Lara's Singapore Blog

I’m no longer living in Singapore, but found that I had one last post buzzing in my head, so here is my meditation on domestic workers in Singapore.

What am I, the maid?

In the US this is a rhetorical question generally employed by people who wish to draw their family’s attention to the fact that they are doing a lot more housework – particularly picking up socks and towels – that should be done by everyone else as well. But in Singapore the question might well be posed by any live-in maid: What am I, the maid? Employee, family member, slave, thief, or spy?

Live-in maids are so inexpensive in Singapore that they are often cheaper to hire than a weekly cleaning service. Just think of how it must feel to live in someone else’s home, not as a renter or roommate, but as an employee. What rights would you have?

Most maids in Singapore come from other, poorer countries – generally Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia. Phillipine maids tend to speak more English and can more easily work in ex-pat homes, so they are more expensive. Indonesian maids were so exploited by Singaporeans that the Indonesian government demanded that they be paid an extra $150/month to deter the worst cheapskates (bringing their total pay up to a whopping $450/month). But in any case they are far from home and the protections that might be provided by friends and family – and even the protections they might claim from their own governments are tempered by the fact that the employer or the maid brokerage service keeps their passports.

It starts right away – the passports are locked away so that, if the maid turns out to be a thief, she can’t go home. Fair enough, sort of, since if you have someone else live in your house she necessarily knows where you keep all your valuables. She can meet up with some guy from her home land – say on the one Sunday afternoon off per month you are required to give her – and let him in to take your goods when you’re not home. So why trust this person you have in your house?

Face it – you HAVE to trust the people living in your house, or there’s no peace of mind. And you have to trust the person doing all the scut-work you don’t want to do – caring for your aged parents, caring for your infant children, cooking for you. But how can you trust someone you’ve hired after one interview, or because she’s cheap? Cover your ass – sequester her passport.

Or it could be for her own protection – that sweet-talking guy from her homeland can easily persuade her to run away with him, and then he can sell her into a brothel in Thailand, Vietnam, anywhere they go with their passports. At least if she stays in Singapore she has rights as a registered alien worker – assuming she has the nerve, knowledge, and language skills to assert them. She has the right to an annual trip home, paid for by her employer, likewise three or four annual medical check-ups. I believe she also has a right to have a cellphone – at least I have never met a maid without one – but even that is a prickly question. Does the maid have a right to privacy?

The husband of one of my colleagues checked through their maid’s cellphone records, and examined all the photos she had taken. She had sent someone a photo of herself in her underwear in the employer’s bathroom, which caused a huge kerfluffle – partly because she was showing a stranger the inside of her employers’ house, and partly because the employer often sees himself as responsible for the sexual purity of the maid.

Some employers sexually assault their maids – this happened often enough that maids below the age of 23 are no longer legally employed in SIngapore (I guess over 23 you’re no longer attractive). But MANY employers want to control all the social contacts their maids have, to ensure their own security. You can see how that works – if she has a boyfriend she can have him in the house while you’re away, and who wants that? – but on the other hand it’s tough on the maid, who may well want a social life.

Most maids have Sunday afternoons off – as I mentioned, they’re legally entitled to one afternoon off per month – and on that day they put on their best clothes and go to town. They congregate with others from their home countries and towns, have picnics in the parks, window shop, chat and snack. But this is also when they can make friends with the wrong kinds of people (wrong from the employers’ point of view), who may try to woo them away or worm into your house while you’re gone.

Chinese employers are notorious for overworking their maids. There are several cases a week where maids fall to their deaths from high-rises in the city – not because they were pushed, but because they were cleaning the outsides of windows, leaning precariously out to reach the corners, when already exhausted by all their other duties. Among maids, working for American or European employers is known to be the best option, in terms of workload.

It is illegal to beat a maid in Singapore, and the frequency with which maids are beaten shows in the fact that they had to pass a law to make it illegal. While I was there a police commissioner was found guilty of beating his maid, because (he claimed) she was stupid. He was jailed, and rightly so, but he was one of the few caught and brought to book.

Maids are trained by the brokerage agencies to please their employers by doing whatever they are told. Yet, of course, if you’re asking someone to run your household, watch your children, care for your elderly, you need someone who will use her best judgment. Being a maid militates against exercising judgment – any initiative in any direction is likely to offend the employer. So if the six-year-old demands a pencil from you so she can do her homework, you go get the kid a pencil. One of my friends found her children growing so lazy and demanding that she got rid of the maid – that way the kids at least had to fetch their own pencils.

And finally, maids have to deal with their own families back home. Those cell phones are in constant use, keeping in touch with maids’ own children or husbands, or with parents. Generally this is a good thing, right, to console the maid for being so far away from her loved ones. But it can also be poisonous – the people at home, unemployed, gambling and drinking, can demand more and more money from their industrious daughter/sister, guilting her into handing them her entire paycheck without any provision for her own future security.

So what am I, the maid? What is the maid in Singapore, or anywhere? Trusted family member? Charity case? Spy? Slave? Thief? This question is at the heart of the incessant nattering in Singapore – and any place where hiring domestic help is part of the culture – about the servant problem, the maid problem, the unreliabilty of foreign workers, etc. etc. etc. I found these conversations interesting at first, then tedious to listen to, because there is no answer, and the maid never gets to participate. What is the maid? This question so puzzled me that I couldn’t stomach hiring one and did my own damn work.

September 10th, 2011 | Category: Money, Uncategorized, public policy | Leave a comment

We were in a mall that houses many Japanese shops yesterday. The place was bustling, which is kind of unusual, and I wonder if there were special deals that sent money to Japan for earthquake relief. Anyway, we walked past a shop that has incredibly beautiful tea sets, and saw this sign in the window:

I believe the phrases for which they were grasping were “Tokyo Towers” and “held up carps.” But I could b wrong

May 2nd, 2011 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I was doing yoga this morning, when I saw a pair of hornbills fly into the tree outside the window. My spouse took some photos, and here is the best one, cropped and blown up:

Or a closer look:
Sorry it’s a bit grainy.  I think it might have been clearer with a manual focus, but this is pretty good for amateur opportunistic bird photography.

There is a pair of hornbills in the neighborhood; I don’t know if this is the same pair that visited the garden of the cafeteria at my office building, but I hope so. That pair parked in a tree and watched people eat for about 20 minutes. They are really large birds, with tails about a foot long, but when they sit still they’re nearly invisible – odd how something so huge can blend in with a green and gray tree.
Anyway, I like them and hope you do too.

May 1st, 2011 | Category: Birds, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Everyone’s excited about this, because of the 87 seats in the Singapore Parliament, 80 are being contested.  In the U.S., that would be like 89 Senate seats and 398 House seats being up for grabs simultaneously.  And for the first time there are a lot of people opposing the single-party system, and they’re not just the usual superannuated communists left over from 1963.  There’s a lot of discontent among young and educated people, who seem to feel that those in government are paid far too much compared to anyone else.  Why all this discontent in such a well-run country?  A general perception, I think, that those in power are reluctant to share the goodies or let anyone else in.  And that they’re corrupt: for every four good Members of Parliament, says a colleague, there’s one cockroach – a crony MP, a wife or cousin who shouldn’t be there.

It doesn’t help that the ruling party also rules the media and airwaves.  You never read or hear of the activities or platforms of the opposition parties, although they do exist.  Several years ago the ruling party had a rally in a stadium, and a long shot appeared on TV showing the crowd.  An even greater crowd filled the stadium at the opposition Workers’ Party rally, but no long shots were shown; the crowd was too big for government comfort, because so many people went to the rally to hear the speakers – that was the only way they could find out what the opposition was saying. So nobody knew how popular the opposition rally was until some brave soul put a long shot of it on the internet.

Recent government policy – surprise! –  outlaws putting political events on the internet.  It’s widely anticipated that in the wake of this election there will be many lawsuits against violating Youtube account holders, as the government follows its traditional policy of slowly, legally squashing the opposition through use of the law.

The system is modelled on the British Commonwealth one, where candidates are nominated (tomorrow) and campaigning occupies about 2 weeks. Long enough, says my friend, for nasty rumors to really get going but not corrected.  Then on May 7 the election is held, with teachers and other civil servants required to man the polling stations (they get a holiday some other day in May), and we’ll see what happens when the dust settles.  Will the PAP (People’s Action Party) retain its majority in the Parliament?  I think they currently have 90% of the seats.

So on the eve of nominations, everyone in the office is really excited, chatting of little else. It’s contagious.

April 27th, 2011 | Category: public policy | Comments (2)

Our education research lab was visited some time ago by a parcel of bigwigs: representatives from the Ministry of Education (MOE), from an American software company and someone from a big Washington think tank who was very concerned with education reform.  They toured the lab and looked at our various projects, then we had afternoon tea and question time with them.

The think-tanker was most interested in Singapore’s school system, as it’s completely under the control of the MOE – a tremendous contrast to the many-headed hydra of the US school system. The MOE determines the syllabus and tells all the schools what they must teach, sets and administers the exams for each grade level, determines school district boundaries, teacher-student ratios, hours spent in instruction, how many schools the nation builds  - in short, everything.  It is the parent body of the National Institute for Education, which conducts all teacher training in the country, as well as all research on curriculum, pedagogy, and learning. (My job is on a project in the Learning Science Lab at NIE.)  I imagine this man hoped to learn how a strongly centralized government could instigate education reform in the schools.

His question was how does Singapore “scale up” the various reforms we come up with at NIE, so that they penetrate the whole school system.  There was in fact no answer, because even though the school system is centralized, the schools themselves manage to differ wildly.

For instance, just look at the two schools my project is involved with.  We design a curriculum that will cover a whole semester of a course – well and good.  But this twenty-week semester is drastically different at the two schools, because School A holds its final exams in Week 17, after a week devoted to reviewing course material, and School B has its final on the last day of Week 10, with no time dedicated to review.  Individual school policy means that the same curriculum, from us, or the same syllabus from MOE, is taught in 15 weeks at School A and 19 weeks at School B.  How can the coverage of course material or student understanding possibly be the same?

There’s also the question of school support for new approaches to teaching and learning.  Generally, innovation must have the support of both the school principal and the teachers involved.  Last year in School A we had the support of the principal and one teacher.  This year we have the support of the principal, the head of department, and the additional firepower of an MOE mandate saying that our approach will be used throughout the school by 2014.  Total number of teachers on board: 3 out of 5.  You’d think we could get all five interested, but no.

And it’s not just our project that has problems scaling up – a study of school reform in Hong Kong showed that the vast majority of teachers who received 6 months of training and support in a new method of teaching made no changes to their usual pedagogy a year later.

So what are the inhibiting factors?  I’ve figured out a few:

1) Too many reforms, all the time.  Teachers know that even if they change their ways, they won’t be off the hook – in a little while someone will demand that they adapt more new systems.  Learning any one new system is likely a waste of time.

2) No reward for changing.  I think I posted about this earlier: teachers are rewarded almost entirely based on exam results, so unless the exams change to reflect the greater student understanding that is supposed to result from the new teaching method, the teachers have no skin in the game.  A colleague once asked an MOE official why they expected teachers to adapt newer, better methods, and the answer was, “We hope some teachers will rise up with the moral courage to do so.”  Well, a raise might help.  I did ask the MOE official at tea if the exams could change, but she answered (defensively but justifiably) that until all students are taught the same thing in the same way it’s unfair to test the ones learning in the new system differently.  A chicken-and-egg problem.

3) Age.  There are indeed older teachers who are great at learning new methods.  And some of them are also adept at adapting new technologies.  But (and here’s the key) if they’re getting close to retirement age it’s no use asking them to change.  It’s just not worth the effort, especially if they know how to gain rewards according to the pre-existing system.  Younger teachers are also a problem: If they’re uncertain in their classroom management skills, they don’t have the mental space to try new things.  So unless the teacher is super-dedicated and morally courageous, the best candidates to adapt reform are those with at least 3 years of experience, but not more than 25 (my rough estimate).

Given all this, how do you scale up reforms from one classroom to a whole nation – even one with fewer than 5 million people?  Nobody knows.

April 27th, 2011 | Category: Education, public policy | Leave a comment

My officemate from Beijing seems to have more or less given up on western medicine for her aches and pains. She goes to a guy in the back room of a Chinese herb shop (one of a prominent chain in Singapore), and he does things to her that leave her with slight lacerations and scraped skin, but which she says work. She had her shoulders scraped to get rid of stiff shoulders and neck pain, and her husband asked her to wear a turtleneck to work so people wouldn’t think he’d been beating her. And last weekend the Chinese doctor pinched the skin between her eyes and shook it heartily, then did the same with the skin on her temples, leaving interesting red marks that are almost covered by her glasses. She says it worked miraculously on her stuffy nose and head congestion.

Scientifically, I’d love to know how this sort of thing works! (Aside from my private theory that the treatment hurts so much that it distracts the patient’s attention from the original condition.) But until there’s some sort of regulation of research systems in China, it will remain a mystery. Alas.
Here’s a token problem in Chinese medical research (Thanks, Mei!): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7318/full/467884a.html.

April 27th, 2011 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

OK, buying an apartment in Singapore is a highly controlled affair. The Housing Development Board (HDB) controls what sizes of apartments are built, how many, where they are located, and who can buy them.  So limiting, lah!   But I just heard from my officemates that Singaporeans get a 2.6% interest rate, which my Singaporean friends think is too high! Permanent residents get 3%. Other people are stuck with market rates.

There are similar regulations in Malaysia.  Very hands-on control of real estate and banking in this part of the world.

A Chinese friend says in Beijing it’s 7%.  Everyone groans over this terribly high interest rate, which is lower than the US average over the last 30 years…

Just FYI.

April 27th, 2011 | Category: Uncategorized, public policy | Leave a comment

I went to Melbourne for a conference 2 weeks ago, and it was lovely to get out of the tropics for a while. Just think – when you open the hotel window, the air outside is COOLER than the air inside – what a concept! And if you towel yourself off in the bathroom, you actually get dry. Again – who knew?

Aside from conferring, I did a certain amount of walking around the city. It’s clean, airy, full of lovely sidewalks and interesting buildings and parks – in short, a wonderful place to walk. One of the places I went was the Queen Victoria Market, where Australians sell their produce. They grow organic stuff: And also non-organic produce (I originally typed “inorganic produce” and then realized what nonsense that would be):This is the Apple Corner of the market, which is essentially a couple of long sheds with a daily farmers’ market going on in them. Towards noon the prices fall precipitously, but where was I going to put a forty-pound box of oranges? Anyway, I did buy some fruit, and was surprised at how good it is to eat relatively locally – Singapore does NOT grow any veggies or fruit (well, some hydroponic greens, but that’s it), and I ate apples that tasted as if they’d been plucked off the tree that morning. What bliss.

But it’s not all outdoor sheds. There’s a huge deli hall, where you can get lots of Turkish/Greek food, pizza, cakes, poppy and sesame and nut-based pastries, and cheese, cheese, cheese, all made locally. Wow. And then if you keep walking you hit another building where they sell meat and fish. Herewith, some photos of beautifully laid out and super-fresh meat and fish. Note the buffalo and kangaroo roasts on offer:
Seafood below: scallops with their shells and oysters ditto, in little plastic trays: And I don’t know if you can see them in this photo, but the little garfish, the yellow/translucent ones with long noses, still have bright clear eyes. I’d never seen these (when not snorkelling) except when they were threaded on a skewer and grilled in japanese restaurants:

April 11th, 2011 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I was telling my officemates about my affection for the Sarawak Museum, but had to mention (of course) the strangely nasty toilet facilities there. Why is there such a contrast between the exhibition halls and the fairly simple matter of clean toilets?

Turns out it’s not simple. In the first place, the whole building and contracting tender system in Malaysia is conducted behind closed doors, so nobody knows what the lowest bid was. So nobody knows how much a builder or services contractor gets to keep in his own pockets once a contract has been “won” – a better word is “awarded.”  Easy money for contractors!

OK, said I, but surely it can’t be so difficult to hire some poor but honest person to clean the bathrooms once or twice a day? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile in a tourist-oriented place?

Well, turns out it is difficult, and that’s because of the easy money problem. Nobody wants to earn a simple living by cleaning stuff (or actually performing any services) because the whole culture revolves around the notion of easy money – of skimming off the top. With toilet cleaning, there is no top. Unless you run a cleaning firm. So let’s say your cleaning firm wins a contract to clean toilets at the museum. You of course don’t mind overseeing the actual cleaning person, but doing the work yourself is out of the question. So you hire someone to do it it for a pittance. That person may or may not do the cleaning – you don’t surpervise them very closely, because you already have your cut from the contract and don’t care if the toilets are clean. And the cleaning person probably doesn’t care either – nobody’s checking to see if the job is done, nobody’s in a position to receive or act on negative feedback from customers. So money may be spent, but nothing gets done.

This is apparently a big problem in Malaysia, where the bidding process is closed. In Singapore, by contrast, the uncle or aunty who cleans the bathrooms is accountable to their supervisor, and if there are complaints from end-users the supervisor makes life miserable for the cleaner. (In turn, the cleaning company is not paid if the cleaning is not done – a condition that seems not to obtain in Malaysia.) The bidding process in Singapore is open, so everyone knows who is responsible. People claim that there’s an easy money mentality in Singapore too, at least for the already-wealthy, but it doesn’t seem to trickle down to the point where nobody does anything, because they’re always hoping for a cut from an uncle in the construction business.

April 11th, 2011 | Category: Money, Uncategorized, public policy | Leave a comment