THE shortage of domestic servants in Malaysia gets worse every year, driving people urgently needing their services crazy with exasperation.”
That was the opening sentence in a report in The Star published on March 4, 1976. As the song goes, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Uh huh.
Thirty-six years on, we are still facing a shortage, although “domestic servants” have morphed into “domestic workers” a.k.a. “maids” of foreign origin.
Let’s see, in 1976, I was in secondary school and sharing household and cooking chores with my sisters. We had long dispensed with the services of a servant/maid. When the last local woman who did our laundry became unreliable, my parents bought our first washing machine and that was it.
Going further back, we had a mother-and-daughter team who did the laundry and cleaned house as well. Actually the daughter, Bedah, was more our playmate. We had fun playing hide-and-seek and masak-masak in the wooden doll-house my dad built.
And when I was a very little girl living in Penang, my mum had a young live-in servant. Poor Ah Hong had a hard time managing my unruly brother, who slashed her arm with a butter knife after a nasty spat. After we moved to Kuala Lumpur, we lost touch with her.
For most of my growing years, my family was fortunate enough to have domestic help who did the heavy-duty stuff. But we kids still had our chores: washing our school shoes, taking out the garbage, weeding the garden and mowing the lawn. One chore which I really hated was peeling and cleaning prawns as I would always end up with bleeding fingers.
When we were in-between servants (we never called them maids in those days), we did the sweeping, mopping, windows, fans, bathrooms and, the most back-breaking of all, the laundry by hand.
I also learned how to hammer nails, saw wood, change light bulbs, use an electric drill, paint walls and fences, build chicken coops, dig wells and even mix cement from my extremely clever handyman dad.
So where did I go so wrong with my own kids?
Do I blame it on the fact that both my husband and I work and we had no time nor the energy to mend and clean on the weekends, leaving it all to the maid, thereby setting a poor example to my kids?
Do I excuse myself that middle class families mollycoddle their children in these prosperous times?
Whatever the reason, I stand guilty of raising children who are inadequately skilled in a lot of things my generation took for granted or were expected to know.
Mind you, they are great kids. They never did drugs nor partied excessively; never got me summoned to school over their grades or discipline problems. As adults, they are articulate and interesting individuals. They are respectful and caring towards their grandparents who live with us.
Yet, they have never toiled at anything in the house and won’t even wash their own cups simply because they grew up with maids who did everything for them.
But to be fair to them, the rot started earlier. By “rot”, I mean the diminishing ability to be self-reliant in keeping one’s house in order without external help.
Because Dad could build, mend and repair just about anything and Mum was an excellent cook and extremely house-proud, between them, my siblings and I were taught a lot of skills.
My husband, on the other hand, isn’t as handy. His answer to fixing anything is super glue. Despite my childhood training, I haven’t applied my skills much either. I quite happily gave up gardening when my lawn-mower broke down,
Fortunately, we can enlist the services of a gardener, plumber or electrician to fix whatever stuff that goes on the blink because they are affordable.
And for now, a maid.
With all these support services, our lives are really easy and comfortable. The downside is today’s convenient ways have made us soft, lazy and wasteful.
Yet, things are changing. If 36 years ago, we moaned the extinction of local servants, now we moan about the availability of foreign maids.
The news isn’t good. No matter how hard our Government is trying to re-establish the supply line from Indonesia, the fact remains that Malaysia is not the first choice for such workers.
What’s more, the countries that have long supplied us with cheap labour are enjoying economic growth and with it better job opportunities for their people.
For now, we can take pride that almost any middle class family can hire a maid. In the not-too-distant future, it may not be the case any more. Already, the agency fees and the salaries are getting painfully high.
Ironically, the richer and more developed a country, the more expensive hired help is. So in countries like Australia, the United States and Britain, DIY stores are huge business because there they don’t call in the plumber or electrician at the slightest trouble. Live-in maids are only for the wealthy.
In all likelihood, the time my daughters marry, they will have to figure out how to keep house and raise kids without a live-in maid.
My son? He sheepishly admitted he didn’t know how to sew a loose button or a tear in his pants. For the sake of my future daughter-in-law and grandchildren, I have decided he’s going to start becoming a bit more like grandpa.
It starts this Saturday when my Indonesian maid goes on home leave for Hari Raya. As they say, “Necessity is the mother of invention” so this mother who has been terribly remiss with her children’s basic life skills, is going to invent some necessity on the home front.
More importantly, better late than never, especially when we still have clever grandpa to teach the kids a handy tip or two. No super glue for them.
So Aunty, So What? By JUNE H.L. WONG
> The writer, if she could turn back time, would certainly have done some things differently in the way she raised her kids. On a more cheerful note, Selamat Hari Raya Aidil Fitri! 