From Maids to Diplomats, Confusion Reigns Before Hong Kong Hand-Over

Like thousands of other Filipinas, Helen Tumagay spends her days cleaning the floors and washing the toilets of Hong Kong.

She came here two years ago, at the age of 24, to work as a maid for a Hong Kong Chinese family. In the Philippine province of Ilocos Sur, that is a well-trod path. Four of Helen’s sisters are now also toiling as maids in Hong Kong.

She is paid about $480 a month, plus her room. Out of that, Helen takes about $195 and sends it back home to her mother and to the two sisters and one brother who are still squeezing out a living in the Philippines.

Recently, however, Helen says she has been thinking--just as a precaution, of course--of applying to go to Canada.

Why? It’s not certain yet whether, after China regains sovereignty over Hong Kong on July 1, 1997, it will continue to permit the legions of maids from the Philippines (and from other countries, such as Thailand and Sri Lanka) to continue to work here. The fear is that the unskilled jobs in Hong Kong now being taken by workers from overseas will, in the future, be filled by people from inside China.

“The Chinese government has never made any official policy statement” about what will happen to domestic workers in 1997, says Cynthia Tellez of the Mission for Filipino Migrants. “You hear rumors that they have been training some of their [Chinese] women on modern household technology. After all, there are opportunities here!”

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Such fears may well be exaggerated. Chances are that the citizens of Hong Kong will be permitted to keep their maids; China doesn’t want to needlessly antagonize ordinary middle-class people in Hong Kong after the 1997 takeover.

Indeed, if there is any change in policy at all, it may be the reverse: The Chinese government may want to open the way for Philippine maids to begin working in Guangdong province adjoining Hong Kong, or in Beijing and Shanghai. Imported maids may become more of a status symbol in China than the cellular phone.

Nevertheless, the maids’ jitters illustrate how much remains uncertain and unresolved in Hong Kong with little more than a year to go before the British government hands its colony back to China.

The most vibrant and dynamic city in Asia is now remarkably unsettled. Nobody in Hong Kong seems to be able to divine what the rules will be once China takes over. Indeed, no one even knows whether, or under what circumstances, they will have to ask China for approval and when they can act on their own, without China’s permission.

The signs of the coming transition are now pervasive here.

Britain is building a consulate, where its officials will work after 1997--like a landlord preparing to move into a guest cottage on the estate he will no longer own.

Hong Kong’s government-run broadcasting station, RTHK, just announced plans to start a radio channel in Mandarin next year. Beijing decided a few weeks ago that residents of Hong Kong next year would observe China’s National Day, the Oct. 1 holiday commemorating the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in honor of the day in 1949 when Mao Tse-tung announced from the rostrum at Tiananmen Square that “the Chinese people have stood up.”

Understandably, press coverage here has focused on the top-level politics between China and Britain--particularly on the continuing struggles between Hong Kong Gov. Chris Patten, Britain’s top representative here, who has been pressing for democratic reforms, and the Communist Party leadership in Beijing, which wants no part of democracy.

Typically, when the London newspaper Financial Times threw a party to open a Hong Kong edition last month, a top Chinese official showed up early and left five minutes before Patten arrived.

China’s eagerness to eviscerate political opposition in Hong Kong is apparently boundless. Eight days ago, China finalized its plans to disband Hong Kong’s democratically elected legislature. The action was announced by a committee picked by China. The vote by the Hong Kong members of the committee to support China’s position was 92 to 1.

This margin was apparently still too close for China’s comfort. Beijing’s top representative in Hong Kong, Lu Ping, promptly announced that the single man who dissented will be disqualified from serving on further bodies to help govern Hong Kong. It was as though China was applying Marxist-Leninist principles of democratic centralism to Hong Kong, requiring that all decisions be unanimous.

In its 1984 agreement with Britain, China promised that it would leave Hong Kong with “a high degree of autonomy” to govern its own affairs for 50 years after 1997. But that phrase remains undefined--and episodes such as the disbanding of the elected legislature show that, at best, Hong Kong’s autonomy will be limited.

Still, all the attention given to the high-level skirmishing between Patten and Beijing tends to obscure the broader story of how, in countless ways, the lives of ordinary people and groups in Hong Kong society are now up in the air.

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About 40,000 people a year are leaving Hong Kong, and the rate is expected to pick up in the months before and immediately after July 1, 1997. A recent poll showed that 40% of respondents said they would leave--or try to--if the changes after 1997 were “unsuitable.”

In one telling episode a few weeks ago, the Lutheran World Federation decided to ask the Chinese government whether it could go ahead with plans, made long ago, to hold its international conference in Hong Kong in July 1997, little more than a week after the takeover date.

At first, Chinese officials in Beijing and Hong Kong advised the Lutherans not to hold their conference in Hong Kong; they suggested Lutherans from around the world might not be granted visas.

That sparked a furor among religious groups in Hong Kong, who took it as a sign that China intended to restrict religious freedom. Chinese officials later retreated and said the Lutherans could hold their international conference here after all.

Chinese officials complained that they should have been informed by British authorities in Hong Kong about the Lutherans’ plans. The Hong Kong government countered that it did not even keep track of religious conventions because they were not the government’s business. For now, China hasn’t worked out what will be its business in Hong Kong and what won’t.

All this uncertainty gives fin de siecle Hong Kong a mood of ferment and fatalism. It also heightens the unease of people here, such as Helen Tumagay.

There are now an estimated 130,000 Filipinos in Hong Kong, and most of them, like Helen, are doing domestic work. They come here on two-year contracts under which they are required to go back home immediately if they leave the household where they are working.

On Sundays, the customary maids’ day off, Hong Kong’s central district becomes a mini-Manila as young women from the Philippines gather in open areas, picnicking, swapping movie magazines, reading the Bible and trading rumors about the future.

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Tumagay is happy in Hong Kong. “When I arrived here, I experienced the life of a born-again Christian,” she said. “My friends showed me the word of God.”

What will happen to her and to her fellow maids after the takeover in 1997? She shrugs: “God’s will be done.”

The International Outlook column appears here every other Monday.

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Will They Stay or Will They Go?

Here are key results from a poll of Hong Kong residents:

1. Would you leave or seek means to leave if changes are unsuitable to you after 1997?

Yes: 40%

No: 40%

Like to, but can’t: 8%

Don’t know: 12%

2. What is the major change which you would find so unsuitable as to make you seek to leave?

Personal standard of living: 11%

The way of life (freedom): 29%

Family prospects: 10%

Economic prospects: 21%

Politics prospects/stability: 23%

Other: 2%

Don’t know: 4%

Source: Poll taken in February by the Hong Kong Transition Project, which includes researchers from Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong University,

the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of Southern Queensland and the University of Hawaii.