When Loretta left the Philippines in the 90s, she didn’t have any training in cooking or house-keeping. But what she did have was an eight-year-old son she had to feed back in Quezon City.
Loretta got pregnant when she was 17 and soon thereafter her boyfriend disappeared. Left with no other choice, the single mother – a title she carried in her home town for eight years like a scarlet letter – turned her child over to his grandmother and headed to Hong Kong in 1986. In the past 25 years, she has served twelve local Chinese families across the city. The Chans, the Wongs and the Leungs, Loretta has seen it all. For a quarter of a century, she clean their apartments, eat in the kitchen and listen to the radio by herself in the maid’s quarter. Most of her employers treat her well enough, though none of them ever considers her one of their own. Not once do they invite her to eat with them, watch television with them, or simply have a chat with them. Loretta has heard that back in the days those Chinese maids with their signature queues – "amah" (媽姐) as they were called – often became their employers’ best friends and confidants. When it comes to Filipinas, however, a maid is always just a maid. She wonders if the complexion of her skin has something to do with it. Or is it a trust issue? She was told that Chinese people, especially the Cantonese, have problems trusting people, especially those who look and sound different from them.
Speaking of trust, she remembers the Kos. She worked for them for only nine months in the late 1980s. Mrs. Ko wouldn’t believe a word her maid said; she never did. That’s why Loretta kept Mr. Ko's little secret all to herself. Until that moment she had only heard about these “incidents” at church gatherings; they were merely urban legends that swirled around within the community. But that one Saturday afternoon in 1989 changed all that. While Mrs. Ko was out, her husband summoned Loretta to his bedroom. He patted gently on the bed and signaled her to get closer. The 20-year-old pretended that nothing happened and went back to her ironing in the kitchen. In all, it happened three more times before Mr. Ko finally gave up. Each time he warned her not to say anything to his wife or else he would terminate her contract. The incidents frightened Loretta, for she no longer felt safe sharing an apartment with a man she didn’t trust, and with a woman who didn’t trust her. But more so the incidents angered her. She wasn’t so much angry with Mr. Ko – he was just a sad, sexually frustrated man – as she was angry with herself and her country, the Maid Capital of the World whose citizens were to be humiliated and taken advantage of at will.
Loretta now works for an expat family. The Harrises treat their 50-year-old helper like an aunt and pay her $6,500 a month – the most she has made all this time in Hong Kong – plus a plane ticket and pocket money every year to visit her son in Manila. These days when Loretta is home alone, she would read a book or make small handicraft that she sells to other churchgoers on Sundays. She still chuckles when she thinks about some of the silly things that young maids would do to kill time when their bosses aren’t around: trying on their name brand clothes, putting on their expensive make-up and taking naps in their beds. The more daring ones would bring men home – men they meet in those sleazy bars on Lockhart Road – and have a jolly good time. All that, and so much more, observed by the veteran maid day after day for 25 years. New recruits who just arrived in the city would come to see Loretta, and the reigning matriarch would dispense the same advice: be patient. “If you let every little thing get to you, you won’t last a month in Hong Kong,” she would tell them before giving them a motherly hug.