Indonesian domestic helpers’ Hong Kong success stories – how they save and take courses to open businesses back home

I have always been puzzled by the choice of 320,000 migrant workers, overwhelmingly women, to work in Hong Kong. As an Indonesian, I would constantly wonder why 150,000 people from Indonesia willingly reduce themselves to the position, as many people have perceived it, of slaves. Even as I matured and started to grasp basic economic concepts, it was not immediately clear to me why, for a meagre $550 a month, many Indonesians would go live in another country and take care of someone else's family while leaving their own back home.

This article by the South China Morning Post shines some light on the issue. It reports the story of Fera Nuraini, a domestic worker from East Java who lived in Hong Kong for ten years before going back in 2015. Finding out that a job in Hong Kong would pay double the wages than a job in Indonesia, she was persuaded to move because of better opportunities. When she returned she had already invested in gold, the payoff of which she used to invest in land. In her first year back, she started numerous business ventures, eventually settling on a business that processes cassava into a rice-like subsittute (thiwul). A second story recounts how another domestic worker, Siti Maryam, went back to open her own salon, earning her the Indonesian Migrant Worker's Award from an NGO (recalling Aihwa Ong's piece on disjointed economies, it would be interesting to further investigate NGOs - the fact that there is an award like this is surprising).

Probably the most interesting example, however, is that of Nelis, who left her 2 year old son and worked in Hong Kong for a staggering 24 years, enough time for her son to marry and have his own family. Nelis feels she is treated as family by her employers; the article states, "feels she has her own family in Hong Kong and sees no immediate reason to return to Indonesia." This is very fascinating as it opens up the question of how familial relations change when domestic labour exports itself abroad.

Of course, workers like Nuraini and Nelis stress how lucky they have been. The former had no family to take care of when she left, so her financial burden was lighter, while Nelis was fortunate to have a welcoming family. At the beginning of the article, the SCMP mentions the famous case of Erwiana, who was beaten in the course of eight months by her employer. Nevertheless, this article complicates the view that domestic work equates purely to perpetual servitude. Indeed, domestic work offers opportunities where they are absent at home, giving migrant workers basic income to invest in further capital or to sustain their families. This article opens up a myriad of further questions. How do governments react to this? How do the experiences of Indonesians and Filipinos differ? How do motivations of workers from urban centers differ from those that come from rural outskirts? What motivates workers to go to different countries? I could understand why some are attracted to Hong Kong - the fact that Erwiana's employer is behind bars for six years is a testament to the city-state's commitment to the rule of law and protections for domestic workers. However, the fact that some choose to go to countries like Saudi Arabia or Malaysia, where protections towards migrant workers (especially women) are much more loose, still confounds me.