Wishing Well: Voices from Foreign Domestic Workers in Hong Kong and Beyond
able to hire a full-time live-in helper whom we could trust with our child, at a very affordable price. We hired a charming lady from the Philippines, who is still looking after our two daughters. After she started working for us, we quickly found out that she had to pay HK$9,000 to the employment agency who placed her with us. This sounded very unfair and more of a medieval practice than something befitting a developed and shining city like Hong Kong. Later I found out this was illegal. Agencies are only allowed to charge 10 percent of a helper’s first month of wages. The current minimum monthly wage for foreign helpers is HK$4,310. To tackle this problem, in 2012, I founded HelperChoice, an online platform that pairs domestic helpers with prospective employers for free. We started in Hong Kong, eventually expanding to Dubai, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. Through HelperChoice, I came to know many of our users personally and listened to their stories. I learned that paying tremendously high and illegal placement fees is just the first challenge of working abroad. Then they must confront other obstacles: the emotional difficulty of being far from the people they cherish most, the guilt of having left their children to take care of others’ children, the sheer exhaustion of physical work that they may not have performed in the past, cultural differences with their employers, the lack of privacy in the intimacy of the household. In 2015, HelperChoice launched its first writing competition. We were surprised to receive 56 stories from all over the region – Hong Kong of course, but also Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore and Dubai – all well-written and very touching. Encouraged, we organized a second edition in 2016, this time backed by the news website Coconuts. We received even more submissions. We hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be for the domestic workers to put their stories to paper. Most of them reported that writing made them cry. We, at HelperChoice, cried as well as we read the stories coming in one by one. As a mother myself, I felt their pain.
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