The
Filipina sisterhood
An
anthropology of
happiness
The Economist. Dec 20th 2001 | HONG KONG
Out of
misery, some extraordinary lessons
ONCE a week, on Sundays, Hong Kong becomes a
different city. Thousands of Filipina women throng into the central business district,
around Statue Square,
to picnic, dance, sing, gossip and laugh. They snuggle in the shade under the HSBC building,
a Hong Kong landmark, and spill out into the
parks and streets. They hug. They chatter. They smile. Humanity could stage no
greater display of happiness.
This stands
in stark contrast to the other six days of the week. Then it is the Chinese,
famously cranky and often rude, and expatriate businessmen, permanently
stressed, who control the city centre. On these days, the Filipinas are mostly
holed up in the 154,000 households across the territory where they work as
“domestic helpers”, or amahs in Cantonese.
There they suffer not only the loneliness of separation from their own
families, but often virtual slavery under their Chinese or expatriate masters.
Hence a mystery: those who should be Hong Kong's
most miserable are, by all appearances, its happiest.
How?
The Philippine government estimates
that about 10% of the country's 75m people work overseas in order to support
their families. Last year, this diaspora remitted $6
billion, making overseas Filipino workers, or OFWs, one of the
biggest sources of foreign exchange. Hong Kong
is the epicentre of this diaspora. Although America, Japan
and Saudi Arabia are bigger
destinations of OFWs by
numbers, Hong Kong is the city where they are
most concentrated and visible. Filipina amahs
make up over 2% of its total and 40% of its non-Chinese population. They
play an integral part in almost every middle-class household. And, once a week,
they take over the heart of their host society.
It was not always thus. Two
generations ago, the Philippines
was the second-richest country in East Asia, after Japan, while Hong Kong was teeming with
destitute refugees from mainland China. Among upper-class families
in the Philippines, it was
common in those days to employ maids from Hong Kong.
But over the past two decades Hong Kong has grown rich as one of Asia's
“tigers”, while the Philippines
has stayed poor. Hong Kong is the closest rich economy
to the Philippines,
and the easiest place to get “domestic” visas. It has the most elaborate
network of employment agencies for amahs in
the world.
A bed in a cupboard
Although the Filipinas in Hong Kong come from poor families, over half have college
degrees. Most speak fluent English and reasonable Cantonese, besides Tagalog and their local Philippine dialect. About half are
in Hong Kong because they are mothers earning
money to send their children to school back home. The other half tend to be
eldest sisters working to feed younger siblings. All are their families'
primary breadwinners.
Their treatment varies. By law,
employers must give their amahs a “private
space” to live in, but Hong Kong's flats tend
to be tiny, and the Asian Migrant Centre, an NGO, estimates that nearly half of amahs
do not have their own room. Some amahs sleep
in closets, on the bathroom floor, and under the dining table. One petite amah
sleeps in a kitchen cupboard. At night she takes out the plates, places
them on the washer, and climbs in; in the morning, she replaces the plates.
When amahs are mistreated, as many are, they
almost never seek redress. Among those who did so last year, one had her hands
burned with a hot iron by her Chinese employer, and one was beaten for not cleaning
the oven properly.
The amahs'
keenest pain, however, is separation from loved ones. Most amahs
leave their children and husbands behind for years, or for good, in order to
provide for them. Meanwhile, those families often break apart. It is hard, for
instance, to find married amahs whose
husbands at home have not taken a mistress, or even fathered other children.
Some amahs show their dislocation by lying or
stealing from their employers, but most seem incapable of bitterness. Instead,
they pour out love on the children they look after. Often it is they who dote,
who listen, who check homework. And they rarely stop
to compare or envy.
Under such circumstances, the
obstinate cheerfulness of the Filipinas can be baffling. But does it equate to
“happiness”, as most people would understand it? “That's not a mistake. They
really are,” argues Felipe de Leon, a professor of Filipinology
at Manila's University of the Philippines. In
every survey ever conducted, whether the comparison is with western or other
Asian cultures, Filipinos consider themselves by far the happiest. In Asia,
they are usually followed by their Malay cousins in Malaysia, while the Japanese and
Hong Kong Chinese are the most miserable. Anecdotal evidence confirms these
findings.
Happiness is kapwa
Explaining the phenomenon is more
difficult. The usual hypothesis puts it down to the unique ethnic and
historical cocktail that is Philippine culture—Malay roots (warm, sensual,
mystical) mixed with the Catholicism and fiesta spirit of the former Spanish
colonisers, to which is added a dash of western flavour from the islands' days
as an American colony. Mr de Leon, after a decade of researching, has concluded
that Filipino culture is the most inclusive and open of all those he has
studied. It is the opposite of the individualistic culture of the West, with
its emphasis on privacy and personal fulfilment. It is also the opposite of
certain collectivistic cultures, as one finds them in Confucian societies, that
value hierarchy and “face”.
By contrast, Filipino culture is
based on the notion of kapwa, a Tagalog word that roughly translates into “shared being”.
In essence, it means that most Filipinos, deep down, do not believe that their
own existence is separable from that of the people around them. Everything,
from pain to a snack or a joke, is there to be shared. Guests in Filipino
homes, for instance, are usually expected to stay in the hosts' own nuptial
bed, while the displaced couple sleeps on the floor. Small-talk tends to get so
intimate so quickly that many westerners recoil. “The strongest social urge of
the Filipino is to connect, to become one with people,” says Mr de Leon. As a
result, he believes, there is much less loneliness among them.
It is a tall thesis, so The
Economist set out to corroborate it in and around Statue Square on Sundays. At that time
the square turns, in effect, into a map of the Philippine archipelago. The
picnickers nearest to the statue itself, for instance, speak mostly Ilocano, a
dialect from northern Luzon. In the shade
under the Number 13 bus stop (the road is off-limits to vehicles on Sundays)
one hears more Ilonggo, spoken on Panay
island. Closer to City Hall, the most common dialect is Cebuano, from Cebu. Hong Kong's
Filipinas, in other words, replicate their village communities, and these
surrogate families form a first circle of shared being. Indeed, some of the new
arrivals in Hong Kong already have aunts,
nieces, former students, teachers, or neighbours who are there, and gossip from
home spreads like wildfire.
What is most striking about Statue Square,
however, is that the sharing is in no way confined to any dialect group. Filipinas who are total strangers move from one group to
another—always welcomed, never rejected, never awkward. Indeed, even
Indonesian maids (after Filipinas, the largest group of amahs),
and Chinese or foreign passers-by who linger for even a moment are likely to be
invited to share the snacks.
The same sense of light-hearted
intimacy extends to religion. Father Lim, for instance, is a Filipino priest in
Hong Kong. Judging by the way his mobile phone
rings almost constantly with amahs who want to
talk about their straying husbands at home, he is also every amah's best
friend. He is just as informal during his Sunday service in Tagalog
at St Joseph's
Church on Garden Road.
This event is, by turns, stand-up comedy, rock concert and group therapy. And
it is packed. For most of the hour, Father Lim squeezes through his flock with
a microphone. “Are you happy?” he asks the congregation. A hand snatches the
mike from him. “Yes, because I love God.” Amid wild applause, the mike finds
its way to another amah. “I'm so happy because I got my HK$3,670 this
month [$470, the amahs' statutory wage]. But my
employer was expecting a million and didn't get it. Now he's miserable.” The
others hoot with laughter.
The Filipinas, says Father Lim, have
only one day a week of freedom (less, actually, as most employers impose
curfews around dusk), so they “maximise it by liberating the Filipino spirit”.
That spirit includes communing with God. Some 97% of Filipinos believe in God,
and 65%, according to a survey, feel “extremely close” to him. This is more
than double the percentage of the two runners-up in the survey, America and Israel. This intimate approach to
faith, thinks Father Lim, is one reason why there is virtually no drug abuse,
suicide or depression among the amahs—problems
that are growing among the Chinese.
The lifeline to home
There is, however, an even more
concrete expression of kapwa. Quite simply, it
is the reason why the Filipinas are where they are in the first place: to
provide for loved ones at home. Most spend very little of
their monthly HK$3,670 on themselves. Instead, they take it to WorldWide House, a shopping mall and office complex near Statue Square. On
Sundays the mall becomes a Philippine market, packed with amahs
buying T-shirts,
toys and other articles for their siblings and children, and remitting their
wages. More than their wages, in fact: many amahs
borrow to send home more, often with ruinous financial consequences.
Father Lim tells a story. An eminent
Filipino died while abroad, and it was decided that local compatriots should
bid the coffin adieu before its journey home. So amahs
showed up to file past it. When the coffin arrived in the Philippines and was
re-opened, the corpse was covered from head to toe with padded bras, platform
shoes, Nike trainers, and the like, all neatly tagged with the correct
addresses.
It is their role as a lifeline for
the folks at home that has earned the OFWs their Tagalog nickname, bayani.
By itself, bayani means heroine, and this is
how many amahs see themselves.
Another form of the word, bayanihan, used to
describe the traditional way of moving house in the Philippines. All the villagers
would get together, pick up the hut and carry it to its new site. Bayanihan was a heroic, communal—in other
words, shared—effort.
It is no coincidence,
therefore, that Bayanihan House is the name the amahs have given to a building in Hong Kong that a trust has made available to them for
birthday parties, hairstyling classes, beauty pageants and the like. One recent
Sunday, during a pageant, one of the contestants for beauty queen was asked how
she overcame homesickness, and why she thought the people back home considered
her a hero. She looked down into her audience of amahs.
“We're heroes because we sacrifice for the ones we love. And homesickness is
just a part of it. But we deal with it because we're together.” The room
erupted with applause and agreement.
“Nowadays, bayanihan
really means togetherness,” says Mr de Leon, and “togetherness is happiness”.
It might sound too obvious, almost banal, to point out—had not so many people
across the world forgotten it.