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
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© 2021 Carlos M. Piocos III
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Contents

List of figures vi
Acknowledgment vii

Introduction: Emotions on the Move 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. 34
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. 70
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. 78
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. 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),” pub-
lished 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 oppor-
tunity 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 commu-
nities that adopted me in Central and Victoria Park every Sunday, the wonder-
ful 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 poten-
tial 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 con-
tinues 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 sis-
ters 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 work-
ing in the country, which he describes as “heartbreaking” (detikNews 2015).
This is why Widodo instructed his labor ministers to find a way of discontinu-
ing 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 domes-
tic 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 citi-
zens 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 invis-
ible 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 migra-
tion is understood in their home and host countries. The present work forwards an
important contribution to the study of gendered migration by archiving and put-
ting 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 city-
states of Hong Kong and Singapore have their own histories of indentured house-
hold 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 inter-
vention 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 moth-
ers 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 else-
where 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’ lega-
cies 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 finan-
cial 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 work-
ers 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, fol-
lowed 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 ser-
vices 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 bil-
lion, 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’ eco-
nomic 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 devel-
opment 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 vulner-
able to abuse and exploitation by everyone from their recruiters to their employ-
ers. 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 indigna-
tion; 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 dis-
crimination 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 emo-
tions 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 nar-
ratives 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 ori-
gin 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 produc-
tions—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 film-
maker, Ani Ema Susanti; or the widely anthologized short story “Bukan Yem”
by Etik Juwita, a former Indonesian domestic worker in Singapore—are aes-
thetic mediations and political interventions to the ongoing critical conversa-
tion 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 inti-
mate 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 motiva-
tions 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 them-
selves in transnational contexts. Brooks and Simpson’s discussion of the intersec-
tion 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 emotion-
in-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 sub-
jectivity 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 tak-
ing 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” feel-
ings 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, helpless-
ness, 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 interchange-
able 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), some-
times 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 lan-
guage, 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 under-
stand 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 pre-
scribe 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 nego-
tiations 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 rela-
tions 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 circu-
late 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 vari-
ous 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 “coher-
ence” of affect’s stickiness in the emotionality of migrant women’s texts because,
10 Introduction
oftentimes, feelings do not necessarily “gel together,” presenting “mixed” emo-
tions even as they seem to cohere as a discourse (Åhäll 2018).
The feelings that surface in Indonesian and Filipina migrant women’s narra-
tives 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 “thick-
ening” 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 resist-
ance, 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 experi-
ence and express displacement, sexuality, victimhood, and agency.
Analyzing the thinning and thickening of the affective quality of women’s nar-
ratives 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 cri-
tiques 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 capi-
tal. 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 com-
pelling 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 flatten-
ing 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 coun-
tries 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 sig-
nificant 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 major-
ity of Filipina women in both Hong Kong and Singapore are Catholics, while
Indonesian women are mostly Moslems in these city-states. In Islam, for exam-
ple, 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 explain-
ing 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 differ-
ent 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 trans-
lated from Bahasa Indonesia to Filipino 26 of what I deem to be the best writ-
ings 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 domes-
tic 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 first-
hand 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 inde-
pendent 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 com-
parative 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 litera-
ture 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 pub-
lic 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 inde-
pendent 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 prob-
lematic 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 height-
ens 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 inter-
racial 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 precarious-
ness, 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 responsi-
ble 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 gen-
dered moral and national discourses of their home and homeland. Collectively,
these affects demonstrate how these women express their subjectivity and exer-
cise 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 pre-
scribe 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 circu-
lated 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 nation-
building 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 portray-
ing migrant mothers and their cruel attachments to the good life fantasies of migra-
tion. 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 problem-
atically 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 account-
ability to the nation-state that deploys its citizen–breadwinners. I employ criti-
cal 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 migra-
tion’s policies and discourses in the Philippines and Indonesia, opening the pos-
sibilities 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 politi-
cal 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 organiz-
ing 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 emo-
tionality of these texts contribute to the emergence and vitality of women’s social
movements in Southeast Asia.

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1 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-by-
side 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 affect-
ing depiction of the irony of employing a live-in maid in Singapore and also prob-
ably 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 moth-
ers. 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 intima-
cies 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 inclu-
sion and exclusion, I examine how both Hong Kong and Singapore, as host city-
states, 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 cost-
benefit 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 work-
ing 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 produc-
tively interrogate these two middle-class directors’ filmic representations of this
inherent intimacy and exclusion shaping FDWs’ presence and labor in transna-
tional 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 pho-
tographs 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 discus-
sions 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
 At Home and Unhomeliness 21
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 neigh-
bors 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 profession-
alization of local women while stabilizing birth and marriage rates of these city-
states. 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 distinguish-
able 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 proxim-
ity 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).
22 At Home and Unhomeliness
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 exac-
erbated “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 dis-
card” 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 inte-
grated 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 guar-
antee 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 bring-
ing 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 popula-
tions 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 conditional-
ity 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 pro-
tect all the other workers in the island-state. Migrant helpers are not covered
by the Employment Act that legislates standard employment terms like work-
ing 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
 At Home and Unhomeliness 23
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 employ-
ment 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 allow-
able 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 mecha-
nisms 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, for-
eign 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 spend-
ing more for another cycle of deployment.
Finally, their vulnerability is heightened by the mandatory live-in arrange-
ment 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 exclu-
sion 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 coun-
tries. 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 bot-
tom up” and “deterritorialized citizenship” by entering into a “universal commu-
nity” 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 labor-
receiving 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 empha-
size 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
 At Home and Unhomeliness 25
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 chil-
dren, 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 transform-
ing 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 house-
hold (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 hos-
pitality as an opening through which issues of world citizenship and cosmopoli-
tanism 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 inti-
mate 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 work-
based 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 oppos-
ing gestures work to shape and produce each other’s conditions. While forms of
intimacy are usually seen as affective strategies of migrant women in circumvent-
ing 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 work-
ers 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 com-
ing 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 standard-
izing 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 can-
not 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 com-
pensation at the mercy of their brokering agency and employers.
From this, Mundlak and Shamir (2008) note that the intimate nature of domes-
tic 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 instrumen-
talization of migrant careworkers, without eroding traditional gendered assump-
tions 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, accommo-
dated, 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 work-
ers 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 integra-
tion 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 domes-
tic 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 anxi-
eties 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 recipro-
cates 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 tro-
phies, 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 disa-
bled 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 transna-
tional 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 trou-
blemaker 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 bor-
ders 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’ feel-
ings of isolation and exclusion through their use of the cramped spaces charac-
teristic 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 par-
ticular 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 night-
lighting, 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,
 At Home and Unhomeliness 31
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 admon-
ish 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 cock-
roach 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 con-
nection. In Ilo Ilo, Terry and Jiale’s growing closeness is depicted in scenes fol-
lowing 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, chang-
ing 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 lat-
ter 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 fam-
ily and on Evelyn’s birthday when her male boss gifts her with an expensive cam-
era. 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 appre-
ciate 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 emo-
tional bond of live-in maids to members of the host family but also how develop-
ing 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 com-
modified 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 Jing-
Ying 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 ide-
ology 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 char-
acters 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-en-
scene 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 Cheung-
Wing, 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, Jing-
Ying 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 bounda-
ries 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 for-
eign maid and a male elderly ward (Ho et al. 2018).
 At Home and Unhomeliness 35
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 pic-
ture 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 pres-
ence 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 Cheung-
Wing’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 relation-
ships 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 hap-
pen 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 gradu-
ate 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 slow-
motion. 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 sus-
tain 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 inclu-
sion, 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 work-
ers 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 workers-
turned-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 domes-
tic 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.
 At Home and Unhomeliness 37
Xyza Cruz Bacani, on the other hand, is an internationally acclaimed Filipina
art and documentary photographer. Just like Utomo, she used to work as domes-
tic 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 photog-
raphy, which she posts on her social media, caught the eye of established photog-
raphers 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 full-
time photographer (MacDonald 2014).
Unlike Utomo’s story, Xyza Cruz Bacani’s visual documentation of the close-
ness 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 pos-
sibility 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 vari-
ous 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 nar-
rator’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 mono-
logues to displace the tension in the story, Utomo also uses narratorial displace-
ment by shifting the narrative from the perspective of the employer instead of the
maid. Through literary displacement, Utomo is able to describe how power oper-
ates 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 distanc-
ing 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 hos-
tility 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 mar-
riage 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 popu-
lation 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 previ-
ously 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 por-
traits 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 photogra-
pher, 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 black-
and-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 ban-
quet 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 rap-
port 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 fram-
ing 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 mark-
ing the distance between the Philippines and Hong Kong (57–58). By presenting
these photographs near each other on facing pages of each spread, Bacani decon-
structs the various dichotomized relationships of families, left-behind and receiv-
ing, 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 cre-
ated 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 wom-
en’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 day-
off 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 con-
ditioned 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 con-
tradictory 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 them-
selves—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 exclu-
sion 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 inti-
mate labor that help negate their marginalization in foreign homes. Bacani’s pho-
tographs, 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 hospi-
tality 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 some-
times even brutal consequences, of social exclusion on the lives of Filipina and
Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore.

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2 Shame and Desire

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 day-
off. 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 reputa-
tion 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 coun-
tries 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 develop-
ment of not only their own households but also their homelands. However, these
labels are always haunted by anxieties that interrogate these governments’ opti-
mistic 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
48 Shame and Desire
victims or morally compromised women abroad, flagrantly flaunting their sexual-
ity 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 neutral-
ized 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 enforc-
ing 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 man-
age 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 ani-
mate 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 inter-
sect 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 domes-
ticated. These contested discourses on Indonesian and Filipina migrant women’s
sexuality reflect the anxieties on their mobility, particularly heightened by expres-
sions 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 prob-
lematic 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 interro-
gated 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 opera-
tions 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 ana-
lyzed 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 por-
tray same-sex relationships of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Hong
Kong. While Villarama’s film mainly centered around the lives of Filipina help-
ers 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 sexu-
ality, like AIDS, prostitution, female circumcision, etc. (Rony 2012). Susanti’s
short documentary focuses on Rian, a divorcee and a single mother working as a
50 Shame and Desire
foreign helper in Hong Kong, and her romantic exploits to maintain her relation-
ship 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 becom-
ing 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 inter-
racial intimacies in transnational spaces. Through migrant women’s understand-
ing 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 schol-
arship in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, classic ethnographic studies on “shame-
embarrassment” 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 feel-
ing 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 emo-
tional trajectory of “embarrassment” but is also inflected by meanings of “timid-
ity” 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 pre-
scribes 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 prosti-
tutes 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 kam-
pung [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 reputa-
tion 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 domes-
tic workers become deployed in the public imagination as mere bodily synecdo-
che of a beleaguered nation” (105).
52 Shame and Desire
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 hierar-
chies 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 vic-
timhood 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 disci-
pline 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) eth-
nography 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
54 Shame and Desire
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 deci-
sions” (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 eve-
ryone 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 per-
form 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 work-
ers encompasses not only the shame in embarrassing encounters of being misi-
dentified 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 prac-
tice of sexuality but also in making her body docile, flexible, and tolerant to suf-
fering 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 kahihi-
yan [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 wor-
ried 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 pro-
hibited 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 expres-
sion 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 cou-
pons. 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—with-
out 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 obliga-
tions 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 bet-
ter 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 sexual-
ized 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 fall-
ing 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 concep-
tions 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
58 Shame and Desire
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 sex-
uality, 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 off-
days in public. Studies estimate that more than a third of Filipina domestic work-
ers 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 relation-
ships 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 pres-
sures 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 awk-
ward 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, hold-
ing 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 com-
munity 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 work-
ing 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 affec-
tion 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 eco-
nomic, cultural, and moral considerations. For one, having an intimate rela-
tionship 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 relation-
ships 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 het-
erosexual 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 domes-
tic 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 adventur-
ism 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 alter-
nately. 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 boy-
friend, 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 hetero-
sexual 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 mis-
takes 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 pow-
erful 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 heterosex-
ual 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 disadvan-
taged (as blue-collar workers or asylum seekers) than migrant domestic workers
in Singapore and Hong Kong and because many of them are also sexually aggres-
sive, 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 pleas-
ures, 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 usu-
ally 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 shame-
ful 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 pos-
sibility 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 gener-
ally 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 trans-
national 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 por-
trays how Arda, an Indonesian household worker in Hong Kong, explores var-
ious 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 cap-
ture a sense of carelessness, with what seems to be little attention to the attractive-
ness 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 com-
munity, 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 same-
sex 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 sud-
denly 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 les-
bian 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.
64 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 con-
trol of her own body, would be replaced by the fantasy of heterosexual attrac-
tion 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 trans-
formation 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 circum-
cised” 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, har-
assment, 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 immedi-
ately 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 re-
domestication 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 mascu-
linity 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 perfor-
mance of lesbianism but also their femme lesbian partners. Kie’s engagement in
66 Shame and Desire
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 homo-
sexual 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 appar-
ently 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 disillusion-
ment 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 vio-
lence and oppression embedded in the patriarchal culture and values of heteronor-
mative 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 gen-
dered 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 forbid-
den 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 sin-
ful 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 heterosex-
ist “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 dimen-
sion 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, path-
ways to gain sexual freedom abroad, as they portray this alternative sexuality
68 Shame and Desire
foreclosing back to heteronormativity. In the contrary, independent documenta-
ries like Effort for Love and Sunday Beauty Queen offer a much more empower-
ing 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 fol-
lows 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 sentimental-
ity 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’ inti-
mate performance … It emerges as a narrative tool that inscribes an unrec-
ognized 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 authori-
tarian 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 part-
ner, “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 com-
munities in Indonesia do not just adopt the Western ideas of sexuality whole-
sale, 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 girl-
friend 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 docu-
mentary, 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 unde-
sirable 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 ren-
dered 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 capi-
tal 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 imagi-
naries 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 repre-
sentation 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
70 Shame and Desire

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 inti-
mate relationship with her partner, Judy, whom she calls “Mommy.” Her fash-
ion 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 din-
ner already prepared. While at the outset, this intimate homelife seems to merely
reproduce binary modes of masculine–feminine dynamic of heterosexual cou-
pling, 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 denatu-
ralizing 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 sen-
timental 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 week-
end, 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 pag-
eant. 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 reli-
gious and cultural ideas in which shame reforms and disciplines transgressive
women’s bodies back to propriety and deference to moral norms, Effort for Love
72 Shame and Desire
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 reposi-
tion and reexamine heteronormative premises in gender and migration” (243). By
introducing and intersecting queerness in desire and sexual expressions to dis-
cussions of Indonesian and Filipina helpers’ subjectivity and agency, these films
also reconstruct ideas of shame and shaming that are usually grounded on heter-
onormative 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 nor-
malized 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 nar-
ratives 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 recon-
struct their sexual identities in transnational spaces, as they explore and narrate
various expressions of their bodies and sexualities in their precarious and vulner-
able lives as migrant women.

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3 Vulnerability and Resistance

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 board-
ing 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 exploita-
tion (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 thou-
sands 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 offi-
cials 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 contradic-
tory 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 prob-
lematic 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 invis-
ibility, 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 eve-
ryday 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 com-
plex operation of how feelings of vulnerability and violence are deployed to but-
tress ideas that consign blame and accountability to the already suffering migrant
subjects and subjectivities. As my reading of foreign domestic workers’ short sto-
ries 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
78 Vulnerability and Resistance

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 suffer-
ing 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 suf-
fering 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 pre-
carious 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 primar-
ily 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 literary-
scape 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 com-
munities, where they get feedback from their readers. Independent publishing
houses in Jakarta, Jogjakarta, and Bandung then pick up and publish their manu-
scripts; 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 train-
ing 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 liter-
ary canon is still in question. As Suryomenggolo (2012) observes: “Indonesian
domestic workers’ writings are often left out from discussions within established
80 Vulnerability and Resistance
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 dif-
ficulties 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 learn-
ing 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 fel-
low 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 encoun-
tering 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 autobio-
graphical 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 com-
munity, 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 foreign-
ers, 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 inter-
play 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 powerless-
ness 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 invari-
ably 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 work-
ing 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 domes-
tic 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 for-
eign 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 “sim-
ple-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 back-
ground, as English serves as the main language of instruction, are seen as
Westernized, adaptable, and self-assured nannies. Their notoriety for assertive-
ness and arrogance, however, turn off lower middle-class employers who find
them cunning, always complaining, and insistent on their rights as foreign work-
ers. According to Pei-Chia Lan (2006),

in contrast to the Westernized Filipinas, the stereotype of Indonesians con-

jured up images of docile women trapped in rural village with Muslim con-
ventions. 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 ethnic-

ity,” 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 prefer-
ences within the market of transnational household labor. These strategies of find-
ing 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 condi-
tions. These attributes have made them particularly vulnerable to abuse, exploi-
tation, 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 com-
pelled 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 voca-
tional 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 govern-
ment requires all their migrant women applicants to go through at least 600 hours
of education and job training at private recruitment centers. These programs usu-
ally 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 work-
ing 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 gov-
erning 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 prod-
uct of labor brokering’s conscious act of sustaining and packaging their docil-
ity 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 infor-
mation 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 for-
eign 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 backward-
ness, 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 agen-
cies 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 pre-
vented 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
86 Vulnerability and Resistance
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 origi-
nated 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 condi-
tions with their employers just so they can finish paying all their debts in install-
ments 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 two-
thirds 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 respond-
ents 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
88 Vulnerability and Resistance
been reduced, but would instead be extended depending on the whims of my
employer.
(70)

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 en-
durance 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 train-
ing 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 maltreat-
ment. 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 hori-
zon. 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
90 Vulnerability and Resistance
their experience of victimhood but instead making the most out of their dire situ-
ations 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 com-
plains 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 self-
reflection 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 victimiza-
tion 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 some-
times, 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 experi-
ences 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 recre-
ate 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 possi-
ble. 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 fin-
ish 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 discov-
ery 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 nor-
mal 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 work-
ing 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
94 Vulnerability and Resistance
competitions in her migrant community in their living room, as if the whole fam-
ily 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 har-
monious 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 vulner-
ability 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 per-
haps 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 intrigu-
ing 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 illus-
trates how one can derive agency from vulnerability.
The story is set in a cramped van transport service, where the narrator uncom-
fortably 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 strik-
ing 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 nar-
rator’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 gam-
bling 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
96 Vulnerability and Resistance
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 condi-
tions 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 revela-
tion 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 con-
tradicts 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 chal-
lenges 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 sup-
posed 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 money-
making 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 exchang-
ing 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 pos-
sibly 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 jour-
ney 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 home-
coming. 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 nar-
rator 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 uncer-
tain answer. Only uncertainties” (185). In concluding the story with ambivalence,
Yem enacts the vulnerability in her identity that destabilizes certitudes about vic-
timhood 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 victim-
hood and resistance in migrant women’s writings.
100 Vulnerability and Resistance
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 resist-
ance 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 pit-
iable 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 experi-
ences are precisely induced and read as sacrifice towards attaining the migra-
tion’s elusive promises of success and development for their own homes and
homelands.

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4 Sacrifice and Social Heroism

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 gov-
ernance” 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, particu-
larly 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 left-
behind 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 pre-
vent 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 rela-
tives 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 devel-
opment. 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 bod-
ies, 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 sex-
ual 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 unsta-
ble, 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 but-
tressed 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 oth-
ers that also promises something in return, the hope of a better life afterwards.
106 Sacrifice and Social Heroism
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 eco-
nomic 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 vary-
ing discourses that sustain, for better or worse, the migrant Filipina women’s rela-
tions 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 opti-
mism 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 remit-
tances 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 popu-
lation 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’ for-
eign 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 condi-
tions 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 dur-
ing 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 coun-
tries 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 struc-
tural 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
108 Sacrifice and Social Heroism
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 devel-
opmental 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 pre-
cisely because the values, responsibilities, and obligations—themselves expres-
sions and regimentations of ideas of sacrifice—that come with it need to be
cultivated and developed through the nation-state’s official discourses on nation-
alism 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 disci-
plining them to regularly remit money (Guevarra 2010, Rodriguez 2002).
Bagong Bayani animates the cultural interplay of Catholic ideals of self-
renunciation 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 work-
ers, 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 predomi-
nant 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 soli-
darity 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 migra-
tion 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 per-
sonal 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 repro-
duced and projected countless times on the silver screen. Philippine mainstream
110 Sacrifice and Social Heroism
cinema has produced dozens of commercial films about transnational labor begin-
ning 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 itiner-
ants 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 spectacular-
izing 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 citizen-
ship 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 sac-
rifice and social heroism, replicating myths of bagong bayani while also contain-
ing 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 particu-

lar, its celebration of migrant workers as ‘new heroes,’ and the neoliberal pol-
icy 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 strug-
gles 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 independ-
ent 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 sacri-
fice abroad on her return to her family. Beyond representations of migrant wom-
an’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 endur-
ing 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
112 Sacrifice and Social Heroism
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 attach-
ments 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 migra-
tion, 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 eco-
nomic mobility but not to the promise itself. It is in this way that this film chal-
lenges 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 sac-
rificed 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 look-
ing 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 opti-
misms 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 send-
ing 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
114 Sacrifice and Social Heroism
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 some-
thing 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 moth-
er’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 navigat-
ing 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 hard-
headed 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 repeti-
tion, 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 chil-
dren’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 narra-
tive. 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 trag-
edy, 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
116 Sacrifice and Social Heroism
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 bar-
ren 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 migra-
tion’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 let-
ting 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 tug-
of-war over the money. Ilyong is injured and spends time in the fields until morn-
ing, 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.
118 Sacrifice and Social Heroism
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 con-
tingent 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 sac-
rifices 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 some-
where 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.
 Sacrifice and Social Heroism 119
Excess Baggage
Zig Dulay’s (2017) Bagahe opens inside a cramped airport toilet, with the cam-
era 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 domes-
tic 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 investiga-
tors, 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 confession-
als. 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 confes-
sion, 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 mater-
nal 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 pro-
tagonist 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 adjudi-
cate 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 mir-
roring in a mise-en-abyme, the audience sees in the silver screen the policewoman
120 Sacrifice and Social Heroism
who observes through her computer screen her suspect, Mercy, who is also look-
ing 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 police-
woman, 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 cul-
pability 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 repeat-
edly 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 sacri-
fice 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 (Marte-
Wood, 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 sub-
ject of interrogation, moral lecture, and public gossip and speculation on moth-
erhood 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 fur-
ther suffering, she realizes that she needs to speak up. When one of her case work-
ers 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.
122 Sacrifice and Social Heroism
The closing moments of the film offer an ambivalent ending to Mercy’s tribu-
lations. 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 dot-
ing, self-renunciating mother and a deeply traumatized migrant woman who can
no longer endure any more suffering. In this ambivalent ending, Mercy trans-
gresses 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 opti-
mism 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 her-
self, 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 prosti-
tution 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 philander-
ing 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 pro-
pelling her to pursue her own business which is her dream for herself. The life-
building 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 entrepreneur-
ship, while also setting this vicious cycle forward because of their highly contin-
gent 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 per-
forms 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 fam-
ily 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 mar-
riage 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 sto-
len 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 fix-
ing 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 declar-
ing 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 self-
lending 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
126 Sacrifice and Social Heroism
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 some-
body 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 sacri-
fice 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 dis-
course 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 rhetori-
cal strategies of social heroism and its representations in these filmic texts illus-
trate 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 life-
times 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 gen-
dered 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-renuncia-
tion 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 pro-
ject. 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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5 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 for-
eigners 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
 Mourning and Movement 131
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 immi-
nent 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 govern-
ment 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 judi-
ciousness 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, say-
ing, “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, blind-
folded, 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 iden-
tify 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 opin-
ion 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
132 Mourning and Movement
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 ille-
gal 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 bod-
ies 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 pub-
lics 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 feel-
ings that may intervene into how their struggles and social movements are under-
stood 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 nation-
state’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
 Mourning and Movement 133
moves people to grieve as a community by binding them according to the col-
lective pathos of national identity or shared suffering and sacrifice. The conflict-
ing 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 sor-
rows 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 mourn-
ing circulates contradictory discourses that maintain and challenge gendered mor-
alistic 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 pre-
carious 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 con-
temporary 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,
134 Mourning and Movement
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 think-
ing 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 wom-
en’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 admis-
sion 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
 Mourning and Movement 135
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, mar-
shal the “power of pity” and “moral certainty” that is reminiscent of the suffer-
ing 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 subordi-
nate 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 aggres-
sive warm-body exportation. Flor’s ultimate sacrifice became another kind of pat-
riotism 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 submis-
sion 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
136 Mourning and Movement
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 pro-
cess, mourning for her has collectively inspirited the Filipino community with the
power of reproach or finger-pointing: “As the Filipino people became metamor-
phosed 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 ordi-
nary 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 affec-
tive 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
 Mourning and Movement 137
fall within the terms of global capitalism and development, which is fundamen-
tally 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 territorial-
ized 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 safe-
guarding 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 self-
recognition, 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 dur-
ing 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 illeg-
ible 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 com-
munity 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 con-
ditioned her vulnerability as an overseas Filipina worker. It also reinforces prob-
lematic 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 concep-
tualizes 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 identifica-
tion 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
 Mourning and Movement 139
unmarked and ungrievable, because their stories are common and ubiquitous in
the continued warm-body exportation of women in the Philippines. Ijah, the pro-
tagonist 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 black-
listed 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 lit-
erary device to portray OFW heroines in a new light. It also works in suspending
140 Mourning and Movement
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, dispers-
ing 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 displace-
ment—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 claim-
ing 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 fam-
ily 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.
 Mourning and Movement 141
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 perfor-
mance, 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, heart-
rending 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 many-
fingered 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
142 Mourning and Movement
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 read-
ers 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
 Mourning and Movement 143
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 suffer-
ing 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 sado-
masochistic 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 com-
plained 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 look-
ing 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 forgive-
ness 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 environ-
ment, 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 some-
thing wicked or even demonic in the brown woman’s distracted look, in the sol-
dierly 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 mor-
ally ineligible as an OFW heroine is her openness towards, and even anticipa-
tion 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 life-
long 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 liv-
ing 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
 Mourning and Movement 145
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 suf-
fering 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 some-
thing 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.
146 Mourning and Movement
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 kara-
oke 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 suf-
fering 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–breadwin-
ners 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 inhibit-
ing as they both erase suffering and reinforce problematic conditions on what
makes Filipina lives grievable and moving enough to inspire social movements
 Mourning and Movement 147
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 introduc-
tion 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 domes-
tic 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 pro-
vide 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
148 Mourning and Movement
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 some-
thing 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 sav-
ings 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 destina-
tion 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 over-
worked 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
 Mourning and Movement 149
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 res-
cuing 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 self-
blaming 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 organiza-
tion, 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)
150 Mourning and Movement
Through this experience of awakening, Ijah is moved to improve her own knowl-
edge 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 fam-
ily, 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 read-
ers also get to observe the tensions created by the labor export policies of two
 Mourning and Movement 151
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 con-
ditions 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 conversa-
tion. 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 employ-
er’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 check-
ing 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
152 Mourning and Movement
Atin’s employer’s alibi is not true. This compels her to convince her organi-
zation to investigate. When Ijah learns that the Filipina helper whom she met
earlier might have witnessed what happened to Atin, she talks Vivian into help-
ing 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 territorial-
izing 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 con-
sulate treated her shows how the nation-state’s governmentality through their
embassies overseas not only manages the migrant women’s bodies but also con-
tains 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, biopo-
litical 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 incapa-
ble of both identifying with Atin’s suffering and perceiving her life as griev-
able, 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 conduct-
ing 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)
 Mourning and Movement 153
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 expres-
sions 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 griev-
ing 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 encapsu-
lated in the novel’s closing passage:

Ijah fell silent. She looked up and stared at the sky. Then, she softly whis-
pered, “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 transna-
tional 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 wom-
en’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.

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Conclusion
Affect and Activism

Viral Texts
In as much as this book is invested in fiction and films on Southeast Asian migra-
tion, 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 understand-
ing 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 pas-
senger 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 sacri-
fices 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
 Conclusion 157
been viewed two million times, with thousands of shares and hundreds of com-
ments. 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 communi-
ties 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 activ-
ist friends had started sharing news of an impending execution of the Filipina
domestic helper by early March 2015. The next month, her own testimony sur-
faced, 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 read-
ings of literatures and films of Southeast Asian migrant women. TWC2 cam-
paign 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 work-
ing 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 nar-
rates 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
158 Conclusion
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 draw-
ing attention to and stirring up conversations on otherwise unheard of narra-
tives 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 fam-
ily 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 gov-
ernments 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 mul-
titudes 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 aware-
ness” (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 releas-
ing the emotional pressures” of being affected by social injustice (9). More impor-
tantly, 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 under-
mining democracies across the world, Southeast Asia has been at the forefront of
the experiment of weaponizing social media in emotionalizing state propagandas
 Conclusion 159
(Ong and Cabanes 2018). Indonesians and Filipinos at home and abroad are vora-
cious consumers of social media, and as migrants rely on these technologies for
their daily lives, they are also exposed to receiving and propagating misinforma-
tion, 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 unwit-
tingly fueled the antagonism between mums and maids inside the household.
While the outrage against Ip’s commentary on migrant Filipina women’s sexu-
ality 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 enact-
ing 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 indis-
tinguishable. These responses reveal how the problematic discourse of sacrifice,
that ties migrant women’s suffering within the logic of the nation-state develop-
mental 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 iden-
tifies 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.
160 Conclusion
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 prevail-
ing discourses of labor migration. This is why the task of reading and analyzing
how Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers exceed these social media repre-
sentations 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 con-
founding the debates on social exclusion, human rights, development and nation-
building, 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 inti-
mate 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 employ-
ing families and fellow migrants allay the effects of alienation and marginaliza-
tion, 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 vulner-
able 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 pre-
carity 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 work-
ers’ 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
 Conclusion 161
Filipina bodies to the nation-state’s developmental strategy that the independent
films about Filipina domestic workers sustain and subvert by portraying migra-
tion-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 understand-
ing 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 inhibit-
ing 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 transcend-
ing 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 inter-
rogate 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 rep-
resent the advocacy for Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ rights and
welfare in Hong Kong and Singapore. As such, these narratives do not only com-
plicate 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 inclu-
sion 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 rac-
ism and discrimination that comes with the policies of rules of the destination
states and unequal treatment from local citizens and employers. Utomo’s short
162 Conclusion
story “Intruder at Home” and Xyza Cruz Bacani’s black-and-white photogra-
phy, 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 cosmo-
politan 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 sympa-
thetic 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 work-
ers. 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 depic-
tions of migrant women’s erotic practices that highlight their agency as pleasure-
seeking individuals challenge moral assumptions that sustain their problematic
relations to their home, family, and homeland, while also reinscribing their labor
 Conclusion 163
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 victimiza-
tion 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 narra-
tive 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 organiza-
tion of migrant advocates and activists has consistently called for the prosecu-
tion 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 blam-
ing 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 strug-
gles 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 gov-
ernment’s development agenda. This criticism, however, overlooks how the par-
ticular conditions of overseas work are brought about by the global landscape
164 Conclusion
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 poli-
tics 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 dem-
onstrate, 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 pos-
sibilities 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 fol-
low 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 griev-
able life has become a potent point of identification that has inspirited a move-
ment 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 congre-
gated 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
 Conclusion 165
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 nar-
rates 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 draw-
ing 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 organi-
zation 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 collabo-
rated with progressive organizations advocating local women and workers in the
host city-state. The inclusion of various nationalities of migrant worker organ-
izers 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 politi-
cal 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 non-
profit groups organized by Singaporean activists have been leading the mobiliz-
ing 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 con-
necting the struggles of not just foreign domestic workers across different nation-
alities 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
166 Conclusion
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 religious-
based 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 trans-
national 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 wom-
en’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 concen-
trations 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 chal-
lenge 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 ena-
bled 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 alli-
ance 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, transgen-
ders, 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
 Conclusion 167
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 activ-
ism 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 partici-
pate. 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 inti-
mate 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.

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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 Index
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

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
Index 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