Marybelle is a Filipino domestic helper who lives with Lincoln Chow, a Chinese-American professor, and Jing, a Hong Kong-born homemaker who yearns for a child she is not able to have. Marybelle earns money not only from the Chows, but also from weekends spent cleaning the rooms of local students. Her hard-earned dollars transform into large remittances home to her mother and daughter in Manila. In turn, her mother mails Marybelle photos of the sprawling family’s newborn babies and of relatives at funerals – a token connection to family milestones that happen while she toils, several continents and oceans away. Marybelle keeps all of these photographic moments in a scrapbook she’s named “The Book of Life and Death”. The pages are filled with “snapshots of those who have just taken their first breath and those who have taken their last”, the halves of the book separated by a ribbon. The live-in domestic helper has been working overseas for so long that her mother used to physically post her the photos. Before the smartphone era, she says, “I would receive a thick envelope from the Philippines, the coarse, mustard-yellow paper still infused with the very odour of home. I’d hold it to my cheek, remembering the warmth of my mother’s skin. I felt loved, and remembering this love is how I survive without the company of the most important people to me.” Author Grace Talusan captures the soul of Marybelle the domestic worker in The Book of Life and Death . The story takes place in Boston, in the United States, and not in Hong Kong, as readers might have presumed. The short story featured this past autumn as the Boston Book Festival’s “One City One Story: Read. Think. Share” offering, with copies distributed to 20,000 readers across the city, and thousands more reading it online. But the Philippines-born, New England-raised writing professor – Talusan is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, near Boston – never set out to write about a domestic helper. “Marybelle suddenly appeared to me through a writing exercise,” says Talusan. “She started to speak and I was ready to listen to her.” As a Boston suburb-raised daughter of an ophthalmologist, Talusan was raised in vastly different circumstances to her protagonist. “I grew up in a place in the US where there were not many Filipinos,” she recalls. “When we first settled in America, my immigrant parents were lonely for their country and when we were out, at a shopping mall or church or just on the street, we always stopped and chatted with people who appeared to be Filipino.” Talusan’s house was “American on the outside, but Filipino on the inside”. On road trips in their Chevy Caprice station wagon, the family would pull up to a rest stop and out would come the Filipino food. “My parents avoided spending money on fast food, instead my mother brought freshly cooked rice and chicken adobo. I was embarrassed as I watched other families eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and potato chips.” Domestic workers all over the world [ …] are susceptible to abuse and exploitation Grace Talusan As an adult, Talusan talked to Filipinos all over the world in hospitals, airports, restaurants and other industries that needed temporary workers. “I met many Filipinos living and working on cruise ships, from the wait staff to the housecleaners to the entertainers. I took a long time to listen, read and learn before I tried to write fiction about a Filipino worker.” Although the story’s employers, the Chows, are kind and Marybelle has freedom and flexibility in her Boston life, she is conscious of sacrificing her life for her family, and her employers; living for years, if not decades, in someone else’s household, treated sometimes as a family member, sometimes like an intruder. Marybelle is very capable of contemplating such a paradox. She is an educated woman who could not find work as a schoolteacher back home. Having had to leave her daughter behind, she is among the millions of overseas Filipino workers – known as bagong bayani , or “new heroes” – who collectively wire about US$33 billion a year in wages back home. By some accounts, there are about 200,000 Philippine nationals working in Hong Kong, and whenever Talusan visits the city, she makes a point of spending time in Central, observing and speaking to overseas workers enjoying their precious time off, crowded into the corners of raised walkways and under flyovers. “So many of us in the Philippines tried to stay in the country but there were no jobs,” Marybelle says in the story. “Don’t you think we’d rather stay with our families at home instead of travelling far away for years at a time living with a family of strangers?” “I think,” says Filipino-American novelist Noel Alumit, who hosted a Los Angeles book event for Talusan, “that what Grace did is try to give voice to one of those servants. What I appreciated about the story was the accessibility and wholeness. The protagonist was a teacher, so I’m glad she was drawn as an articulate person. Indeed, some of the overseas workers doing menial labour have advanced degrees.” In doing her research, Talusan most likely learned that Hong Kong helpers can never become eligible for permanent residency unlike other migrants and expats, and that some employers keep their passports while they toil six days a week. The author’s literary inquiries also led her into darker corners, including the story of a Filipino domestic worker in Singapore who was convicted of strangling a co-worker and drowning the three-year-old boy in her charge. Despite the strong possibility that Flor Contemplacion had been framed for the murder and her confession forced through torture, she was executed by hanging in 1995. “I was in college at the time and coming into consciousness about my identity as a Filipino, which is why I paid attention to the story,” Talusan recalls. “The Filipino immigrant community around me were talking about it.” When the author’s parents travelled to Singapore some years later as tourists, they took a photograph of a sign in a lift that stated: “No Filipinos allowed.” “It’s not surprising to hear about the mistreatment of overseas Filipino workers, especially vulnerable women who live and work inside their employer’s homes,” says Talusan. “Domestic workers all over the world, especially those who are far from home for months at a time and outside their support networks, while also dealing with cultural and language differences as well as economic precarity, are susceptible to abuse and exploitation.” Talusan is no stranger to putting deep, human stories on the page. In her 2019 memoir, The Body Papers , she recounts a childhood transgression with a quiet terror. Having grown up in Medford, Massachusetts, as a member of the only Filipino family in that small, upscale Boston suburb, Talusan prayed to God she would wake up as a white girl, with blond hair and blue eyes. In the hope of forcing a transformation, she even practised a Bostonian accent. Instead, she woke up one morning inflamed with hives: “My lips had disappeared into a mass of swollen flesh, my ear lobes were triple their usual size and my cheeks were throbbing hot.” The symptoms could not hide the fact that something far more terrifying was happening to Talusan. Her paternal grandfather, who paid the family an extended visit each spring, was entering the girl’s room at night, pushing her floral nightgown above her breasts and violating her. Tatang , Tagalog for “father”, sexually abused her throughout her childhood, with the young Grace keeping quiet to protect her family. “During the years the abuse was happening, I knew implicitly how dangerous it was to tell on my grandfather,” she writes in her memoir. “A story could get you killed, whether you were the person the story was about or the storyteller. My parents would often tell me to be careful of what I said, because ‘even the walls have ears’. You could not take it back once it had been told.” As she reached puberty, she could no longer stand the abuse. “I could not become pregnant with my grandfather’s baby. No, I would not survive that.” My grandfather was an unrelenting paedophile. He did monstrous things to three generations of his family Grace Talusan When she turned 13, Grace waited for Tatang to steal into her room, and “with both hands, I rose up and shoved his shoulders. Every cell of rage fired. He hit the bedroom wall and slumped to the floor. He quickly gathered himself and closed the door behind him … That was all”, she writes. “My rage turned to joy.” Yet that joy was not to last, nor would it stop a predator. Tatang continued to abuse other girls. After publishing the book, Talusan heard from a cousin who said the elderly man had sexually abused her too. “My grandfather was an unrelenting paedophile. He did monstrous things to three generations of his family.” The horror of those years followed Talusan, both physically and emotionally. She put on weight as an unconscious way of creating a protective padding. In college, at the prestigious Tufts University, Talusan felt suicidal and suffered anxiety attacks. She began to search for reasons for her grandfather’s actions. “Do my grandfather’s years as a colonial subject explain him?” she writes in The Body Papers . “Perhaps his trauma, among other factors, created a desire to feel strong and he became addicted, getting his fix from dominating bodies less powerful than his. And yet, none of this justifies what he did.” “Part of my personality now is that I am never overwrought,” Talusan says. “I have a limited range of dynamics or emotions now. Things have happened to me when other people ask, ‘Why aren’t you freaking out?’ When extremely difficult things happened in my life, I had to hold myself together. Falling apart was not an option.” And yet this courage may have worked against her, in terms of her literature being embraced by her native country. “In my opinion,” says Alumit, “I don’t think the Filipino media embraced this book as much as it should have because it raises difficult themes that are challenging here in the US and there’s even more silence around some of these issues in the Philippines.” There was no Philippine edition of The Body Papers . “For whatever reason, there wasn’t enough interest,” says Talusan, adding that as a foreign import, “it was likely too expensive to reach a wide audience”. She has, however, heard from friends in the Philippines who bought it while travelling in the US or downloaded it as an audio or e-book. “They loved it, but thought that some of the topics, like childhood sexual abuse by a family member, especially by the patriarch, the grandfather, is not talked of or written about as openly in the Philippines, a country where it is still not legal to divorce or have an abortion, and while it is supposed to change, the age of consent is still age 12 .” Talusan’s hope for The Book of Life and Death is that readers will “consider those who are not celebrated or very visible in our society, but who are essential. If the pandemic has taught me anything, it is how much we rely on each other.” Such issues are all too familiar in cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, but having appeared on a Zoom call to a Boston nursing home and spoken to the 75 elderly residents as part of the One City One Story festival, she says, “I don’t think there was one person of colour or any Asian-Americans.” She recalls wondering what she might have in common with an all-white audience several decades her senior. “We didn’t share the same age or ethnic background or anything.” And yet, she says, “Some knew Filipinos as caretakers and nurses. But beyond that they all talked about the ways they connected to the story of an immigrant, who was also a mother who loved her kid so much that she would do anything and sacrifice anything for that person. They did all the talking. I barely said anything.”