunderstanding or forget where she had put the thing she requested. Her employer would easily get enraged and would bite, kick, and punch Ijah until her lips bleed and her body gets bruised. Because she

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was required to work hard under constant threats of physical and verbal abuse, Ijah could not rest well. She sleeps for only three to four hours. Ijah has already lost eight pounds in just two months. Ijah’s face became thin and her skin became drier and darker. This woman who has never been fat all her life became fully emaciated with gloomy and withered eyes. (139) She is only able to get out of this vicious cycle of torture and torment when she faints in her young ward’s school as she is picking the boy up. When another Indonesian domestic worker helps her up and senses that she is in trouble, she offers her a way out. But because Ijah feels trapped in her situation, the prospect of escape and freedom from her employer seems impossible to her: “It seems like the suffering she endured had robbed her of her self-confidence and dignity” (146). But her newfound friend, Dinah, an Indonesian helper like her, is resolved in rescuing her, as she promises Ijah her support in getting her away of her employer’s house, finding a temporary shelter, and seeking redress. On the day of the rescue, “Ijah saw herself as a terrified prisoner who was given a chance to run away” (147). This moment of escape signals a critical turn for Ijah. The once timid and selfblaming helper slowly transforms into an assertive migrant worker because of her exposure to and friendship with her fellow Indonesian domestic workers who rescue and support her through her legal battle with her employer and recruiter. At first, she would marvel at how strong her other friends are even though they are practically the same as her, just a foreigner, a woman, and a maid in this city-state. Ijah would be awed at how, for example, Dinah would shout back at her recruiter or how Intan would aggressively demand her lending agency to return her passport despite her outstanding debts. Through these women and other Indonesian domestic workers, who also become her comrades in their organization, Ijah becomes aware of another possibility for a migrant woman like herself, one where their dignity is defined not just by their moral virtues but also by their courage to fight for their cause. Ijah’s rescue has also revealed another world to her. While waiting for her case to be resolved, she stays at a shelter with other domestic workers who, like her, are victims of abuse and exploitation. Ijah not only finds kinship with fellow migrant workers but also, through various activities inside the halfway house and in Victoria Park, where they join other members of organization, discovers an impetus to develop herself: For the first time, Ijah realized that the poor and uneducated are also entitled to freedom. Free to decide what they deem is best for their own lives and future. In that instant, Ijah recognized how little of the world she knows. She saw how hard her fellow migrant workers fight to gain more knowledge and better their skills, as if they were saying: let me work as a domestic worker so that I will learn to use computer to write poetry, short stories, and also plays. Ijah was inspired. (152)

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Through this experience of awakening, Ijah is moved to improve her own knowledge by reading books and acquiring new skills while also learning about her rights as a migrant worker in Hong Kong. In these excerpts, the migrant women workers no longer see themselves merely as unskilled, ignorant, and hopeless household maids. They see the many other possibilities that their identity and experience as domestic workers holds for them. Like Ijah, most of them have not finished more than secondary schooling, yet their excursion and experiences abroad have imbued in them the prospect of becoming someone much more than their designations as household helpers. Later on, when Ijah finds herself in much amenable working and living conditions with a good employer and generous family, she pushes on cultivating her skills through her continuous involvement with her organization. This transformation can be seen not just in how Ijah becomes more active and embedded in her own social network but also in her personality. She becomes more articulate and confident not only inside her new employer’s home but also outside. Her fears and insecurities are slowly peeled off along with the shame and guilt of her past that had defined her former self. She begins to be unbounded by the gendered moral codes of innocence and blind obedience imposed on her and other Indonesian women overseas. Instead, she learns from her own suffering and uses her knowledge not just to improve herself but also to help others. In her off-days, she immerses herself in her organization’s activities and assists her fellow Indonesian domestic workers in their troubles. What Intan and Dinah did to her when she felt helpless and afraid, she also does with the distressed fellow domestics she meets along the way. In fact, she has been called a “provocateur” after she threatened a recruitment agency with a labor complaint for keeping the passport of Yani, a fellow Indonesian domestic worker she meets in her group, on account of the latter’s debts. However, Ijah realizes that there is so much more that needs to be done in her organizing work. She becomes aware of this when she meets at the car park two other domestic helpers working in their building, one an Indonesian and the other a Filipina. Enquiring about the suicide incident of an Indonesian maid a few days ago, Vivian, the Filipina helper, tells Ijah: “Poor girls, all of you who came from Indonesia,” she said half-mockingly and half concerned. “Even if you are more than us, your organizations can be counted by fingers. We have about 2,000 organizations. If Hong Kong employers cannot appreciate us, then our government will deal with Hong Kong government. In your case, your consulate cannot even help you, other than add to the already complicated problem.” (181) Even though Ijah feels slighted by Vivian’s comments, she understands the truth in her words. She only needs to look at her own experiences and comprehend how her own government has done nothing to help her. From this scene, the readers also get to observe the tensions created by the labor export policies of two

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nation-states—Indonesia and the Philippines—in Hong Kong, which affects the kind of lives these migrant women live in their host states. The Filipina helper’s statement describes not only how better protected Filipina migrant workers are by their government but also their significantly wider support network in Hong Kong. Instead of being compassionate, this has made Vivian feel invulnerable and immune to the kinds of suffering that her Indonesian counterparts endure. The differences in nation-states’ management of their own citizens overseas result in the feelings and discourses of one being better off than the other, which becomes a source of tension and estrangement between the migrant women of different ethnicities in their destination states. Vivian’s observation demonstrates how one’s feelings over their transnational conditions are also territorialized by nation-states’ discourses of governmentality. These discourses create fissures among migrant women who, in many ways, inhabit and thus share the same conditions of vulnerability and suffering, even though they feel its effects differently. The Filipina maid’s remarks are further affirmed when Ijah gets to talk to the Indonesian domestic worker who has only been silently listening to the conversation. After Vivian leaves, Ijah notices that the Indonesian helper is deliberately hiding her bruises from her and she tries to engage her in a casual talk. She learns that she is Atin from Ponorogo and she is working in the flat next to her employer’s. Ijah no longer needs to ask her about the bruises and instead goes straight to advising her to get out of her employers’ house and report them to the police. But Atin refuses, fearing that she will lose her only source of income and would be forcibly repatriated by her agency to Indonesia. As Atin cries, Ijah sees herself in the same situation a few months ago. If it were not for her chance meeting with Dinah and the others, she would still be trapped in her previous employer’s cruel household, weeping helplessly like Atin. Because Ijah identifies with what Atin is going through, she fears that the troubled fellow, like herself back then, would not seek help until her body and spirits are completely broken down. This is why she advises Atin to report to police while she still can: “How can I help you if you yourself do not have the courage to report this to the authorities. Until when are you going to survive like this? Do not let things get worse until you can’t bear it anymore” (183). Ijah’s help does not stop with this advice as she constantly makes her presence felt to Atin. When she hears a commotion next door, for example, she tries checking up on Atin by pretending to return a hairpin she borrowed from the latter in front of her employer. She also constantly stops Atin whenever she sees her in the hallway just to see if she is okay. Her efforts, however, fail her when she sees Atin lying bloodied on their building court in what looks like another case of an Indonesian maid jumping to her death. Ijah’s suspicion that Atin did not commit suicide, and that there was foul play involved in her death, only becomes stronger when she reads the employer’s alibi in a newspaper: Atin was so depressed because all her loved ones back home were dead from a fatal tsunami that hit Aceh triggering her to jump from the 19th floor of their building. From the very little that she knows about Atin— her name, where she came from, and the marks on her skin—she knows that

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Atin’s employer’s alibi is not true. This compels her to convince her organization to investigate. When Ijah learns that the Filipina helper whom she met earlier might have witnessed what happened to Atin, she talks Vivian into helping her build up Atin’s case. But Vivian had already made contact with the Indonesian embassy and was turned down and dissuaded from testifying for possible foul play that could have reopened the case and compelled the police to reinvestigate Atin’s death: “You know … Your consul makes me sick. My good intentions were ignored. What’s worse, they accused me of causing more trouble … I do want to help, but I was already insulted by how your consulate treated me” (195). Vivian’s reply illustrates the vicious results of the nation-state territorializing discourses on migration by not only suppressing stories of suffering of their migrant women but also repressing the radical politics that these stories may inspirit. On the one hand, Vivian’s account of how the Indonesian consulate treated her shows how the nation-state’s governmentality through their embassies overseas not only manages the migrant women’s bodies but also contains their narratives. After all, news detailing the abuse and exploitation of their citizen–breadwinners, like that of Atin, would only expose the anxieties of their government’s aggressive warm-body exportation. This is why, biopolitical extensions of the state, like the Indonesian embassy, would most of the time choose the less troubling versions of “mysterious death” and “suicide” because they obscure and mask their accountability for these fatal casualties. On the other hand, Vivian’s response to how she was treated by the Indonesian consulate also reflects how far detached she is from Atin’s life that she does not feel responsible in pursuing the truth behind her death. Because she is incapable of both identifying with Atin’s suffering and perceiving her life as grievable, Vivian is easily deterred from doing the right thing by testifying for Atin’s justice. Even if there is no witness to account for Atin’s death, Ijah and her fellow migrant activists push on to find justice on her behalf. What unfolds towards the last few pages of the novel is a work of mourning over Atin’s life. Several Indonesian domestic workers’ organizations gather and hold prayer rallies in front of the building where Atin fell. In between these solemn prayers, activists speak up and condemn Indonesian and Hong Kong authorities for not conducting a more thorough investigation on Atin’s case. This series of indignation and prayer demonstrations lead to a bigger march where Ijah and her fellow protestors stage a symbolic funeral march from Victoria Park to the Indonesian Embassy in Causeway Bay: There were a number of Indonesian domestic workers who did not participate in the long march, but immediately ran to join the procession when they saw the made-up coffin. They even thought that Atin’s body was inside it. They joined the procession as an expression of sympathy for the tragic fate of their fellow. (197)

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This symbolic ceremony simulating a funeral procession, while also holding a protest action, presents a different frame by which grief is enacted. From the little that they know about Atin’s life and the details that surround her death, fellow Indonesian migrant women who fall in line and participate in the demonstration show how they are able to imagine and identify with her suffering. The fact that they do not really know Atin but still mourn for her attests to how their grief is no longer bounded by the question of whether or not she deserves to die according to gendered moral codes or the nation-state’s discourses of migration. Their expressions of sympathy and solidarity come from perceiving how Atin’s death matters in their own transnational experiences. They see in Atin the story of their lives, a narrative that speaks about them because they are still part of the structure that conditions Atin’s vulnerability and highly contingent fate, even if many of them have overcome some of its more fatal effects. This form of identification is all the more manifest in Ijah. Even though all she knows about Atin is her name, where she came from and the bruises on her arms, she sees herself and her past experiences in Atin’s fate. This feeling of grieving for Atin is also grieving for herself, as recognizing Atin’s vulnerability and suffering has attuned her to also acknowledge her own precariousness. For her, Atin does not need to testify for her innocence and virtue as a migrant woman to deserve grieving. The torment that she went through is already enough to claim social justice on her behalf. And this form of radical grief from Ijah is encapsulated in the novel’s closing passage: Ijah fell silent. She looked up and stared at the sky. Then, she softly whispered, “Go to sleep calmly Atin. We will never forget you. We will continue your struggle until the dignity of migrant workers stand towering into the blue sky.” (200) In her silent invocation, Ijah demonstrates an alternative politics for mourning that makes Atin’s life grievable, not because she is exemplary but precisely because her travails are ordinary. Atin is like Ijah and other domestic workers, and the suffering that she endured when she was alive came from the same conditions that structured why Ijah and the others are socially excluded and living a highly contingent life as foreigners, women, and domestic workers in Hong Kong and elsewhere in the world. Grieving for Atin is thus no longer about redeeming her honor as a migrant woman, following gendered moral scripts of their transnational passages, but has become a way of claiming for her rights and social justice as a worker. Ijah knows that this kind of grief work takes time, as Atin’s death can only be truly resolved in the long and drawn-out struggle to achieve their dignity as migrant domestic workers. In this way, Ijah’s passionate attachment to Atin’s death illustrates how one tarries with grief as a radical impulse for political and collective action. In the end, A Lump of Cracked Soil opens up a new way of thinking about grief and its deeper implications in understanding and forwarding migrant women’s claims for social justice. The Filipino text demonstrates how the gendered

154 Mourning and Movement moral and national discourses that recognize Flor’s life as grievable also relegate Soledad’s death ungrievable. This understanding of grief undermines and even effaces the kinds of suffering that migrant women endure because they fall out of the frames of national mourning. This has grave consequences in not only alienating and detaching the public to the kinds of agony that migrant women go through in their transnational passages but also making their deaths mere numbers in the narrative of the nation-state’s casualties of its path dependency on labor exportation. In choosing which lives deserved mourning, and which lives do not, this grief work is limited and limiting because it can never thoroughly challenge the very conditions that allow for these deaths to happen in the first place. In this Indonesian novel, on the other hand, Ijah offers a different understanding of grief, in which suffering becomes the very locus of migrant women’s struggles. Atin’s dead body, for Ijah, does not just inspire pity but also inspirit their calls for their rights and dignity. In these ways, Ijah maintains grief as part of her political impulse to effect social change. And this kind of political mourning remains to be an important affective resource for the migrant women’s social movement.

References Butler, Judith. 2006. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Cheah, Pheng. 2006. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Boston: Harvard University Press. Dalisay, Jose. 2008. Soledad’s Sisters. Manila: Anvil. Fitria, Rida. 2010. Sebongkah Tanah Retak [A Lump of Cracked Soil]. Jakarta: Tiga Kelana. Francia, Luis. 2016. “Wider and Wider Circles of Outrage.” The Philippine Inquirer. Accessed 28 July 2016. Galang, Armand. 2017. “Veloso Family Asks CA to Allow Mary Jane’s Deposition.” Philippine Daily Inquirer. Accessed June 28, 2018. Gavilan, Jodesz. 2016. “Duterte’s Drug War in Numbers.” Rappler. Gutierrez, Natashya. 2016. “Women on Death Row: 5 Similarities between Mary Jane Veloso and Merry Utami.” Rappler. Inquirer Social Media. 2015. “Netizens: #Firing Squad for Celia Veloso.” Philippine Daily Inquirer. Accessed 5 July 2015. Kwok, Yenni. 2015. “How Indonesia’s Migrant Workers Helped Save the Life of Mary Jane Veloso.” Time Magazine. Accessed 5 July 2015. Lacuesta, Sarge. 2013. “Soledad’s Sister, Brilliant New Novel by Jose Y. Dalisay.” Philippine Daily Inquirer. Accessed 13 November 2013. McBride, Meredith. 2015. “Hong Kong Activists Call for Last-Minute Pardon of Mary Jane Veloso.” Asian Correspondent. Accessed 5 July 2015. Migrante International. 2013. “SUMA: Summing-Up of the State Migrants under Aquino (2010-June 2012).” Migrante International. Accessed 13 November 2013. Pagaduan-Araullo, Carol. 2015. “Mary Jane is Flor Contemplacion 2.” Business World Online. Rafael, Vicente. 2000. “Your Grief Is Our Gossip: Overseas Filipinos and Other Spectral Presences.” In White Love and other events in Filipino History, 204–228. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Sambalud, Mart D. 2017. “Group Claims Dead in Duterte’s Drug War Now at 13,000.” Davao Today. Accessed August 23, 2018. Sorot, Jogja, ed. 2015. “Eksekusi Marry Jane Ditunda, #BiarkanHidup Jadi Trending Topik.” Sorot Jogja. Sulistyaningsih, Erwiana. 2015. “I Could Have Been Mary Jane Veloso.” Jakarta Post. Accessed 20 May 2015. Veloso, Mary Jane. 2015. “The Story of Mary Jane Veloso, in Her Own Words.” Rappler. Accessed 24 April 2015.

Conclusion Affect and Activism

Viral Texts In as much as this book is invested in fiction and films on Southeast Asian migration, it has also been invigorated by the presence and stories of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in social media. Throughout this work, I have been introducing several “viral texts” that have affected how issues of foreign domestic workers are being discussed and contested in virtual and real worlds in recent years. These photos, videos, statements, and news stories have erupted and broken the internet during the times I have been thinking about the stakes of understanding the lives of migrant women through their own narratives. It was perhaps out of chance—or maybe because my own social network is comprised of Filipina and Indonesian women who used to be my Sunday group while I was in Hong Kong from 2012 to 2016—that these digital images, short clips, and newsbytes have caught my attention and transformed how I worked out many of the questions I have for this project. In early 2014, my Facebook feed was abuzz with the photograph of Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, showing her body and face covered with cuts and bruises, her hands swollen and burned, and her mouth half-open gaping in pain. Indonesian migrant activist groups in Hong Kong have circulated her picture and translated its caption to English, narrating what Erwiana briefly relayed to a concerned passenger at the airport. The picture and the caption depicted her as a victim of a gruesome case of abuse and torture of foreign maids in Hong Kong. A few months later, some of my migrant Filipino friends posted a video clip of a Lenten message from the then Philippine President, Benigno Aquino III, where he said that Filipinos should practice their faith more by learning to make sacrifices for the good of the nation. While the video is a standard Presidential address using the Passion of Christ story to reach out to its generally Catholic constituents, many netizens, most of them overseas Filipino workers (OFW), took offense from what they felt was the President’s subtext: they should not complain because they have not yet suffered enough for their homeland. In April 2015, a friend of mine back in Manila directed me to a YouTube clip, which he claimed might be of interest to me. By the time I visited the short video, the Transient Workers Count Too’s (TWC2) “Mums and Maids” ad had already

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been viewed two million times, with thousands of shares and hundreds of comments. What started as a stream of generally positive reactions from netizens, mostly saying how touched they were by this effective advocacy campaign, later on turned vitriolic, as commenters pointed out that Singaporean working moms have been unjustifiably shamed in the video. Within the same month, a different issue on migrant women’s intimacy to their employing families became a spotlight when Regina Ip, a Hong Kong legislator, commented on the misdemeanors of many Filipina helpers, who she claimed are having sexual affairs with their male bosses, resulting in broken marriages and families. This sparked an outrage among both the local and the migrant communities in the city-state, who criticized the politician’s racist and sexist remarks, as it sexualizes the figure of foreign maids who are, most of the time, vulnerable to physical and sexual abuses inside the household. While these issues were raging on in Hong Kong and Singapore, I was also closely following the developments in the case of another Filipina helper, Mary Jane Veloso, who was on death row in Indonesia. My Filipina migrant activist friends had started sharing news of an impending execution of the Filipina domestic helper by early March 2015. The next month, her own testimony surfaced, saying that she was not a drug mule but a victim of human trafficking. Her case became a center of mass protests in Manila and Jakarta, and before the end of April, Mary Jane was given a reprieve and her name generated two trending hashtags in the Twitterspheres of both Filipinos and Indonesians. While #MaryJane was tagged in millions of sympathetic and supportive posts for Veloso among Indonesians, the #BitayinNaYan [ExecuteHerNow] trended among the posts of Filipinos. These social media events have been critical in interrogating my own readings of literatures and films of Southeast Asian migrant women. TWC2 campaign ad’s “Mums and Maids” has shed light on the issue of social exclusion, particularly on the deprivation of the right for rest days, experienced by many foreign domestic workers in Singapore. In a span of two minutes, it affectively portrays how denying the foreign maids of this worker’s right had led to working mothers losing touch with their kids. The photo of Erwiana, on the other hand, put into limelight the stifled stories of many victimized Indonesian helpers in Hong Kong households. The image of her bruised and wounded body narrates the life of suffering this vulnerable group endures in isolation and silence. The vehement comments of migrant Filipina women on politicians’ comments about their role in the homeland and host land illustrate the gendered politics of their lives and labor abroad. On the one hand, their own state leader’s call to sacrifice reveals how the Philippine government uses migrant Filipinas’ labor as a form of sacrifice for their kin back home as part of its own developmental strategy. On the other hand, the Hong Kong legislator’s discriminatory remarks expose how the receiving state perceived their bodies and sexuality as a threat to the moral fiber of the host families that hire them. Finally, the conflicting responses of Indonesians and Filipinos on the stay on the execution of Mary Jane Velasco attest to how the people at home or abroad understand why some

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migrant women’s lives matter, and why some migrant women’s death does not deserve to be mourned. These anecdotes highlight how social media has been instrumental in drawing attention to and stirring up conversations on otherwise unheard of narratives of those who exist in the fringes of society, i.e. foreign domestic workers. Communication and digital technologies are important in migrant domestic workers’ lives abroad, as they use them to connect with their left-behind family back home, form social ties, and navigate their daily lives in host countries (International Labour Organization 2019). Because of this, Southeast Asian migrant women workers also actively create, consume, and circulate social media content as part of their everyday lives abroad. In the above instances that I have cited, the spread of these social media texts is mainly attributed to Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore, putting forth these newsbytes as ways of emotionalizing their issues, and forwarding their claims to both their home and their host governments. In these ways, social media become a platform for migrant women workers to connect and communicate with the governments of their origin and receiving countries in affecting change in the migrant labor policies that subject them to further vulnerability and exploitation. New media technologies advance the talking points of marginalized groups like foreign domestic workers and present their woes in ways that do not just hook the public but compel them to respond. Beyond the democratizing possibilities of information access and social networks that the digital world brings to multitudes of people, the force of social media resides in its power to affect people. This affectivity of social media, for Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygsrup (2015), makes it “a new tool for improving the world through emotional and social awareness” (12). Social media cultivates a “feeling culture” where online platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., direct participation in and engagement with social issues through liking, sharing, and commenting on posts. While these are important contributions of new media technologies, there are also limits to these platforms for political action. The social media’s feedbacks through liking, sharing, and commenting can “only function as valves for releasing the emotional pressures” of being affected by social injustice (9). More importantly, viral texts usually tend to dilute and dumb down these social issues by reducing the complexity of global inequality into easy representations that would fit a particular narrative or agenda. This is what Susana Paasonen (2016) describes as the “fickle focus” of social media activism, where the emotionality of viral texts, even the ones that are overtly political, are most of the time relegated as distraction or provocation, cultivating an emotionally charged reaction or outburst that neither lasts nor translates into more concrete action. The real-life stories of migrant women, once reduced to social media content, also spread thin and get to be flattened when politicians seize and redeploy their narratives as part of their political rhetoric (Ardivilla 2018). With the growing global trend of disinformation and fake news violently intervening into and undermining democracies across the world, Southeast Asia has been at the forefront of the experiment of weaponizing social media in emotionalizing state propagandas

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(Ong and Cabanes 2018). Indonesians and Filipinos at home and abroad are voracious consumers of social media, and as migrants rely on these technologies for their daily lives, they are also exposed to receiving and propagating misinformation, provoking incendiary responses among their community (Arsenault 2017, Wong 2019). These problems are evident in the viral texts that attempt to represent foreign domestic workers’ everyday lives and social issues. Within the realm of social media, their stories have been reduced in the service of forwarding affective claims about their struggles without looking at how these portrayals support and sustain problematic discourses of gendered migration. The TWC2 “Mums and Maids” ad, for example, has relied on problematic assumptions on the intimacy of domestic and care work that only amplifies the anxieties over the migrant women’s presence as a threat to working mothers. Instead of presenting how refusing to grant day-off to foreign helpers is a concrete practice of social exclusion on the part of the employers, the video has also unwittingly fueled the antagonism between mums and maids inside the household. While the outrage against Ip’s commentary on migrant Filipina women’s sexuality was justified on the grounds of its explicit racism and sexism, the responses of migrant Filipina activists, however, are sustained by moral indignation and shaming that tends to deemphasize and even silence narratives that portray female OFWs as pleasure-seeking, agentive individuals capable of finding love and enacting desires with either foreign men or fellow migrant women. More importantly, as other migrant Filipinas highlight their vulnerability in upholding their virtuous sacrifice in being “good women” to disavow suspicions of promiscuity as intuited by the politician’s column, they also deny the struggles of other more vulnerable women like migrant sex workers. For highly visible cases of foreign maids’ abuse, like that of Erwiana’s, the depiction of foreign domestic workers as helpless victims in social media forward problematic ideas about their vulnerability as migrant women in transnational spaces. This portrayal of victimhood not only dismisses their agency but also invites heightened control of migrant women’s bodies in the guise of protection from the state. Aquino’s Lenten address and the backlash it generated among Filipina migrant women show how both the nation-state and the overseas Filipino workers’ claims on sacrifice for the good of either their family or their country are almost indistinguishable. These responses reveal how the problematic discourse of sacrifice, that ties migrant women’s suffering within the logic of the nation-state developmental strategy, remains unchallenged even among the ranks of migrant Filipina activists. Lastly, the contrasting reactions of Indonesian and Filipino public to Mary Jane’s case demonstrate the political prospects and limits of mourning over migrant women’s lives in transnational spaces. It exposes how a community identifies with a migrant woman’s grievable life based on either her vulnerability or her morality. These diverging ideas of mourning have implications in politicizing the fates of Southeast Asian migrant women.

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While these viral texts and the online responses that they have generated have ignited the interest in important issues of foreign domestic workers’ experience of marginalization and victimization in host states and their role and place in the development of their home and homeland, they also support and circulate prevailing discourses of labor migration. This is why the task of reading and analyzing how Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers exceed these social media representations and complicate these problematic discourses through their narratives is important. These films and fiction that look at the intimate lives of Southeast Asian migrant women thicken the emotionality of politics of labor migration by confounding the debates on social exclusion, human rights, development and nationbuilding, and social justice claims in the politics of migration and globalization. In my analysis of the films Ilo Ilo and Still Human, the short story “Intruders at Home,” and the photographs in We are Like Air, I demonstrate how the intimate lives of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers complicate their place and claims inside and outside transnational households through their own voices and lens. Their simultaneous experience of intimacy and exclusion from the kind of hospitality extended to them as guest workers by their employers and host states attest to how complex social exclusion works in their daily lives. However, these texts also depict how the emotional bonds that they forge with their employing families and fellow migrants allay the effects of alienation and marginalization, allow them to feel a sense of belonging, and help them advance their claims towards a more hospitable and less exclusionary treatment from their hosts. The stories written by Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore and Hong Kong present a multifaceted understanding of their expressions of romance, love, and sexuality, and their own experience of victimization and suffering. By looking at how gendered ideologies on mobility purported back home have exacerbated the precarious conditions of migrant women abroad, these literary narratives express affects of shame and patience that reveal how they are not only vulnerable but also made to feel responsible for their own vulnerability. The confluence of vulnerability and personal responsibility in their understanding of victimhood highlights the effects of gendered ideologies on mobility in shaping both their precarity and their identities as passive and docile workers inside foreign households. However, these feelings are also signs of agency, especially in stories where Indonesian domestic workers begin to question why they have to be ashamed in their choices for love and romance or why they need to be patient while working out ways to last and endure their experiences of abuse and exploitation. In these ways, their narratives provide a much more complex understanding of suffering where assumptions of their vulnerability can be contested and where discourses that make them more vulnerable can be challenged. In reading the films of Filipina domestic workers, I realize how powerful the invocation of sacrifice is in explaining the worth of their suffering abroad for people back home. The films are critical melodramas of Filipina domestic workers’ personal hopes and aspirations for themselves and their families. However, they also transmit and circulate particular ideas that reiterate the Philippine state’s rhetoric of migrant sacrifice for the good of the nation. It is in this cruel binding of

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Filipina bodies to the nation-state’s developmental strategy that the independent films about Filipina domestic workers sustain and subvert by portraying migration-for-development’s “cruel optimisms,” where the flourishing of homes and homeland hinges on the diasporic maternal’s suffering and sacrifice. It is in the discursive space of sacrifice that the complicated process of unhinging the stakes of Filipina migrant women from the claims of Philippine nation-state must begin as an important political task for scholars and critics of the country’s labor export policy. Finally, the Southeast Asian film and novels that depict how grieving over migrant women’s deaths are framed by gendered moral and national discourses of labor migration, and the implications of this framing, are important in understanding how their lives and struggles are politicized in public discourse. Soledad’s Sister portrays how Filipina domestic workers’ deaths are shaped by how their virtues and morality as migrant women make their lives worthy of mourning for their fellow Filipinos or not. This politics of grief is limiting and politically inhibiting as it ignores the global structures of inequity and injustice that Filipina women confront in their transnational passages. As a counter-narrative, I discussed how the Indonesian novel Sebongkah Tanah Retak [A Lump of Cracked Soil] offers a radically different politics of bereavement by identifying with another migrant women’s suffering. This kind of grief opens up a possibility of not only transcending borders but also transforming the grounds of fighting for migrant women’s lives on the basis of the larger structures that perpetuate their vulnerability and victimhood. This work of mourning can broaden new ways of thinking about enacting social movements and forging solidarity and political movements on the basis of shared suffering.

Moving Texts These stories resonate with the themes of real-life struggles and campaigns of migrant activism for Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. These texts interrogate and intervene into the same issues that are not just exposed in the social media but also become platforms from which NGOs, civil support groups, and organizations of migrant workers themselves organize and rally around to represent the advocacy for Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ rights and welfare in Hong Kong and Singapore. As such, these narratives do not only complicate how these social issues are being discussed in the public spheres of home and host countries but also push for ways of transcending and transforming the territorializing politics of both the nation-state’s labor migration discourses and its nationalist activism that, most of the time, limit and confine the scope and compass of migrant women’s social movements. For example, the migrant activists’ political campaigns towards social inclusion and integration of migrant women in the host society need to take into account the complexity of how social exclusion operates beyond the issue of racism and discrimination that comes with the policies of rules of the destination states and unequal treatment from local citizens and employers. Utomo’s short

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story “Intruder at Home” and Xyza Cruz Bacani’s black-and-white photography, for example, illustrate that marginalization and exclusion is also inherent in the foreign domestic workers’ (FDW) intimate labor and presence in the private realm of the households and in the public spaces of the city. In these ways, these texts produced by Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers themselves not only challenge the social harmony that the host countries attempt to project as cosmopolitan city-states but also unmask the deeper structures of exclusion inherent in the sphere of domestic labor. At the same time, the reactions and responses towards the TWC2’s short clip reveal how the NGOs and the filmmakers that represent the experiences of migrant women need to problematize their position as middle-class advocates and sympathetic artists of foreign workers in the city-state. Since Singapore does not allow FDWs the same democratic rights for assembly and political participation as what domestic helpers in Hong Kong enjoy, groups like TWC2 and Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics (HOME), which are spearheaded and composed mainly by Singaporean citizens, act in behalf of migrant women workers. Therefore, their advocacy, always directed at a local level and constantly addressing either the Singaporean citizens or the authoritarian Singapore state, is within “ethics of care that resonates with state-sponsored campaigns aimed at producing a volunteering middle class” (Lyons 2010, 104). As such, the campaign ad, even though questionable and contestable, has to be understood within the context of Singapore’s laws and political policies on worker’s rights, advocacy, and organization. While the reality on the ground may at first disclose a very limiting outlook for a more political and more transnational frame for grassroots organizing, it can also illustrate the complexity of discourses that TWC2’s campaign bear. These are the same challenges that shape Chen’s Ilo Ilo, a film that visually renders the perspective of the host hiring a stranger inside one’s house. Ilo Ilo’s perspective, just like the TWC2 campaign ad’s mode of address, presents the local realities in Singapore that also open and limit the prospect and direction of migrant activism in the island-state. This is why it is very important to analyze this Singaporean film against Chan’s Still Human because such comparisons not only may reveal the differences between the issues and the experiences of migrant women workers in Singapore and Hong Kong but can also open up new ways of challenging both these city-states policies and laws that perpetuate similar and divergent forms of social exclusion towards FDWs. The narratives that portray Southeast Asian migrant women owning their sexuality amid conditions of precarity confound gendered moral ideologies that impose shame on their bodies. Literary and filmic representations of Indonesian and Filipina women’s pursuit for love, romance, and happiness in foreign shores, through both heterosexual and homosexual affairs, en-queers the landscape of their sexualized labor and role in both the host land and the homeland. These depictions of migrant women’s erotic practices that highlight their agency as pleasureseeking individuals challenge moral assumptions that sustain their problematic relations to their home, family, and homeland, while also reinscribing their labor

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with desires that exceed the heteronormative framing of their bodies and sexuality as mere household servants. More importantly, stories about their participation in transnational sex work radically defy the stigma and shaming of this sexualized labor by reframing it as part of the complex fate-playing of migrant women that illustrate both their agency and their vulnerability in foreign shores. Indonesian migrant women’s fiction that dwells on experiences of victimization exposes how the already suffering bodies of migrant women are being made responsible and accountable for their own precarious fates. These accounts also compel readers to have a more transnational perspective by talking about not just individual employers but also the nation-state and transnational actors like labor recruiters and brokers that perpetuate this system of suffering. Erwiana’s narrative and the events surrounding her case, in many respects, have stirred this kind of conversation as her story exposed other abuse cases not only to Indonesian women but also to women of other nationalities. Erwiana’s case has also become a point of unity for several organizations of different nationalities. The Justice for Erwiana and All the Migrant Workers Committee, a transnational group of migrant workers that started in Hong Kong, has unified diverse groups of migrant workers not only from Indonesia but also from the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. This umbrella organization of migrant advocates and activists has consistently called for the prosecution of Erwiana’s recruitment agency, which exposes how labor brokering is as much part of Erwiana’s abuse as her employer. The group has also used Erwiana’s case to hold Hong Kong and Indonesian governments accountable for policies of deregulated recruitment, mandatory live-in arrangements, and two-week rule that have become means by which migrant women have been made vulnerable inside foreign households. In these ways, the campaign for Erwiana’s case has led to political action that exceeds the territorializing tendencies of merely blaming individual actors or one government, while taking into account the deeper structures and organizations that maintain the system of abuse and exploitation towards FDWs. Framing the struggle of migrant women workers beyond the confines of nation-state criticism is crucial, particularly in the context of dominant narratives of advocacy towards overseas Filipino workers. While it is true that the struggles of Filipina migrants are largely shaped by the Philippine nation-state labor export policies, much of the efforts of Filipino migrant activist networks have failed to account for how these experiences of overseas Filipino workers relate to their fellow migrant workers of other nationalities. This propensity to focus on a nation-state’s migration policies, through the discourse of sacrifice, territorializes the politics of migrant advocacy. Just like the reactions over President Aquino III’s call for Filipinos to sacrifice more, the cultural representations and even the rhetoric of transnational Filipino activists have gravitated towards solely critiquing the Philippine government’s policies that have made migrant Filipina women the sacrificial lambs in the government’s development agenda. This criticism, however, overlooks how the particular conditions of overseas work are brought about by the global landscape

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of labor migration, where Filipina migrants’ experiences of vulnerability and marginalization connect and intersect with the suffering of other migrant women workers from other nationalities. As such, unbinding the discourse of sacrifice in the representation of the diasporic maternal’s role and place in their home and homeland, as seen in the independent films of Mes de Guzman, Zig Madamba Dulay, and Patrick Daly and Joel Fendelman, has deeper implications in the politics of migrant Filipina activism as it will open up the possibilities of transnational movement where the struggle of migrant women from the Philippines can be seen as part of and contiguous to the experiences of other migrant workers from the Global South. This has particular salience in looking at how the life and death of migrant workers engender political demonstrations among the national communities of Filipinos and Indonesians. As Soledad’s Sister and A Lump of Cracked Soil demonstrate, representing how the life of a migrant woman matters for her homeland has political consequences. The prospects of advocating for migrant woman’s life that these texts present particularly resonate in the case of Mary Jane Veloso, as the discrepant responses between her fellow Filipinos against her fellow migrant woman of other nationality illustrate both pitfalls of nationalist grief and the possibilities of transnational mourning. The refusal of many Filipinos, including some overseas Filipino workers, to heed the call to exact accountability from the Philippine government from Filipino migrant activists reveals the problems of confining the politics of grief along the lines of local-level activism. It uncovers how the nationalist position of critiquing nation-state policies over the deplorable life of a migrant Filipina may not just be insufficient but also be deeply problematic as it relies on moral and gendered assumptions of which lives and which acts of sacrifice deserved to be mourned. Mary Jane is not like Flor Contemplacion, as many Filipinos at home and abroad argue. Instead, her fate mirrors that of Soledad in Dalisay’s novel, whose death does not account for the nation’s tears and indignation because she does not follow the script of a good migrant Filipina. This is why Filipino migrant activists in the Philippines and overseas have to constantly rethink and reframe the narrative of migrant Filipina women’s struggle through the transnational lens. This is a possibility that Indonesian activists have opened up in their response towards Mary Jane’s case. Their dynamic campaigns within Indonesia’s public sphere and their transnational perspective of making Mary Jane a symbol of their own migrant women’s woes and suffering abroad attest to an alternative and much more progressive form of grief. Just like Atin in Fitria’s novel, Mary Jane’s grievable life has become a potent point of identification that has inspirited a movement that transcends and transforms the geopolitical borders of mourning. This is something I witnessed firsthand in one of the migrant community demonstrations in Hong Kong in April 2015. In this interfaith service, migrant women from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Nepal, and Sri Lanka congregated at Chater Road to hold a secular prayer rally and share their support for the embattled Filipina domestic helper. At one point in the program, a row of Indonesian women in matching blue dresses and headscarves knelt on the street

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while carrying a picture of Mary Jane and emotionally chanting a sorrowful song in Arabic. Even though I did not understand their song’s lyrics, the performance of these women of their grief in protest is all the more powerful, as they find a way to genuinely connect their own lives with Mary Jane’s plight. By looking at the connections and intersections of migrant women’s struggles beyond national borders, the Indonesian activists are able to present a political campaign that narrates how women from the Global South bear the shared fate of vulnerability and victimhood that comes out from the system of uneven globalization and labor migration. There are stakes in understanding the deeper implications that these stories present, not only in the study of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ experiences but also in representing their political claims and social struggles. These films and fiction intervene in the politics of labor migration by also drawing out the political wavers of organizers, advocates, and activists of Southeast Asian migrant women. By reading and analyzing the intimate lives and feelings of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers through their narratives, one can see how challenging dominant representations going beyond the territorializing politics of home and host countries, and fostering a transnational framework of migrant activism can offer new and more compelling ways of making migrant women’s lives matter in transforming the politics of labor migration.

Mobilizing Affect At present, the promise of a transnational movement of migrant women has already emerged. In Hong Kong, migrant women from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Nepal have forged solidarity under the umbrella organization Asian Migrants Coordinating Body (AMCB) to challenge the policies of both Hong Kong and their own home countries towards migrant domestic workers (Hsia 2010). This coalition of foreign domestic workers has also actively collaborated with progressive organizations advocating local women and workers in the host city-state. The inclusion of various nationalities of migrant worker organizers and their dialogue with local activists under common unities and advocacies represent how these organizations and their constituents “negotiate the effects of transnational migration and strategize their solidarity” in advancing shared political claims to their origin and destination countries (Law 2002, 219). In Singapore, where democratic rights to join organization and participate in political assemblies do not apply as liberally as in Hong Kong, civil and nonprofit groups organized by Singaporean activists have been leading the mobilizing work for migrant women. Even if organizations in Singapore are bound by local-level activism, the work of TWC2 and HOME, for example, can still be considered transnational as they address the problems of labor migration by connecting the struggles of not just foreign domestic workers across different nationalities but also other foreign workers in Singapore (Lyons 2010). By focusing on similarities of working conditions of not just one group of nationality and not just one group of migrant workers, these NGOs transcend borders by forging

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trans-ethnic and transnational solidarity around foreign workers’ social exclusion in the island-state. In the home countries, migrant activist organizations from Indonesia and the Philippines have been working to create transnational networks and affiliations. In Indonesia, organizations like the Jakarta-based Migrant Care have advocated and addressed migrant women’s issues by exploring the intersection of women’s rights and workers’ rights not just in their country but also abroad, while religiousbased organizations of Indonesian women’s groups, like Solidaritas Perempuan [Women’s Solidarity for Human Rights], have constantly challenged anti-women policies and ideologies in Indonesia by promoting a hybrid framework of transnational feminism and gender-progressive Islamic values to advocate for migrant women’s rights (Robinson 2009, Rinaldo 2013). In the Philippines, Gabriela Women’s Party and Migrante International are examples of the transnational grassroots organizations that have been leading advocacies for women and im/migrants in the past three decades or so. Both Gabriela and Migrante are umbrella networks—the former focusing on women’s issue while the latter centers on migrant workers—that link prospective and returned migrant Filipina women based in the Philippines to their chapters in Asia Pacific, Middle East, Europe, and North America where there are high concentrations of migrant Filipino women (Rodriguez 2010, Lindio-McGovern 2012). These transnational formations of activist movements among migrant women workers are crucial in highlighting how migrant domestic workers’ issues challenge and reconstruct the “domestic/public, private/political dichotomies” to offer a progressive politics where “the domestic transcends and transforms the public, political, transnational, and global” (Constable 2010, 143). Another radical prospect opened up by migrant women’s movement in host countries is the intersectional advocacy of addressing issues of migrant LGBTs. In Hong Kong, about 200 migrant Filipina and Indonesian lesbian activists have organized and led Migrants’ Pride March, which puts a spotlight on the levels of discrimination and social exclusion many lesbian foreign domestic workers face (Ting 2019). This event is part of the larger movement for LGBT rights, as the rally also joined hands and expressed solidarity with the groups’ leading Hong Kong’s annual LGBT Pride Parade. This intersectionality between queer and migrant women’s advocacy shows how “the experience of migration in Hong Kong enabled women to link their individual life issues with other lesbian women in the migrant community” (Lai 2018, 143). This is something that Singaporean LGBT activist still need to pick up on, as the Pink Dot, the progressive rainbow alliance in the city-state, remains to merely celebrate mainstreaming homosexuality in Singaporean society: “championing homonormative ideals of family values and family inclusion” that becomes “site of exclusion for other LGBTs othered by its normalizing logic” (Yue and Leung 2015, 9). This exclusionary gesture is seen, for example, in the 2014 Pink Dot’s pride rally, where groups of sex workers, transgenders, and transsexuals were denied space in their celebration. These examples of LGBT organizing work in host states, which may include or exclude queer migrant women, demonstrate the limits and possibilities of intertwining migrant women’s

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claims and struggles with queer advocacy. The Singaporean Pink Dot alliance may learn well from Hong Kong’s LGBT groups in embracing migrant queer others in their fold. More importantly, both of these sites of queer activism can also push the radical intersectionality of their struggle for social justice by including the voices of not only lesbian migrant women but also the more marginalized migrant queer bodies, like sex workers, transgenders, and transsexuals, who remain to be at the fringes of advocacies sustained by notions of middle-class respectability. The challenge of the work for transnational advocacy and intersectional activism now is to constantly take into account the lives, voices, and narratives of the migrant women that they seek to represent, and to present their struggles in ways that would not just affect other people but also compel them to act and participate. In these ways, the films and fiction that are written and produced by and for migrant women workers become more than just social documents offering intimate studies into not just their experiences but also what and how they feel about their experiences. More importantly, these literary and visual texts can take on the political task of affecting a social movement. By portraying what and how Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers feel and how they act upon their feelings, these fiction and films confound what it means to feel at home and feel excluded, to find love and pursue freedom and security, to bear and endure precarious life conditions, to suffer for the sake of others, and to have a life that is grievable enough to matter to people back home. The stakes of these affective claims of Southeast Asian migrant women, written in print, rendered on screen, or embodied in the transcripts of their everyday lives, weave and, sometimes, rupture the discourses that define and represent their lives and struggles. Through the critical practice of reading affect in the narratives of Southeast Asian migrant women, this book aims to illustrate how these stories compel novel ways of thinking about contemporary debates on gender, migration, and globalization, in the hopes that such undertaking will close the gap between being affected and being moved to take action.

References Ardivilla, Jose Santos P. 2018. “Messages in the Social Media Bottle.” Heinrich-BöllStiftung Southeast Asia. Accessed June 28, 2020. Arsenault, Adrienne. 2017. “‘Democracy as We Know it is Dead’: Filipino Journalists Fight Fake News.” CBC. Accessed July 23, 2019. Constable, Nicole. 2010. “Migrant Workers and the Many States of Protests in Hong Kong.” In Migrant Workers in Asia: Distant Divides, Intimate Connections, edited by Nicole Constable, 127–144. London: Routledge. Hsia, Hsia-Chuan. 2010. “The Making of a Transnational Grassroots Migrant Movement: A Case Study of Hong Kong’s Asian Migrants’ Coordinating Body.” In Migrant Workers in Asia: Distant Divides, Intimate Connections, edited by Nicole Constable, 105–126. New York: Routledge. International Labour Organization. 2019. Mobile Women and Mobile Phones: Women Migrant Workers’ Use of Information and Communication Technologies in ASEAN. Thailand: International Labour Organization.

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Lai, Francisca Yuenki. 2018. “Migrant and Lesbian Activism in Hong Kong: A Critical Review of Grassroots Politics.” Asian Anthropology 17 (2):135–150. Law, Lisa. 2002. “Defying Disappearance: Cosmopolitan Public Spaces in Hong Kong.” Urban Studies 39 (9):1625–1645. Lindio-McGovern, Ligaya. 2012. Globalization, Labor Export and Resistance: A Study of Filipino Migrant Domestic Workers in Global Cities. Abingdon: Routledge. Lyons, Lenore. 2010. “Transcending the Border: Transnational Imperatives in Singapore’s Migrant Worker Rights Movement.” In Migrant Workers in Asia: Distant Divides, Intimate Connections, edited by Nicole Constable, 87–104. London: Routledge. Ong, Jonathan Corpus, and Jason Vincent A. Cabanes. 2018. Architects of Network Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines. Paasonen, Susanna. 2016. “Fickle Focus: Distraction, Affect and the Production of Value in Social Media.” First Monday 21 (10). Accessed July 26, 2019. Rinaldo, Rachel. 2013. Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robinson, Kathryn. 2009. Gender, Islam, and Democracy in Indonesia. London and New York: Routledge. Rodriguez, Robyn. 2010. Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Sharma, Devika, and Frederik Tygsrup. 2015. Structures of Feeling: Affectivity and the Study of Culture. Berlin: De Guyter. Ting, Victor. 2019. “‘We Are Here, We Are Queer, We Will Never Disappear’: Hong Kong’s LGBT Migrants Hold Pride Rally to Push for Better Wages, Rights and Respect.” South China Morning Post. Accessed June 19, 2020. Wong, Emily. 2019. “How Indonesians Embrace the Digital World.” The Jakarta Post. Accessed March 25, 2020. Yue, Audrey, and Helen Hok-Sze Leung. 2015. “Notes towards the Queer Asian City: Singapore and Hong Kong.” Urban Studies 54 (3):747–764.

Index

affect 6–11; affect versus emotions 7–8; affective economy 9, 108–109; affective turn 6; stickiness 9; structure of feeling 8 agency 15, 78, 89, 91, 94, 97–99, 159, 162–163 Aguilar, F. Jr. 51, 108 anger 136 Angraeni, D. 85, 89 Ahmed, S. 9–10, 32, 109 Aquino, B. (Ninoy) 108 Aquino, B. III (Noynoy) 104, 131–132, 156, 159, 163 Aquino, C. (Cory) 104, 107–108 Arun, P. 54 Asian Migrants Coordinating Body 165 Asis, M. 25 Bacani, X.C. 6, 12, 13, 36–37, 40–41 Bagahe (2017) 7, 15, 106, 111, 119–122 bagong bayani [modern-day heroes] 4, 104, 107–112, 121–122, 127, 135, 138, 146 balikbayan box 104–106, 113 Balikbayan Box (2007) 15, 106, 111–128 Bautista, J. 109 Berlant, L. 109, 112, 114, 115, 117, 126 Bo Niok, M. 14, 49, 59–61 Brooks, A. 6–7 “Bukan Yem” [Maybe Not Yem] 6, 15, 94–99 Butler, J. 78, 81, 97, 137–139 “Cahaya Untuk Penaku” [Light for my Pen] 14–15, 91–94, 100 Campos, P. 110 Catholicism 11, 51, 57, 108 Chan, C. 53 Chan S.K. 12, 20, 28, 43 Cheah, P. 22, 24, 136–137

Chen, A. 12, 20, 28, 43 “Cinta Murah di Bukit Merah” [Cheap Loves at Bukit Merah] 14, 49, 59–61 Constable, N. 21, 48, 51, 58, 70, 83, 120, 166 Contemplacion, F. 107, 130–132, 134–139, 164 cosmopolitanism 22–26 crisis ordinariness 114–115, 118 cruel optimism 109, 111, 117, 120, 122, 123, 126, 127 Dalisay, J. Jr. 16, 133, 134, 138 Daly, P. 12–15, 49, 55, 106, 111, 122, 164 de Guzman, M. 15, 106, 111, 112, 116, 164 Deleuze, G. 8 desire 48, 58, 61–72 Devi, A. 8, 14, 84, 87–91 diasporic maternal 110–111, 119–120, 122–123, 127, 161, 164 Dulay, Z.M. 7, 12, 15, 106, 111, 119, 164 Duterte, R. 1–2, 132 emotion versus affect 7–8 emotionality of texts 9 emotion-work 6 feminization of survival 124 Fendelman, J. 12–15, 49, 55, 106, 111, 122, 164 Fitria, Rida 16, 147 Gabriela Women's Party 166 global care chain 6 grassroots migrant organizations 165–167 gross domestic product: contribution of foreign domestic workers to Hong Kong's economy 4; to Singapore's economy 4

170

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Handayani, E. 14, 49, 52 Heberer, F.M. 68, 69 heterosexual love and romance 14, 58–61 hiya 14, 48, 50–52, 55, 57, 72; see also shame Hochschild, A. 6, 35 homosexuality 58, 61–72 Hong Kong: as host city-state 3–4, 20–28; policies on foreign domestic workers 22–24 hospitality 20–28; calculated hospitality 22–24; hospitality and intimate labor 4–6 Huang, S. 21, 22, 25, 27, 48, 83 Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics 162 Ilo Ilo (2013) 13, 20, 28–36, 43, 160, 162 Indonesia: as a migrant-sending country 2–4, 82–86 Indonesian Migrant Workers Literature 12, 36, 78–81; see also Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia interracial affairs 58–61 intersectionality 166–167 intimacy 20, 24–27 intimate labor 6, 20, 24–27; regime of labor intimacy 20–21 Ip. R. 73, 157 Islam 11, 51, 88 Juwanna 14, 49, 62–65 Juwita, E. 6, 15, 94–99 “Kerudung Turki” [Turkish Veil] 14, 49, 62–65 laglag-bala [bullet-planting] 104 Lan, P.C. 21, 83 Lesbian sexuality 14, 58, 61–72 lifetimes of disposability 113, 123, 126–127 Lindquist, J. 51, 53, 82 Longo, P. 24–26 malu 14, 48, 50–52, 55, 57, 72; see also shame Manalansan, M. 61, 72 Marcos, F. 3, 106 Margareta, I. 14–15, 91–94, 100 Marte-Wood, A.S. 110, 121 Martial Law 3, 106 Massumi, B. 8

McKay, D. 113 melodrama 110, 112, 121, 160 Mengusahakan Cinta [Effort for Love] 6, 14, 49, 68–69, 71 Migrant Care 82, 166 Migrante International 107, 141, 166 migration-for-development 106–107 Mission for Migrant Workers 80, 81 morality 53–4, 122, 133, 138, 142; gendered moral hierarchies 53; moral anxieties 47, 53; morality and sexuality 57–58, 72 mourning 16, 134–139, 154 Mums and Maids 19, 156–157, 159 Mundlak, G. 24, 26–27 Nisa, S. 49, 65–67 “No Diamond in Diamond Hill” 8, 14, 84, 87–91 OFW film 106, 109–112 Ong, A. 22 Orde Baru [New Order] 3 pahlawan devisa [foreign exchange heroes] 4, 47, 99 Parreñas, R. 6, 23, 25 patience 15, 88–91, 160 “Penjajah di Rumahku” [Intruder at Home] 13, 20, 37–40, 43, 160 Philippine reproductive fiction 110, 121 Philippines: as a migrant-sending country 2–4, 106–109 Pinay DH 52, 55, 69, 108 Pink Dot 166–167 pity 135–136 Pratt, G. 113, 123 precarity 81–82 Pride Parade 166–167 queer politics 166–167 queer sexuality 58, 61–72 race: racial boundaries 21; racism 21 Rafael, V. 108, 135, 137 Remittance (2015) 14, 15, 49, 55–59, 106, 111, 122–126 remittances: Filipino migrants’ remittances in 2012 4; Indonesian migrants 4 reproach 136 resistance 15, 78, 81–82, 94, 100 Riswati, Y. 93

Index Rodriguez, R. 108, 166 Rony, F.T. 49, 68 sacrifice 15, 106–112, 159, 160–161, 163– 164; economy of sacrifice 108–109; as a political discourse 106–108 Sarvasy, W. 24–26 Sassen, S. 124 Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia 12, 36, 78–81; see also Indonesian Migrant Workers Literature Sawai, S. 80, 98–99 Sebongkah Tanah Retak [A Lump of Cracked Land] 16, 147–154, 161, 164 “Sebuah Surat di Penghujung di April” [Letter at the End of April] 14, 49, 54–55, 57–58, 84, 86–88, 90–91 sexuality 14, 47–48, 58–72 sex work 53–54, 166–167 shame 14, 48, 50–52, 55, 57, 72, 160, 162 Shamir, H. 24, 26–27 Silvey, R. 51, 85, 97 Sim, A. 48, 58, 61, 62, 66, 71 Simpson, R. 6–7 Singapore: as host city-state 3–4, 20–28; policies on foreign domestic workers 22–24 situation tragedy 115, 118 social exclusion 22–24, 157, 159–162, 166 social media 156, 158 Soledad's Sister 16, 139–47, 161, 164 Solidaritas Perempuan [Women's Solidarity for Human Rights] 166 “Sopir Taxi” [Taxi Driver] 14, 49, 52 Spivak, G.C. 13 Still Human (2018) 13, 20, 28–36, 43, 160, 162 Suarez, H. 110 suffering 15, 76–78, 81–82

171

Sulistiyaningsih, E. 76–78, 131, 156, 157, 159, 163 Sunday Beauty Queen (2016) 14, 49, 69–71 Suryomenggolo, J. 79–81 Susanti, A.E. 6, 12, 14, 49, 68–69 Tadiar, N.X. 51, 54, 108 tenaga kerja wanita [overseas Indonesian female laborer] 52, 54, 68, 76, 92, 94, 95 Tiwi 14, 49, 54–55, 57, 84, 86–88, 90–91 Tolentino, R. 110 Transient Workers Count Too 19, 86, 156–57, 159, 162, 165 transnational activism 165–67 “Tuhan, Aku Pulang” [Allah, I'm Home] 49, 65–67, 71 Ueno, K. 48, 58, 62–63, 66 Utomo, S. 13, 20, 36, 43 Veloso, M.J. 130–133, 137–138, 157, 159, 164–165 victimhood 76–78, 84–86 Victoria Park 47, 79 Villarama, B.R. 12, 14, 49, 69–72 violence 77–78, 81 vulnerability 15, 77–78, 81–82, 84–86, 89–99 We Are Like Air 6, 13, 36–37, 40–43, 160 Widodo, J. 1–2, 130–131 Williams, R. 8 Yeoh, B. 21–23, 27, 35, 48, 83 Yudyohono, S.B. 76 Zero Remittance Day 105 zones of exception 22