The emotional and economic ties between mothers and their domestic helpers
- Megan K. Stack’s memoir Women’s Work takes an unflinching look at the relationship between an expat journalist and the Asian migrant women who helped raise her children
When American journalist Megan Stack moved to China, in 2010, she knew her life was at a crossroads. Having spent the previous decade working as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, “I was at a point when I was burned out on travelling and reporting,” she says, speaking from yet another “new” home in Singapore.
Stack’s last posting, in Russia, had followed a five-year spell covering the Middle East – “a huge beat” she notes with understatement, adding that she had worked in every country in the region save for Oman.
So when her husband, Tom Lasseter, also a foreign correspondent, was made a Beijing bureau chief, Stack decided it was time for a change of direction. “I wanted to write a novel and I wanted to write books,” she says. But just as she was settling into her new city and beginning Chinese language classes, Stack learned she was pregnant with her first child.
The long story of what happened over the following nine years forms the basis of her book, Women’s Work (2019). It is essential reading not only for new mothers, working mothers and mothers who work for working mothers, but for parents of all stripes and indeed anyone interested in the world right now.
“There is an undertone in the book of this dystopian future,” says 44-year-old Stack. “I hope one of the things people are reading out of it is the experience of unprecedented human displacement and migration. That to me is the story of our age.”