The Amahs of Hong Kong is one of six short films in the series
A Woman's Place: Short Stories, produced for the United Nations Beijing Conference on Women in 1996. This film provides a glimpse at Filipina domestic workers, of whom there are approximately 130,000 in Hong Kong today.
The film opens with images of crowded Hong Kong streets and the sound of Filipino music, and quickly moves to several brief interviews, interspersed with scenes of domestic workers. Evelyn is the first domestic worker we encounter. Following in her parents' and her sisters'
footsteps, she came to Hong Kong -- like many others -- to support her children and her family. She is grateful to have a "very good employer" who provides her with housing, a reasonable workload, and a subscription to Reader's Digest, but she misses her children who remain in the Philippines. We then meet Linda Layosa -- once domestic worker, now editor of the overseas worker magazine Tinig Filipino -- who describes Hong Kong as a "paradise" for Filipino workers, and who advises women to "work as a domestic helper, but never think as a domestic helper."
Although Hong Kong is considered one of the best locations for overseas workers (the wages are relatively high, the rate of abuse relatively low, and it is close to the Philippines), workers experience serious difficulties there as well. Cynthia Tellez--editor of Migrant Focusand director of the Mission for Filipino Migrant Workers--describes some of the "loopholes" in the domestic worker contract, and points to problems associated with the "Two-Week Rule," a policy introduced in 1987 requiring domestic workers to return to the Philippines within two weeks of the termination of their contracts. As she explains, this rule deters workers from reporting abuse since the alternative is to return home and risk financial loss before securing new employment. Next we encounter Rosa and Lutgarta, workers who have experienced difficulties with their employers. They are living at Bethune House, a shelter for domestic workers whose contracts have been terminated or whose legal cases against their employers are pending. The film closes with a church scene: Filipinas take communion and a baby is baptized.
This film introduces interesting visual images, and raises an appropriate topic for advanced high school, college or university classes dealing with labor, gender, and global migration. Yet the film is very brief and somewhat cryptic, and there is little narrative to help situate it, so the
instructor should be prepared to provide some necessary contextualization. The film does not inform viewers, for example, that the crowds of women in the urban scenes are domestic workers who congregate in Central District on their Sundays off, or that many Filipina domestic workers are highly educated. We do not learn about the fate of women like Rosa and Lutgarta,
or why Linda Layosa and Cynthia Tellez have such different perspectives on the situation for domestic workers in Hong Kong. A source of background information is Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers (Cornell University Press, 1997). Finally, it is worth noting that Filipina domestic workers might object to the title of the film, since the term "amah" is generally understood to refer to Chinese domestic workers of the past, not to foreign domestic workers.
