Maid in China:
More Workers Flock
To Cities as 'Aunties'

SHANGHAI -- When he was growing up in the Chinese countryside in the 1980s, Wang Jianlong never dreamed he'd grow up to have a maid.

"It was impossible to have a maid at home," recalled Mr. Wang, 25 years old, who runs his own arts-and-crafts business. "Even rich people didn't have maids."

As Mr. Wang talked, Luo Youlian, a slight, weathered woman, bent down and swept around his feet in his sparsely furnished three-room apartment. She gathered up the dirty dishes from the dinner she had cooked him the night before and started washing them.

Ms. Luo worked for Mr. Wang seven days a week, 10 hours a day. She was constantly in motion -- sweeping, dusting, washing windows, doing laundry. She earned about $50 in yuan a month. "It's a reasonable price to pay her," said Mr. Wang, who hired Ms. Luo through an agency.

The emergence of a large servant class, mostly low-paid maids from the countryside, is the latest sign of how money is transforming Chinese society -- and hardening class divisions. Communist inhibitions about hiring servants have largely disappeared. Rising wages have given city dwellers the wherewithal to hire the help they need. And an influx of migrant workers from the countryside has created a class of willing, low-wage workers.

For many middle-class families, hiring a maid has become an affordable luxury. While the per capita income in Shanghai last year exceeded about $1,600, wages for the city's three million migrant workers are about half that, according to Cao Jinqing, a sociologist who studies migrant workers. Migrant workers lack many of the legal rights and employment benefits residents enjoy. Migrants' medical expenses are high, as are fees for enrolling their children in school.

"Mao eliminated class differences," says Prof. Cao. "But with all the changes in China, class differences are coming back."

Ayis, or "aunties," as maids are known in Chinese, are a topic of constant discussion among Shanghai's growing middle class: where to find them, how to keep a good one.

In a restaurant in a downtown office building, three professional women stylishly dressed in black talked about how hard it is to get good help.

Wang Zheng, who works for a Shanghai public-relations business, has been looking for a good ayi for three years to take care of her daughter while she and her husband work. In the meantime, the child lives with her grandparents. "In two years we went through four different ayis," says Mrs. Zheng.

Recently a Hong Kong company opened an office in Beijing advertising Filipino maids, promoting them as having "a better submissive consciousness." The company handed out brochures picturing maids serving tea in pink and white uniforms. While the company says most of the inquiries it has had so far have been from expatriate families, it has also begun to hear from nouveau riche Chinese taken with the cachet of employing a foreign maid.

Ms. Luo is in many ways a victim of both old and new China. She is 32 but looks much older. Her hands are wrinkled and chapped. She seldom smiles, and she looks down when she talks. She first came to Shanghai from the poor province of Anhui, about 300 miles west of here, in early 1998 after divorcing her husband -- a situation that left her ostracized in her small village and with no way to support herself and her 2-year-old daughter. The child went to live with Ms. Luo's mother-in-law.

Hired by a Shanghai family as a live-in maid for about $50 a month, Ms. Luo arrived to find her middle-class employer only willing to pay her less than $45.

"I didn't argue," says Ms. Luo. "I needed the money."

Over the next eight months, Ms. Luo says, her employer shouted at her and watched how she folded laundry, how she cleaned the windows, how she cooked meals.

Finally Ms. Luo quit and went to work for an elderly man who hired her to live in and help take care of his elderly wife. Ms. Luo slept on the living room couch but soon was fending off sexual advances from the man. Ms. Luo says she didn't dare complain to the authorities about her treatment because she, like millions of other migrant workers, is in Shanghai illegally. She lacks a proper residence permit.

Last fall, Ms. Luo moved in with a 72-year-old retired textile worker, Zhao Shiying, and her husband, a retired shop clerk, in their tiny fifth-floor walk-up.

She slept on a wooden platform in a windowless alcove. And with space so tight, Ms. Luo ate her meals with the couple at a small round table in their bedroom. Typically she made a meat dish, vegetables and rice. But Ms. Luo says she was never allowed to eat the meat, just the vegetables. Her employers, she says, told her meat was too expensive. "I was angry, but what could I do," says Ms. Luo. "I am the maid."

Ms. Zhao says she never treated Ms. Luo unfairly and is sorry she decided to leave. "This is a good way to use workers from the countryside," says Ms. Zhao. "They help Shanghai people doing work that Shanghai people don't want to do."

A few months ago, Mr. Wang, the 25-year-old entrepreneur, moved, putting Ms. Luo out of work yet again. She now gets up at 5:30 in the morning and bicycles an hour from the 9-by-9 attic room she rents to a company cafeteria where she washes dishes until 3 p.m. She then heads to a second job cleaning the offices of a cosmetic firm.

Despite her bad experiences, Ms. Luo says she would like to work again as a live-in ayi. It's the best way she can earn a living, she says, and she likes feeling part of a family.

Ms. Luo sends about $12 a month home to support her daughter and up to about $25 a month to her mother. But since moving to Shanghai five years ago, Ms. Luo has been able to save enough money to visit home only twice. When she calls home these days, she says, her daughter sometimes doesn't recognize her voice.

"I never compare my life to the life of these rich people in Shanghai" she says. "I always think it's all about a person's destiny. The people I work for have a good destiny. I don't."