I would hear the spit and sizzle of something hitting hot oil, followed by the sweet and spicy aromas of ginger leaking from the kitchen. It would be a good night, because Jenelyn was most likely making Ginger Chicken for dinner. It was my favorite of the meals she would prepare.
Jenelyn, Heather and Jamie’s live-in Filipina helper, was diminutive in length and breadth, and her dark chocolate hair was perfunctorily clipped at the back of her head, no fuss and ready for business. Her eyes often twinkled, her personality and warmth much larger than her stature. Still, Jenelyn displayed the helper’s inculturation to subordinate her presence to others.
I had never before encountered a live-in helper, and it made me uncomfortable. I was resistant to Jenelyn doing my laundry and making my dinner; it wasn’t her responsibility. Of course, not playing my role left Jenelyn anxious as well; she was hired to be the household’s helper in whatever form the household took. That was how she understood her part.
Jenelyn and I settled into a rhythm after a couple weeks, meaning I became more comfortable with the help she provided. I cooked some, partly to lighten the load and partly because it was one of the things I enjoyed doing, and sometimes Heidi, Heather, Jamie, or I would wash the night’s dishes.
Mostly, we responded to the extra work we imposed by paying more, which really was Jenelyn’s preference. She viewed her workload as relatively light, smaller than most helpers in Singapore, who took care of extended families with children. An apartment with Heather and Jamie, and even with Heidi and me added, was not a large job in her context, and was the smallest she ever had. She commented several times that Heather and Jamie were the best family she had ever worked for, and tears would pool against her lower eyelids if there was conversation of them eventually leaving Singapore.
While Jenelyn considered her household duties fairly light, her general obligations were heavy: her monthly remittances to the Philippines supported her daughter, who was just graduating a post high school training in bookkeeping, and her son, who was just finishing high school. Money also helped her mother and extended family. Of the S$750 she earned monthly, 600 went home. Heather and Jamie provided her food, housing, healthcare, and most of her other expenses. They were required to send her for a home visit once every two years.
Heather and Jamie hired Jenelyn from a reputable agency and paid the prevailing wage. They were generous beyond local expectation in funding food and necessities for her, encouraging Jenelyn to buy food that she enjoyed (most helpers simply ate whatever their employers ate after their employers had consumed their fill).
Beyond this, Heather and Jamie helped when Jenelyn’s family needed it. Most significantly, in 2018 when Typhoon Mangkhut tore apart the simple one-room home of wood and tin where Jenelyn’s kids lived in the Philippines, Heather and Jamie rallied their families and raised enough money to build her kids a small but durable home, with a concrete block ground floor, a second floor that could also withstand a typhoon, and separate sleeping spaces for each kid for the first time in their lives.
Several times Jenelyn opened her phone to show us pictures of the still-simple but now sturdy home; she was thrilled that her kids had a safe place to live. Then her ex-husband (“ex” in reality for many years, but not legally – a divorce was too expensive) appeared and moved in to what was now one of the better homes in the neighborhood, declaring his right to it. Jenelyn spent tear-soaked, frantic hours on the phone with her kids and other family in the area, feeling overwhelmed and powerless, trying to get him out. She spoke with the police multiple times, to no real effect.
Luckily for Jenelyn, an officer finally asked whether her husband had been paying to support the children all those years. The had not. So often there is no real effort to enforce this support, whatever the ostensible legal requirements. In this case, the police took the obligation seriously, and soon the husband was in handcuffs rather than Jenelyn’s house. A woman who had rarely felt much power in the world got a brief taste of it.
Additional support from Heather and Jamie caused Jenelyn an understandable problem: her family now saw an endless pot of gold. Her mother would call and demand that Jenelyn ask her employers for money for all sorts of needs and wants. “They can afford it,” she’d say, which was true, of course. It didn’t, however, reflect the complicated reality of how much people might give, and put painful pressure on Jenelyn to either trouble her employers (likely causing Jenelyn to worry about endangering her job) or to disappoint her family.
In addition to the monthly amount Heidi and I paid Jenelyn for her help, at our departure we gave her an additional lump sum. The next week Heather and Jamie reported that Jenelyn had bought beds for her children, the first they’d ever had.
Jenelyn had a good a gig from the perspective of a helper in Singapore. Heather and Jamie were caring and respectful, and made efforts to improve her life.
But that didn’t deny Jenelyn’s situational realities, or those of others like her.
I avoided circumstances where Jenelyn and I would be home without others, not for my protection, but for her comfort. Sexual assault is prevalent with in-home helpers in Singapore (and elsewhere, of course), and the word of the employer held privileged position. To make an accusation against an employer would almost certainly result in a helper’s deportation. I’m confident this was front and center for Jenelyn when I moved in; she interacted with me more cautiously than with Heidi. I hoped my behavior over the months reduced her anxiety, but I’m confident it never ended. Her lived reality dictated that she always guard against the risk.
Jenelyn was lucky to have her own bedroom with Heather and Jamie; many helpers slept on a mat on the floor of the kitchen or laundry room. Jenelyn worked long hours, up at 5:30am to make coffee for early-riser Heather, and finally going to bed when Heather would, about 9pm. That said, she had hours during the day where she was free to do her own thing, was not working. Jenelyn spent many of those hours sitting on the balcony, talking via the apartment’s wifi with her children and other family back in the Philippines. Many helpers worked similar hours, but without time off mid-day. The standard helper work week ran Monday through Saturday, with Sunday off. Helpers could agree to work Sunday as well, for extra pay, and many did (and did not always receive the extra pay).
Jenelyn chose her work not for the adventure of travel (ala Heidi and me), but to provide for her children and family. She left her kids behind because she could not meet their basic needs while living in her hometown. Jenelyn’s daughter had been raising her brother for years while mom worked abroad to pay for basics. This was common for people from many developing countries.
In many wealthy countries, including my own, migrant laborers subsidize a comfortable lifestyle. In Singapore this includes domestic help like Jenelyn, and construction, maintenance, and landscape workers. Some skilled workers commute daily across the causeway from neighboring Malaysia, such as the garment workers for Heidi’s wedding outfit. Others come from countries in the region, and the men who perform most of the city-state’s manual labor live in dormitories, converted former factories with up to 20 men in a room. Because employers provide housing, and their incentive is to keep costs low, workers live in crowded conditions and travel to job sites in packed vans.
It was a perfect scenario for COVID-19 spread. Yet Singapore, widely praised for handling the coronavirus swiftly and effectively in the earliest months, completely forgot about its workers in dormitories, numbering some 323,000 souls. As of mid-December, 2020, 47% of Singapore’s foreign workers, 152,000 of them, had been infected, according to the BBC. That compared with fewer than 4,000 people out of 5.5 million (.07%) “in the community,” as Singapore referred to people not contained in the dormitories.
Singapore imposed lock-downs across its population during the peak of virus transmission, but they ended for those “in the community” in just over 7 weeks. Even at their strictest, people were still allowed to shop for groceries and exercise outside. After those seven weeks ended, people had been fairly free to shop in malls, go out to eat, and live normal lives.
Not so for those in the dormitories. It took longer to control the virus there because of the close living conditions, but even as infections came under control the dormitories remained under lock down. The BBC reported that healthy workers were still only allowed to go to their work sites, and restricted to occasionally shopping at designated places near their dorms. In late January, 2021, Singapore authorities declared the outbreak in the dorms under control, and indicated some workers would be allowed into the general community once a month, provided they were wearing contact tracing devices and adhered to safety protocols. The rules remained different.
The Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, in a speech broadcast to the nation, acknowledged and apologized for failing to secure safe and appropriate housing for migrant laborers. He promised Singapore would get the virus under control for them, and then would address their living conditions.
Such changes will hopefully happen, but they will not lead to real changes in the power of the migrants over their own circumstances while in Singapore.
Around the world, the poor and dispossessed, the marginal and vulnerable, have suffered more substantially under the pandemic, mirroring their reality during “normal” times.