Spatial Agency and Occupation: Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Kwok, Evelyn Book Spatial Agency and Occupation: Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong Edinburgh Studies in Urban Political Economy Provided in Cooperation with: Edinburgh University Press Suggested Citation: Kwok, Evelyn (2024) : Spatial Agency and Occupation: Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong, Edinburgh Studies in Urban Political Economy, ISBN 978-1-4744-7918-9, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474479189 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/321939 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover Evelyn Kwok Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong EDINBURGH STUDIES IN URBAN POLITICAL ECONOMY ‘Spatial Agency and Occupation consolidates the trajectory of Evelyn Kwok’s highly original theorising and meticulous research on the intersections of space, economics, gender and labour for over a decade. A powerful and moving analysis of the discipline and marginalisation of female migrant workers with unique insights into their resilience and everyday resistance. Interdisciplinary scholarship at its best!’ Maggy Lee, The University of Hong Kong ‘This is a remarkable book that provides valuable insights on migration, care, norms and the global political economy that shape the options, choices and experiences of Indonesian and Filipino migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. Kwok deftly interweaves the historical and structural discourses with personal narratives, thereby deepening our understanding of the underlying power relations and contradictory outcomes of migration policies. Her exploration of these workers’ resourcefulness provides food for thought regarding resilience and women’s agency.’ Maria S. Floro, American University, USA Explores the resistance of a marginalised female migrant workforce through the intersection of space, economics and labour There are around 340,000 foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong, but the ways in which they experience migration is largely hidden in the homes of their employers. Spatial Agency and Occupation helps us to understand the complexities of migrant experiences by analysing the socio-spatial consequences that emerge from global migrant labour and examining the capacity of the disenfranchised to create new spatialities by using public space to resist their disempowerment. This approach gives voice to a phenomenon silenced by the hegemony of mainstream urban economics and, in turn, reveals practices that cut across global labour. By shedding light on the importance of space in moulding these practices and how they, in turn, shape space, Kwok demonstrates the power and limits of spatial agency in pushing back against the deleterious consequences of considering labour as another commodity and reveals what lies behind the curtain of Hong Kong’s ‘successful’ spatial capitalism. Evelyn Kwok is Research Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. Cover image: Ikat Seamless Pattern Design for Fabric, Shutterstock Cover design: Bekah Dey and Stuart Dalziel Evelyn Kwok Spatial Agency and Occupation Spatial Agency and Occupation EDINBURGH STUDIES IN URBAN POLITICAL ECONOMY Series editor: Franklin Obeng-Odoom 978-1-4744-7916-5_PPC_Format: 234 x 156mm_Extent 224pp_Trimmed artwork size: 274 x 367.7mm_Spine 15.7mm_Book Code 5981 3767 eup Kwok_PPC.indd 13767 eup Kwok_PPC.indd 1 17/08/2024 10:5917/08/2024 10:59 Spatial Agency and Occupation Half Title Edinburgh Studies in Urban Political Economy Series Editor: Franklin Obeng-Odoom In a world characterised by cities, their disproportionate share of problems as well as prospects, and the limitations of mainstream urban economics as a compass, the Edinburgh Studies in Urban Political Economy series strives to publish books that seek to better understand, and to address, such challenges. The Global South is of particular interest, but it is by no means the only focus. As an alternative political economy series, it emphasises social sustainability of urban transformations, encourages the use of transdisciplinary political-economic approaches to urban economics, and welcomes books that are both heterodox and pluralist in their economics. Books in the series strive to both engage and to transcend mainstream urban economics, in methodologies, values, and visions, while placing their insights at the disposal of the wider fields of urban studies and political economy. Titles in the Edinburgh Studies in Urban Political Economy series include: Published: Open Access Coal and Energy in South Africa: Considering a Just Transition Lochner Marais, Philippe Burger, Maléne Campbell, Deirdre van Rooyen and Stuart Paul Denoon-Stevens Open Access Urban Political Economy: Marx’s Theory of Land and Cities Don Munro Open Access Urban Inequality in Finland: Land, Housing and the Nordic Welfare State Mika Hyötyläinen Open Access Spatial Agency and Occupation: Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong Evelyn Kwok Forthcoming: Urban Regeneration and Governance in Africa: The Political Economy of Market Redevelopment in Ghana Lewis Abedi Asante and Ilse Helbrecht Series Page Spatial Agency and Occupation Migrant Domestic Workers inHongKong Evelyn Kwok Title Page Copyright This book is dedicated to migrant women workers around the world, who work for the possibility of a better life for themselves and those around them. Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com We are committed to making research available to a wide audience and are pleased to be publishing Platinum Open Access ebook editions of titles in this series. © Evelyn Kwok, 2024, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative licence Cover image: Ikat Seamless Pattern Design for Fabric, Shutterstock Cover design: Bekah Dey and Stuart Dalziel Edinburgh University Press Ltd 13 Infirmary Street Edinburgh EH1 1LT Typeset in 11 on 13pt Baskerville MT Pro by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 7916 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 7918 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 7919 6 (epub) The right of Evelyn Kwok to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents List of Figures vi Preface: It Takes a Village ix Acknowledgements xiii A Note on Terms and Interviewees xiv Introduction: A Matter of Space and People 1 1. Policy and/vs People: Mobility and Stagnation 36 2. Narratives of Oppression: Servitude, Invisibility and Spacelessness 69 3. Agency and Resistance 96 4. Little Manila and Beyond 127 5. Commodification of Care: Costs and Sacrifices 150 Conclusion: A Matter of Gender, Labour and Space 174 Bibliography 183 Index 201 Contents List of Figures 0.1 Photograph of domestic workers in the Former Central Market Arcade on a Sunday afternoon. 2 0.2 An example of how the site analysis is documented via photography, drawing and annotations. 26 0.3 A floorplan sketch of one interviewee’s bedroom produced during fieldwork. 28 0.4 The final digital version of the drawing of DD’s bedroom, showing the scale of her occupancy in dotted lines, in the same scale as her employer’s child, with whom she shared the room. 29 0.5 A digital image that presents the space the worker has at home, next to the temporary social space she creates for herself and her friends on the footpath that can be expanded, on an elevated walkway on a Sunday. 30 2.1 Drawing of KL’s bedroom, where KL and her space are outlined in dotted lines. 76 2.2 Drawing of two scenarios in dotted lines (A and B) of FH’s sleeping arrangement. 78 3.1 Map of Central Elevated Walkway. 105 3.2 The cardboard units are often reinforced by string and cable ties connected to the balustrades to create sturdy structures to reside in for the day. 107 3.3 Spaces outside of closed shop fronts in the Former Central Market arcade, which has been renovated and reopened since 2022, were popular with workers because they were completely protected from the weather. 108 3.4 Chater Road hosted the global campaign ‘One Billion Rising’ on a Sunday in 2015 as hundreds of migrant domestic helpers gathered to participate in choreographed dancing. 110 3.5 Workers gather to practice their dance routine as part of the parade for the 125th anniversary of Philippines Independence Day. 110 3.6 & The two photographs show the activities created by Angelique 3.7 Santos as part of The Essence of Sundays. 111 3.8 Indonesian workers gather in Victoria Park for traditional dance performances on Sunday. 116 List of Figures Acknowledgements The research for this book originated from my PhD project at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia between 2012–2018. From 2019 onwards, I relocated to Hong Kong and since then, the world has changed and shifted in many unexpected ways, along with my research. Firstly, my deepest thanks go to the editor of this series, Franklin Obeng Odoom, Professor of Global Development Studies at the University of Helsinki, whom I met a decade ago at the beginning of my PhD, as a colleague and friend. He saw the validity and clarity in my work well before I was aware, and he continued to show encouragement throughout the years, even after we went our separate ways to different parts of the world. My thanks also extend to Sarah Foyle, Sam Johnson, colleagues at Edinburgh University Press and the reviewers of the manuscript. The book could not have been written without the generosity of the migrant domestic workers I met over the last decade, who spent time with me sharing their stories, goals and dreams over food, laughs and tears. I am deeply aware that they are real people beyond the words I have represented them with here, and that their compromises, sacrifices and resilience are very real and ongoing. I am honoured and humbled by their perseverance for a better life for themselves and those around them. I want to thank my colleagues at the Academy of Visual Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University and my research assistant, Athena Cheng. I also would like to thank Justyna Kabala for introducing me to the members of Guhit Kulay – Cris, Jonalyn, Lyn, Mari Chris and Dong – and for their wonderful artworks and enthusiasm for doing them for this book. I want to acknowledge the coaches of the self-development and leadership program I did during the final stages of this book, in particular Colin Bennett and Dee Cheung. This book would not have moved forward without their encouragement and commitment in getting me to take action. Lastly, I want to thank my parents – my mother, my stepdad and my father – for their unconditional love. This book has been funded by the General Research Fund of Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the Academy of Visual Arts’ Quality Research Fund at Hong Kong Baptist University. Acknowledgements A Note on Terms and Interviewees This book focuses on the migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, who are legally called Foreign Domestic Helpers. There are terms used throughout the book to represent migrant domestic workers varying from ‘workers’, ‘migrant workers’ and ‘domestic workers’. As the majority of migrant domestic workers are women, all interviewees featured in this book are women. This book features stories from twenty-five workers, selected from eighty-seven formal interviews and fieldwork data collected between 2013–2023. Their names have been changed into acronyms or altered to uphold anonymity. A Note on Terms and Interviewees Introduction: A Matter of Space and People Sunday: a public encounter It was a typical Sunday afternoon, and I was walking along the Central Elevated Walkway, towards the International Finance Centre shopping mall in the Central Business District on Hong Kong Island. The Central Elevated Walkway is a system of elevated walkways that connect over twenty-five buildings in the area. Such is a typical urban wonder of cities like Hong Kong, where the walkways create an alternative network of paths above ground level for people to access the various transport hubs and commercial towers without setting foot on the street. As a spatial design researcher, I am interested in the way public space is activated and appropriated by city users. Throughout my creative practice, I focused on how people have used and transformed public space for their own purposes and the emergence of temporary urban spaces. Protests, public assemblies, flash mobs, skateboarders and other kinds of temporary interventions all fascinated me with their alternative and subversive use of public space. There has been a long-standing global phenomenon of smalland large-scale spatial contestations, and my practice was significantly informed by various philosophers and artists’ ways of reimagining and remapping cities in two-dimensional and threedimensional ways that suggested different ways of occupying the city. Thus, some ten years ago, I began to look at Hong Kong’s urban spaces through this lens. On this Sunday on the elevated walkways, I began noticing that these spaces were used differently than on the weekdays. They were not just conduits for office workers and consumers to access the various shopping malls and office towers. They were also a site for migrant domestic workers to gather. I was motivated to document these spaces of aboveground circulation. As I wandered through the Former Central Market arcade, most of the shops were closed with their shutters down. With the row of shutters to my right and an empty public exhibition space to my left, the arcade served as a pedestrian corridor for a steady flow of tourists and locals.1 My focus shifted to people sitting on the floor in front of them. Groups of women sat on flat cardboard boxes; eating, chatting, sleeping or applying beauty routines to themselves and others. Small suitcases and various personal items were arranged to form new sets of delineated spaces. Some groups stood their cardboard boxes upright, others opened umbrellas to act as barriers between the pedestrians and themselves. Shoes were Introduction: A Matter of Space and People 2 Spatial Agency and Occupation placed on the periphery of the cardboard mats, resembling the common Asian practice of removing shoes when entering the home. Some of the women had their backs turned away from the footpath, denying eye contact with pedestrians. Absorbing the details of the scene in front of me, it became evident that I was seeing where migrant domestic workers come together informally to socialise and to have some space of their own. Connecting the dots between my personal interactions with my cousins’ worker during my childhood and other disparate pieces of related information to the scene in front of me, it made sense in ways it never did before. I was overwhelmed by the intensity of their collective appearance and occupation of public space. A few moments later I reached the end of the arcade and witnessed more migrant domestic workers occupying the next section of the Central Elevated Walkway; the U-shaped elevated walkway that connects to the Hang Seng Bank tower. Unlike the enclosed arcade, this section has glass balustrades, providing unhindered views of the streets below. Here the groups of workers were leaning against the glass panels which, when viewed from the street, can offer a sense that the people are floating in an elevated space within the density of the city. In this elevated walkway, the groups were also seated on flattened Figure 0.1 Photograph of domestic workers in the Former Central Market Arcade on a Sunday afternoon. (Photograph by author). Introduction 3 cardboard boxes, although they did not make vertical dividers between their occupancy and the pedestrians. The width of the walkway was narrower than the arcade and I was following the pedestrians in front of me in single file, moving uncomfortably through and between groups of seated women, who seemed to be intensely focused on each other and their conversations in Tagalog, an Austronesian language native to the Philippines (its standardised form is Filipino, which is the official language of the Philippines alongside English). It was an uncomfortable experience because it felt as though I was entering a private space where women were engaged in domestic activities. Informally speaking to Hong Kong locals about this phenomenon on Sunday, many expressed their frustration at how congested, dirty or noisy Central (the district) had become due to the overbearing number of migrant domestic workers. By contrast, when I heard Filipino workers talk about Sunday, many of them affectionately called Central ‘Little Manila’, which is a commonly used term to describe their gatherings in Central (Law, 2001; Tam, 2016; Kwok, 2019). The distribution of the population of migrant domestic workers is split almost evenly between the Philippines and Indonesia (Government of Hong Kong SAR, 2019). On Sunday, Central Hong Kong’s overpasses, walkways and pockets of public space are dominated by Filipino migrant domestic workers while Indonesian migrant domestic workers gather in Victoria Park, some three kilometres away in Causeway Bay and proliferate in many public spaces throughout other suburbs and territories. In Central, different urban interior and exterior spaces – formally and informally – offer a range of goods and services to the Filipino community. World Wide House provides Filipino food and magazines, World Wide Lane sells international phone cards, Chater Road provides open spaces for choreographed dancing and political rallies and Connaught Road Central becomes a packing and loading zone for care packages enroute to the Philippines. On early Sunday mornings, pieces of cardboard boxes can be seen, laid flat, in various parts of Central – on the Central Elevated Walkway, the ground-floor atrium of the HSBC headquarters building, various underpasses and sheltered footpaths – symbolising the informal demarcation of such public spaces. These pieces of cardboard are eventually used by the migrant workers to construct makeshift home-bases for temporary inhabitation between errands that day. Every Sunday, specific public spaces in Central are linked by the ritualised inhabitations of migrant domestic workers. What emerges is a unique ecology; a temporary but repeated socio-spatial system of overlapping spaces of an ethnic enclave, a site of contention between the citizens and the workers, and the recreation of a series of domestic spaces. Further, it reflects the problems within the labour conditions, whereby workers have no legal access to a home of their own outside of the workplace, intersected with low wages, temporary residency status and deregulated working hours. Migrant domestic workers are a 4 Spatial Agency and Occupation socially, economically and spatially marginalised group that makes up 5% of the city-state’s population. The scope: space and people This book explores the socio-spatial phenomenon of the migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong through the intersection of space, economics, gender and labour. The scope will begin with introducing the physical context of Hong Kong through space and the migrant workers as people. Space Hong Kong is located on China’s south coast, connected by land to the Chinese Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen and enclosed by the South China Sea and Pearl River Delta, with a total useable land mass of 1,089 km2 and a population of 7.34 million (Hong Kong SAR Government Census and Statistics Department, 2023). Hong Kong SAR consists of Hong Kong Island, the Kowloon peninsula, New Territories and 200 small offshore islands. Hong Kong’s geographic terrain is mountainous, with hills and slopes throughout Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon peninsula. Approximately 25% of Hong Kong’s land is available for urban development, with the majority in Kowloon, the north coastal edge of Hong Kong Island and scattered areas of New Territories. Victoria Harbour runs between Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, separating their corporate and commercial skyscraper-dominated skylines. Hong Kong’s urban density may seem complex and chaotic as shopping malls, hotels, corporate towers and residential towers ascend in quick succession and intense proximity, merging and blurring spatial and programmatic boundaries. Architects Adam Frampton, Jonathan Solomon and Clara Wong summarise Hong Kong’s urban planning strategy as ‘a combination of top-down planning and bottom-up solutions, a unique collaboration between pragmatic thinking and comprehensive master planning, played out in three dimensional space’ (Frampton, Solomon & Wong, 2012, p. 6). In Central, the commercial district of Hong Kong Island where the migrant domestic workers from the Philippines congregate every Sunday, the compact density is specifically aided by subterranean and vertical connective spaces. These public spaces are predominantly privately-owned public spaces which are regulated with various modes of surveillance such as frequent security patrols, closed-circuit television and numerous signs to imply a strict sense of spatial order and regulated public behaviour. Homeless people, buskers and other disenfranchised minorities who cannot afford admission into these spaces by means of consumption discover opportunities in the liminal spaces that are in between. Every Sunday, groups of migrant workers inhabit such liminal spaces: elevated walkways, corporate atriums, underpasses, open stairways and pedestrianised Introduction 5 roads. In doing so, they transform these spaces by enacting their agency in ways that create new spatialities and histories. Hong Kong’s colonial history and postcolonial political landscape have shaped its unique cultural identity, which can be easily overlooked as an archetype of ‘East meets West’ (Abbas, 1997; Mathews, Ma & Lui, 2008), with East being the Chinese ethnic origin of Hong Kong and West referring to British occupation (1842–1997). Yet, to categorise Hong Kong’s cultural identity as a bifurcation of cultures is too generic. Rather, it has been moulded by the complexity of the intertwined strands of Chinese, British colonial and postcolonial influences, in addition to laissez-faire economic practices, which have created a strange amalgamation embodying aspects of capitalist cosmopolitanism, traditional Chinese paternalistic and patriarchal values, and international progressiveness. This intricate identity has formed the foundation for Hong Kong people’s lifestyle and their identification with certain politics and freedoms. Over the last decade, with many large-scale social events that resulted in various changes to its political structure, the city-state is and continues to undergo significant social, cultural, political and economic changes. Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842, and the Sino-British treaty between the British and Chinese governments was signed in 1984, establishing the ‘one country, two systems’ policy, under which Hong Kong’s rule of law and economic system were promised to remain unchanged for fifty years after the handover, between 1997 and 2047. This was to benefit both Britain and China, as it ensured the continuation of Hong Kong’s capitalist mixed service economy, which is distinctly different to China’s authoritarian, planned economy, while activating a gradual transition of ties to China towards 2047 (Lim, 2015, p. 4). Hong Kong’s postcolonial, diverse socio-cultural identity offers a unique political, social and urban-spatial context to this book, which sets the scene for the socio-spatial ecology that the migrant domestic workers create and dwell in. People Migrant domestic workers are live-in domestic workers employed on a twoyear contractual basis, earning a minimum wage of HK$4,870 each month, which is approximately US$622 (Hong Kong Immigration Department, 2023). According to their contract, they have one weekly rest day and other specified working conditions (Hong Kong Immigration Department, 2022a). They are responsible for all domestic duties within the home, including caring for the children and elderly who reside in the home. Their legal monthly wage is substantially below the Hong Kong citizens’ minimum wage of HK$40 per hour, which equates to a monthly salary of HK$16,300, approximately US$2,083 (Hong Kong SAR Labour Department, 2023b). From fieldwork data collected between 2012–2017 and 2019–2022, nearly half of the eighty-seven workers who were formally interviewed earn less than the legal minimum amount or 10–20% below 6 Spatial Agency and Occupation that, many due to private negotiations with recruitment agencies and employers. The overwhelming majority of the people entering into Hong Kong under the Foreign Domestic Helper visa are women. Many of these women leave behind their families in their home country to come to Hong Kong alone, and work as domestic helpers for middleto high-income families. According to the legal specifications, migrant domestic workers are required to live in their employers’ homes. These workers have no legal access to rent property on their own. Due to the limitations of apartment sizes in Hong Kong and very little specifications about the provision of private spaces in the contract, the most common sleeping arrangement for domestic workers is a makeshift bed on the floor of the children’s bedroom or one that is temporarily placed in the living area and used only when the rest of the family have retreated to their bedrooms. Such spatial restrictions and lack of separate spaces within the home have a significant impact on the workers’ capacity to have privacy, autonomy and refuge within the home that is also their workplace, where they spend most of their time in Hong Kong. Beyond being economically marginalised, the workers are also spatially restricted. Migrant domestic workers from the Philippines first entered Hong Kong in 1975 (Law, 2002). As Hong Kong’s economy continued to grow, migrant domestic labour continued to be in demand, with the number of migrant domestic workers growing from 30,000 to 380,000 between 1990–2020, thus supporting the economy indirectly by fulfilling the domestic roles of local women (Chiu, 2003; Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, 1992; 2020; Hong Kong SAR Immigration Department, 2022b). Despite the importance of their roles, migrant domestic workers are one of the most marginalised workforces in Hong Kong due to their low income, inflexibility over their work, no choice over their place of accommodation and no right to permanent residency. Their identity, status and occupancy in the domestic and public realm are marginalised and contested. Employment process Before the workers set foot in Hong Kong, their employment process begins with applying for the Foreign Domestic Helper visa with a potential employer. This is often not a smooth, straightforward process and is rife with potential for exploitation, negotiations and miscommunications. In the sample migrant domestic worker employment contract provided by the Hong Kong Immigration Department (2022), there are subtle disparities between the Chinese and English versions that subsequently alter the perception and portrayal of the migrant worker and their relationship with the employer. The formal legal term ‘Foreign Domestic Helper’ in the English contract is represented in the Chinese version as ‘ 外國聘用家庭傭工 ’, which translates to ‘Hired Family Servant from Overseas’. The disparity between the English and the Chinese Introduction 7 legal representation is problematic, as there are significant implications within ‘Helper’ and ‘Servant’, ‘Domestic’ and ‘Family’. A ‘helper’ is someone who helps with an activity, which does not automatically denote the person to a lower status or belonging to the person who he or she is helping (Cambridge University Press, n.d.). In contrast, a ‘servant’ is defined as ‘a person who is employed in another person’s house, doing jobs such as cooking and cleaning, especially in the past’ (Cambridge University Press, n.d.). There is an unsaid and well-practiced expectation of a servant obeying rules and being under the control of an employer or master who is of higher status economically and socially. Subsequently, the terms ‘Foreign Domestic Helper’ and ‘Hired Family Servant from Overseas’ are inconsistent in their Chinese and English translations, thus falsely representing their meaning. The implication of the role remains ambiguous as the concept of servitude and obedience is lost from the Chinese to the English translation. There are also differences between ‘domestic’ and ‘family’ as ‘domestic’ refers to the home or the household, while ‘family’ inscribes a close relation between spouses, parents and children. The migrant worker is an individual who is not related to the employer by name or by blood. They are hired on a professional basis to perform domestic duties and not family duties. In this situation, domestic duties are recognised as paid labour, while family duties can be perceived as a moral obligation. The migrant worker is not working for the employer due to moral obligation. However, the misuse of terminology, misconstrued meanings and expectations can impact how employers interact with the migrant workers. An example of how the language used has direct impact on the workers was in 1997, when the Hong Kong government reduced the domestic workers’ legal minimum wage due to the financial crisis. At the time, the argument used to justify this was that the workers are ‘members of the family’ and should also bear the sacrifices that the citizens were facing (Wee & Sim, 2005). This ‘member of the family’ identity is used often in many circumstances publicly and privately as a means to justify control and continue to access cheap domestic labour (Constable, 2007). The Chinese representation of ‘Foreign Domestic Helper’ as ‘Hired Family Servant from Overseas’ is dishonest as the term abstracts the pragmatic differences between a paid assistant and a person who is morally obliged to obey orders. The Chinese version of the employment contract further suggests a master-servant relationship between the employer and the migrant worker as the English contract uses the term ‘Employer’, while the Chinese version usestheterm ‘ 雇主 ’, which translates to ‘Employer, Hirer or Master’. This term in the Chinese contract openly prompts an ambiguous power imbalance between the ‘Hired Family Servant from Overseas’ and the ‘Employer/Hirer/Master’. Despite the inequality between employers and employees, the English version portrays a more professional employment relationship between the ‘Foreign Domestic Helper’ and the ‘Employer’. Many employers of migrant domestic workers are Hong Kong Chinese, which gives them access to both the Chinese 8 Spatial Agency and Occupation and English versions of the contract. On the other hand, the migrant workers are not of Chinese background, which limits them to reading the English version of the employment contract only. Therefore, the disparities in translations between the two language versions disadvantage the workers as the Hong Kong Chinese employers have the discretion to command the terms of employment that denote the master-servant relationship. As a result, these gaps encourage the identity of the employer as the master and the migrant worker as the servant. On the other hand, the migrant worker agrees to a more professional, upfront employeeemployer relationship that is suggested in the English version of the employment contract. The disparities of terms in the contract extend beyond legalities to the perception and identity of the worker. One simple and prominent example is the way they are colloquially addressed condescendingly in Cantonese as ‘ 賓妹 ’, which directly translates to ‘Filipina girl’ and is understood as ‘Filipina maids’ even when they may not be from the Philippines and erases the fact that they are grown adult women who may likely be the breadwinners of their families. The way the domestic workers are represented in language has direct impact on the way they are consequently treated. Contracts, fees and debts The disparities in representation contribute to the role and identity of the migrant domestic workers, making them more open to manipulation or exploitation by their employers and the recruitment agencies. To begin, the employment process can be aided in several ways: through agencies in both the labour-sending and labour-receiving countries, online platforms, and referrals by friends and family members. Assistance by agencies is the costliest for both the employer and employee, and increases the chance of the worker being exploited by the agencies due to illegal fees that can lead to the accumulation of months of debt before they have even begun their employment (Hong Kong Helper’s Campaign, 2023; Lindio-McGovern, 2013, pp. 45–53; Mission for Migrant Workers, 2018). Online platforms such as HelperChoice minimise the agency fee and allow workers and employers to post job advertisements and connect with transparency for a small fee (HelperChoice, 2023). Personal referrals are usually the most direct way to connect for employers and employees, with no third-party charges, yet it does not negate exploitative situations over verbal agreements and personal communications. To understand the process of employing a migrant domestic worker in Hong Kong, I spoke in 2021 and 2022 to three employment agencies based in Hong Kong – Overseas Employment Centre Ltd, Sunlight Employment Agency and Fair Employment Agency Ltd – and the Immigration Department. Legally, all migrant domestic workers must submit a Standard Employment Contract as specified by the Immigration Department in Hong Kong, which then creates a Foreign Domestic Helper employment visa (Hong Kong SAR Immigration Introduction 15 The New Economics of Labour Migration has in fact been little more than an avatar of the neoclassical approach in which only marginal concessions and changes were made, while the core rationality, methodological individualism, lack of regard for structural trends and constraints remained untouched. (Ibid., p. 64) Abreu’s reasons for a new ‘historical-structural synthesis’ are a more satisfactory alternative to both the new economics of labour migration and the standard neoclassical theory. As mentioned, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong are often discussed and understood as part of the millions of migrant workers worldwide or are often subsumed within the group of Filipino or Indonesian migrant domestic workers. This subsumption obscures the workers’ experiences of specific marginalisation in Hong Kong that has been uniquely shaped by the city state’s social, cultural, economic and spatial forces. Further, an important part that is missing within New Economics of Labour Migration is the impact of individual migrant agency, as the title of the book emphasises spatial agency; that is a moulding of the individual by space and reciprocally, the space is shaped by the individual. It has been the general practice within existing literature to speak of and view the workers as a sector of migrant workers from the labour-sending nations. There are practical reasons to analyse and understand the issue from a macro perspective; however the collective is made up of many individual workers and their families, and the significance of individuals’ motivations, identity and agency should be explored. The key point here is that this book addresses these many gaps and moves our understanding and actions forward, as fundamentally, the manner in which mainstream (urban) economics addresses questions of identities and power relations is problematic. The issue of identity has been seen as a niche issue in economics, in that focusing on certain aspects such as race and religion has the tendency to be side-lined as ‘identity politics’ (Burnazoglu, 2023; Ozkul, 2019). Failing to distinguish between ‘identity politics’, which challenges the oppression of certain identities, and Identity Politics, which excludes others for its own gain, has serious ramifications for research, policy and practice (Obeng-Odoom, 2022, p. 7; Darity, 2021). Current social and political movements use identity politics to challenge the centralised notion of the ‘average man’ and moving away from this reference point opens the discussion of identity beyond the dichotomous structure of what is considered ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ (Burnazoglu, 2023, p. 12). In addition to edging away from this so-called normality, the idea of the ‘average man’ is often the average, white man, which has clear limitations in being used as a norm to understand women migrant workers in Hong Kong, who originate from non-white dominant nations in the global south. Merve Burnazoglu asserts that ‘Objectivity, rationality, universality all appears for default man (“reference man”), but “seeing the world from a female perspective … is niche, ideological”’ (2023, p. 15; Criado-Perez, 2019, p. 22). Stratification economics and feminist economics are possible alternative 16 Spatial Agency and Occupation approaches to the standard economic approach of the ‘average man’ and are gaining momentum in demonstrating what is at stake, as they Focus on economic and political institutions in search of a deeper, systemic, and intersectional understanding of the mechanisms behind inequalities by looking at the interplay between identity and structurally discriminating and excluding labour markets and their consequent inequalities. (Burnazoglu, 2023, p. 13) Evidently, to adequately address the intersected issue of the migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong and contribute to the existing scholarship of the topic at large, an interdisciplinary framework combining economics, space, gender migration and labour must be used. Ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, spatial analysis and drawing as methods of urban political economy Interviews: positionality and power dynamics One way of addressing the issues concerning migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong and expanding the study of these issues is to focus on the quality of the study’s data. This book uses combined fieldwork data collected in Hong Kong from 2012–2018 for my doctoral research, and in addition for this book between 2020–2023. During these years, I have formally interviewed eightyseven migrant domestic workers and have met and had informal conversations with more than 100. Before the pandemic, interviews were conducted in public spaces. In the later period during the global pandemic of COVID-19, interviews were conducted at a safe physical distance in public space, over the phone or on Zoom. Throughout the early years of the pandemic, Hong Kong had many stages of restrictions on public gatherings, which also significantly impacted on the migrant workers’ daily lives; the way they engage with their duties inside and outside of the home, the way they gather in public space on their day off work, their access to healthcare, and other factors that furthered their marginalisation. In early 2022, there were cases reported regarding mistreatment of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong in instances where workers were sacked, locked out of their employers’ homes and denied hospital treatment when they contracted COVID-19 (Wai, 2022). Lisa Law, Simona Azzali and Sheila Conejos discussed how temporary urbanism has resulted in the time of COVID-19; however there was no specific reference to how migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong have been adapting to new social distancing measures in public space and beyond (Law, Azzali & Conejos, 2021). This book will include discussions on the negative impact the pandemic has had on the migrant workers in Hong Kong. Ethnographic research is almost always messy. It is messy because it is conducted by people with people, and people are inherently influenced by and are products of societal constructs, politicised ideals and contextual identities. Being Introduction 17 an academic researcher does not exempt one from subjectivity, even if one works with rigorously tested and supported methodologies and peer-approved frameworks. Many ethnographers have acknowledged the influence of positionality, reflexivity and power relations. Reflexivity in research involves reflection on self, process, representation and critically examining power relations and politics in the research process, and researcher accountability in data collection and interpretation (Jones et al., 1997; Falconer Al-Hindi & Kawabata, 2002). Farhana Sultana notes that it is important for reflexivity to be present throughout the entire research process, and that the researcher’s reflexive reflections and examinations can create a more nuanced and complex understanding of the subject (2007). Similarly, Ann L. Cunliffe and Geetha Karunanayake build on feminist psychologist Michelle Fine’s conceptualisation of ‘working the hyphen’ to unpack the stickiness of relationships and issues of objectivity, representation, power and identity in research (2013). It can be discerned that agility, flexibility and constant care are required to decipher the subjective/objective entanglements of problems and possibilities, and it will not be a linear or clean process. Michelle Fine argues that researchers who work directly with respondents are in a power relationship that is often asymmetrical and possibly exploitative because as the researcher observes, analyses and represents the lives of others, they are speaking for and actively constructing their identities (1994). In addition, sometimes participants’ voices are written out of the research and they are presented and preserved as generalised abstractions (Cunliffe & Karunanayake, 2013, p. 365), where researchers are the ‘inventors of some questions and repressors of others, shapers of the very context we study … interpreters of others’ stories and narrators of our own’ (Fine, 1994, p. 13). Critical reflections along the lines of what Fine articulates were present with me throughout the first stages of conducting fieldwork around 2013, however only in the form of inarticulate feelings of doubt, hesitation and confusion. Only years after I first began ethnographic research did I begin to have some clarity about my own position of acquired power within my identity and the constantly blurred boundaries I operated in. As mainstream (urban) economics deals inadequately with power and identities, I turned to stratification economics, the most comprehensive alternative to consider race, gender and class of my interviewees and of myself as a researcher, and an immigrant (when I lived in Australia). Mainstream economics has either no general theory of race with respect to global migration or when it does provide one, it is usually insufficient and problematic (Obeng-Odoom, 2022, p. 63). Franklin Obeng-Odoom looks at Gunnar Mydral’s acclaimed book, An American Dilemma (1944) on the subject, The book struggles with developing a robust theory of race, along with many other problems … First is looking at race without its intersections with class, 18 Spatial Agency and Occupation gender, ethnicity, colour, and caste. Second is reducing racism to beliefs and attitudes, suggesting racial consciousness elevates racial minorities in the class hierarchy. Third is considering economic interests (in those cases when such material interests are the focus of some attention) as secondary or subordinate to so-called ‘culture’. A final critique is that institutionalism reduces race to binary, black and white categories. (Obeng-Odoom 2022, p. 63) Obeng-Odoom furthers his point that stratification economists (Darity, 1982, 1995; Darity and Mullen, 2020) attempt to address these problems by emphasising that identities are omnipresent and diverse and are continuously produced, reproduced and transformed in the process of migration and the importance of their focus on the centrality of economic interests to stratification by race, colour, caste and other identities, including how they are interlinked (Ibid.). As a renowned stratification economist, William A. Darity Jr asserts that as the typical person holds multiple identities, some will matter more than others in determining their relative social ranking and condition. Individuals may possess a mix of identities, some of which are celebrated (which may propel them) and others denigrated (Darity, 2022, p. 403). He explains, The full effect of the identity potpourri is an empirical question that should be resolved on a case-by-case (society-by-society) basis, best determined by a quantitative, social, intersectional analysis. As such, stratification economics considers the context in a way that traditional neoclassical utility does not. (Darity, 2022, pp. 403–404) These insights provide a framework for my own reflections on my identities and their entanglements with power. My personal identity as an Australian, Hong Kong-born woman who is proficient in English and Cantonese plays an important role in how my fieldwork in Hong Kong was conducted. Critically, my personal heritage also shapes my approach as I am part of a generation of Han-Chinese Hong Kong citizens who migrated to Western countries prior to the transfer of British sovereignty to China in 1997. My family’s migration path was shaped by socio-political and economic motivations that were beyond our household. This is important to note because my socio-political perspectives and research interests have been shaped and influenced by a unique mixture of Hong Kong’s post-1997 identity, the social, cultural and political discourse and productions created since then, as well as by my Australian (colonial and Eurocentric) socialisation. The post-1997 identity for some Hong Kong people refers to an affinity between the colonial cultural experience of before 1997 and the experience of belonging to the Chinese nation after having been a British colony. 2 While living as an immigrant and later as a citizen in Australia, my Chinese ethnicity and identity place me as part of a ‘model minority’, which refers to a minority group whose members are perceived to be achieving a higher socio-economic status than other minority groups and the population Introduction 19 average (Wong, 2015). Although this term has been largely used in the United States to refer to Asian Americans as a ‘model minority’, it is a term that can also be applied to the Asian diaspora in white-dominant countries such as Australia. 3 With these intercultural influences, my perspective is not simply a binary combination of ‘East and West’; rather it is partly autoethnographic with a critical distance that requires ongoing awareness of my position within coloniality that is in flux. As a researcher, my identity is connected to a generation that holds a collective identity. This identity is nuanced within the postcolonial and Special Administrative Region (SAR) era of Hong Kong that is taking place now, between 1997–2047, which is also not static. The handover from British sovereignty was in 1997, when ‘One Country, Two Systems’ was agreed to be active for fifty years according to Hong Kong’s Basic Law (Government of Hong Kong SAR, 2021a). In the field, my identity facilitated the successful acquisition of information as I was able to shapeshift between many identities and appearances: a young Chinese woman who speaks fluent Cantonese; a young Western-educated Chinese woman who speaks fluent English with an Australian accent; a female academic in a position of authority; and a generic-looking and non-threatening Chinese woman pedestrian. That I was able to shift from and move between these identities opened opportunities for me while conducting fieldwork in Hong Kong that would not have the same effects or advantages elsewhere. Being bilingual allowed me to understand what was occurring around me, yet I could easily pretend I did not speak Cantonese and blend in as an expatriate. Giving the impression of being an expatriate can be advantageous as they can be less targeted by law enforcement in some circumstances and are sometimes favoured by migrant workers as they are perceived to be nicer employers and pay higher wages to workers. This reflects a deep-seated and often unconscious bias towards whiteness and coloniality that still exists in Hong Kong (Lee & Chou, 2018; Li& Liu, 2021). Essentially, my gender, identity and appearance allowed me to be perceived as low-threat and to be able to walk around and be relatively unnoticed and easily accepted. While being reflexive about my/a researcher’s positionality can be perceived as a self-indulgent exercise, it is important to understand and critically examine how I participate in power relations and the impact on how information is obtained, interpreted and re/presented. Audrey Kobayashi has reflected on this nexus of identity and power since the first volume of Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography was published in 1994. In her 2003 work, she remarks on how reflexivity can result in ‘navel-gazing’, yet she insists that bringing attention to one’s positionality is not to self-indulge, but to reflect on how one is inserted within the grids of power relation and how that influences the way research is conducted (Kobayashi, 1994; 2003). It gives room for thinking beyond the work itself and into the spheres of influences, as Farhana Sultana echoes: 20 Spatial Agency and Occupation Reflexivity is integral to conducting ethical research … as it is also implicated in how one relates to research participants and what can/cannot be done vis-à-vis the research within the context of institutional, social, and political realities. As such, it is integral to conducting ethical research. (Sultana, 2007, p. 376) While reflexivity is an important aspect to engage with in conducting ethical fieldwork, it needs to be used in combination with other methods throughout the research process in creating a more holistic representation of an issue through particular voices and perspectives – those of the researchers and the subjects. While my work does not fit in singularly within the discipline of feminist geography, the research that I have chosen to do has always asked for constant unlearning and relearning of ethnographic approaches that critique the self, the field and the disciplines as boundaries and relations of power and identity ebb and flow. My unease with interviewing migrant domestic workers as an Australian, Hong Kong-born Chinese woman was ever present throughout my ethnographic research process. From the start, it did not go unacknowledged that I come from a position or class that is like that of some of their employers or prospective employers. As I am a Hong Kong-Chinese woman, I am perceived as possessing the financial ability to employ a domestic worker. This evidenced itself as a fluctuating sense of unease and some awkward interactions between the workers I interviewed and myself. My first interview was enabled by an introduction to a friend’s worker in her apartment over dinner one evening in 2013. At the time, I knew I had to undertake fieldwork via both observational and participatory methods; however I did not know where and how to begin approaching potential respondents. My friend’s helper, known as JM, agreed to introduce me to her friends on the following Sunday. While I asked her in front of her employer, I was mindful of not coming across as too inquisitive or demanding and anticipated some unease and awkwardness. I clearly explained my project and asked if I could come to one of her hangouts with her friends on a Sunday, respecting the fact that I would be intruding on her day off work. With JM being my friend’s employee and her being much older than I was, with adult children likely not too far from my age, I was aware that there were several possible relations of power between us. Firstly, within Asian cultures, our age difference gave her seniority over me. However, as I was her employer’s friend, a woman with a tertiary education, in addition to being a Hong Kong-Chinese person, I was on those counts in the position of authority and power. My understanding of this dynamic influenced the way I interacted with her and her friends, especially in the way I spoke and behaved around them. For example, instead of interviewing from my pre-planned questions, which would have placed me at the centre of the group, I asked openended questions and listened and observed on the periphery of the group, to Introduction 21 show patience and respect. This method was intuited from behaviours in my upbringing within Asian patriarchal customs – from girlhood to womanhood – rather than any academic resource. Currently, I have yet to come across other women of colour scholars who have reflected in detail on their way of incorporating particularities of their cultural upbringing into a professional scenario of ethnographic research, although the boundaries of professionality in fieldwork are arguably very much open to interpretation. Geetha Karunanayake’s experience of working in a tea plantation in Sri Lanka, among local workers who were the subjects of her research, shared similarities with my own experience (Cunliffe & Karunanayake, 2013). She is a Sri Lankan-English woman educated overseas who returned to Sri Lanka to conduct fieldwork and who has ethnic and gender sameness to the subjects, yet distance in education, religion and class placed her in situations where she had to approach her subjects in ways she was not prepared for within academia. She had hired some local people who could bridge the divide, which closed eventually after a slow process of introductions and initiations. Like me, Karunanayake walked into the field with trepidation and caution, knowing there were different power relations at play that put her at a distance from her subjects. Her situation was more complex than mine as she also grappled with religious identities and juggled different cultural behaviours attached to such different identities. She felt like she was at times an insider and an outsider, and the advantages and disadvantages of this varied considerably between different people she approached (Cunliffe & Karunanayake, 2013, p. 373). On the first occasion I met JM and her friends on their day off work after my initial meeting with her at her employers’ home, I left with nearly five hours of audio recording, with most of their conversations with each other responding to my questions or prompts and chit chat that happened subsequently. This became the basis of my interviewing methodology. I realised that being sensitive to our power dynamics was not enough to justify or lighten my intrusion into their social time on their day off work, borrowing their stories and using certain apertures of their lives for my research. I had a niggling feeling that my research was somehow too straightforward and that it should be more agentic, take a more critical stance and care for the issue. Initially, I had thought that my intentions were to simply shine a light on the workers’ narratives of struggle and reveal overall systemic issues within migrant labour policies. However, through my observations, time spent with them and our conversations, it became apparent that their lack of labour rights and economic conditions restricted them to temporary status despite their long tenure in Hong Kong. Further, their lack of autonomy and personal space within the home of their employers placed them in vulnerable positions that are acknowledged at face value, unrightfully justified to an end, and not recognised with the urgency that the matter deserves to be as a dire breach of personhood for cheap labour. As I realised the research was providing 22 Spatial Agency and Occupation a platform for the workers’ voices and empowering them to speak up about the intersected problem of labour, gender and space, my complex positionality also became more apparent. Beyond the academic and professional framework, I became personally and emotionally invested, specifically with respect to my identity and personal experience as a Hong Kong-born woman who has grown up around domestic workers who enabled the women in my family to be able to undertake formal employment outside of the home. This directly impacted on my education and wellbeing. I am the beneficiary of the labour of the domestic workers I grew up around and collectively, I am part of a generation of Hong Kong children who have benefited from the contingent of migrant domestic workers. Aside from this, my positionality is also steeped in coloniality. The Hong Kong government’s intention to import migrant domestic labour in the 1970s was to integrate local women into the workforce, and consequently discovered a readily affordable labour stream from its neighbouring Southeast Asian neighbours who needed solutions for their own economic crisis (Constable, 2007). Prior to British occupation, Hong Kong had practised Chinese customs of domestic servitude that saw girls and women of all ages as domestic properties of their employers (Constable, 1996; Jaschok, 1988; Watson, 1991). Although slavery was abolished by the colonial government of Hong Kong in 1923, some Chinese slavery customs illegally remained and were often culturally accepted (Watson, 1991). Within colonial British households, their domestic servants were often Hong Kong Chinese. The hierarchy of white supremacy was pervasive, with lighter skin-toned people at the top and darker skin-toned people towards the bottom. As a political ideology, white supremacy seeks to maintain social and institutional domination by white people and has been put into effect to justify European colonialism in structures such as the White Australian Policy, the Jim Crow laws in the United States and the Apartheid in South Africa, to name a few examples (Shain, 2020; Gale de Saxe, 2021). Hong Kong, as a former British colony, for over a century has not been exempted from the impacts of such social and institutional influences. Racism, intersecting with classism, was common among Hong Kong Chinese people, as there were prejudices against darker skin-toned Chinese people, who were considered as labourers who worked in the fields (Constable, 1996; 2007; Gaw, 1991). It is not a coincidence that the importation of domestic workers into Hong Kong in the 70s was, and continues to be in the present day, of people of a darker skin tone than the majority of Hong Kong’s population, the Han-Chinese. Domestic workers have become synonymous with cheap and easily available labour and the way they have been addressed colloquially by the media in Cantonese as ‘Filipino girls’ and ‘Indonesian maids’ reflects a commonly accepted white-supremacist, classist and sexist attitude. In 1989, American activist and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality as a framework to describe how systems of oppression overlap and Introduction 23 intersect, creating multi-layered discriminations for people who live in multiple identity categories (Crenshaw, 1989; 1991). The prejudices that migrant domestic workers experience in Hong Kong intersect gender, race and class across both a colonial and Chinese society in ways that situate their marginality in a very localised context. To normalise these everyday occurrences would be to ignore the impacts of Hong Kong’s colonial history and the complexity of such intersected discriminations. Coloniality is an important point to bring into my positionality as a researcher in the field, as not only am I a Hong Kong-born Chinese woman, but I am also educated in a country that has its own colonial history – Australia. In other words, I embody and perform coloniality in ways that are multi-spatial and multidirectional, which consciously and unconsciously impact the way I behave in my fieldwork interactions. My colonial roots influenced the way power and authority were perceived by my participants, despite their seniority in age. During my interactions with participants, I did not openly discuss my background, however my accent and my purpose for conducting fieldwork were unavoidable. Some women were impressed with my education background and interests, while some women were not familiar with the tertiary education system, but were impressednonetheless. Sometimes I was also asked if I wanted to marry a HongKong Chinese man or a white Australian man and occasionally asked about the reason why I am pursuing further study instead of pursuing potential marriage partners. Many participants were intrigued by my background, education and my identity as being both Hong Kong Chinese and Australian, with a steadfast association with both cultures, rather than the more common social phenomenon of leaning more heavily into one and maintaining a certain distance with the other. On one of the earlier fieldwork occasions in 2015, while I was sitting with two workers, known as MB and CJ, I was mistaken as their employer’s daughter by their friend who was walking by. The interaction between them happened very quickly in Tagalog (the Austronesian language that forms the basis of the standardised language of the Philippines), and they explained to me what happened after she had left. The friend who passed by found it very strange that they were accompanied by their employer (or a proxy of) on their day off work. MB and CJ casually said I was not a relation of their employer and was just a friend doing a university project. Their friend asked if I was paying them a fee and walked off with a dismissive chuckle when they said I was not. I asked them if it is common to be approached by researchers. They said it is not uncommon for people to want to know about ‘what it’s like to be a worker in Hong Kong’. MB elaborated further: Sometimes, people want to know what our struggle is, how our employers are mean to us and how hard it is for us. They already think they know what we do 24 Spatial Agency and Occupation when they want to talk to us. I don’t know why that is helpful. Why don’t they ask us about what makes us happy? I’m very happy I can give money to my family and my daughter can go to university! (MB, personal communication, January 2015, exclamation in original) This response reflected several common assumptions about foreign domestic workers: 1) that they are mistreated by their employers; and 2) that they are unhappy in their job and that they need to be rescued out of their circumstances. These common assumptions stem from legitimate concerns as there have been public protests and court cases over mistreatment of domestic workers, particularly regarding physical and emotional abuse (Carvalho, 2017; Siu, 2021). From my observation of MB, CJ and their friends over a few occasions, my understanding and interpretation of this comment was a demonstration of her frustration about being perceived as a victim. It also expressed her desire to be seen as a person who has a full spectrum of characteristics and nuanced ideas beyond being reduced to a one-dimensional vulnerable victim of social or economic circumstances. More importantly, it was an expression of agency, self-awareness and decisiveness. Currently, there are nearly 350,000 foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong. They are not a monolith that shares the same background, feelings or circumstances. This interaction was a turning point for my research as I was reminded to consider how the work will frame the public perception of the collective, particularly how it should not contribute to an ongoing narrative of their victimhood, and should rather establish one that is empowering and multidimensional. Fine (1994) draws on the idea of a hyphen space that the researcher and respondent dwell in during fieldwork, and within this space, both the researchers and respondents have a mutual understanding that identity can fluctuate and change in their conversations as they account for themselves and their actions (Fine, 1994; Cassell, 2005; Cunliffe, 2003). This means a reflexive stance is necessary in exploring power relations and the multiple influences on the coconstructions of meanings and identities in the relational spaces that researchers and the participants co-inhabit (Cunliffe and Karunanayake, 2013). Throughout my research, I was dwelling in a hyphen space that I co-created with the workers I interviewed. In these spaces, both physically at the time and thereafter in my writing that can be considered as another ‘space’, I felt the responsibility to frame their narratives not as evidence of their hardships through victimisation, but rather as ones of solidarity and empowerment. This reframing from victimhood to resilience could only have happened through the continual revaluation of, and reflection about my intersectional positionality of gender, education and ethnicity, as well as confronting the impact of Hong Kong’s colonial history of domestic servitude. This was not an act I was able to do alone; rather it was something that could only have been conceived with the participants. Acting with integrity and care with the information I had access to, being cognisant of Introduction 31 contexts, individual migrants’ agency and the structures the migrant domestic workers operate within. Furthermore, this book critically examines how the workers create new spatialities through the weekly reconstruction of a unique socio-spatial ecology. It shows how migrant workers resist the socio-spatial limitations and cultural deprivation they experience in their employers’ homes, from the interconnected restrictions in their labour, by appropriating and transforming public spaces for themselves and using them to enable agency, relationships and community. Structure of the book This book will use an institutionalist/structuralist approach that is a more appropriate alternative for three reasons. First, it will consider race, class and gender in relation to the participation of domestic labour and the feminisation of labour. It will investigate both the Filipino and Indonesian Foreign Domestic Helper communities in Hong Kong to explore, compare and understand the social activities and place-making strategies they engage in to enact their freedoms and agency. Second, it will analyse the socio-spatial limitations within the workers’ labour to further understand the particularities of their marginalisation in Hong Kong. Third, it will incorporate the politics, governance and use of public space to recognise the significance of the workers’ appropriation and occupation of public space to create their own community within their state of disenfranchisement, as a demonstration of agency, resistance and autonomy. Further, the book will explore other ways in which private/personal space is carved out by the workers in public or private space through other means such as same-sex relationships, food and religion to create temporary remedies for the deprivation of autonomy and space. The book will also argue that the current methodology within new economics of labour migration is lacking in incorporating the various scales of contexts; from the global systems to the individual’s agencies, space, rent, identities and power and considerations for participation in migration labour. As this current chapter sets the context of Hong Kong, introducing the space and people, the gaps in existing literature and the methodological approach of the book, in Chapter 1 – Policy and/vs People: Mobility and Stagnation unpacks the economic, social and legal frameworks within which the migrant domestic workers operate with analyses of the government policies, employment contracts, rights and wages of the workers, in combination with existing literature across multiple disciplines of migration studies, political economy, urban geography and cultural studies. Unpacking these frameworks is important, because it is via these that institutions inherently established the grounds for the oppression and exploitation of migrant workers, and the chapter makes clear the failure of the policies within labour-sending and receiving nations in providing social mobility and equity for the workers. 32 Spatial Agency and Occupation The chapter responds to one of the four research questions of this book – What are the local and international contexts in which they operate that allow this systemic oppression to be accepted and overlooked as common practice? It poses the problem of social equity against the increasing economic and political motivations behind migrant labour, while challenging the current methods of labour migration and discussing its ineffectiveness, and proposes the relevance of stratification economics in creating a different framework to discuss the intersected problem in this book. It also reveals the reasons for migration through ethnographic data and discusses the ‘double bind’ that many workers experience; moving away from their families to provide for them as they live under the pressures of unemployment/underemployment and sustaining livelihood for themselves and their families in their home countries. At first, being able to seek opportunities abroad for higher wages seems to be creating physical and economic mobility, yet the lack of upskilling potential in domestic work and very minimal salary increases often leave the workers stagnant. Chapter 2, Narratives of Oppression: Servitude, Invisibility and Spacelessness follows on from the systemic problems that have impacted their marginalisation on a larger scale by moving into a more local scale, exposing the social and spatial problems created by the lack of boundaries between the home and workplace, ultimately providing grounds that lead to exploitation. The chapter continues to raise the research question presented in Chapter 1, focusing on why the systemic oppression is commonly accepted and overlooked. It presents the intersectional nature of their oppression, discussing how their gender, race and class all contribute to the systemic and personal prejudices the migrant workers experience that only a few migration scholars have touched on and, hence, remain trapped in space. I argue that these intersectional issues have directly impacted on workers’ lack of social and economic equity on a global and local scale. Drawing on extensive ethnographic data collected from 2013–2023, the chapter will explicitly expose the forms of control that occur in the employers’ homes and reveal various themes that influence the disciplinary strategies applied to the workers by their employers. These themes evolve around the female body as a sexual or moral threat, separation and isolation and the normalisation of continuous abuse. It will further demonstrate the negative impacts of the legalities in the employment contract that sympathise with the Hong Kong employers and ultimately give power to the employers. The primary data from interviews reveals the detrimental effects of the blurred spatial boundaries between the domestic space and workplace, including the facilitation of exploitative scenarios that expose the workers to mistreatment and solidify their invisibility and spacelessness. The term spacelessness is created to describe the condition where the workers have minimal to no physical and personal space within their place of employment. While clarifying the issues raised in Chapter 1, this chapter Introduction 33 also raises three additional questions, namely: Are these workers mere victims or do they exercise some agency? If so, how, and to what extent, could such agency be liberating? Could the response of migrants provide any policy lessons for the labour-sending and receiving nations? Answers to these questions will be explored in the following chapter. A long-standing debate between neoclassical economists and Marxist economists is the extent to which individual agency can help to address all social problems. The rational individual in the neoclassical model is entirely freed from structures and social bonds, while the classical Marxist models give limited room for individual autonomy (Charusheela, 2005). The approach utilised for this book helps to see that the reality among migrant workers is not as dichotomous. Emerging from the understanding of the intersectional oppressions through space, gender and labour that migrant domestic workers experience, Chapter 3, Agency and Resistance, analyses how they resist the continuous socio-spatial oppression endured during their work week by creating community through gathering in public space, and in so doing, perform their identity and exercise the freedoms they regularly are deprived of in a unique temporary socio-spatial ecology. This chapter focuses on two of the four research questions of this book – how does the workers’ occupation of public space reflect the problems they endure in the workplace that is also their home, specific to the labour and spatial conditions in Hong Kong, and what activities do they engage in that cultivate resilience and agency? The chapter will do so by exploring how Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestic workers resist the limitations of their labour by establishing their community externally in public space on Sunday, and investigating the specific ways they express social agency through relationships, food, religious practices, place-making and social media platforms to continue to cultivate and enact social agency. These vignettes will demonstrate how these methods are significant in facilitating agency and reflect the full spectrum of resourcefulness, resilience and agency of the workers. Furthermore, this chapter will unpack the complexity within the kind of resistance, resilience and resourcefulness the workers engage in that has materialised as a socio-spatial phenomenon. I also put forward the argument because existing migration scholars and political economists have not previously discussed the resistance of the workers through the informal communities they have repeatedly established on a weekly basis, and the continuous significance of this resistance. Their small acts of resistance have been documented, but thorough discussions of Little Manila and other public spaces Indonesian workers occupy as sites of resistance and agency remain thin, and have not been discussed to the full extent and contextual expansion as I do in this chapter and book. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City and social production of space, and the works of Judith Butler that focus on public assemblies and appearance in the public realm, I argue that the migrant workers’ public assemblies, individual and group activities 34 Spatial Agency and Occupation and their collective appearance in public space are indeed important ways of self-actualisation and performance of identity and dignity. The next chapter, Little Manila and Beyond, is a photographic and illustrative component that provides a visual narrative of migrant domestic workers’ socio-spatial occupation on Sundays. The photographs will be selected from the database created during field research between 2013–2023 and the chapter will also feature illustrations by Hong Kong-based migrant workers artist collective Guhit Kulay. The visual chapter aims to show the spectrum of activities, events and social interactions, moving through different areas in Central, Causeway Bay and beyond. This photographic account visually displays the reclamation of space that disrupts the city-state’s hegemonic spaces every Sunday and demonstrates the migrant women workers’ agency, socio-spatialised resistance and joy. After a visualisation of the scenes on Sundays, the next chapter, Commodification of Care: Costs and Sacrifices investigates the origins of the socio-spatial phenomenon and analyses the origins of migrant exploitation. Contrary to claims in neoclassical economics theories of migration about ‘free choice’ and ‘autonomy’ of migrants, the chapter argues that experiences of migrants are shaped by certain institutions and structures. Migration is not an isolated circumstance of intersectional disempowerment. Rather, it is a consequence of a global economic and labour restructuring. When migrant domestic workers emerge weekly from their workplace to use and activate public space, it reflects power relations and spatial contestations that result from the economic, political and socio-spatial inequality inscribed in the global operation of migrant domestic labour. This chapter exhibits the global context in which the workers’ disenfranchisement in Hong Kong originates and the network of disempowerment that is the operative method of global migrant domestic labour. The chapter will include a discussion around the economics of care, particularly through a feminist economic framework. It will discuss the type of work that the marginalised groups participate in and how care work and domestic work are known as part of the informal or unskilled labour sector, which undermines and undervalues its efforts, and subsequently diminishes the rights, social mobility and economic value of those who participate in this workforce. It poses a question of how much is care valued and how much does it cost, in human terms and economic terms. This chapter aims to reinforce the ideas expressed in Chapter 1, by adding the global scale, focus on the nature of domestic work and comparative case studies to provide the reader with a holistic view of the structural problems and systemic prejudices that have created the unique scenario that the migrant workers operate in. It answers the last of the four research questions of the book – how does the intersection of the migrant domestic workers’ wages, gender and labour further their marginalisation? The book concludes with a summary of the key findings and arguments, and reflects on the methodological contribution of the book. Here, the final chapter, Introduction 35 A Matter of Gender, Labour and Space, will reiterate the problems within mainstream urban economics in understanding migrant labour and how the book has challenged the previous methods with its structural approach, in combination with ethnographic and fieldwork data that reveal the many interconnecting layers and scales of the issue. In so doing, the book illuminates a new understanding of how the migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong operate, as well as using this as a framework to review global migration and other disenfranchised migrant labour groups. Finally, a summary is presented of the various ways in which the workers have enacted their agency through social, cultural and spatial acts, to not only resist the socio-spatial depletion endured in the domestic spaces of Hong Kong but also to reclaim physical space and autonomy to continue living a dignified life. This book makes clear that there is an urgency to instate systemic changes to migration labour that could prevent and minimalise exploitation, and empower migrant workers to be integrated into host nations with equitable opportunity. Notes 1. The Former Central Arcade has undergone renovations since the described event here. Since 2022, it has been transformed into an arcade of food providers and shops, with no space that migrant domestic workers could occupy in the following scene as described. 2. For more elaboration on the topic of Hong Kong’s post-1997 identity, please see Lin, Chen & Flowerdew (2022), Fung & Chan (2017) and Mathews, Ma & Lui (2008). 3. The ‘model minority’ is a stereotype that can be deleterious to the reality of understanding discrimination and prejudices that occur to and within minority groups placed under this categorisation. Please see Chow (2017). CHAPTER 1 Policy and/vs People: Mobility and Stagnation This chapter unpacks the economic, social and legal frameworks within which the migrant domestic workers operate. With analyses of the government policies, employment contracts, rights and wages of the workers, in combination with existing literature across multiple disciplines of migration studies, political economy, urban geography and cultural studies, it reveals how the policies of labour migration, whether in the labour-sending or labour-receiving country, are not designed for the well-being of the people (the migrant workers), and instead create a mobile migrant workforce who are immobile and stagnant. It will give context to the two labour-sending nations that provide the majority of workers to Hong Kong – the Philippines and Indonesia – to reveal the origins of the labour export policies and the economic motivations. The following section, The economic forces of migrant labour, poses the problem of social equity against the increasing economic and political motivations behind migrant labour, while challenging the current methods of labour migration and discussing its ineffectiveness, and proposes an alternative framework relevant to the intersected issue of labour, gender and space as the focus in this book. The next two sections zoom in on Hong Kong, looking at the city-state’s active participation in labour importation and how the specific regulations within the Foreign Domestic Helper contract create the grounds for exploitations of the workers’ time and labour and enforce their permanently temporary status. Throughout the chapter, the reasons for migration begin to unfold through ethnographic data, such as in Diana’s story and others, and bring to light the ‘double bind’ that many workers experience; moving away from their families to provide for their families as they live under the pressures of unemployment/underemployment and sustaining livelihood for themselves and their families in their home countries. At first, being able to seek opportunities abroad for higher wages seems to be creating physical and economic mobility, yet the lack of upskilling potential in domestic work and very minimal salary increases often leave the workers stagnant. Essentially, this chapter responds to one of the research questions in this book – What are the local and international contexts in which the workers operate that allow systemic oppression to be accepted and overlooked as common practice, and why are they so prevalent? The chapter aims to make clear the transnational contexts for migrant domestic labour and the failure of the policies in providing social mobility and equity for the migrant workers, and 1. Policy and/vs People: Mobility and Stagnation Policy and/vs People 37 the chapter after this will illustrate the oppressive common practices that result from these policies and structures. Diana’s story I want my children to grow up with more than I had. I hope they can understand that I moved away only to give them more, so they can go to college and get a better job, a good life. It has been very difficult for me to be here without them. I think about them every minute. (Diana, personal communication, February 2015) I first met Diana in 2015 in Hong Kong and I met her again in 2021. Diana is from Rosario, the Batangas province from the Philippines, and first came to Hong Kong in 2007. She was the oldest of four siblings in her family. At the time of her departure, her children were of the ages of two and five. Before working in Hong Kong, Diana was studying for a degree in nursing, but discontinued in the second year because she needed to provide for the family. She initially worked in a food factory for five to six days a week, earning a monthly wage of 7,000 peso (approximately US$147). Her husband worked as a courier in a freight company that required working long hours, and his earnings were double her income. The couple relied on the help of her mother and aunt to take care of their children, as well as doing some domestic chores while they were at work. Diana first discussed with her family the possibility of working abroad as a domestic worker several months after giving birth to their first child. Her husband strongly objected to this suggestion at the time. A few years later, after the birth of their second child, her husband had an accident, which led to a recovery period that heavily reduced his income. Diana acknowledged the best way to earn more money for the family and to afford better education for the children was to work abroad. After careful consideration and discussions, the couple and their families agreed that Diana would go to work in Hong Kong for some time, at least until their financial difficulties eased. Diana’s first Foreign Domestic Helper contract in Hong Kong began in March 2007, earning her a monthly wage of HK$3,800 (approximately US$489), which was more than three times her salary back home.1 Each month, she saved HK$500 for herself and the remainder HK$3,300 was remitted back to the Philippines to support her family. Although this new employment made significant contributions to the family’s operations, her husband, before and during her time abroad, asked for her return after two contracts (four years). At the time of the interview in 2015, Diana was working in Hong Kong for the eighth consecutive year and earning HK$5,000 each month (approximately US$643). She had not foreseen spending almost a decade abroad: I wanted to go home after two contracts, but it is very difficult to return home because I can help so much with my wages here. My children can go to a better school outside [their village]. My husband can work less. It is too hard in the 38 Spatial Agency and Occupation Philippines to have the same pay. But it is very sad to come back to Hong Kong after going home. Very sad. I cry for two weeks after every visit. (Diana, personal communication, February 2015) Despite the pain of family separation and her family’s plea for her return to the Philippines, Diana saw time spent with her children as something necessary to sacrifice in order to provide money for them. This ‘decision’ of money earned at the expense of time is not one made from free will; rather it is a forced decision between two difficult options that has partly resulted from the Philippines’ continuous participation in the global migrant labour force. At the time of Diana’s departure in 2007, and the years leading up to the decision, the labour market conditions in the Philippines were poor. Wages in the country were low and decent employment opportunities for women, even educated women, were limited (Asian Development Bank, 2013). The rate of employment for women during 2000–2012 was between 42.1 to 46.7% and although the Labour Force Participation Rate for women was rising steadily between 1990–2012, it did not translate to reductions in the gender gaps in labour market outcomes including employment, decent work and social protection (Ibid., p. 13). The Philippines’ government encouraged Filipino workers to partake in overseas work deployment to alleviate the pressure of underemployment in the country, despite the numerous discussions about phasing out, yet the reality was that labour export had long been part of the government’s economic development strategy given the value of remittances to help the national economy (Estopace, 1997; Ofreneo and Samoste, 2005). Overseas work deployment has been part of the Philippines migrant labour experience over the course of the last century; to Los Angeles in the 1920s (Ong & Azores, 1994), to Rome in the 1980s (Parreñas, 2001), to Hong Kong since the 1970s (Constable, 2007), to the United Arab Emirates since the 1990s (Lindio-McGovern, 2013) and to various developed countries in Asia such as Singapore and Taiwan in the 1980s (Lindio-McGovern, 2009; 2013; Parreñas, 2001). In A Good Provider is One Who Leaves, reporter Jason DeParle immersed himself into the life of a Filipina woman and her family over three decades, documenting their migratory path that eventually moved them out of poverty into a global middle class (2019). The book reports the reality of the years of sacrifices and separation of one family, while holding up a mirror of the thousands of migrant workers and their families that endure similar paths in order to create a better life for themselves and generations to come. Diana is part of a consistent migratory path of Filipino women who seek full-time employment overseas. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, whose work focuses on Filipino migrant domestic workers in various parts of the world, sets the context of her book upfront by stating ‘The outflow of women from the Philippines and their entrance into domestic service in more than 130 countries represents one of the largest and widest Policy and/vs People 39 flows of contemporary female migration’ (2001, p. 1). In 2019, the number of Overseas Filipino Workers globally was estimated at 2.2 million, of which 56% were women (Philippine Statistics Authority, 2020). Although the number has decreased since COVID-19 became a global pandemic in early 2020 (from 2.2 million in 2019 to 676,000 in 2021), the actual number of migrant domestic workers from the Philippines in Hong Kong has not decreased to the same proportion. There were 399,320 migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong in 2019, which decreased incrementally due to border restrictions of the pandemic to 373,884 in 2020, 339,451 in 2021 and 338,189 in 2022, with between 48–57% from the Philippines (Hong Kong SAR Immigration Department, 2022b). This shows that the demand for migrant domestic workers has not decreased at the same rate in Hong Kong despite the decrease in total outflow globally. Diana shares a similar experience with many women migrant domestic workers, which reflects the standardised narrative of female labour migration from the Philippines – a narrative of dislocation in which Parreñas refers to the positions into which external forces in society constitute the subject of migrant domestic workers (2001). Parreñas describes four key dislocations that Filipino domestic workers experience in their global migratory labour process: pain of the transnational household, contradictory class mobility, non-belonging and partial citizenship (2001, p. 23). The analysis of dislocations illustrates their process of constitution and the means by which the workers resist in an attempt to eliminate, or negotiate to mitigate the effects of these dislocations in their everyday lives. In other words, from this perspective, the experience of migration is embodied within these dislocations (Ibid., p. 3). For all the migrant domestic workers who participated in my fieldwork research between 2012–2023, I was told that providing for the family is the primary, sometimes the only, motivation for their migration. These women, together with their families, make the decision to migrate as domestic workers with the main goal of improving the livelihood and financial prospects of their families due to the lack of decent and long-term employment opportunities in their home country. Most of these women embark on their journeys with the intention of returning after two or three contracts, that is four to six years. Realistically, this is usually not the case. For Diana, she and her family realised how much her income as remittance provides for the support of the family despite their separation, and she continued to stay in Hong Kong. Diana’s experience may not be the standard experience of all migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, but her circumstances are certainly common. Supporting the family can mean providing for daily expenses such as food, transport, school fees and so on, to larger, long-term financial tasks such as paying off debts or buying land (to build a home) or buying a home. Remittances from migrant workers cannot provide a finite solution to a housing problem back in their home country (Obeng-Odoom, 2022, p. 246). The migration path of the workers, varying 40 Spatial Agency and Occupation from different economic schools of thought; definite return (neoclassical), circular migration (institutional), dependant on household conditions (new economics of labour migration), all impact on the role remittances play and whether it continues (Obeng-Odoom, 2022; Hunter, 2018). Many workers I interviewed feel the longer they stay, the longer they can provide financial support even if it’s not a permanent fix. Many see returning as not being a favourable outcome financially and indeed, it can often be perceived as redundant in fixing the housing problem (Ibid., p. 246). Despite this acknowledgement, many workers remain in Hong Kong. In March 2021, I met with Diana again. She informed me that the last time she saw her family in the Philippines was November 2018, and she had not been able to travel back due to COVID-19 restrictions. Her children were now sixteen and nineteen years old, and she and her husband had separated some three years prior. She felt that over the last fourteen years in Hong Kong, some of the toughest times experienced were at the beginning and now, since she had been stuck in Hong Kong without the capacity to fly home, even if she was owed paid leave every two years, as her contract was renewed and the Philippines is only a twohour flight away. At the time of our meeting, she said much of her remittances pay for her children’s school fees, paying for her elderly mother’s medical care and savings towards buying a house for them to live in together. However, due to her mother’s declining health, she was planning to move back to the Philippines earlier and permanently to be with her children and her mother: I want to go back home to be with my children, to help my mother and to see what I can do now. I am forty years old! I have been here for a long time. I want to try something different, but I am also scared I can’t come back [to Hong Kong] and can’t help them. (Diana, personal communication, March 2021, exclamation in original) Diana completed her high school education but did not finish her degree in nursing before she left to work in Hong Kong in 2007. This sense of uncertainty around the availability of desired employment opportunities in the Philippines if she leaves and the lack of job security in Hong Kong even if she continues to stay is very commonly felt among migrant domestic workers. The repeated renewal of the short-term contract gives the impression of permanence; however it can be anxiety-provoking as security of renewal is never guaranteed, and has been even more exacerbated by the global pandemic. Semi-permanent is the term Ligaya Lindio-McGovern (2013) uses to describe the nature of migrant domestic labour. She explains that although migrant domestic workers operate on short-term contracts, which technically classify them as temporary workers, the feminisation of the Philippines’ labour export policy that has been supplying a steady stream of female workers over the last fifty years contradicts the temporary nature as it is tailored to the import policies of labour in the receiving Policy and/vs People 47 sectors (Harris & Todaro, 1970; De Haas, 2012; Dannecker and Piper, 2021; Obeng-Odoom, 2017; 2022). Prior to the 1990s, migration labour was defined primarily as a necessary response to the need for economic development in the labour-sending countries. Exemplified in the case in the Philippines, migration labour was a temporary strategy to relieve the unemployment crisis and rising national debt, yet evidently, that has not been the case and migration labour has continued to increase and widen the gap between wages and employment opportunities at home and abroad (Parreñas, 2001; 2008a, Lindio-McGovern, 2012). In the 1990s, positive aspects of migration and the role migrants have in the development of their home countries were being celebrated by governmental organisations, as evidenced in the Philippines, where migrant workers were deemed as modern-day heroes and the Philippines’ government even created a national Migrant Workers Day on 7 June as the Migrant Workers Act was signed into law in 1995 (Parreñas, 2005a; 2008a).3 The discourse around that time shifted from structural development of countries to one that began to see individual agency (Rosewarne, 2010; Piper, Rosewarne & Withers, 2017; Mora & Piper, 2021). However, the understanding of development and in tandem, migration labour, as an economic process, was still placed as priority and persisted. In 2003, the World Bank published the Global Development Finance Report that collated global remittances data showing the potential development impact of migratory flows and remittances. It created a new enthusiasm, along with many debates and strategies, on how governments and international organisations could create and further the positive relationship between migration and development (Faist, 2008; Lindley, 2010). Remittances were not just seen as flows of money, but as an influx of knowledge and ideas that support a nation’s development, particularly in poverty reduction and movement of human capital. This was an attempt to push back against the ‘brain drain’ argument of the 1970s and 1980s, replacing it with ‘brain gain’ in the 1990s – the former was about migration labour creating the loss of skilled people within the labour-sending country, while the latter was focused on the circulation and continuous flow of people, thus the gaining of skills and people around the world (Kapur, 2004). Around that time, global remittances were about US$167 billion, quadruple the amount of US$40 billion in 1990 (International Organisation of Migration, 2005, p.270). With this significant increase, since then, there have been many studies that emphasise the positive effects of migration and development, with fewer studies that adopt a critical approach to the neoliberal orientation of the so-called individual’s agency or bring attention to the discourse around what exactly constitutes the ‘agency’ of the individual migrants – i.e. their own motivations for migration and how they consider their own contribution to the country’s development (De Haas, 2012; Dannecker, 2009; Withers, 2019; Piper and Rother, 2014). 48 Spatial Agency and Occupation Neoclassical economic theory explains migration labour on a macroand micro-level; macro being the geographical differences in the supply and demand for labour while at the micro-level, migrants are viewed as individual, rational actors, who are assumed to have free choice to move on the basis of a cost-benefit calculation (De Haas, 2008). The perspective on individuals’ decisions in choosing to migrate for an expected or perceived optimum combination of better wages and job security, as noted by John Rees Harris and Michael Paul Todaro, is that the motivation of rural to urban migration, or migration from less-developed economies to developed economies, is because ‘migration proceeds in response to urban-rural differences in expected earnings with the urban employment rate acting as an equilibrating force on such migration’ (Harris & Todaro, 1970, p.126). Further, as the expected income in the urban area also depends on the probability of employment, Todaro argues that as long as rural-urban income differences remain high enough to outweigh the risk of becoming unemployed, the ‘lure of relatively higher permanent incomes will continue to attract a steady stream of rural migrants’ (Todaro, 1969, p. 147). This Harris-Todaro-model was later refined and modified to include a balance of factors such as opportunity costs of migration, cost of travel, temporary unemployment and the psychological costs of migration, et cetera (Bauer & Zimmermann, 1998, p. 97; De Haas, 2008, p. 5). The critique of the model, and of neoclassical economic theory for migration labour at large, considers it as being one of an ‘a-historical and Eurocentric’ framework, in that it assumes that migration of workers from rural to urban areas satisfies a modernisation of developing countries like in nineteenthand twentieth-century Europe (De Haas, 2008, p. 7), which situates the discourse in the context of the global north and negates the structural conditions of the global south. A historical-structuralist theory on migration emerged as a response to the neoclassical approach, claiming that economic and political power is unequally distributed among developed and underdeveloped countries, leading to people having unequal access to resources, and that capitalist structure and its continuing expansion reinforces these inequalities (Castles & Miller, 2003; Massey etal., 1998; De Haas, 2008). For those underdeveloped countries, their economic development remains trapped and stagnant in a deprived position within the global political structure (Sassen, 1990). Additionally, this historical-structuralist theory sees migration as a natural outgrowth of disruptions that are intrinsic to the process of capitalist accumulation, viewing migration ‘as one of the many manifestations of capitalist penetration and the increasingly unequal terms of trade between developed and underdeveloped countries’ (De Haas, 2008, p. 7; Massey et al., 1998, p. 36). There are elements in both the neoclassical and the historical-structuralist framework that can possibly be applicable to the situation of the workers from Policy and/vs People 49 the Philippines and Indonesia migrating to Hong Kong, particularly the rural to urban move for higher income and probability of employment, and the continual inequality of access to resources and employment for both of the labour-sending nations’ economies and their reinforced subordinate position in the global political economy. However, both neoclassical and historical-structuralist theories on the whole fail to explain why some people in a certain country or region migrate and others do not, and why people tend to migrate between particular places in a spatially clustered, concentrated, typically non-random fashion (Massey et al., 1993; Reniers, 1999, p. 680; De Haas, 2008, p. 8). The interrelated processes of demographic and economic change impacts on global migration patterns, and Skeldon argues that There is a relationship between the level of economic development, state formation and the patterns of population mobility. Very generally, we can say that where these are high, an integrated migration system exists consisting of global and local movements, whereas where they are low the migration systems are not integrated and mainly local. (Skeldon, 1997, p. 52) Responding to gaps between the frameworks and theories came the new economics of labour migration, which acknowledges that migration decisions are not made by isolated individuals but by larger units of people such as families or households (Stark & Bloom, 1985). This framework criticises the previous models as too individualistic and unable to be applied to the diverse realities of migration. Oded Stark places emphasis on the behaviour of individual migrants in a wider societal context and by consideration of not just the individual but the unit, allowing for integration of factors other than individual income maximisation as influencing migration decision-making Stark (1978; 1991). Furthermore, the new economics of labour migration sees migration as risk-sharing behaviour of families and that better than individuals, households have larger capacity to diversify their resources, especially labour, to minimise income risks (Stark & Levhari, 1982). The assumption is that people, households and families act not only to maximise income but also to minimise and spread risks, and international migration is perceived as a household response to income risk, as remittances provide income insurance for households even if their employment opportunities are low for those remaining in the laboursending country (De Haas, 2008, p. 35). Criticism of the new economics of labour migration persists. Alexandre Abreu argues that it is insufficient as it disguises itself as having reconciled both individual agency and structures, between the macro and the micro, yet it is still too individualist in that it does not consider the constraints at the structural level that shape migration dynamics, nor for individual migrant agency interacting with the structure that it is informed and constrained by (Abreu, 2012). Abreu asserts that the framework is fundamentally misleading as a balanced approach 50 Spatial Agency and Occupation and that there should be a new and improved ‘historical-structural synthesis’ as a more satisfactory alternative (Ibid., 2012). Considering the specificity of migrant domestic workers’ situation in Hong Kong, all three theories can be applied yet be insufficient, as the issues of gender, race and space are missing. As mentioned in the introduction of this book, stratification economics could be a possible framework to consider aspects of identity and power, in particular race and gender. Stratification economics has been used and pioneered by black economists and economists of colour as an alternative approach to conventional economic analyses of group-based inequality (Darity et al., 2015; Obeng-Odoom, 2020). William A. Darity Jr posits that stratification economics conceives of a world where there is a continuous competitive interplay between social groups motivated by the collective self-interest of their respective members (2022, p. 402). He notes: Collective self-interest centers on advancing or maintaining the status of one’s social group in comparison with another or others that are situationally relevant. The frame of stratification economics provides a general theory of intergroup inequality. In principle, it is applicable to all societies and at multiple levels of inequality. (Ibid.) Stratification economics’ fundamental context is that individuals are concerned not only with their absolute position, but with their relative position; that is, individuals gain greater satisfaction the higher the status of the social group with whom they identify, and they gain greater satisfaction the higher their personal status within the social group with whom they identify (Darity, 2005; 2017; 2022). This framework can be used to further understand and analyse the intersected inequality faced by the migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong through the social groups they identify with in Hong Kong and in their home country. The former is a socially, economically and spatially marginalised contingent with higher earnings than they would otherwise have in their home country, yet back in their home country, many of them are their families’ breadwinners, and are considered as national heroes. This disparity in social status and identity is part of the motivations in which the workers may leave the labour-sending countries, return to their home country, yet after deliberation return back to the labour-sending countries to continue to work (For further details see Parreñas 2001, p. 150–196). Through the many studies about migration labour from a macroor microlevel, no matter how large the remittance amount, the individual choices or how choices are impacted by structural parameters, the issue of gender and the inevitable unequal power relations become apparent (Dannecker & Piper, 2021, p. 306). Petra Dannecker and Nicola Piper revisit the migration-development nexus debate through the prism of gender, politics and agency, and assert that governmental and international organisational actors involved in the migration– development nexus debate at the global level have not analysed gender-specific Policy and/vs People 51 power structures and intersectional forms of agency in a sufficiently comprehensive manner (2021). They argue that much of the mainstream debate and policies around the migration and development nexus is too narrowly focused on economic aspects of development, while neglecting the social aspect where care is a very crucial and gendered element. I would consider that care in this instance can speak to both the nature of the work as well as the role of caring women take on that furthers the social wellbeing of individuals, families and communities. Dannecker and Piper further consider that the creation of the hero image of migrant workers, as that of heroes of development, serves the political need to emphasise why their migration is ‘good’ for development, which precisely is a creation that stems from the inability to see the migration and development nexus through a gender-specific framework (Ibid., 2021, p. 304). What this glorification does is take away the intersectional forms of precarity experienced by the migrant women workers – gender and race, and potentially more – that limit their economic agency in the first place (Piper, Rosewarne & Withers, 2017). Overall, they argue that a more nuanced understanding of migrant agency at the intersection of migrant rights, care and development would have the potential to help generate policies that would have better gender outcomes. I assert that similarly, using the intersected lens of gender, labour and space and considering power dynamics within these aspects (that is, the relationship between employer and employee, labour supply and demand, the right to land in rent, the gendered nature of care work) to analyse the decades-long practice of migrant domestic work in Hong Kong, a more nuanced understanding emerges that would have new discoveries and impacts. These analyses will unfold in the next chapters of the book. So far, this chapter has outlined the migration labour export trajectory of Indonesia and the Philippines and the global migration economic frameworks that it is mostly situated within where there are useful aspects, yet there are missing elements in (urban) economics and particularities concerning space, labour and gender that need to be included. Diving into the situation in Hong Kong, it should be made clear that the city-state has been a long-standing labourreceiving destination for migrant domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia and it is not a passive labour-receiving state that just happens to be geographically convenient in the path of labour migrants. Its economic structures and policies have been active agents of the capitalist system that commodifies migrant labour, which has heavily shaped the economic, social and spatial interactions and negotiations that the workers operate in. Hong Kong as an active labour-receiving state Hong Kong was a British colony between 1841–1997. The city-state’s laissez-faire capitalist economy, British liberalism and colonial governance by the state underthe rule of law have resulted in a relatively transparent legal 52 Spatial Agency and Occupation infrastructure, which have made it a popular labour-receiving destination. Prior to the migrant domestic labour import from the Philippines in the 1970s, Hong Kong was always a popular destination for migrants from mainland China. In fact, the city-state was known to be a stepping stone for Chinese migrants on their way to North America. Ronald Skeldon has described Hong Kong as a destination of human circulation, observing its emigration in the second half of the twentieth century (1995, p. 51). Anecdotally, that was also a similar practice for Filipina migrant workers between the 1980s and early 2000s (Wee & Sim, 2005). Despite this so-called practice, the number of migrant domestic workers steadily increased from the first 1,000 in 1975 to 140,500 by 1998, to 189,000 in 2016, to 338,189 in 2022 (Research Office-Legislative Council Secretariat, 2017; Hong Kong Immigration Department, 2022b). From the 70s, the introduction of Filipina domestic workers coming into Hong Kong and supposedly using it as a potential transit city to obtain employment experience for further migration to North America was coincidentally useful for Hong Kong’s own developmental trajectory (Ibid., p. 178). At the time, the Hong Kong government sought ways to make it more difficult for immigrants from mainland China to come to the city. One of these ways was establishing the official term Foreign Domestic Helper, emphasis on the term Foreign, which apparently was intended to make a clear separation between these workers and the Chinese majority population of Hong Kong, and ensure that family members from mainland China would not be recruited under the visa, thus eventually enabling them to stay (Chiu, 1999). Minimalising mainland China’s workers from migrating to Hong Kong, and having workers from Southeast Asia instead, with a visibly different appearance under temporary work visas, was a strategy in protecting Hong Kong as a capital-rich base (Wee & Sim, 2005, p. 179). By the 1990s, most of Hong Kong’s manufacturers had moved into mainland China due to cheaper labour costs. Within a mere twenty years, between the 1970s and 1990s, Hong Kong’s middle class also vastly expanded. This new middle class became the employers of the migrant domestic workers, and having fulltime outsourced domestic work was preferred by local women who could relieve themselves of household duties and focus on their professional careers. The new middle class’s wealth and access to resources were also created by their experiences of living abroad. Prior to the handover of British sovereignty of Hong Kong to China in 1997, many Hong Kong people emigrated to countries with developed economies, particularly English-speaking countries such as the UK, US, Canada and Australia. It was a common social practice at the time, and arguably still is, to obtain alternative citizenship for many economic and social reasons. In the time before 1997, many Hong Kong people sought to migrate due to the uncertain political and economic future of the city-state. Those who returned to Hong Kong after obtaining citizenship elsewhere became more employable and had higher incomes, and were thus able to afford a fulltime live-in domestic worker. Policy and/vs People 53 In 1982, the minimum monthly wage of migrant domestic workers was set by the government at HK$1,150 (approximately US$147). At the time, this minimum wage was above what most Hong Kong people could afford, except for wealthy expatriate families, which meant that the minimum wage acted as a sorting mechanism, limiting the number of workers coming into Hong Kong and the number of employers who could afford them (French, 1986; Wee & Sim, 2005). This all changed in the 1990s due to the city-state’s economic growth. As the middle class became wealthier, the minimum wage of migrant domestic workers did not increase at a comparable rate. This meant the gap between the employers’ wages and that of the migrant domestic workers widened, making it more affordable to hire the workers and increasing the demand for them. In 1992, the minimum monthly wage was increased to HK$3,270 (approximately US$420) and as of 2023 to the time of this writing, it is set at HK$4,870 (approximately US$622) (Wee & Sim, 2005; Mission for Migrant Workers, 2018; Hong Kong SAR Immigration Department, 2023). Wee and Sim noted that while the workers’ minimum wage became affordable for the middle class, most Hong Kong people would consider it too low for it to be a fair renumeration, ‘least of all a job that required live-in arrangements and 24-hour standby service for one’s employers’ (Wee & Sim, 2005, p. 182). This has proven to be a long-standing observation that is part of the systemic problem of undervaluing the role of the migrant domestic workers, socially and economically, as well as the inconsideration of domestic work itself as legitimate labour that should be compensated equitably. There were sentiments from many Hong Kong Chinese that setting a statutory minimum wage for migrant domestic workers indicated the generosity of the government, that they were being overpaid and that these migrant workers were lucky to be able to work in Hong Kong (Lowe, 2000, p. 118). While there is no hard evidence to prove whether this was still a popular sentiment in 2023, from the many interviews and conversations I had with migrant domestic workers between 2013–2023, I believe that this attitude exists among some Hong Kong Chinese employers, particularly those who are older and have classist and racist prejudices towards Southeast Asians.4 While there were and possibly still are negative sentiments towards the workers about their pay, having a legislated minimum wage sets Hong Kong as a good destination for workers as it provides an obligatory standard that some other countries do not have. The minimum wage of migrant domestic workers became a topic of contention in the years following the Asia Financial Crisis of 1997. To ease the financial burdens of employers of the migrant workers, in 2003, the government reduced the monthly minimum wage by HK$400 (at the time it was approximately US$51) and imposed a levy to be paid by employers to the government of the exact amount. The justification was to reduce the wages, while using that reduction to fund the government’s new initiate known as the Employees Retraining Scheme. This caused outrage from the Philippines government and 54 Spatial Agency and Occupation led to a temporary suspension of all contracts for domestic workers coming to Hong Kong and an investigation by the ILO into the negative effects on migrant workers under this imposed reduction. The Philippines Senate described this cut as unjust, especially as at the time, Hong Kong citizens were not liable to pay income tax unless they had a monthly income of HK$9,000 (approximately US$1,155), which amounts to nearly three times that of the minimum wage for migrant domestic workers. At the time, surveys were conducted whereby there was consensus that agreed with the government’s move, which can be regarded as a common thought that the wages of migrant domestic workers are leakages from the economy (Wee & Sim, 2005). The notion that the workers relieved local women of domestic duties, lending them time and freedom to be employed full time and contribute to the city-state’s economic growth, was a less popular sentiment (Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, 2003). Penalising migrant workers to subsidise the local unemployment was unreasonable and harsh as the workers were ‘taxed’, while not having access to social welfare benefits that citizens had or the permanency of stay. The levy was in effect from 2003–2013. During this decade, the number of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong ranged from 216,000 to 300,000 (Cortés and Pan, 2013). Since every worker was deducted HK$400 per month, this means each person would have been deducted $400 x 12 = $4,800 each year. By simple calculation, the Hong Kong government had received between $4,800 x 216,000 in the year 2003 and upwards of that every year to $4,800 x 300,000 in the year 2013. This is an astronomical amount of revenue generated off the workers for a decade to retrain citizens to find suitable employment. Despite the levy, Hong Kong was still a preferred destination for the workers, as the minimum wage was more than what was given back home in the Philippines and Indonesia. From the example of the levy imposed between 2003 and 2013, Hong Kong, as a labour-receiving state, has been actively participating in the global migrant domestic labour movement and benefiting from the cheap labour provided by its southeast Asian neighbours. The city-state has continued to do so in many other ways, as other features within the Foreign Domestic Helper contract, apart from their wages, benefit the employers economically and socially. These include: the imbalanced ratio of the workers’ minimum wages to the minimum household income of the employers, the two-week rule, the lack of permanent stay, the live-in rule and others. These will be unpacked in detail in the next section and further in the next chapter. Migrant Domestic Workers in Hong Kong: wages, two-week rule and non-citizenship Wages: overworked and underpaid Long working hours is one of the biggest challenges for a migrant domestic worker, as there is no legally set number of hours each day or each week in their Policy and/vs People 55 contract (Asian Migrant Centre, 2001; 2005; 2008; Constable, 2007; Hong Kong Helpers Campaign, 2023b; Mission for Migrant Workers, 2022). According to the Practical Guide for the Employment of migrant domestic workers, all migrant domestic workers are entitled to a monthly wage of no less than the legal Minimum Allowable Wage and one weekly rest day of no less than a continuous period of 24 hours (Hong Kong SAR Labour Department, 2022b). It is commonly practised that Sunday is the usual day off work; however some employers might require assistance on Sunday in exchange for another day off. Adherence to the minimum wage and one weekly rest day appears to be reasonable. However, what is not specified in the contract is a contractual wage rate per hour or the number of working hours each day, nor are there suggestions for both given. The lack of standardised working hours and lack of wage rate exploits the workers, and their wage rate fluctuates depending on how many hours they are on duty. In response to the lack of standardised working hours, the Labour Department and Immigration Department claim that household work cannot be measured and that precise work hours would be too difficult to enforce (Constable, 2007, pp. 133–136). To claim housework cannot be measured is factually false, as there are tasks to do, actions to be taken and those tasks can be finished under a time frame that can be accounted for. Yet, for an official government department to state that is demonstrative of how deep and common the sentiment of devaluing domestic work is in the zeitgeist. Further, this response disadvantages the workers and gives the employers discretion to determine their work hours. Of the eighty-seven migrant domestic workers I have interviewed, eighty claim to be on duty approximately fifteen hours each day between 7 am to 10 pm, and some may work a few hours before they leave home on their day off work, and in the evening once they have returned. This amounts to 15 hours x 6 days, in addition approximately another 5 hours, which equals to 95 hours each week. For the sake of simple calculation, minus the 4–5 Sundays, it can be estimated that there are 25 days of work each month, and the average migrant domestic worker possibly works 25 × 15 hours each month, which is 375 hours. To include the possible 3–5 hours at the beginning or end of their day off work, then that will be an addition of a minimum of 12 more hours each month, making the possible total number of hours 387. Acknowledging that this is an approximation only, it is not far from the potential truth. I have done these calculations with some interviewees and many of them are not surprised bythe amount, which they have claimed to be the ‘industry standard’. Comparatively, according to the Legislative Council’s statistics report in 2018, the average weekly working hours for full-time employees who are citizens or have working residency in Hong Kong is 42 hours (Hong Kong SAR Legislative Council, 2019). The report highlighted that people who work in the service sector can work up to 60 hours each week, with no mention of the migrant domestic workers. By the calculation of the hours that migrant 56 Spatial Agency and Occupation domestic workers are on duty for an estimated 15 hours each day for 6 days of the week, their average of 90 hours each week far exceeds those included in the official government report of 42–60 hours. According to labour laws in Hong Kong as of the time of this writing, there are no general statutory provisions for maximum working hours, overtime limits or overtime pay for citizens and workers on working visas (Hong Kong SAR Labour Department, 2023a). This is problematic as there is no legal protection of guarantee for paid overtime and employers have the discretion to compensate or not, and how much to compensate by. However, more concerning is that migrant domestic workers are excluded from this labour ordinance and that they are in a separate category of workers, with much longer working hours and less pay. In 2011, Hong Kong instated the Statutory Minimum Wage for Hong Kong workers, which in 2023 was HK$40 per hour. Many of the migrant workers I interviewed expressed physical exhaustion from long working hours. I spoke with MZ, a 32-year-old Filipino migrant domestic worker, in 2015. At the time she had been employed for six years by the same employer. She recalled the long hours of her daily routine at work (Personal communication, 8 February 2015): When I first started, Ma’am [her female employer] asked me to wake up at 6.30every morning and go to sleep by 9 pm at night. They leave the house at 8.30am in the morning and I take the boy [employers’ child] to school. Many nights Ma’am and Sir [her male employer] finish work and are home by 9 pm. I cook for them and clean up after. I actually do not stop working until around 11 pm. I also must check on the boy and he goes to sleep about 8 pm but he wants to stay up longer when they [her employers] come home. Sometimes I get in trouble for not making him sleep earlier. With this daily schedule, MZ was expected to be on duty for nearly 16.5 hours each day. Although her employers have set a daily standard work period for her, it was often difficult to abide by those hours. In households where there are infants, young children or elderly people, workers often wake up throughout the night and are expected to begin work the next day at the scheduled time. From the employer’s perspective, the workers usually have several hours during the day at home when the children are at school and the adults are at work, which are considered as ‘free time’ (Constable, 2007, pp. 96–101). This assumption is false because within that period, they are still on duty and doing other chores. Whether MZ was actively engaged in a task or was between tasks, she was on duty for approximately 99 hours of work each week. In 2015, M’s monthly wage was HK$4,600 and the minimum wage for citizens was HK$32.50 per hour (Hong Kong SAR Labour Department, 2015). To illustrate mathematically how her wage depreciates with her long hours of work, her hourly rate can be Policy and/vs People 63 rule’ (United Nations Economic and Social Council, 2013, p. 5). Alongside the UN Human Rights Committee, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Oxfam have also urged the Hong Kong authorities to repeal the rule, as it has a direct impact on the conditions of employment and living conditions of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. The two-week rule negatively impacts on the migrant workers’ wellbeing, as the terms within the official contract continue to disempower them and give hidden leniencies to employers to exert control over the workers. The rule also becomes a pressure point that hangs over the workers as their income, shelter and legitimacy in Hong Kong are interconnected and could be denied without real reason and legal protection that supports them. In this way, migrant domestic workers are more likely to remain silent and comply with extended working hours and other possible forms of unprofessional requests and exploitation. Considerations for wellbeing, from having personal space to taking breaks and other requests, can also become superfluous and be self-forfeited to secure employment. Non-citizenship: permanently temporary One of the most contested and concrete features within the employment policy that creates a specifically restricted context for migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong is that they will never be eligible for permanent residency. No matter how long a person under the Foreign Domestic Helper visa has lived in Hong Kong, and despite the fact other foreigners on different visas can apply for permanent residency, migrant workers exclusively will not be eligible. In 2013, the Hong Kong High Court denied Evangeline B. Vallejos, a Filipino national, the eligibility to apply for citizenship although she had lived and worked in Hong Kong as a migrant domestic worker continuously for seventeen years. This was a contentious case as Hong Kong’s immigration laws allow any foreign person who has lived in the city-state continuously for seven years to apply for permanent residency. Despite this, the ruling made migrant domestic workers an exception and demonstrated no leniency towards Vallejos’s continuous contribution to her Hong Kong employers. It symbolised a disregard for the integral role that migrant domestic workers play in Hong Kong society and a nonacceptance of them beyond the intermittent status of a temporary guest worker. It also placed them in a state of exception that separates them from other foreigners working in Hong Kong. From the interviews I conducted between 2013–2023 and the countless workers I have spoken to, the majority have renewed their two-year visa more than two times and have been working in Hong Kong for over five years, and at the time of the interviews were not planning to leave. In the case of the shortest duration of a worker I have met, she had only just started her first twoyear contract, while the longest duration of employment for a worker I spoke to 64 Spatial Agency and Occupation was thirty-one years. Legally, they are excluded from purchasing or renting property in their own name and are contractually obligated to the living arrangement provided by their employers inside their home. Although it has been known that some employers provide separate accommodation, it is illegal and both parties could be prosecuted if found. The denial of permanent residency also means the workers cannot have another legal identity other than that of a migrant domestic worker in Hong Kong for as long as they entered and stayed in the city under that visa. Under the legalities of their entry, they are temporary with exclusively limited rights, yet they have proven to be a permanent part of the society, playing an intrinsic part in Hong Kong’s economy and lifestyle. They dwell within Gorgio Agamben’s ‘state of exception’ where they are permanently in a ‘zone of indifference’ where the internal and external do not exclude, rather blur with each other (2005). Their exception to the norm presents two issues: firstly the complex interdependent relationship between them and Hong Kong society, and secondly their continuous role in Hong Kong despite being temporary residents. Drawing upon Daisy Tam’s engagement with Michel Serres’s work The Parasite, and Saskia Sassen’s positioning of citizenship and alienage, these two issues reveal an alternative way to understand the Foreign Domestic Helpers, not just as onedimensional migrant workers; rather as actors with potential for legitimacy and agency (Sassen, 2005; 2008; Serres, 2007; Tam, 2016). This informs the lens through which we can understand migrant domestic labour through the agency of space, gender and labour. Tam discusses the so-called messy geographies of Little Manila and the parasitic relations between Filipino migrant domestic workers and Hong Kong (2016, pp. 119–135). Using Serres’s reading of The Parasite (2007), Tam introduces a paradigm where the guest workers and hosts – migrant domestic workers and Hong Kong – are interdependent and co-existing rather than a one-sided parasitic dependency from the guest workers on the hosts. Tam expands on the problematic generalisation of the parasite: In contemporary political media, migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers are often portrayed as poachers, perceived through metaphorical associations of taking without giving back, profiteers off the host country (2016, p. 129). The figure of the parasite regarded as a purely negative, destructive or undesirable agent is widely deployed to stigmatise and evoke distrust; for example, the blaming of economic problems and unemployment on migrant labourers or benefit cheats. Tam deploys Serres’s point that ‘the parasitic relation is intersubjective, that the roles of hosts/guests are not fixed, that every identifiable actor is capable of taking up the place of the other with the shift of circumstance’ (Tam, 2016, p. 130). This point is crucial as the complex interdependent relations between the migrant domestic workers and Hong Kong unfold. In Hong Kong, agencies profit from fees obtained from the workers and employers, households gain another set of income since domestic labour allows another family member to Policy and/vs People 65 take on formal employment, and the Hong Kong government benefits from more citizens participating in the formal sector and not needing to provide the same social welfare for the migrant workers as they are temporary residents. The Philippines and Indonesia also have a chain of beneficiaries: the migrant workers earn a higher salary in Hong Kong than at home, their families are supported by their remittances, remittance agencies collect fees from their monthly transfers, mobile phone and cellular data companies have made exponential profit from all migrant workers who are in constant communication with their friends and families, agencies profit from training courses that domestic workers participate in before arriving in Hong Kong that give them a slight competitive edge, and lastly the workers’ remittances contribute to the GDP of their home countries. From these interconnections, it becomes apparent that the workers activate a series of financial benefits where it is no longer valid to view them within a hierarchy where they are simply parasitic guests. The relations described by Tam are a collection of economic and social networks that have become a parasitic ecology that the migrant domestic workers operate in. As put by Tam, ‘In Little Manila, migrant workers do not vandalize the face of Hong Kong. They are what makes Hong Kong’ (2016, p. 133). Apart from the parasitic paradigm, Saskia Sassen’s considerations on the dichotomy of citizenship and alienage outlines the need to reposition contemporary understandings of these terms, as she states: The two foundational subjects for membership in the modern nation state, the citizen and the alien, are undergoing significant changes in the current period. The effect is a partial blurring of each of the citizen subject and the alien subject. (2005, p. 79) The status of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong should be understood as a blurred status between citizen and non-citizen. This blurring of their intermittent migrant status yet established labour role renders their status more complex to define when they act with agency. Saskia Sassen notes that there are certain global transformations that are shifting the relationship between citizenship and the nation-state: firstly it is the expansion of globalisation-linked policies that have resulted in economic privatisation since the 1980s; secondly and consequently, the communities and social groups that are strengthened by these transformations have increasingly questioned the need to identify with a nation as represented by the state (2005, p. 80). The concept of citizenship is a complex one, especially in the current global political climate where people are constantly moving for work, seeking refuge or have been displaced. To reposition citizenship against these global transformations requires a process of deconstructing the basic understanding of citizenship. Citizenship can be defined as the state of being given the rights, privileges and duties of a member of society. It is also a powerful political ideal as it relates 66 Spatial Agency and Occupation to being a legitimate part of a society rather than an illegitimate or a temporary one. It entitles protection for people in their home country and abroad. Citizenship also alludes to equality irrespective of a person’s gender, ethnicity, wealth or sexual orientation. Sassen illustrates that it is not formal features of citizenship that have changed, rather the embeddedness of citizenship and the nation-state, and argues that the global forces are destabilising the relationship of citizenship and the nation state, thus creating opportunities for the emergence of new types of political subjects and new spatialities for politics (2005). New types of political subjects can be various non-formalised or partly formalised political actors. Furthermore, informal practices and political subjects not quite fully recognised (as citizens) can nonetheless function as part of the political landscape (2005, pp. 80–81). Undocumented immigrants who are long-term residents engage in practices that are the same as those of formally defined citizens in the routines of daily life; this produces an informal social contract between these immigrants and the community. I assert that migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong are a new type of political subject that are neither citizens nor non-citizens materialised from the destabilisation of the citizenship and nation-state couplet. They are not legally recognised as permanent residents, but they are an integral part of Hong Kong’s labour force. As such they are an indispensable part of the local economic, social and political landscape; every Sunday, as they emerge from their employers’ homes and exercise their right to public space, appropriating and transforming to reclaim spaces for their own needs. Thus, they are political bodies in Hong Kong and have become what may be considered as emergent political subjects and new emergents – as subjects of denationalised forms of citizenship (Sassen, 2005, p. 81–88). They also participate in other forms of engagement and social exercise of freedom and power such as joining informal migrant worker hobby groups (kickboxing, yoga, dance, art and cooking are very popular), liaising with local NGOs for outreach events and volunteering with them for various events. Reconsidering how migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong are categorised within the discourse of citizenship is relevant due to the spatial and geographical context they inhabit. Sassen notes that the repositioning of citizenship and alienage is particularly visible in the ‘global city’ as it is a strategic site for new types of operations, where new socio-political claims materialise and assume concrete forms (Sassen, 2014, pp. 9–10). Hong Kong is in fact a global city, a strategic site where: Disadvantaged people, while powerless, gain presence and hence the possibility of a new kind of politics and culture. Insofar as immigrants and political refugees are part of the disadvantaged, the global city is also a site for post-colonial history. Hong Kong remains as a space for a certain type of contestation. (Sassen, 1998, p. 131) Policy and/vs People 67 Relating to Hong Kong as a global city, it is also a space of contestation and a site where people with less power, such as migrant domestic workers, can gain presence, autonomy and to an extent, power, to create a new kind of politics and culture. Sassen further elaborates that the global city enables a partial reinvention of citizenship and this reinvention shifts away from the narrowly defined nation-state towards citizenship practices that revolve around claiming rights to the city (2005, pp. 81–82). In global cities, urban practices contain the possibility of directly engaging strategic forms of power, a significant point in a context where power is increasingly privatised, globalised and elusive. As emergents of denationalised forms of citizenship in a global city, migrant domestic workers have reinvented their relationship with Hong Kong by their continuous spatial and social practices, which simultaneously are a claim for their rights to the city. David Harvey proposes that Henri Lefebvre’s vision for the right of the city is: Far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. (2012, p. 10) Dwelling within a blurred status between citizenship and temporary residency in Hong Kong, migrant domestic workers, as emergents of a denationalised form of citizenship, continue to reclaim space, together with their right to the city, acting as empowered agents in the local and global structure of global migration labour despite the economic and social limitations. Conclusion This chapter discussed the economic forces of migrant labour and provided contexts for both the labour-sending nations – specifically the Philippines and Indonesia, and the labour-receiving state of Hong Kong. It demonstrated how the existing frameworks of political economy are insufficient in grappling with the situation in Hong Kong. The neoclassical economic theory views migrants as individual, rational actors, who are assumed to have free choice to move on the basis of a cost-benefit calculation (De Haas, 2008), and that the motivation for rural to urban migration, or migration from less-developed economies to developed economies, is ‘that migration proceeds in response to urban-rural differences in expected earnings with the urban employment rate acting as an equilibrating force on such migration’ (Harris & Todaro, 1970, p. 126). The critiques of neoclassical economic theory for migration labour at large consider it as being one of an ‘a-historical and Eurocentric’ nature, and the historicalstructuralist theory on migration emerged as a response, claiming that economic 68 Spatial Agency and Occupation and political power is unequally distributed among developed and underdeveloped countries, leading to people having unequal access to resources and that capitalist structure and its continuing expansion reinforce these inequalities (Castles & Miller, 2003; Massey et al., 1998; De Haas, 2008). Responding to gaps between the frameworks and theories came the new economics of labour migration, acknowledging that migration decisions are not made by isolated individuals but by larger units of people such as families or households (Stark & Bloom, 1985). However, it is still too individualist in that it does not consider the constraints at the structural level that shape migration dynamics, nor for individual migrant agency interacting with the structure that it is informed and constrained by (Abreu, 2012). Considering the specificity of migrant domestic workers’ situation in Hong Kong, existing frameworks can be applied, yet there are missing elements in (urban) economics and particularities concerning space, labour and gender that need to be included. This is where stratification economics could be a possible framework to consider aspects of identity and power, and used to consider the power dynamics embedded in the labour, gender and spatial structure enforced by migration labour policies. In Hong Kong, the migrant labour policies specifically created for Foreign Domestic Helpers reveal how the workers are limited spatially and economically, which reinforces their permanently temporary position in Hong Kong society. I assert that these policies were created not for the protection of the people (people being the migrant workers), rather they are policies against the people’s protection, wellbeing and development, consequently creating a workforce with limited options and stagnated mobility for the sake of cheap, imported labour. The next chapter will dive deeper to illustrate the impacts of these policies in the domestic spaces of Hong Kong, where practices of oppression breed and fester, further marginalising the workers’ temporal position to a subordinate one. Notes 1. In 2007, the legal minimum allowable wage for migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong was raised from HK$3,270 to $3,480, as publicised by a Hong Kong government press release: http://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/200706/05/P200706050169.htm 2. In 2014, Erwiana Sulistyaningsih was a 23-year-old Indonesian migrant domestic worker in Hong Kong who had suffered from eight months of abuse by her employers. Her female employer was found guilty of causing grievous bodily harm and the case received worldwide attention, specifically on the precarious situations and limited rights of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong and migrant domestic workers worldwide. 3. The Republic Act No. 8042, also known as the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995, was an act to institute the policies of overseas employment and establish a higher standard of protection for Overseas Filipino Workers. 4. Prejudices and examples of the types of discrimination the migrant workers face from their employers, and the conception of such attitudes, will be discussed in the next chapter. CHAPTER 2 Narratives of Oppression: Servitude, Invisibility and Spacelessness From the previous chapter, the legalities within the Foreign Domestic Helper contract that are problematic have been outlined and unpacked in detail: their meagre wages that depreciate, especially in the commonly practiced context of unregulated work hours, the two-week rule that pressurises the security of their work contract and right to be in the city-state, and their unending temporary status specific to their work visa that denies their eligibility for permanent residency. Migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong operate in a different category than all other workers – local or expatriate. The single biggest issue that contributes to their marginalisation and underpins the possibility for all kinds of exploitation is the live-in requirement. It limits the workers’ spatial mobility by assigning them one space to work and live in – their employers’ homes – for the entirety of their time in Hong Kong. This case reflects the broader political economic argument for paying attention to, and acting on, institutions of space and rent and how they mould migrant experiences across the world (Obeng-Odoom, 2022). In what follows, I nuance, enrich and extend this argument by examining the practices of control and discipline that occur in the home through existing literature and interviews with workers between 2013 and 2022. I will begin the chapter by foregrounding the history of domestic servitude in Hong Kong that contextualises the disciplinary practices experienced by migrant domestic workers and give background to the formation of the socio-cultural position of the workers through Hong Kong’s Chinese and colonial history. No Home of One’s Own will follow and unpack the details in the contract that suggests meagre spatial provisions within the live-in requirement, reflecting the policy’s sympathy towards the spatial limitations of Hong Kong’s housing situation, therefore giving power to the employers to decide how much room (often very little) to provide for the worker. This section is titled as a nod to Virginia Woolf’s extended essay A Room of One’s Own where she famously articulates the idea that ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ (1929, p. 5). A cry for a radical idea nearly a century ago for women to be given the same financial and spatial access in order to become equal members to men in society, yet it remains obsolete in the context of providing separate housing for women migrant domestic workers in contemporary Hong Kong. This section includes spatial drawings of the living experiences of interviewed workers to visualise the measurable reality of not having a room of their own. The three sections that follow under Subordinate 2. Narratives of Oppression: Servitude, Invisibility and Spacelessness 70 Spatial Agency and Occupation position in the home: ‘Is that what you are wearing today?’, ‘What are you eating?’ and ‘Where are you going?’ are titled with quotes from interviews with workers relating to their lived experience, which further illustrate the forms of disciplinary practices occurring inside the homes that reinforce their subordinate position in the home. These practices and experiences are often invisible to outsiders but are common within the experiences of migrant domestic workers. This chapter seeks to fully illustrate and demonstrate the detrimental effects of the lack of adequate and separate housing provision for the workers and how these spatial, socio-cultural oppressions form the agency and resistance that are on full display when the workers emerge as a collective of people, not just workers, on their weekly day off work. Hong Kong’s history of domestic servitude Migrant domestic workers as a labour group in Hong Kong form part of a continuous history of servant labour of female domestic servants from China. Arguments from existing knowledge provide the historical and cultural context of servitude in Hong Kong and demonstrate the influence it has had on the current disciplinary practices imposed on migrant domestic workers; the disciplining of traditional Chinese female domestic servants in Hong Kong (Constable, 1997; 2007; Gaw, 1991; Watson, 1980), the blurred boundaries and roles of wives, concubines and servants in pre-colonial and early colonial times (Sankar, 1978; Watson, 1991), the private relationships and tensions between female employers and female servants (Constable, 1996; Jaschok, 1988; Rollins, 1985) and the misconstrued sexual deviance of Filipino migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong (Constable, 1997). Nicole Constable contends that Hong Kong employers discipline the workers because they hold onto the past images and memories of obedient Chinese servants who ‘know their places’ and pose no moral challenge to existing patterns of authority (Constable, 1997). In contrast, they see contemporary migrant domestic workers as sexualised foreign women, thus legitimising their exercise of control to satisfy previous standards of servitude (Constable, 1997; 2007). Constable adds that the public concern about Filipino migrant workers’ sexuality is linked to broader changes in women’s roles in the home of satisfying the traditional domestic roles of motherhood and womanhood, as well as entering into the public workforce and becoming financially independent, and in the social identities of the workers (1997). The historical influence of the traditional Hong Kong Chinese domestic servants and the contemporary methods of discipline used in the homes of employers are problematic. Together, they have distinctly solidified migrant domestic workers’ socio-spatial and cultural disenfranchisement in Hong Kong beyond their economic marginalisation and temporary residency status. Narratives of Oppression 71 The concept of servitude and the servant as a common figure within the domestic realm of Hong Kong runs deep into its Chinese and colonial history (Jaschok, 1988; Watson, 1980). During the mid-nineteenth century, wealthy Chinese families on the mainland relied on free and unfree men and women workers. Up until 1949 ‘China had one of the largest and most comprehensive markets for the exchange of human beings in the world’ (Watson, 1980, p. 223). Participation in domestic labour by both local men and women was practised in Hong Kong Chinese households and the homes of British government personnel from the early 1900s (Carroll, 2007; Tsang, 2007). Opportunities arose for men to work as manual labourers, rickshaw pullers or drivers, which gradually decreased their participation in domestic labour, thus ‘Hong Kong experienced a stricter “feminization” of household work’ (Constable, 1996, p. 452). As Hong Kong’s manufacturing sector expanded exponentially in the late 1960s, older Hong Kong women who might otherwise have become domestic workers opted instead for factory work, while new service sector jobs attracted younger middle-class women into the paid workforce (Constable, 1996, p. 453). The number of traditional Chinese domestic workers decreased because of old age, retirement and other job opportunities, thus the demand for household workers continued to increase. This gap led to the import of migrant domestic workers from neighbouring Southeast Asian countries. Since then, domestic work in Hong Kong has evolved into a sector that is synonymous with temporary female migrants from Southeast Asia, especially those from the Philippines and later, Indonesia. Comparisons of the quality of service are made between the previous league of Chinese servants and the contemporary migrant domestic workers, as Constable notes: ‘fuelled by a powerful sense of nostalgia, Hong Kong Chinese employers carry prejudice towards the migrant domestic workers with the notion that Cantonese domestic servants were more superior’ (Constable, 2007, p. 44). Historically, in late Imperial China and Hong Kong, Chinese servants came from a variety of social groups and were integrated into the family for the entirety of their lives (Gaw, 1991). This differs to how migrant domestic workers are, as they work for the employers on two-year contracts at a time, are not a part of the family as a regular member and are identified as foreigners in the home. The employment of domestic servants was common in wealthy Chinese families in mainland China throughout the mid-nineteenth century and extended to Hong Kong when it became a British colony. At the time, house workers consisted of both free and unfree men and women. Most free servants were men, while most female servants were unfree. There were two main types of female Chinese servants: the muijai,1 who were young women purchased to become lifelong servants to a family; and the amah, who were older, sworn spinsters who worked for a family (Watson, 1991). The fundamental difference between the two groups of womens’ labour conditions and identity rested upon their free or unfree status; 72 Spatial Agency and Occupation the muijai, who were a commodity purchased by the family, held a lower socioeconomic status and had less power than the amah, who were contracted employees of the family. These typologies of domestic workers are no longer practised as they became outdated and were eventually replaced by migrant domestic workers. Within the cultural context of Hong Kong, the contemporary migrant domestic workers are part of that lineage and are often compared to the stereotyped identity of muijai – the docile, obedient female commodity of the household (Constable, 1996; 2007). Muijai were synonymous with unfree and young female servants. They were sold to become indentured servants. Indentured servitude refers to the labour system widely practised in the British colonies of North America in the eighteenth century, where servants worked for a fixed number of years without pay to obtain freedom to then work on their own. Migrants who travelled across the ocean to escape poverty in Britain were sold as indentured servants by the seamen who brought them over. This was an exploitative situation, as the indentured servant essentially signed over their freedom for life as the employer retained the servant’s identification – the employment contract – and repeatedly sold it along with the servant to other employers. The muijai in Hong Kong followed a similar trajectory to the indentured servants in the West. In many cases, to obtain lifelong support outside of indentured servitude, female subjects preferred to be married off, even in their teens, to another family, even as mistresses or concubines.2 Constable states that ‘the ending of a muijai’s obligation to her master at marriage theoretically differentiated the practice from other more extreme forms of slavery’ (2007, p. 49). This transferral of identity as indentured servants to married subjects continually reinstated the women’s lives as illegitimate commodities that remained within the domestic realm. The practice of muijai remained in effect until the 1940s even though Queen Victoria abolished slavery in 1844; however the practice of muijai was often undetected when the female servants were disguised as members of the family (Jaschok, 1988, p. 133). Although the migrant domestic workers do not participate in indentured servitude, their legitimate residency in the city-state, including their accommodation and income, relies solely on the employment contract.3 The amah was a particular type of Chinese domestic worker different from the profile of the muijai. During the 1930s, spinsters or widowed women from nearby provinces in southern China relocated to Hong Kong seeking employment. Many of these women worked in sericulture, which collapsed as a result of the Chinese civil war and the Japanese occupation in 1937 (Gaw, 1991). Simultaneously, the recruitment of muijai was not illegal yet it was decreasing in social acceptance, therefore with the influx of older women with previous work experience, amah became more appropriate candidates for domestic work. The term amah is a derivative of several other Chinese terms pertaining to wet Narratives of Oppression 79 On a Sunday afternoon in 2021, I sat with KL and FH, on a walkway outside Victoria Park in Causeway Bay. This is an area where many Indonesian migrant domestic workers gather. Prior to the pandemic, many Indonesian workers gathered in the park on their day off work, however, at the time, the park was closed due to the social distancing measures. We sat on the ground with about one metre distance from each other, on a space made up of four pieces of flattened cardboard boxes. This temporary space for the three of us was approximately 3 metres long by 1.5 metres wide. KL and FH had more friends sitting with them usually, but because of COVID-19 rules they had a separate space close by. Although this makeshift space was shared, the group could expand the size of their gathering space as they wished. Compared to the makeshift bed space F had in the living room and KL’s shared bedroom with her employer’s child for six days each week, their temporary space on Sunday was nearly three times as large. KL and FH’s circumstance were not unique, which echoes the findings of other researchers and organisations (Amnesty International, 2013; Asian Migration Centre, 2004; Constable, 2007; Law, 2001; Zoitl, 2008). Of the workers I interviewed, the majority slept on mattresses or makeshift beds in children’s bedrooms or shared bedrooms, and a small number slept in communal spaces with or without spatial dividers, and the smallest number had their own bedroom. In the rarest circumstances where the workers have a room of their own, these rooms might not be regular bedrooms, rather they may be laundry rooms or windowless rooms created by subdividing a room. Nicole Constable notes through her research that in cases where domestic workers had their own ‘quarters’, they were generally a small windowless bedroom and if they had their own bathroom, it typically had less fixtures than the family bathroom, a squat toilet rather than aseat, and a shower that is a faucet that drains to a hole in the floor rather thana separate shower stall (Constable, 2007, p. 109). Out of the workers I met who had their own bedroom, some did indeed have regular bedrooms while some had bedrooms that were converted from walk-in wardrobes, laundry rooms and other rooms. All of the workers I interviewed who did not have their own bedroom mentioned the discomfort, difficulties and other unpleasant experiences due to the lack of their own private bedroom. On acceptable standards for domestic workers’ accommodation within employers’ homes, Article 6 of the International Labour Organisation Convention 189 (International Labour Organisation, 2011, p. 3) states: Each member shall take measures to ensure that domestic workers, like workers generally, enjoy fair terms of employment as well as decent working conditions and, if they reside in the household, decent living conditions that respect their privacy. This article is supported by the recommendation that when accommodation and food is provided for, the following are essential (International Labour Organisation, 2011, p. 13): 80 Spatial Agency and Occupation (a) a separate, private room that is suitably furnished, adequately ventilated and equipped with a lock, the key to which should be provided to the domestic worker; (b) access to suitable sanitary facilities, shared or private; (c) adequate lighting and, as appropriate, heating and air conditioning in keeping with prevailing conditions within the household; and (d) meals of good quality and sufficient quantity, adapted to the extent reasonable to the cultural and religious requirements, if any, of the domestic worker concerned. As evident in the employment contract for hiring a migrant domestic worker in Hong Kong, the provisions were brief and the overall tone was more sympathetic to the employers’ possible limitations, rather than making clear and detailed suggestions that considered the basic spatial needs of the worker. Most Hong Kong employers have satisfied the loose requirements within the employment contract but do not uphold recommendations by the International Labour Organisation as these are not suggested in the Guidebook for the Employment of Domestic Helpers from Abroad or other similar official documents (Hong Kong SAR Immigration Department, 2022a). The government is responsible for how the workers will be received and be provided for, and that should be demonstrated in the official documents. As pointed out, in many cases migrant domestic workers’ sleeping arrangements take the form of a mattress on the floor of the child’s bedroom (Kwok, 2019; Amnesty International, 2013, p. 11; Wohrer, 2008, pp. 50–57). Amnesty International (2013) reported that over 60% of migrant domestic workers interviewed did not have a room of their own in their employers’ home. MA, a 39-year-old Filipino Foreign Domestic Helper, had worked for the same Hong Kong employer for ten years and had never had a bedroom of her own (MA, personal communication, 8 June 2022). MA said her sleeping arrangement used to be a single-sized mattress placed on the floor of the children’s bedroom when they were younger. When the children grew into their teens, one of them moved into another room, while the other remained in this room and they shared a bunkbed. When she used to sleep on the mattress placed on the floor between the two girls’ beds, she constantly had backaches and enquired about obtaining a more supportive mattress or even a proper bed. Her employers were willing to replace the mattress with a new one that had more support, and the condition improved when she moved onto a bunkbed. Nonetheless, the foldable mattress as ease of storage determined the priority and quality of the mattress. Realistically, there was not enough space in the bedroom for two young children and an adult person. She was much happier when one of them moved out of that room and she could have a bed that was not a mattress on the floor, as she exclaimed, It is much better that I have a bed nowadays. Back then even when I was uncomfortable I rather sleep in the girls’ room than in the living room. I am at least not Narratives of Oppression 81 sleeping in the kitchen. Once they [her employers] joked that the only room that can fit a bed is the bathroom, over the bathtub. I know they were joking! But of course I had to say no thank you! (Ibid., exclamation in original) Apart from the employment contract, employers are also given a Revised Schedule of Accommodation and Domestic Duties, which refers to the facilities provided in their accommodation that require employers to select ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the following items: (a) light and water supply; (b) toilet and bathing facilities; (c) bed; (d) blankets and quilts; (e) pillows; (f) wardrobe; (g) refrigerator; (h) desk; and (i) other facilities. This list includes a disclaimer that reads: ‘Application for entry visa will normally not be approved if the essential facilities from item a) to f) are not provided free’ (Hong Kong SAR Immigration Department, 2016, p. 2). Quantative research that shows the number of employers ticking ‘yes’ to all these requirements cannot be found; however, my interviews with the workers (some have shown me a copy of their original contract) show that there is a lack of congruence between what employers state on paper and the living conditions of the migrant domestic workers. MA, for example, used to share a bedroom with two children, which eventually turned into sharing with one; there was barely enough space for storage of her belongings and she was also not provided with a wardrobe of her own. She shared part of the small wardrobe with the children and eventually she was given some storage containers that fitted under her bed when they installed a bunkbed. Technically, MA’s employers had not fulfilled the criteria in the list of requirements and the disclaimer. As the schedule does not define what is acceptable as a wardrobe or a bed or give examples of the variations of such features, they can be interpreted and skewed to the convenience of the employers. More importantly, like the criteria for a separate space and its listed variations, the facilities were set out as options that may be negotiated or not provided by the employers at their discretion. The items on the list are everyday essentials that should not be optional but mandatory. The disclaimer noting that the visa will normally not be approved if selected items were not provided implies the possibility that the visa may still be approved. The document should clearly define the mandatory essentials of everyday, ensuring the employers are providing a healthy, safe and supportive domestic environment for the migrant domestic worker to work and reside in. However, 82 Spatial Agency and Occupation the lack of specific mandates in the schedule reflects sympathy and leniency towards the employers’ spatial and resource limitations, as if there is a silent understanding that the employers should save as much space as possible or that the worker should take up as little space as possible in their home. It makes clear that prioritising such limitations above the quality of living of the workers in the homes of their employers is a result of treating labour as a commodity, and the workers could remain invisible in the space for as long as the work is visibly completed. The live-in policy and the clauses for accommodation are not created to protect the workers, rather they demonstrate a treatment of the workers as a bi-product of the labour and not as people who are entitled to decent living conditions. The live-in requirement is a means to have them work as efficiently as possible, maximising the cost effectiveness. The impact this has on the workers is their continuous sense of spacelessness and invisibility in the home that is also their workplace. Outside of their sleeping hours, KL, FH and MA’s sleeping arrangements and personal belongings were in some ways stored away and out of sight in their employers’ homes. Ultimately, they had no space to have as their own apart from their bed space in the hours when they were sleeping. Outside of their sleeping hours, that space may be tucked, folded or stored away and placed out of sight. They had no legitimate space of their own inside the homes that they lived in for many years. Their privacy was limited to time spent in the bathroom and temporarily contained. Conceivably, they were spatially ‘invisible’ for the majority of their work and living. For six days each week, KL, FH, MA and many migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong become visible only in the acts of continuous domestic duties. They are seen when picking up children from school, waiting in line in the supermarket, walking dogs, supporting the elderly and such like. Their occupancy at home remains transitory. From the outset, the lenient provisions give more power to the employers to limit the workers’ space in their home. But this is not a classic case of employer-employee struggle as described by Karl Marx in ‘the working day’ (Owusu-Ansah, Ohemeng-Mensah, Talinbe, and ObengOdoom, 2018) for two reasons. First, the employer is also a landlord. Thus, the power of landlords is dramatically increased, as is the power of employers, as research in other contexts (Obeng-Odoom, 2021) demonstrates. Second, unlike the structuralist analysis of Marx, where the employers are the stronger class compared to the employees as they have more power to exert force and define the conditions of work, such as wages and duration of work (Marx, 1867/1990, pp. 162–165), these migrant domestic workers have one more power to exercise, which is what I have been calling spatial agency (Kwok, 2015; 2019). Thus, when this depletion of space perpetuates the invisibility and spacelessness of migrant domestic workers, which disempowers them and encourages a culture of docile and disciplined domestic workers, every Sunday, the impact of the live-in regulation manifests in public spaces where the workers engage in domestic activities Narratives of Oppression 83 such as eating together, resting and grooming in public, as if they were in private spaces of their own. The cross-contamination of the workplace and home is challenging for both the employers and the workers as spatial and professional boundaries dissolve. For the employers, sharing their homes with an employee for six days each week potentially exposes their personal relationships and behaviours that they otherwise would not share with their regular co-workers (International Organisation of Migration, 2020, p. 22). Conversely, the workers have little to no private space or sufficient time away from their place of work to recover from their continuous labour routine. Both the employers and employees operate within a complex environment where professional and personal boundaries constantly intermingle, dissolve, fluctuate and reform. Subordinate position in the home The lack of spatial separation between the workplace and home facilitates disciplinary practices, where the employer asserts discipline over the workers and places them in a subordinate position. At times, they are required to communicate to their employers in a manner that reflects obedience, and to speak only in English or Cantonese. Many families prefer the workers to speak English in the home, especially to the children. There is often a bias towards Filipino workers for their English proficiency, therefore they are preferred in taking care of children. However, where the employers’ English skills are not proficient, they may specify they want a worker who can speak Cantonese. In these circumstances, Indonesian workers may be preferred as there is a perception of their greater proficiency in adapting to Cantonese. Some workers learn Cantonese in training agencies in their home country or through intensive courses provided by agencies in Hong Kong. The use of both Cantonese and English are common in many households with migrant workers. Employers also impose various forms of discipline over the workers including enforcing house rules, applying time-based tasks or Nicole Constable’s so-called ‘budgeting’ time, specifying the workers’ physical appearances and controlling the food they consume. These strategies are echoed in Constable’s Maid to Order in Hong Kong (2007), where she examines the dialectic relationship between discipline and resistance in the lives of Filipino migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. Similar narratives have emerged from my interviews, including the strategy where employers coerce the workers to do extra work by manipulating them to believe they are an equal member of the employers’ family. Constable calls this tactic ‘part of the family’ where employers give the workers a false sense that they are equally respected as a regular member of the family, and therefore may lead them to assist the family outside of contractual agreements, work extra days or receive less pay (Constable, 2007, pp. 112–115). The coercive nature of this method places the migrant domestic 84 Spatial Agency and Occupation workers in a vulnerable position as relationships with different family members can be used against them as reason for personal conflict. Throughout the decade that I have been involved in this research and speaking with migrant domestic workers, the forms of control exerted over the workers by their employers have changed and evolved (Kwok, 2015; 2019). From actively pressuring or even asserting control over the workers’ appearance, the food they consume, their social behaviours and so on, to subtle comments and more ‘playful’ cajoling, there have been more instances around discipline through technology, for example, applying time limitations around ‘screen time’, limiting access to the home wireless internet network, providing them with a separate phone that negates access to social media accounts or personal communication during work hours, and having surveillance cameras in the apartment that are connected to the employers’ phones, among other things. The more traditional forms of discipline are still prevalent but have lessened, such as control over the workers’ attire, the food they eat (separate from the food they prepare for the family), setting house rules and curfews, budgeting of time and coercion through being called as part of the family. However, as Hong Kong society has slowly progressed regarding gender rights and attitudes towards women, the more traditional forms of discipline over the workers have loosened, and instead many have become more passive remarks or unwelcomed comments rather than enforcement. These remarks are condescending and disempowering as the workers are being seen as vulnerable or gullible people, rather than adult women who have capacity to manage households while being breadwinners for their families back home. Although attitudes have changed, workers have had a long practice of selfdisciplining and remaining subservient at the risk of losing their employment, their accommodation and right to be in the city-state. All forms of control, whether exerted by employers or exercised by the workers themselves, are exacerbated by the cross-contamination of home and the workplace and some only exist because there is no spatial separation for the workers and their employers. The global pandemic exaggerated the measures for control even more when everyone spent more time at home and there was a growing anxiety around contracting the virus and infecting the household. All forms of control reflect degrees of distrust from the employers, which come from the insecurity of living with a stranger in the home, and prejudices around race, level of education and gender amplify the distrust and disconnection. The next section will use stories collected through interviews to illustrate the forms of discipline experienced by the workers, and the impact these have had in placing them in a subordinate position in the home, and effectively, their marginalised position in Hong Kong. Narratives of Oppression 85 ‘Is that what you are wearing today?’: Controlling physical appearances The physical appearance of a migrant domestic worker can be used to represent the employer’s power and the family’s social status (Constable, 1997). When the workers first began to operate in Hong Kong in the 70s, many employers required them to wear a uniform, especially when guests were visiting the home. At the time, some wore a maid’s uniform, typically a short-sleeved, kneelength loose-fitting dress in light blue, pink or grey, sometimes with an apron attached. When these uniforms were common, they were sold in many places in Hong Kong, including in the shops in World Wide Plaza in Central, where many Filipino workers gathered every Sunday. The visual identity of the uniform was phased out from the early 1990s onwards. Today in Hong Kong, the workers do not have a designated uniform. Their work attire is usually casual everyday clothing, and some employers make requirements for what they deem appropriate. However, on the websites of recruitment agencies, candidates are still pictured wearing a maid’s uniform similar to the one described above that was worn in the 70s. This outdated image of the maid reminds employers of a particular kind of servitude they may expect from migrant workers that is unrealistic and outdated. The custom of the domestic worker’s uniform in Hong Kong shares similarities with the traditional appearance of Chinese servants; amah and muijai. The typical amah was dressed in a black and white traditional Chinese worker’s suit with their long hair braided back, which was a cultural symbol of their spinsterhood. The muijai, who were usually much younger girls or women, were dressed in a similar worker’s suit in a youthful, floral pattern. These uniforms clearly signified them as domestic servants and the families with servants were traditionally of high socio-economic status (Rollins, 1985, p. 129; Romero, 1992, p. 112). Enforcing uniforms on domestic workers had been a long-standing tradition and a form of body discipline (Constable, 2007, p. 102). Today, migrant workers in Hong Kong no longer wear uniforms, yet in the standardised photographs of workers on the websites of all employment agencies, workers are shown wearing uniforms, often with aprons, with similar haircuts, postures and courteous smiles. Olivia Killias notes that such standardised portraits ‘underline the focus on the labouring body and contribute to the idea that choosing a domestic worker is a matter of physical measurements…, which suggests domestic workers are all the same, thus easily repleaceable’ (Killias, 2018, p. 9). I assert that although the workers do not wear uniforms in the homes, their clothing and appearance remain under the scrutiny of their employers as a form of discipline and control. This entitlement of having control over the appearance of the workers has been enhanced by the popular misrepresentation among Hong Kong citizens 86 Spatial Agency and Occupation that they pose a sexual or moral threat to the families because they have not come from a lineage of obedient, chaste women who dedicated their entire lives to the families they work for. They can also be misunderstood as being selfish mothers and wives who have willingly abandoned their families to earn higher wages in Hong Kong than in the Philippines (So, 2015). In reality, this is a prejudiced misconception that is untrue. Based on my interviews with migrant workers, and the research of Nicole Constable (1996; 1997; 1999; 2007), Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (2001; 2005a; 2008a) and Ligaya Lindio-McGovern (2011; 2013) and the works of many other scholars, the main reason these women participate in domestic labour abroad is to support their families back home, whether in providing for education, for a family home or both. They are dedicated mothers, wives and daughters whose decision to migrate is made under difficult circumstances where sacrificing time with the family is necessary in order to financially support the family. The prejudiced misconception impacts the way the workers are treated by their employers. In 2019, I spoke to PY over the phone. I have known her since 2015 and at the time of the interview she had been working for the same employers for seven years. On her days off work, PY likes to wear makeup, leaving her hair long and dressing in fashionable clothing. She can only dress this way on her days off because her female employer has prevented her from doing so at work and has given her the impression that wearing fashionable clothes is not aligned with being a good worker (Personal communication, 8 February 2015). During her first couple of years of working for this employer, PY often received comments on her clothing on Sundays before she left home, usually a rhetorical question of ‘Are you really wearing that today?’ This line of questioning would be followed by the employer’s opinion about suitable clothing for her body type or skin tone and how she may not be dressed appropriately for a woman of her age who was a mother. PY told me the comments eventually stopped, but she became much more aware of what her employer might think of her and would dress more conservatively so as to not attract such comments (Personal communication, 17November 2019). Few of the migrant workers interviewed had the freedom to wear their work attire without comments or questions in the first few months or year of their work with a new employer. Many had restrictions imposed on them by their female employers specifying conservative clothing to be worn in the home, in the form of high neckline tops that cover the chest, sleeves that cover the shoulders even in hot weather, loose clothing that does not show contours of the body and no dresses or skirts above the knees. Some workers commented that they have observed their female employers becoming nervous around young, attractive workers. PY recalls occasional unpleasant comments made towards her about her clothing choice on Sundays by her female employer, directly alleging her image was too sexualised: Narratives of Oppression 87 I was wearing a dress and some boots, she says I’m looking too sexy. She tells me that Hong Kong people look at us [Filipino workers] and think we are not good women when we dress like that! (Personal communication, 8 February 2015, exclamation in original) Similar comments were made by other migrant workers I interviewed over the years. Some recalled accusations of being inefficient in their tasks when they spent time on their appearance, even on their day off work. The comments received by PY from her employers, and other employers’ various comments about the workers appearing sexualised, give legitimacy to the imposition of bodily discipline. The misrepresentation of the workers as a sexual threat is further skewed by their representation in mainstream Hong Kong media, as noted by Constable, ‘where Filipino migrant domestic workers are often criticised by employers in private conversations and in the media – for their independence, immorality, impertinence, and lack of commitment and dedication to the families for whom they work’ (Constable, 1996, p. 458). Over the years, the perception of the sexualised worker has persisted in the mainstream media, as they are often portrayed as devious and sexualised women who want to cause harm to the employers in Cantonese television dramas. These narratives have an impact on the real lives of workers, as these false sentiments may be treated as real in public. The website of a Hong Kong-based migrant domestic worker employment agency, under the section of notes and tips for potential employers upon the application for workers, stated in English: Both the husband and the wife shall jointly select the Helper. A beautiful or young good-stature helper is more attractive for the husband, and may cause an affection dispute. (Peony Employment Agency Ltd, 2023) The Chinese language version uses a much more problematic expression, as it states ‘that maids who are beautiful or in good shape can easily seduce the husbands’ (Ibid.). The suggestion of the physical appearance of the worker as a possible cause of a couple’s dispute is factually unsubstantiated and ethically irresponsible. Moreover, the suggestion of the possibility of the physical appearance of the female worker seducing the male employer, and causing a breakdown of marriage, is sexist. Public statements like this continue to misrepresent migrant workers and amplify gender and racial prejudices that already exist, and give a false reason for employers to justify their use of control over the way the workers dress, appear, speak and behave. Additionally, they reflect a dichotomous identity that Hong Kong employers may place on the workers from the outset, as sexualised strangers with ill intentions. In 2022, I spoke to BS, who spoke to me about various experiences with her female employers controlling her appearance. When we first met in 2015, her 88 Spatial Agency and Occupation then-employer coerced her to go to a hair salon to get her long hair cut short, claiming it was better for work because her hair will not get in the way of cooking (Personal communication, 1 February 2015). She was twenty-seven years old at the time and was on her first contract in Hong Kong, so she was scared to object to her employers’ wishes. Later, this employer began to buy clothes for her to wear as her daily uniform. She spoke to her family and some friends about the progressively unprofessional demands, and eventually with the help from Mission for Migrant Workers, she was able to find another employer right after the twoyear contract ended. Her next employer told her not to wear any jewellery, apply nail polish or wear makeup except on her day off work. She was not bothered by this request but would be questioned by her employer on whether she was wearing makeup or not: She asked me why I look nice to go to the shops. I say I am not doing anything different. She would walk up very close to me and look at my face to see if I have make up on. When I dress nice to go out on Sunday, she says I should not look too nice, because I will attract the wrong guys. Maybe because I am not married, she is scared I will have a boyfriend. She asks me why I don’t have a husband back home. I don’t know what she wanted. (Personal communication, 1 February 2022) Some employers have a preconceived idea that on the workers’ day off work, they might engage in other jobs, particularly in sex work. This is part of the misconception that some workers are overly sexual and would engage in illegal, or what the employers deem morally questionable, activities. BS speculated that her employers were controlling of how she looked because they were scared she would find a boyfriend, or fall pregnant. Legally, the employers are not allowed to terminate the contract if a migrant domestic worker falls pregnant and would have to provide her and the child with adequate care and time off. Putting restrictions or demands on the appearance of a migrant domestic worker is not an uncommon practice of exercising control. From specifying items of clothing to banning cosmetics or long hair, the female body is under direct surveillance and discipline, with the aim of oppressing individuality and femininity. BS and PY have both been subject to bodily discipline motivated by the sexualised threat of the female body. In contrast to PY, BS experienced a more severe disciplinary imposition as the perceived threat – her femininity in the form of her long hair – was forcibly removed. Stripping away the workers’ agency over their own physical appearance and hiding particular physical manifestations of femininity, disciplinary practices shape the workers to become homogenous bodies that only exist as obedient and unthreatening subjects of domestic labour. Narratives of Oppression 95 to the employers’ spatial or economic limitations, then it will continuously make sub-par treatment of the workers inevitable and acceptable. On a Sunday afternoon in 2022, as BS was talking to me in between mouthfuls of food eaten with a gloved hand, she gestured to her group of friends next to us, who were dancing and laughing: At least we can be who we want to be once a week. We can talk about who we are not just as workers, just be us like we are back home. When we are at work, sometimes we are just being workers, not really us, you know what I mean!? (Personal communication, 15 May 2022, exclamation in original) In the next chapter, the workers emerge from the domestic interior into public spaces on their day off work, where their agency and resistance are enacted and witnessed in full force. Notes 1. Muijai is defined as a young girl, sometimes as young as 10 years old, who was transferred from her biological family to another family with the intention that she be used as a domestic servant without a regular wage and not at liberty to leave the employer’s family on her own free will or her parents’ will (Constable, 2007; Watson, 1991). 2. They could not be wives as they were deemed as illegitimate and unsophisticated (Constable, 2007, p. 50). 3. They can never become a permanent resident on their own accord, unless they enter into a marriage with someone who has permanent residency and remain in Hong Kong on a dependent visa and apply for permanent residency after living in Hong Kong for more than seven years continuously under that visa. 4. According to Constable, the term amah is not often used when speaking Chinese but has been used by Chinese who speak English and by English speakers in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. The exact meaning and origin of the term has been debated by Chinese Singaporean and Malaysian academics Mimi Chan, Helen Kwok and Kenneth Gaw. See Chan and Kwok (1990, pp. 204–205) and Gaw (1991, pp. 87–89). 5. In this excerpt of the English version of the contract, the terms ‘helper’ and ‘servant’ were used in the same sentence to refer to the Foreign Domestic Helper. The ambiguity in terminology continues to reflect the perception of the worker as both a domestic helper and a family servant. 6. To give an example of meal prices in Hong Kong, as of 2023, the average cost for a meal at McDonalds is HK$45. CHAPTER 3 Agency and Resistance The challenging conditions of migrant domestic workers raise the following questions: Are these workers mere victims or do they exercise some agency? If so, how, and to what extent could such agency be liberating? Could the response of migrants make transparent any policy lessons for the labour-sending and receiving nations? This chapter will answer these questions by exploring the ways in which the workers resist the continuous socio-spatial oppression endured during their work week by occupying and transforming public space for their own needs on their day off work. In so doing, they create community through their gatherings, thus performing their identity and exercising the freedoms they regularly are deprived of in a unique temporary socio-spatial ecology. A long-standing debate between neoclassical economists and Marxist economists is the extent to which individual agency can help to address all social problems. The rational individual in the neoclassical model is entirely freed from structures and social bonds, while the classical Marxist models give limited room for individual autonomy (Charusheela, 2005). Emerging from the understanding of the intersectional oppressions through space, gender and labour that the workers experience, this chapter helps us to see that the reality among migrant workers is not as dichotomous. Responding to two of the four research questions in this book: 1) How does the workers’ occupation of public space reflect the problems they endure in the workplace that is also their home, specific to the labour and spatial conditions in Hong Kong?; and 2) What activities do the workers engage in, in public space and privately, that cultivate resilience and agency?, this chapter will look at how Filipino and Indonesian workers establish their community externally in public space on Sunday and investigate how they express social and spatial agency in and through the makeshift spaces, along with how they gather and how they engage in place-making in public and private spaces. The chapter will analyse and summarise how the various methods, activities and relationships are significant in facilitating agency and demonstrate the full spectrum of resourcefulness and agency of the workers. Existing migration scholars and political economists have not discussed their resistance through the informal community that they have repeatedly established on a weekly basis and its continuous significance. Their political protests or small acts of resistance have been documented, but thorough discussions of their use of public spaces as sites of resistance and agency remain thin. Further, this 3. Agency and Resistance Agency and Resistance 97 chapter will unpack the complexity within the kind of resistance and resourcefulness the workers engage in that has materialised as a socio-spatial phenomenon. This chapter argues that this unique phenomenon contains important ways of self-actualisation and performance of identity and dignity. It will begin with Understanding public space in Hong Kong to provide context for the unique urban spatial formation of Hong Kong, which is rife with pockets of public space for creative uses and adaptation. It then explains and demonstrates in full detail the extent to which Filipino migrant domestic workers and Indonesian workers form their own spaces and places, thus creating a home away from home in different parts of Hong Kong on their day off work, in the next sections: Little Manila: Central Elevated Walkways, Chater Road and beyond, and Place and space making of Indonesian workers. Threading excerpts from interviews, the chapter moves to discuss The use of social media for knowledge exchange and building community, and Relationships and sexuality as expression of the workers as they exercise their freedoms beyond just being workers. On Sunday, on their day off work, migrant domestic workers demonstrate they are not mere victims of globalisation, but actors with agency and power. Understanding public space in Hong Kong With upwards of 7.34 million people and the eighth highest population density in the world, both public and private spaces are limited and crowded in Hong Kong. On a typical Sunday, crowds proliferate in all kinds of public spaces; shopping malls, parks, transport hubs, recreational venues, the streets and so on. In the Central Business District of Hong Kong Island, known as Central, prestigious shopping malls, major financial institutions, international hotels and globally recognised high-end fashion design houses all reside within a short distance of the photogenic Victoria Harbour. Sunday is the only day when the usual business attired workers cannot be easily spotted, and in their place are tourists, shoppers and migrant domestic workers. Every Sunday, the financial hub of Hong Kong transforms into ‘Little Manila’, where Filipino workers come to gather and occupy public spaces unlike any other group. They do not act like the common consumer as they cannot financially afford to engage in typical consumerist activities. Instead, they gather in pockets of public space that are ‘free’ and engage in activities they otherwise would have if they had their own private, domestic spaces. They use cheaply available materials and turn them into walls and floors to create spaces to eat, talk, rest, play card games, groom and so on. They also use street areas for packing and sending care packages back home, use flat open spaces for dance practices and many other activities they want to do. These uses and adaptation of public space are not just limited to Central or the resourcefulness of Filipino workers. All over Hong Kong, every Sunday, migrant domestic workers can be seen and heard, especially in areas that have the optimal 98 Spatial Agency and Occupation combination of ‘free’ public spaces and public amenities in proximity, both indoor and outdoor. These so-called free public spaces are elevated walkways, underpasses, wide footpaths, atriums, pedestrian tunnels, courtyards and open plazas that are within reach of public transport, bathrooms, free WIFIand so on. Essentially, public spaces that do not require money for admission and are not heavily patrolled by security guards are fertile grounds for migrant domestic workers to inhabit for the day. Public space in Hong Kong has a particular importance that differs from what pertains in other densely populated cities. As Anne Haila calls Hong Kong ‘Property State’ in relation to the role of land revenue made in the process of urban development (2000), the city’s housing market has been known for its unaffordability, exacerbated by rapid population growth, the influx of money from foreign investors, the lack of supply of residential land and properties, and substantial land being controlled by property tycoons (Yau & Cheung, 2021, pp. 428–429). According to the Planning Department of Hong Kong, only 7.1% of useable land in the city-state is attributed to residential use (Planning Department of Hong Kong, 2019). Within this percentage of land, providing affordable housing to the general public has not been prioritised and has been stunted by the monopoly of property developers working with the state, causing cause urban sprawl and stagnation of urban development (Yau & Cheung, 2021). This has adverse impacts on the long-term socioeconomic and environmental development in Hong Kong and in response to this, one of the common socio-spatial and cultural practices is for families to remain together in shared houses – that is, adults living at home with their parents, shared with children, the elderly and domestic workers. With limited private space in the home for every person of the household to comfortably go about their affairs, public space then becomes a space of reprieve for many people, where all kinds of intimacy and connections take place in public away from their families. It is not unusual to see many adult couples express physical, intimate affection in public and create other means to have their own private space in public, because they cannot afford to have their own home together (Lee, 2020). In other words, public space becomes an alternate private space, where people can act freely without the gaze or questions of family members under the same roof. The desire to have this kind of freedom and be able to be oneself is amplified for migrant domestic workers, especially when they have no spatial separation from their workplace for six days each week. Consumers who can afford to dine at restaurants and engage in public activities that require money do so, while migrant domestic workers create spaces for themselves and engage in all kinds of activities that cost much less. Migrant workers are not the only group of people who use public space creatively. Hong Kong has had a long history of adaptive use of public space, from street hawkers and vendors to graffiti artists, skateboarders, peaceful Agency and Resistance 99 demonstrators and so on. The density of Hong Kong’s urban spaces breeds many ‘liminal’, ‘in-between’ or ‘loose’ spaces with the potential for people to engage in activities they were not originally designed for. The term liminal was brought into prominence by Victor Turner to describe the ritual state of inbetween (Turner, 1967). Derived from the term threshold, it defines moments outside the conventions of everyday existence. In spatial terms these tend towards unprogrammed spaces that are open to diverse activities. Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens use the term ‘loose space’ to describe urban public spaces that afford appropriation, adaptation and some risk taking, and are the opposite to tightly programmed spaces (2007). They note that ‘People create loose space through their own actions. Many urban spaces possess physical and social possibilities for looseness, being open to appropriation, but it is people, through their own initiative, who fulfil these possibilities’ (2007, p. 35). This concept of loose space resonates with the public spaces that the workers appropriate for their own use as the legitimacy of loose space relies on several factors that are present. Firstly, people’s recognition of the potential of the space; secondly, the determination of the users to make use of what is available, and thirdly, the users are not passive users, rather they are actively using the public space to satisfy their own needs and desires. Indeed, the workers are not passive consumers of public space. In fact, they are resourceful and willing to transgress the boundaries of what may or may not be socially acceptable to take place, motivated by their desire to have a space of their own. As a counterpoint to specifically programmed spaces that have little room for appropriation, loose spaces are created from the pivotal point where initial intention unravels and other modes of inhabitation can be created (Franck & Stevens, 2007). The spaces that migrant domestic workers appropriate every Sunday are such spaces that have copious potential for ‘loosening’: underpasses, sidewalks, pedestrianised roads, elevated walkways and atriums. In some ways, these leftover or loose spaces that are temporarily appropriated and transformed by migrant workers can also be perceived as in-between, liminal spaces or non-places. Marc Auge proposes non-place as a product of super-modernity and states, ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (1995, pp. 77–78). Auge proposes a dichotomy of places and non-places, where the first is never completely erased and the second never completed (1995). This dichotomy has been derived from Michel de Certeau’s opposition of place and space, which sees space as an intersection of moving bodies and place as an assembly of elements co-existing in a certain order (De Certeau, 1984). In this framework, one may see the public spaces that the workers occupy as spaces created by their usage, and place, namely the elevated walkways, underpasses et cetera, as co-existing alongside the domestic spaces the workers create. Auge defines non-places as temporary spaces for passage, undefined and incomplete, yet dedicated to communication 100 Spatial Agency and Occupation and consumption (Auge, 1995). So too can the elevated walkways, underpasses and corporate atriums be described as spaces singularly dedicated to specific and linear movement rather than the particularities of program. The looseness and liminal nature of the public spaces in Hong Kong provides prime opportunities for augmentation. Beyond Hong Kong and the marginal groups of migrant workers, in cities around the world, temporary inhabitation of urban public spaces exists and represents the constant challenges against the privatised, regulated and increasingly diminishing freedoms of and within public space. The participants who oppose the passive ways of occupying public space, who subvert the conservative boundaries in unconventional methods, come from many socio-economic sectors of society and are not limited to the disenfranchised. They also bring with them different objectives and intentions. In Beijing, as the city is constantly densifying, retired yet active citizens search for accessible and free public space to practise taichi and yangge, a traditional Chinese dance that celebrates youth and freedom (Chen, 2010, pp. 21–35). They appropriate flat, long unused public spaces such as underpasses and plaza forecourts and transform them into public dancefloors. In New York City, citizens claimed Zuccotti Park as the protest headquarters of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 (Shiffman et al., 2012). This triggered a national and global movement of protests that are ongoing and prevalent throughout the world. In Chung Shan, Taiwan, Filipino migrant workers pluralise the public spaces in the city centre on their day of rest as their community hub, despite some locals’ rejection of their legitimacy to occupy the public spaces in the city (Wu, 2010, pp. 135–146). These instances are not isolated events or limited to geographical location, rather they are part of a global phenomenon of socio-spatial contestation that the migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong are also part of. However, the main difference between other examples of public spatial contestations and the spatial phenomenon of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong is the specific socio-spatial inequality they experience in their place of work, which has cultivated their agency to resist. This motivates them to continuously, on a weekly basis, exert their right to public space and reclaim their autonomy in and through space. Little Manila: Central Elevated Walkways, Chater Road andbeyond Every Sunday, as Filipino migrant domestic workers gather in Central, parts of the suburb transform into Little Manila. Groups gather according to the Filipino provinces they come from and return to occupy the same area every week.1 Each area of Central adopts a different function according to the spatial infrastructure, proximity to amenities and existing services. Very early in the morning, while the rest of the business district remains unstirred, in World Wide House, a plaza that Agency and Resistance 101 sits two levels above the underground Central transport station, Filipino women bustle about, socialising with the Filipino retailers and purchasing homemade food to share with their friends for the day. Many of them wait for their friends at the intersection of World Wide House and the Central Elevated Walkway before moving to their weekly gathering areas on other parts of the walkway or the surrounding public spaces in Central. On Chater Road, a couple of enterprising Hong Kong locals can be seen pulling a trolley of flattened cardboard boxes, delivering them to groups, who will occupy those spaces and use the cardboard pieces to construct temporary home-bases by demarcating public spaces for the day. Located between luxury shopping malls, this road is pedestrianised on Sundays, providing open spaces for choreographed dancing, celebrations and in the past, rallies that are specific to incidents of violation or injustices experienced by the workers. On Connaught Road Central, some of the Filipino women use fresh cardboard boxes to pack goods and gifts to make up care packages to send back to their loved ones in the Philippines. A couple of freight trucks are usually parked in the loading zone of Connaught Road Central, unloading more flatpacked boxes onto the footpath. There are three Catholic churches that Filipino migrant workers frequent in Central including St John’s Cathedral, which houses the Mission for Migrant Workers and the Bethune House Migrant Women’s Refuge. As Sunday ensues, these spaces are part of an active scene as pedestrians negotiate various public spaces with the workers. The spatial order and regular use of these spaces overlap with the construction and infiltration of Little Manila, producing a temporary but repeated socio-spatial system of layered spaces – an ethnic enclave, a site of contention and an urban domestic interior. This has consistently occurred throughout the last few decades in Hong Kong as the number of workers has increased. No matter the weather, even throughout distancing restrictions during the height of the global pandemic, Little Manila was present loudly and clearly. Little Manila has often been referred to by various scholars as a ‘well-known spectacle’ and a ‘carnivalesque gathering’ (Hou, 2012, p. 89; Tam, 2016, p. 119). Throughout my time spent in these spaces, I observed the methods by which the workers appropriate and transform unoccupied or seemingly ordinary public spaces into semi-public private spaces that facilitate their socio-spatial expression and autonomy. It became apparent that these acts of temporary transformation are not simply a repeated ethnic spectacle, rather, they are deliberate and expressive acts of freedom. This freedom is one that resists the spacelessness and invisibility the workers endure for six days each week in their workplace. Many workers also affectionately refer to Central as Little Manila, as it is their home away from home. Beyond the assumption of an ethnic spectacle, Little Manila can perhaps be viewed as a predictable site of contention where the Filipino women express 102 Spatial Agency and Occupation themselves outside of their domestic worker status. As such it can be viewed as a site of resistance where the workers disrupt the district’s established public space order. The interviews and conversations I had on site revealed a common perception held by Hong Kong locals that the weekly gatherings are a disruptive event on the city. In the past, many locals voiced concerns about a lack of cleanliness in public spaces the workers gather in, and fears that their appearance might tarnish the prestigious reputation of the financial district. Local media outlets have also made public accusations that the workers are a disorderly crowd of unruly foreigners, with headlines such as ‘Congestion eyesore for tourists’ (South China Morning Post, 1998, p. 20) and ‘Must clean up Central’ (South China Morning Post, 1998, p. 20). Such comments and discussions reflect a degree of prejudice and socio-cultural tensions that underlie the weekly event, making Little Manila a site of contention (Law, 2001; 2002). Although headlines like those rarely appear anymore in 2023, opinions of this nature can still be heard in casual conversations, and the sentiment of certain parts of Central being ‘taken over’ is still commonly shared by some locals. Experiencing Little Manila from within, I came to understand that the workers’ reclamation of space creates the capacity to be themselves. It is more than a contested site; it functions as a temporary domesticated home that cultivates solidarity, resistance and resilience for the workers. The conception of home constantly evolves across new social and cultural settings, particularly for migrants. Home can be an expression of identity, of personalities and the bedrock of cultural integrity and citizenship (Ralph & Staeheli, 2011). For six days each week, the migrant workers’ so-called home does not uphold those values. It is not a place where they can express themselves, rather it is a place of employment under Hong Kong’s history of domestic servitude, where legalised methods of discipline and control sanction the erosion of the workers’ physical and personal space, and deprive them of their social and cultural freedoms. They physically and conceptually have no room to be themselves within the domestic interiors of their workplace and are therefore denied the fundamental value and meaning of home. Home becomes an abstract concept realised on Sunday. Their continuously restricted freedom, deprived personalities and cultural integrity, although they live and work in a domestic space, are realised outside the domestic interior in full vigour. To describe and analyse the makeup of their Sunday home, I focus on the specific spatial programs that occur within urban interior and exterior spaces. These spaces choreograph the spatial organisation of Little Manila and the analysis reveals a complex network of semi-public private spaces that produces a unique socio-spatial ecology of resistance and reclamation. World Wide House and Lane: food store and mass karaoke World Wide House is a mix-use commercial building located on Connaught Road Central. Situated within the first three levels of the building is a plaza and the Agency and Resistance 103 retailers are mostly Filipino vendors, providing Filipino food, newspapers, magazines, and remittance and telecommunication services. Every Sunday, Filipino women fill the ground level, aboveground entrances and staircases in and around the building. As World Wide House is situated directly above one of the underground exits of Central Mass Transit Railway station, the interstitial spaces act as a series of temporary waiting zones and meeting areas. Every Sunday, all pedestrians emerging from the station experience the bustling residency of Filipino workers. Next to World Wide House is World Wide Lane – a narrow pedestrian laneway. It acts as an extension to the meeting areas of World Wide House and contains a popular Filipino fast food store, Jollibee, with queues of locals and Filipinos that stretch out onto the footpath. Prior to the height of the pandemic, on the corner of the lane, a Filipino telecommunication shop held weekly karaoke competitions. Usually hosted by an enthusiastic Filipino man who addressed the crowd in Tagalog and English, this weekly event attracted a sizeable audience of migrant workers, pedestrians and tourists alike. The audience would gather in the small space at the front of the store, and infiltrate the limited spaces under the atrium of World Wide House and the adjacent pedestrian footpath. This space is shared with another underground entrance to the Central Mass Transit Railway station. In 2015, I witnessed an incident there where a member of staff from the railway station was using a loudspeaker to ask the audience of the karaoke competition to move away from the area so as to not hinder pedestrian access to the station. He repeated his message in English and Cantonese several times, however most people paid little attention to the announcement and the event carried on. I asked a Filipino worker near me what she thought might happen if the guard persisted. She replied, It doesn’t matter. They’re not going to do much. It’s just karaoke and we are having fun. Today is Sunday and we can find another place. But this is our place too, you know? (Personal communication, 1 February 2015) This scenario demonstrated how the workers have the capacity to activate public space for their own use and to strategically refuse to comply with discipline outside of their place of work, without using aggressive tactics of disobedience. Since the government implemented distancing rules in public gatherings between the second half of 2020 through to most of 2022, the shop no longer hosts these events. Instead, many workers now have sets of portable karaoke speakers and microphones, which are widely seen and heard throughout Little Manila. World Wide Lane connects to Connaught Road Central, which facilitates another important function. Connaught Road Central: care package postal zone Every Sunday, approximately 30 metres of this arterial road is removed from traffic as a loading zone for ‘care packages’ – Balikbayan – to be sent directly 104 Spatial Agency and Occupation to the Philippines. Throughout the day, the surrounding pedestrian footpath is constantly occupied by groups of workers packing large parcels. The parcels are approximately 800 mm in height and 700 mm in width and length. They are filled with personal hygiene products such as surgical facemasks, toothpaste, shampoo, washing powder and sometimes clothing and toys. Some workers include items given by their employers, like used clothing, that are no longer wanted but are still in good condition, and could be used for reselling or personal consumption. Sending packages back home to their families to help ease their expenses is a common activity among workers. Each parcel costs between HK$800 to $1,000 for door-to-door delivery from Hong Kong to the Philippines, and delivery takes up to two weeks or more. Many workers I interviewed use part of the remainder of their wages after remittance to purchase items for family and friends back in their hometown. Those who have their own bedroom will accumulate items in their own room until there are enough items to fill a large parcel. Those who do not have their own room or space to hold items will make purchases on the same day as sending the boxes. Many workers can be seen wheeling around suitcases and large nylon bags in and out of this makeshift postal zone and some have friends attend to half-filled boxes while they move about to do more purchases. The purchasing, packing and labelling continue all Sundays. Pedestrians witness this packing process and negotiate their way through the footpaths of this small junction of Connaught Road Central that has become an informal Filipino postal exchange. Throughout the height of the pandemic, the delivery time for these packages was delayed, however it did not stop the workers from sending these care packages – rather, due to the inability to fly home for those two years,the packages became an important way to continually show care and love for their families. These care packages are also a small gesture that is part of the larger process of the economics of return in migration labour (Obeng-Odoom, 2022; Killias, 2018). For many workers, whether they are from the Philippines or Indonesia, the act of remitting their wages is tied to the expectation of returning home one day, and every bit of financial resource (whether in material goods or cash) symbolises this commitment and ultimate return home. For many years, Olivia Killias documented the migration journey of Indonesian migrant domestic workers who migrate from rural villages to urban areas in Indonesia and Malaysia (2018). In Follow the Maid, Killias discovered that the remittances of the workers being used for the purpose of building a house was particularly important, as it ‘stood as material proof of a migrant’s plans to return – the presence of the house compensated for the physical absence of the migrant herself, and as such, it was invested with affective engagements’ (Killias, 2018, p. 183). Although there are cultural differences and different expectations of the use of remittances for Indonesian and Filipino workers, the economics of return, in various forms, is part of the individual and collective network of ties that keep the workers working abroad. Agency and Resistance 111 Figure 3.6 and 3.7 The two photographs show the activities created by Angelique Santos as part of The Essence of Sundays, where one event was a talent competition and the other was a ritualistic breaking of mirrors that had the workers’ writing of their personal negative experiences in their work. (Photographs by Angelique Santos). 112 Spatial Agency and Occupation Outside City Hall, community art projects and cooking events created by local artists and migrant workers also take place. Between the months of March to May 2023, Angelique Santos, a Hong Kong-based university student with Filipino heritage initiated an art project called ‘The Essence of Sundays’ that generated seven Happenings on seven Sundays. The project was intended for public participation, particularly from migrant workers. The participants were encouraged to collaborate and creatively express themselves through prompts such as dance competitions, karaoke, food sharing, sharing stories of being migrant workers, and breaking of props that symbolised social stigma. The intention of the project was to spread the message of care, compassion and empowerment while celebrating the migrant workers’ contribution to Hong Kong society. City Hall is a well-known cultural space in Hong Kong that hosts all kinds of events requiring paid admission. Santos’s use of the free space at the forecourt was a clever way to situate the project and gain the attention of migrant workers nearby as well as residents and tourists. Little Manila’s informal economy: cardboard, grooming, gambling, thrift store, food services Migrant workers rely on cheap and readily available resources for the construction of their temporary spaces every Sunday. As it is difficult to store materials like disused cardboard in their employer’s home before Sunday, many workers instead purchase cardboard from a few enterprising Hong Kong locals in the area who collect and resell cardboard. It is a common sight throughout Hong Kong, where locals, ranging from the middle-aged to the elderly, collect cardboard from retailers and transport it around in push carts and trolleys. Many of these locals do not have a formal occupation and rely on collecting cardboard and other recyclable and reusable materials to resell and make a living. In Central, migrant workers purchase cardboard pieces from a few Hong Kong locals who deliver cardboard boxes to their designated areas every Sunday. These distributors have knowledge of each group’s regular spaces and how many pieces of cardboard they want. Each piece of cardboard was priced from HK$2 for many years before the pandemic. In 2021, the prices increased to HK$3 and even HK$5. The cardboard is delivered early in the morning, and the amount owed is collected throughout the day. The distributors return in the evening to pick up the cardboard pieces and sometimes they can be reused or are discarded. The cardboard boxes were temporarily significant as they transported commercial goods that are not affordable for the workers themselves. Once they were no longer required, they were discarded from Hong Kong’s formal economy and became ‘recommoditised’. Every Sunday, these discarded elements are reincarnated as an affordable ‘commodity’ to engender privacy and private space for one of the lowest socio-economic groups of Hong Kong. This weekly informal Agency and Resistance 113 economy, motivated by the workers’ demand for cardboard as temporary walls and floors, symbolises an interesting reversal of supply and demand between Hong Kong and the workers. Beyond the commoditisation of cardboard, the workers themselves have created a supply of goods and services in Little Manila on Sundays. The pedestrian tunnel between Chater Road and City Hall is informally known as ‘the Salon’ as grooming services such as manicures, Kilay (eyebrow shaping in Tagalog) and head and body massages are available. The costs for these services are much lower than that in formal retail spaces, with Kilay being priced at HK$20–40, while in any formal shop in Central they would cost upwards of fifteen times the price. Undoubtedly, the target customers are the workers themselves, so the prices are set according to the workers’ affordability. Some workers have learnt the skills from tutorials online, while others have had experiences or even formal training back home. SM, a Filipino worker who has been in Hong Kong for a decade, is a popular nail artist in Little Manila. She has a beautician qualification from the Philippines but had not practiced formally in Hong Kong. Her employer encouraged her to upskill herself and she would provide the service for her employer and her friends for a small fee. She is very happy to be able to continue this skill and passion of hers: I can’t do nails in Hong Kong because it’s illegal for me. But my boss likes what I can do and she pays me extra. She even helped me buy the equipment and things for cheap! On Sunday I come here and do it for my friends and whoever wants it. It’s good for me and good for them! I don’t charge them full-price! [she laughs] (Personal communication, 19 March 2023, exclamation in original) It is illegal for migrant domestic workers to do any kind of work, paid or unpaid, outside of their full-time contract with their employer. Some workers may manoeuvre around that law, with or without their employers’ knowledge. In SM’s case, her boss is very supportive of her having a hobby and a skill outside of domestic work. This is not a common experience for most workers. Other goods and service exchanges also happen on Sunday via playing card games with cash, selling homecooked foods that are rare to find in Hong Kong and swapping and selling items of second-hand clothing that are sometimes donated by employers or from shops that needed to discard stock at very low prices. Many workers use Sunday as a day for rest, while some also see the day as an opportunity to generate extra income for themselves. Sometimes, workers exchange items or services instead of money, such as home-made food for clothes, or one service for another. Exchanges like these are common occurrences and they are an integral part of an informal economy that can bring small joys and a sense of autonomy and community. More importantly, they forge social connections that are reminiscent of the activities the migrant worker might otherwise engage in within their own home, with friends and family. 114 Spatial Agency and Occupation Place and space making of Indonesian workers Although workers from Indonesia consist of half of the current number of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong (Hong Kong SAR Immigration Department, 2022b), a so-called ‘Little Jakarta’ is yet to be established like the well-oiled socio-spatial ecology of Little Manila. However, Victoria Park in Causeway Bay and Kowloon Park in Tsim Sha Tsui are both very popular places for Indonesian workers and the vastness of these public parks allows for a high number of workers to gather there throughout Sunday. Apart from the public spaces available in those parks, their proximity to the Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia, Bank Mandiri, the largest Indonesian bank headquarters in Hong Kong and the Kowloon Mosque and Islamic Centre is a good reason for the workers to repeatedly create makeshift communities in those areas. Causeway Bay is a popular shopping destination, with a wide range of shopping malls and arcades that are closely clustered. Different from Central, where there is a concentration of high-end international fashion houses, Causeway Bay attracts a wider range of locals shopping for daily essentials as well as the latest street fashion and gadgets. Spatially, it is more densely used than Central and the streets are tighter and shorter, and non-commercial public spaces are limited even without the influx of migrant workers on Sunday. This leaves leftover occupiable space available for the workers in clusters, separated by malls and unoccupiable streets in between groups, unlike in Little Manila where areas bleed into one another and different functions of spaces continue flowing with less separation. Tsim Sha Tsui, where the Mosque and Islamic Centre are located, is known for its diverse shops and service providers to South Asian and African communities in Hong Kong. Apart from the two popular areas, Indonesian workers also gather in many places all over Hong Kong, away from city centres. One of the reasons for this is that many Indonesian workers’ employers’ homes are not on Hong Kong Island, and the proximity to their friends and community motivate the distance they will travel. From my interviewees, around 75% of those who are Indonesian workers have Hong Kong Chinese employers who live in more suburban areas, away from the city centres in greater parts of Kowloon, New Territories and outer lying islands. It is a common practice that expatriate employers tend to hire Filipino workers more than Indonesian workers and that local Chinese employers do the opposite. One of the reasons for this is the stereotype of Indonesian workers as being more docile and less educated than Filipino workers; therefore they are deemed more obedient, which aligns with Chinese traditions and customs of domestic servitude (Sim, 2009, p. 9). The proficiency of languages of the worker is also a factor that attracts expatriate employers to hire Filipino workers due to their English proficiency, while Indonesian workers are known to be favoured for their quick grasp of Chinese Agency and Resistance 115 (both Cantonese and Mandarin) by employers who prefer to speak to them in Chinese at home, especially if the worker is hired to care for elderly family members (O’Connor, 2012, p. 49; Ibid.). Many Indonesian workers gather in Victoria Park in Causeway Bay. Around the park, there are Indonesian food stores, salons and freight trucks in nearby streets, where the workers also pack and send care packages in similar ways to the Filipino workers in Central. Victoria Park is a park with sports courts and green areas. It is opened to the public for various municipal functions, including for carnivals and mass demonstrations.3 Workers can be seen gathering inside the park, outside on the footpaths all around the block, as well as saturating the forecourts of shopping malls nearby, underpasses and even traffic islands. Beyond the opportune occupation of large disused traffic islands under highways, the most surprising and clever appropriation of public space is the temporary inhabitations of the domestic stages in the Swedish furniture showroom Ikea. The showroom is located underneath a large shopping mall adjacent to Victoria Park. Every Sunday, groups of Indonesian workers can be seen using the staged apartments as their own; relaxing on the lounges in the living rooms, gathering around the dining tables, and using the complimentary wireless internet to connect to family and friends. The showroom managers do not ask them to leave as the workers are legitimately using the showrooms as they are intended. Indonesian workers might not have an obvious socio-spatial ecology like Little Manila; however their presence is still very much seen and heard throughout many public spaces. The education level, religious background and cultural practices impact on the way the workers gather in public space as their habits, rituals and preferences for social connection differ. Since 2010, the largest number of Muslims in the territory have beenIndonesian, most of them femalemigrant domestic workers, accounting for over 120,000 of Hong Kong’s Muslim population (O’Connor, 2012). The workers’ Muslim faith influences the way they interact and appear in public. They dress visibly differently, often in a Hijab, Hijab Amira or a Khimar. Their dress also forms part of a more conservative way of being, meaning they are less frequently seen dancing or singing in public (although some still do) in the way that Filipino workers do in Central, dressed in contemporary fashion and dancing to pop songs. Indonesian workers who do not dress conservatively can be seen dancing to Korean pop songs, hip hop and other popular music and dance routines. Beyond socialising, eating and resting, some of the groups that gather in Victoria Park are also Islamic study circles. According to the Islamic Union of Hong Kong – the oldest Islamic charitable organisation in the territory – there has been a shortage ofIslamic teachers and many Indonesians turn to the internet and social media for religious guidance and general news on the Muslim world (Subchi et al., 2021). Sunday’s public 116 Spatial Agency and Occupation gathering can become a day where Indonesian workers preach their faith to recruit new members, which is also a way of practising religion and creating community away from home. The Mosque and the Islamic Centre help foster solidarity and community that are specific to the workers’ religion, as workers establish religious study groups to strengthen their faith, simultaneously providing an alternative support network in facing challenges while in HongKong (Ibid.). Apart from religious group gatherings, Sundayprovides an opportunity for the workers to develop new skills and share their knowledge and passion with peers in a friendly, welcoming environment. There are groups that create makeup, martial arts and sewing workshops. Traditional Indonesian dancing also occurs, which is another very popular and spiritual way for the workers to feel connected to their identity beyond being a migrant worker. On a warm Sunday afternoon in Victoria Park, workshops and dance performances (both traditional and contemporary) and competitions unfolded throughout the day. I spoke to a worker who had just finished a dance performance: Dancing gives me such a good feeling! It is a way for me to feel spiritually connected to my community and reminds me that I am human and can have fun! (Personal communication, 26 June 2022, exclamation in original) Figure 3.8 Indonesian workers gather in Victoria Park for traditional dance performances on Sunday. (Photograph by author). Agency and Resistance 117 Many workers form dance groups and participate in competitions and fashion shows, which become a way to express their culture and identity in a different way to other forms of socialising. They also provide room to develop gender knowledge, reconsiderations of their sexuality and intimacy (Lai, 2020). The use of social media for knowledge exchange and building community Social media and the use of digital communication tools are vital parts of the daily lives of migrant workers to communicate with their family back home and connect with their peers in Hong Kong for many purposes. It is well-documented that there exists a common practice of employers restricting workers’ phone usage during work hours, confiscating workers’ phones or even in some cases, not allowing them to have a mobile phone at all (Astagini & Sarwono, 2021; Killias, 2018; Yeoh et al., 2016). All of the workers I interviewed had a personal mobile phone and only some of them had experienced employers curtailing their usage during work hours. The reasons some employers restrict phone usage are often about not wanting the workers to watch videos during work, which might distract them from their tasks, as well as using too much bandwidth on the home wireless internet network (Personal communication, March 2022).4 During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, social media became a reprieve for many workers I encountered. Instagram, YouTube and WhatsApp are among the most frequently used applications – not just for communication, but for entertainment and information exchange. Istik Wates, an Indonesian domestic worker living in Hong Kong, has a YouTube channel (Wates, n.d.) that has over 650 videos created between 2017–2023. Her video content ranges from various parts of her daily life, from cooking to giving tips about where to buy particular foods or Indonesian goods, to information about vaccine regulations during the pandemic. Many of her videos contain live footage in public spaces; in shops, on the street greeting friends, doing outdoor leisure activities and so on. The channel has over 22,400 subscribers and one of her most watched videos is from 2021 titled ‘Mandatory!!! Swab test in Hong Kong before May 9// How to test for Covid in Hong Kong’ (original title in Bahasa Indonesia). In this video, she documented the experience of going to a community testing centre during the pandemic, with details of where to queue, how to prepare, what to bring and so on. It was common practice, and at times required by the government, to be regularly tested at an official centre throughout the pandemic in Hong Kong. This video was viewed over 2,700 times, attracted 498 likes and had 126 comments from Indonesian workers that expressed thanks to her for sharing details and insights. This video and her channel are a rich source of local knowledge for workers, and the shared appreciation can be seen by all the positive and celebratory 118 Spatial Agency and Occupation emojis that were used in the responses to this video and others. Examples of migrant domestic workers generating digital content from their daily lives are not uncommon, with some even transforming their lives, such as Farida Nurhan, an Indonesian domestic worker who became a food video blogger with more than 4.9 million followers on her YouTube channel (Nurhan, n.d.), and Xyza Cruz Bacani, who was a Filipino domestic worker in Hong Kong who shared photographs she took as a hobby on her Facebook page and was then spotted by professional photographers. She became a globally-recognised photographer featured by the New York Times, and attracted other media attention (Giles, 2022). These examples certainly become beacons of hope for workers who aspire to be artists, video bloggers or creative entrepreneurs, but they also reflect the power of social media as a way for constructing identities that differ from the daily mundanity as domestic workers. Nuria Astagini and Billy Sarwono assert that ‘social media has an important meaning for women domestic workers, because through social media they can construct and identify their ideal self apart from their profession’ (2021, p. 232). Furthermore, social media allows participants to construct a different reality in the online realm that gives them a feeling their position is shared and equal to other users who are not necessarily domestic workers (2021, p. 228). Pangyao (meaning ‘friends’ in Cantonese) is a social platform founded by Hong Kong-born Filipino Aileen Alonzo-Hayward and British expatriate Martin Turner. The platform is the first social platform in Hong Kong for migrant domestic workers that consists of a website, a Facebook community and a bimonthly print magazine, addressing all kinds of challenges of their labour, how to deal with authorities, as well as celebrating their diasporic roots via music events, stories, interviews and other special features (Cremer, 2023). The creation of this community through social media, although not created by a domestic worker but someone who is part of the Filipino diaspora in Hong Kong, has a positive impact on the workers’ community by raising public awareness of the experiences of the workers and their culture, and builds a sense of collegiality and solidarity with and for the workers. Many of my interviewees are active on social media platforms to experience this sense of solidarity and community, especially when they feel isolated from their friends and family. Throughout the pandemic, when social distancing measures prevented many workers from gathering in large groups on their day off work, social media became an important way to remain connected, as GS, an Indonesian worker, expresses: I like to watch videos of other workers doing things in Hong Kong, and sharing their thoughts and feelings sometimes. I don’t like to share too much myself, but to watch others have fun or know what’s happening makes me feel not alone. If someone was positive [referring to being infected with COVID-19], they also can share with us and not suffer by themselves. (Personal communication, 6 November 2022) Agency and Resistance 119 Apart from sharing updates on particularities of their daily lives, many workers also share their various hobbies such as artworks, kickboxing, cooking, sewing and poetry. Members of Guhit Kulay, an artist collective formed by migrant workers who taught themselves how to paint, draw and create artworks, often share their artworks on their social media accounts, drawing praise and attention from fellow workers and the public. Speaking to one of the founders of the group, Cristina Cayat, she expresses the importance of sharing her own artistic work so she can continue to develop herself, but also sharing to empower and inspire other workers to pursue their own hobbies and creative expressions: I want others to see they can do what I do, teach themselves how to draw, paint, sew and all that so we can all do things not just as workers cleaning houses. It is good for everyone to see so we can all do it together and support each other. I think this is very important. (Personal communication, 28 May 2023) There is little doubt that social media platforms and digital communication tools play an important role in many people’s lives, particularly during times of struggle such as the global pandemic of COVID-19. For migrant domestic workers, remaining connected to their family and friends back in their home country is fundamental, and to be able to build new ties and nurture community in Hong Kong is also fundamental to their wellbeing and self-expression. Relationships and sexuality as expression Many migrant domestic workers have children and husbands back in their home countries. However, there is also a considerable number of workers who are single and date while working in Hong Kong, sometimes in same-sex relationships. Francisca Yuenki Lai conducted research with the Indonesian migrant worker community in Hong Kong and examined the lived experiences and sexual ideologies that circulate the pop dance groups of Indonesian women workers (Ibid.). Lai discovered that there are many membership-based groups that Indonesian migrant workers are part of: dance, religion, wealth management, labour rights and so on. Senior members become leaders and organisers, who may provide moral, emotional, skills-based and sometimes even monetary support for junior members. Lai’s research focused on a pop dance group, Champion, and observed their family unit-like structure, where leaders and members use kin terms to address each other, which is common among the dance groups. A comparison can be made to the ballroom culture that originated in New York City in the 1970s, where African American and Latino drag queens organised their own pageants in opposition to racism and discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people. Ballroom houses were formed, where kin relations were also created in their own spaces. The workers in Hong Kong do not have their own physical space, so their kin relations are maintained by 120 Spatial Agency and Occupation their activities or kin labour, without relying on a fixed home or space (Lai, 2020, p. 48). These dance groups also are not just open to workers who might identify as LGBTQIA+, rather they are open to any Indonesian worker who wants to dance and be part of a community with shared values of kinship and prestasi, which is the manifestation of good citizenship in Indonesia (Boellstorff, 2004). Boellstorff asserts that prestasi fosters social connectivity and it can be any personal achievement that reflects positively on one’s community, which is a useful notion for explaining the prevalence of organising and taking part in competitions in the Indonesian community (Boellstorff, 2004; Lai, 2020, p. 43). Membership in the dance groups not only generates kinship and community for the workers, but also creativity, as the competitions require the groups to create their own dance steps and fashion style. These performances literally become a space for the workers to express themselves in entirely different ways to their daily routine, outward expressions and appearance as migrant domestic workers. Lai also observed that in the fashion shows and dance competitions, as all the participants are physiologically women, there are different divisions called tomboi and cewek, where the tomboi dress in men’s clothing with short hair, while the cewek dress in women’s clothing in more traditionally feminine styles (2020). I observed several dance competitions and fashion shows throughout my fieldwork and have found that everyone is cheered and supported equally and the atmosphere is very jovial and supportive. In the audience, there are many people who are dressed like tomboi and cewek, and sometimes they can be seen holding hands and showing physical affection in ways that signify romantic relationships. MB, an Indonesian worker who has been in Hong Kong as a domestic worker for eight years, is in a same-sex relationship with GS, who is also an Indonesian worker. They met at a dance competition in late 2019, sixmonths after GS arrived in Hong Kong. They became friends quickly but did not get to spend a lot of time together as in early 2020, the pandemic necessitated social distancing measures and GS’s employers were strict about the amount of time she spent outside of the home every Sunday. In 2019, GS was 26 years old and single, and had never left Indonesia prior to coming to work in Hong Kong. She worked for a local Chinese family in Fanling, a town in the New Territories. Her primary job was to take care of an elderly aunt, who required assistance for everyday activities. She shared a bedroom with her and had very little privacy in her work. When GS met MB in 2019, she had only been in a relationship once with a man in Indonesia, someone in her hometown with whom she went to high school. They were in a relationship for many years and intended to marry, but the man came from a poorer family and promised to marry her when he had enough money. Before she left for Hong Kong, her family decided she should go abroad and earn higher wages, so she may have potentially better marriage prospects. GS realised that she did not want to marry at all, and was relieved when her family suggested for her to work abroad: CHAPTER 4 Little Manila and Beyond Every Sunday, the majority of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong have their weekly day off work. From Central to Causeway Bay to Kowloon Park to further out into the New Territories, the workers can be heard and seen all over the city-state, engaging in whatever activities they wish to do without the daily social and spatial limitations of their working lives. Appropriating loose and transitory public spaces like elevated walkways, pedestrianised roads, tunnels and underpasses, the migrant workers demonstrate their desire to have their own domestic spaces in which to do as they would if they had their own home. It is in these spaces that community occurs, bonds are formed and solidarity is present. Further, they enact freedom and agency by their resourceful use and adaptation of public spaces, demonstrating that they are not simply a labour commodity, but a contingent of people who are resilient and powerful. So far, this book has analysed the agency and occupation of the workers through economic, historical, social and spatial approaches. While all of these are informative and necessary, it is important to be able to experience what occurs on a Sunday, because what is often missing in text-based analysis is the actual humanistic element that cannot be replaced. Historically, ethnography and its research practices have been informed by its long traditions of drawing on visual elements in the pioneering work of anthro pologists and sociologists, such as John Collier Jr and Pierre Bourdieu (Mannay, Fink & Lomax, 2019, p. 4). Clifford Geertz notes that ethnographic research often involves in-depth studies to engender data that enables thick descriptions of sociocultural phenomena (1973), ‘including the development of approaches that support immersion in the lifeworld of participants … for extended periods of time to enable the ethnographer to understand the social practices which frame and constitute the lives of those being studied’ (Mannay, Fink & Lomax, 2019, p. 5; Ibid.). Within the limitations of the book format, it is in this spirit of having immersed myself in the lifeworld of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong for the last decade that I believe it is vital to visualise the resistance analysed in the previous chapter and present the activities and spaces that have long been described and discussed in this book. Since the development of still and moving photography, many scholars have seen the potential of using these techniques and tools for social change (Marion& Scanlan, 2020). Journalists and documentarians have used photography to connect social justice to visual imagery in the universally recognised genre 4. Little Manila and Beyond 128 Spatial Agency and Occupation of photojournalism, as have filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, who pioneered documentary filmmaking with a wide range of camera techniques, as exemplified in Man with A Movie Camera (1929). While I am in no way claiming I have the photographic skills worthy of artistic relevance in the photographs used this chapter or in other chapters of this book, coming from my background as a spatial design researcher, I am pointing to the importance of visualising and spatialising the scenes in my research to contribute to the uniqueness of the book and to thefields of research this book straddles. With Hong Kong’s unique urban landscape formation in the background, the visualisations demonstrate the spatial agency of the workers in poignant ways, resonating with this notion: ‘Sometimes the city is sending a clear, straightforward message, sometimes an unobtrusive, subtle and silent one, with a hidden agenda to foster values and beliefs, knowledge and power’ (Suleimanova & Tivyaeva, 2023, p. 1). This chapter provides a visual narrative of the activities the workers engage in and the spaces they create. The narrative consists of some photographs from my fieldwork from various years between 2013–2023, and illustrations by five Filipino artists based in Hong Kong from the art collective Guhit Kulay in 2023. Anthropologists and ethnographers have long enrichened their research with visualisations, but many of the products can be exploitative and stereotypical (Marion & Scanlan, 2020). I would like to acknowledge that in the earlier years of this research, I took many photographs and sketches, yet for this book I would like to add drawings of what occurs on Sunday created by and seen through the eyes of the workers themselves. Guhit Kulay was established in Hong Kong in 2017 and many of its members are migrant domestic workers. Guhit Kulay means ‘to draw in colour’ and it is a platform built by migrant workers for fellow migrant workers to share their talents and support one another through their self-expression in visual arts. The illustrations featured in this chapter are created by Maria Christina Anire, Cristina Cayat, Lyn Lopez, Lorelito Eludo and Jonalyn Molina. Figure 4.1 On the Central Elevated Walkways, workers create robust cardboard structures to separate their space from the pedestrians’ foot traffic. As pictured here, the structure has walls that are reinforced with extra cardboard pieces against the balustrade for weather protection and comfort, and the handrails along the balustrade have been put to good use as coat and bag holders. There are even spare cardboard pieces on a trolley parked outside their space. With the shoes along the outside of the lowered cardboard entrance, this structure particularly resembles a ‘real’ private gathering space for the workers to have their own space. (Photograph by author). Little Manila and Beyond 129 Figure 4.2 It is very common to see workers gather in their spaces to play cards and sing pop songs from their portable karaoke sets. This scene was captured on the Admiralty footbridge and drawn by Maria Christina Anire. 130 Spatial Agency and Occupation Little Manila and Beyond 131 Figure 4.3 Card games of all kinds ensue throughout Sunday, in between conversations and sharing food. This scene was captured outside a bus terminal outside International Finance Centre shopping mall in Central and drawn by Jonalyn Molina. Figure 4.4 Workers create spaces in areas under the elevated walkways for protection from the weather. They are also less frequented by foot traffic, which offers a sense of ease without constant looks from passers-by. (Photograph by author). Figure 4.5 Migrant workers come together to celebrate each others’ birthdays with food, drinks and customised decorations and balloons. Sometimes after the feasts, workers can be seen relaxing into a nap in the comfort of their friends. This scene was captured on the Central Elevated Walkway near the Central piers and illustrated by Maria Christina Anire. 132 Spatial Agency and Occupation Little Manila and Beyond 133 Figure 4.6 On Chater Road, many workers find spaces away from the crowds to video call their loved ones, sing songs to them on karaoke sets and make crafts. This scene is illustrated by Cristina Cayat. Figure 4.7 Some groups of workers collect extra cardboard pieces for their friends, who may need more to build larger spaces. Throughout the day their friends will know who to go to for extra cardboard, and if they are running other errands and do not have the time to find some for themselves, they will always know who to turn to. (Photograph by author). 134 Spatial Agency and Occupation Figure 4.8 In Victoria Park, Indonesian workers like to use plastic mats that can be easily folded and stored and are also suitable for outdoor weather conditions. The workers here are eating Indonesian food purchased from Indonesian food stores nearby. This scene is illustrated by Lyn Lopez. Figure 4.9 Sometimes, plastic sheets and fabric mats are also used by workers, especially if they are sitting in undercover areas like some of the semi-enclosed elevated walkways in Central. They demarcate space in similar ways to cardboard pieces, albeit with less rigidity and structure. (Photograph by author). Little Manila and Beyond 135 136 Spatial Agency and Occupation Figure 4.10 Workers get a lot of joy from singing, especially when they sing with one another or compete against each other. This scene was captured outside the undercover area at Central bus terminal, and illustrated by Jonalyn Molina.