OFW SPECIAL: A NATION OF NANNIES
OFW VIRTUAL WORLD, NOVEMBER 20, 2010 (INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING QUARTERLY) By SHELIA CORONEL, Columbia University School of Journalism Professor; MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR BELOW.
[PHOTO: INDISPENSABLE. The yaya is a fixture in many Filipino homes where she is surrogate mother, reliable servant, and pillar of domestic harmony. [photo by Vinia M. Datinguinoo]
SOME MONTHS ago, a Danish couple living in Australia created a tempest of sorts when they posted this message on the website philippines.com.au, an online forum for Filipinos Down Under: Danish family is looking for a part time (3 days a week) amah in Jindalee...live out. Must be 100% trust worthy, independent, love our 2 chinese kids / 9 year old retriever and master of cleaning. Prefer non-smoker and QLD drivers licence. Start late Jan 2005. Email Sten & Ella
Sten and Ella didn't realize that their innocent posting for a Filipina yaya or nanny in December 2004 would unleash an avalanche of emotional responses. They had unknowingly hit on the rawest nerve of the Pinoy community in Australia and probably elsewhere as well.
An irate member of the Web forum, whose email identity was Ronkers, reacted with a virtual scream: "Sten & Ella, You are in the wrong forum! Don't you know that you are insulting people here in the forum? Judging by the posts here, I can assure that these people are well educated. So pissed [sic] off!"
The couple promptly apologized, but the discussion didn't end there. Bagoong, another forum member, attempted a sober defense of his countrymen: "Working as a maid does not equate to being uneducated. Most of our compatriots abroad working as nurses and nannies in Asia, Europe, and Middle East are highly educated. They are tertiary qualified graduates who are forced to leave as there are no jobs for them in the country. I guess that the connotation of a 'maid' as a second-class citizen remains in our psyche."
Many others wrote back, among them TruBlu, who included memories of her own childhood, "I still have a lot of affection for my yaya, who looked after me and my siblings...definitely, I do not consider our yaya as a second-class citizen." Roobie had his own observations on nannies and social class: "The idea of a domestic helper being a lowly commoner is largely due to the attitudes of the rich that span back in some cases, hundreds of years." This view was seconded by Richard who said, "I've noticed there is a very clear class distinction among the Philippine people."
This email exchange provides a window as good as any to how conflicted Filipinos are when it comes to overseas migration. This ambivalence — on one hand, embarrassment, if not shame, at being known as a nation of nannies, and on the other hand, a grudging acceptance that the yaya sisterhood keeps families and indeed, the economy, back home alive — haunts Filipinos everywhere. Whether in their country or overseas, Filipinos are forced to confront the reality that millions of their countrymen, or more precisely, countrywomen, are toiling in homes, hotels, and hospitals across the planet and however homesick and miserable they are there, millions more at home are dying to be in their shoes.
The issue of OFWs — overseas Filipino workers — is an emotional one because it reflects our torment, or at the very least, our unease about the migration of so many of our citizens. Nearly eight million or one in every 10 Filipinos is abroad. The economic benefits of such large-scale migration (we are second only to Mexico in terms of the number of migrants) are well known: in 2003, OFWs plowed back $7.6 billion in remittances through formal channels; if money sent through informal channels is included, the figure could reach $9.5 billion. Either way, overseas work is the country's main source of foreign exchange and is a major driver of the local economy.
The social cost of this in terms of separated families, especially a whole generation of children growing up without their mothers, is also well known; it has even been immortalized in popular culture through films like the heart-rending Anak (Child). The loneliness and homesickness that migrants suffer, not to mention the discrimination and prejudice they often encounter, cannot be quantified in monetary terms. Neither can anyone convert in any currency the pain, longing, and neglect that scar motherless children.
We are a nation that is centered on family, and for sure, the Filipino family has borne the brunt of the costs of migration, although it, too, has reaped the benefits. This is why the ambivalence about migration resides in the very heart of the family itself. Migration, therefore, cannot be anything but an emotional issue in this country. No other concern can cause so much grief, as many officials have found when they were forced to deal with the public outcry over the government's indifference to abused OFWs. No other issue can rake the coals of so much collective guilt — after all, if our society were better able to provide, there would be no need for mothers to leave in droves. Moreover, as the heated exchange in philippines.com.au so vividly illustrates, no other issue can stir up all the Pinoy hang-ups about race, gender, and social class.
I GREW UP in Quezon City, with five other siblings, cared for by a succession of yayas. The most memorable among them was Soling, a bubbly Igorota from Kiangan, deep in the Cordillera, who was raised in mission schools and so could speak English far better than Tagalog. I remember her as being so good humored that when she had to bathe my two youngest brothers (I have four) and they put up a fight, she merrily ran after and fought mock battles with them just to get them to the shower. Soling said she came from a village that was a three-day walk from the nearest highway. Her stories always had a landscape in them — rivers, trees, and mountains. It is only now that I realize how foreign the suburbs of QC must have been to her.
The yaya phenomenon — women leaving their families to care for the children of others — has been with us a long time. Since at least the 19th century, Filipino women have ventured outside their native villages to go to towns and cities to work as servants for the more affluent. They were often compelled to do so by poverty, a lack of other opportunities, and a desire to help their families. There was, of course, also the lure of the big town or city.
The reality is that a lot of Filipino women have been able to pursue careers, fight causes, even become presidents or flaming feminists (or, for that matter, investigative journalists), because there were other women who took care of the children, cooked the meals, and cleaned the toilets. Because millions of Filipinas have been working as helpers or literally katulong in the homes of others for a long time, generations of Filipino children have been reared by yayas. This is why katulong characters populate popular culture. In films and TV programs, they are portrayed as comic figures with laughable accents and ignorant about the city and modernity. Sometimes, they are also cast in tragic mode, as innocent women seduced by their male employers or treated cruelly by jealous mistresses. Every soap opera worth its name has a katulong character, either to provide comic relief or to act as confidante to the virtuous and weepy woman in the lead role. Commercials abound with maids, so that even Sharon Cuneta's yaya, although not quite the megastar that her mistress is, has now also become a TV icon.
Popular culture reflects the reality that the yaya is a central figure in the Filipino home. As surrogate mother, reliable servant, and pillar of domestic harmony, she is indispensable. The yaya is a fixture not just in the mansions of the wealthy, but also in middle- and lower-middle-class homes where mothers work and so rely on yaya for child care. Indeed, the yaya represents one archetype of Filipina femininity: self-sacrificing, loyal, with lots of EQ, even if sometimes lacking in IQ.
The same factors that have forced women to find employment as yaya for decades are the same ones that compel millions of Filipinas today to go overseas to work. A 2004 Asian Development Bank study estimated that 65 percent of OFWs are women, most of them working in the service industry, providing various forms of nurturing and caregiving, whether as domestic helpers, nannies, chambermaids, nurses, hospital attendants, or even as entertainers and bar companions. The numbers are so high (200,000 Pinay maids in Hong Kong; 150,000 in Singapore; 100,000 in Taiwan; close to a million in the Gulf; and perhaps over half a million in Europe) that in many of these countries, the stereotype of the Filipina is that of a nanny.
Some years ago, when the Oxford English Dictionary listed among the many definitions of the word "Filipina," one that said nanny or maid, Filipinos were in an uproar, accusing the venerable OED of casting a slur on the national dignity.
The problem was that there was, everyone knew, an element of truth in what the OED had printed. That was why it hurt so much. With our collective ego already so bruised, to be called a nation of nannies was so psychologically devastating, the only way to salvage our dignity was to put up a fight to defend not so much the honor of nannies, but that of a psychologically battered nation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sheila Coronel is director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and a professor of professional practice at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Coronel began her reporting career in 1982, when she joined the staff of Philippine Panorama, a widely read magazine in her native Philippines. Coronel is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including Coups, Cults & Cannibals, a collection of reporting; The Rulemakers: How the wealthy and well-born dominate Congress; and Pork and other Perks: Corruption and Governance in the Philippines. She has received numerous awards and widespread recognition of her work. She received an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of the Philippines, and a master's degree in political sociology from the London School of Economics.
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