Then & Now | A farewell to Ah Kam, and an ode to domestic workers everywhere
- A writer pays tribute to his amah as she retires to her native Thailand after more than 20 years
- He celebrates the woman who shared his daily life as ‘blunt-spoken; meticulously honest; fond of an occasional beer’
For generations, rural women have left their own homes to work, and so support themselves and their families, and provide a more secure start for following generations than they, themselves, experienced. From the 1920s, Cantonese women migrated in their thousands from Guangdong province to Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaya; with their distinctive white blouses and black trousers, they became the intergenerational mainstay of the families who employed them.
From the 70s, domestic workers came from across Southeast Asia – the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand were the main suppliers. Some migrants adapted better than others to their new surroundings; one such transplant was our amah, who has just retired to Thailand.
She had a Thai name, of course, but that was only deployed for contracts, passports and identity documents. To us, she was Ah Kam; a literal Cantonese translation of her Thai name – Gold. To everyone else, from Shek Kong neighbours and Kowloon City goldsmiths to Kam Tin market people, she was Kam Jeh – “Sister Kam”.
Ah Kam’s Cantonese was fluent – learned in northeast Thailand before moving to Hong Kong to work – so that was what we spoke at home. Beyond a few pithy phrases, she resolutely refused to learn any English; my own Thai remains rudimentary – food words and rude words, mostly, and all learned from her.
Not that we particularly wanted her to know English; Cantonese as a home language added richly to the overall texture of life, and also offered a welcome measure of conversational privacy – or so we fondly thought. “Ah Kam understands much more than she lets on, no question …” my mother once muttered darkly, towards the end of a visit; and she probably did. Not that it matters.
Language fluency and long years in Hong Kong did not, however, make her like its inhabitants; quite the contrary. Casual racism, petty discrimination and unfair treatment – the everyday lot of most migrant workers’ lives here – were never forgotten.