Lai, Ming-Yan.
MING-YAN LAI teaches cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her work focuses on gender, oppositional discourses, and alternative representations for the marginalized. Her book on the gender politics of nativist contestation of modernity in China and Taiwan is forthcoming from the State University of New York Press. She is currently conducting research on foreign domestic workers' public articulations and representations in Hong Kong.
-- Women's Studies Quarterly, Fall 2007
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Excluded, like many other marginalized and dispossessed groups, from 5 the negotiating site where decisions ultimately affecting their lives and livelihoods were being hammered out, Indonesian domestic workers (IDWs) nonetheless commanded attention with their impassioned, vibrant presence in the grassroots protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) during its sixth ministerial conference in Hong Kong. The IDWs constituted the largest and most prominent contingent of "local" demonstrators. Under the coalitional umbrella of KOTKIHO (Hong Kong Coalition of Indonesian Migrant Workers Organizations), hundreds of vivacious women marched and danced to music drummed up from traditional handheld gongs; sang folk and pop songs with rewritten, progressive lyrics; waved bold banners; staged a funeral procession for the WTO; killed a gigantic puppet WTOsaurus; and performed dramatic scenes of abuse, exploitation, and resistance in the approved protest zones. Remarkable in its visual impact, their activism is especially striking against the pervasive public effacement that plagues migrant workers in general and foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in particular. Countering the invisibility and isolation of their work and everyday existence in individual households, which are discursively reinforced by the prevalent representation of migrant women as helpless victims of trafficking, the IDWs' prominent participation in the WTO protests highlights the tenacity of activist resistance in our contemporary world, which is simultaneously connected and fragmented by global capitalism.
Although the several hundred IDWs participating in the WTO protest amount to less than 1 percent of the one-hundred-thousand-plus Indonesian women engaged in migrant domestic work in Hong Kong, their activist involvement is highly significant, not least in shedding a different light on IDWs than that of their objectification and disciplining into submissive, toiling bodies by dominant discourses and actual employment practices. Joining the tenacious struggle begun by Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong more than two decades ago, IDW activism compels our recognition of FDWs' agency in proclaiming a subjectivity and identity against their reduction to domestic bodies at the beck and call of their employers and in service to their nations. The rich array of IDW organizations in Hong Kong underscores the diversity of identification underlying the solidarity of this activism. With the right to association they enjoy under the Hong Kong Employment Ordinance, IDWs in Hong Kong have established numerous organizations catering to different interests and serving different purposes, including labor unions, religious groups, vocational training organizations, charity associations, and cultural groups. The coalitional umbrella of KOTKIHO, formed in 2000, garners seven such diverse organizations together for solidarity struggles to better the conditions of IDWs.
As a participant-observer of KOTKIHO's repeated collective actions for wage increases and changes in discriminatory government policies even before the WTO protest, I have witnessed impressive turnouts and passionate commitment to articulating the common concerns and redressing the exploitation and abuse of IDWs in particular and FDWs in general. Because of its global scale, the WTO protest offered an opportunity for KOTKIHO to accentuate and consolidate this collective activist agency, drawing in new participants and energizing veteran activists. Before the weeklong multinational activities coordinated by the Hong Kong People's Alliance in the week of the WTO ministerial, KOTKIHO staged two massive preparatory rallies on successive Sundays at Victoria Park, a transient "home" that IDWs claim for themselves on their rest days. The rallies featured cultural performances by members of its constitutive organizations and sing-along sessions at which audiences could learn songs with lyrics, set to familiar melodies, about the plight, but also indomitable courage, of Indonesian migrant workers, as well as speeches by Indonesian activists and migrant nongovernmental-organization leaders about the impact of the WTO on the Indonesian economy and the consequent rise in labor migration. These preparatory rallies doubled as educational and mobilizing vehicles, and rehearsals for the WTO protest, which included festive onstage performances celebrating solidarity among migrants, workers, and peasants of different nationalities, and carnivalesque marches from Victoria Park through busy streets to the designated protest zone near the ministerial conference venue. From the KOTKIHO preparatory rallies to the WTO protest marches and rallies, IDW participants enacted a collective activist subjectivity and experienced a solidarity struggle that highlighted national identity even as it dramatized the urgency and power of coalition building across boundaries.
Coalition building figured prominently in the activities that KOTKIHO took part in throughout the WTO protest. In the stage backdrops, banners, and giant posters for the rallies and marches, the particular demands of the IDWs as migrant workers in Hong Kong were put side by side and given equal attention with general calls for "sinking the WTO." IDW demands inscribed in these protest props included such long-standing demands as the following: stop underpayment; stop abuses and discrimination of migrants; scrap the new condition of stay (which requires FDWs to leave Hong Kong within two weeks after contract termination, thus making it extremely difficult for them to find new employment without going through the whole costly process of returning to their home country and applying for another agency placement); enact wage increases now; and use the employers' levy to compensate and protect FDWs. Next to these particular demands, directly tied to the FDWs' conditions of work and stay, were general calls for getting the WTO out of the industries to be covered by the agreement under negotiation, including agriculture and food, fisheries, and services. Linking these two sets of demands is the concept of commodification, as indicated in the slogan "No to Commodification of Workers, Women, and Migrants" and explained in KOTKIHO rallies by activists from Indonesian NGOs and migrant organizations in Hong Kong.
Although this discursive link proved rather elusive to IDW participants in the protest, as my conversations with many of them during the rallies revealed, the actual practice of marching side by side with Korean peasants, Filipino fishers, and workers and labor activists from different countries impressed IDW participants of a tangible connection between their particular woes and poor people's struggles all over the world. The empowerment experienced in a grassroots protest on a global scale and the collectivity articulated in activist struggle was palpable and keenly expressed. Even if their participation was immediately motivated by the opportunity to capitalize on the media coverage at a global event, to call attention to their particular conditions of exploitation and demands for redress, the experience of a contingent global coalitional struggle was in itself motivating and generative of further activism. Marching with them, I, too, was heartened and energized by the collective action, though my participation was differently motivated by my ongoing research on FDW representational practices in Hong Kong. As we were caught together in a tear gas attack by the Hong Kong police to disperse a march that had gone off the designated course, a supportive bond was forged in the actual practice of resistance. Notwithstanding the fluidity and contingency of this activist bond, which became apparent once we emerged from the confrontation to face the police's strategic maneuver to differentiate the "foreign" protestors from "local sympathizers" for targeted repression and control, the moment of solidarity helped to nurture a growing collectivity of IDW activists and to prime the ground for further coalitional struggles with local and transnational activist groups down the line.
