Leanda Lee
Many expatriates and foreign residents come to the point early in our stay where we have to make a decision about hiring domestic help. My problem wasn’t so much about how to go about finding information on how and whom to hire, but whether to hire at all.
Those from egalitarian communities have been accustomed to being self-sufficient, perhaps calling on friends, family and school and activity based carpooling arrangements to ease the ballet/soccer-mum-taxi syndrome. Our homes are set up with mod-cons; we buy food-processors, blenders and large microwave-ovens and bake/roast/prepare/freeze the weekly meals ahead. We invariably do the shopping once a week and have large refrigerators and freezers to accommodate the volume. It’s not unheard of to buy half a side of beef and a full side of lamb prepared and packaged by the local butcher so save shopping for meat for a few months.
Life was busy before Macau. Working, studying, looking after kids, pets, parents, shopping, cooking, commuting, ferrying, paying bills, running errands, weeding, pruning, mulching, burying the odd dead possum, cleaning, dusting, mopping, washing…maintaining assets to sustain the lot. Time and social life is precious. If it takes 45 minutes to reach a friend as it often does where distances are great, that’s one and a half hours lost even before the party starts – forget about weeknights.
We might pay professional cleaners to come and do the necessary once-over. But in our countries of origin, mostly the air is clean and the dust might roll in fluff balls but rarely cake our surfaces in pollutant or construction dirt as we find in our homes in Macau.
At first I couldn’t see the need for hired help. My sense of pride in self-sufficiency was the first barrier. My egalitarian upbringing and socialised response to equal opportunity and equal pay with the cry of “you’re abusing the underprivileged and powerless” ringing in my ears was the second.
It was the black dirt on the windowsill that changed my mind.
And the fact that queues were long and systems inefficient. Internet services for paying bills were clunky. My first day’s list of 9 errands ended in failure. Completing only the top one and a half items made me realise that life in Macau isn’t friendly to the helper-less.
With a helper on board together with the short distance to anywhere, life in Macau can be good. Workers can be productive, socialisers can readily socialise, loved ones can spend time together and students have very little excuse to be running late to class – just literally run. Given the size of this place you could kick a football across it.
Commuting time and household chores are substantial detractors from more valued activities in many world cities. Depending upon mode of transport, personal wellbeing can also suffer, and there are indications of lower levels of happiness and increased anxiety levels.
Macau commuters are relatively free from the travel stress of other cities described in IBM’s Global Commuter Pain Studies. Beijing (where 69% of drivers have at one time returned home rather than face the traffic) scored 99 on the 2010 Pain Index, and London and Paris were at 36. Melbourne (17), where commuters are more likely to use private cars, came close to New York at 19 which has population density and good public infrastructure. An average commute of just over an hour a day is typical across a large number of cities. We’ve been relatively free of this pain in Macau, although the gap is closing due to infrastructure capacity constraints.
Returning to the economically and socially under-valued domestic work, in Australia and Portugal women do over 5 hours of unpaid work per day. In the US, it’s just over 4 hours and just under 4 in China. Unpaid work, which domestic workers help free us from, shapes the ability to undertake paid work and other activities we value.
We (and our employers) are lucky. By being in Macau we’re at least 4 hours a day better off, allowing us to be economically productive or to enjoy our own company or that of family and friends. Anyone for a cuppa?
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