When the Personal Meets the Global at Home: Filipina Domestics and Their Female Employers in Taiwan

Since Elsa started working here, I don't have to rush home to cook dinner. I can take my time. I don't have to worry about the messy house.... She picks up the children from school. She cooks them dinner. She prepares their lunch boxes. She helps them with the bath. They practice English with her.... Children really like her. I appreciate her too. But I am a bit jealous that they are so attached to her. They are becoming close to her like she was the mother.... My husband likes her too.... He is glad that I stop nagging him about helping me around the house. It's like she is becoming the mother and the wife.... I think about that a lot.

Excerpt from an interview with Hui-Ling, a Taiwanese female employer of a Filipina domestic.

When I interviewed thirty-seven-year-old career woman Hui-Ling in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1999, she had recently employed Elsa, a Filipina domestic. She had been juggling the double burden of family and work before she and her husband finally decided to hire live-in help. Her husband was concerned about the presence of a stranger at home, yet he was more than happy to be spared the constant pressure from Hui-Ling to take on more household responsibilities. Hui-Ling no longer had to perform the housework, but supervising the domestic became her new task. In addition, she had a certain ambivalence about the presence of another woman at home, as her narratives indicated. What did Elsa's emotional and physical labor say about the two women's respective status and role in the family? During our interviews, Hui-Ling expressed her anxiety about being a woman, a wife, and a mother. Many of the Taiwanese women employers I interviewed for my research on the global restructuring of home, child, and elder care shared her sense of crisis in identity.

The Taiwanese government legalized the importation of foreign domestics in 1992. Since then, many upper- and middle-class Taiwanese families have depended on foreign domestics as a source of cheap labor to address the deepening of privatization under globalization as well as the inadequacy of state provision for care.¹ Foreign domestics have also become one of the major strategies for both sexes to attenuate conflicts over the allocation of household responsibilities. They have become the temporary solution to the unequal gender division of labor associated with the ideological construction of heterosexual masculinity and femininity.² Not surprisingly, the presence of foreign domestics has compelled Taiwanese female employers to redefine their understanding of domesticity, womanhood, and motherhood in relation to the paid labor of "other" women. Foreign domestics' intimate knowledge of the households that employ them has also enabled them to critique their female employers and unveil the mythical construction of the latter's status superiority.

In this article, I examine the competing meanings of domesticity, womanhood, and motherhood implicit in the global restructuring of care, focusing on the tension between Taiwanese female employers and Filipina domestics. I argue that meanings of domesticity, womanhood, and motherhood constitute central loci of identity struggles between these two groups of women under the context of globalization. I juxtapose their interconnected experiences and contending narratives to demonstrate the relational construction of identities between them. While the importation of foreign domestics has allowed Taiwanese female employers to redefine their domestic roles and to elevate their status as household managers, they have also struggled to reframe their conceptions of womanhood and motherhood. Their redefinitions occur partially because of foreign domestics' active challenges. Crossing national borders to work as live-in help has also compelled Filipina domestics to redefine their ideas of domesticity, womanhood, and motherhood. Occupying the position of the intimate other as well as the "outsider-within," they form resistance discourses surrounding these central identities.³ In other words, the personal meets the global at home. The process of globalization has introduced different sets of relations and dynamics of power within the private sphere Taiwanese female employers and their...