Filipinos learn to think outside the box on putting money to work

THERE IS THIS terrible but very telling joke about a mother-daughter tandem of Filipino domestic helpers working in Hong Kong, although they could have been based in Singapore, Rome or any one of innumerable, interchangeable postings.

One December, the daughter sent a huge box home to her family in a tiny, thirsty town in the Philippines.

In local parlance such cargos are called balikbayan boxes, named after Filipino expats who return to the motherland after a long stint abroad loaded with pasalubong - the accretion of their years of economic exile.

The box was huge - about three by six feet, and three-feet deep - and contained the well-preserved fruits of the two women's labours: tinned cans of sardines and meatloaf, bags of cookies and candies, variously sized footwear and garments, bottles of fruit juices bubbling perilously close to their use-by dates, knick-knacks and ornaments such as picture frames, candle-holders and lamp shades.

The box was accompanied by a letter from the daughter, with its litany of directives on which item should go to whom, and how this manna from Hong Kong should be divided among the members of the clan.

'And by the way,' went the daughter's letter, 'under the tinned sardines and meatloaf you will find a layer of blankets and curtains. And under them you will find, carefully wrapped in a polyester bed sheet I bought in Shenzhen, the body of Mother.'