Settling In

‘And have you settled in?’ Thank you,
Yes. Barely seen a cop at all.
The food’s the best I’ve ever had,
The women the most beautiful,
And the city the most faithful
To Alice Through the Looking Glass
It’s ever been my joy to pass.

One day I saw, in Chai Wan Park,
An orgy of terrapin!
The locals are friendly enough —
Though the ex-pats are rather grim
And full of daft opinion
On Blighty and how she’s altered
Since they left her at the altar.

But it’s not all fun. The climate’s
Unbearably hot, like living in
A teenager’s sock. And although
The British are gone, our sins
Have not: one in twenty residents
A foreign domestic worker —
Or ‘servant’, as we used to call them.

It’s not escaped my notice that
The smiles are on the waiting staff
Who serve me gin-and-tonics
And at my jokes, for a tip, laugh.
But on the street, as in the past,
Eyes that still remember bear
Colonialism’s sober stare.

— Hong Kong, April 2024

• • • • •

Out of Hong Kong’s nearly 7.5 million people, 340,000, around 5 per cent of the population and 10 per cent of the working population, are foreign domestic workers. Most of these are from the Philippines and Indonesia, with some from Thailand, Sri Lanka or Nepal. 98.5 per cent of these workers are women, many of whom, I presume, have children in their own country. 327,700 households in Hong Kong, 12 per cent of the total, employ a foreign domestic worker. The median monthly wage is HK$4,500, or about £465 per month. Required by law to live in their employer’s home, on Sundays, the one day of the week they have off, foreign domestic workers congregate in Hong Kong’s public spaces, from the beaches of Hong Kong Island to the elevated walkways and squares of the city, including the undercroft of the HSBC headquarters in Central.

In 2005, Citi Group Inc., in a report titled ‘Plutonomy’, identified the ability of globalisation to ‘rearrange global supply chains with mobile, well-capitalised elites and immigrants’ as the key to increasing and profiting from global economic inequality. ‘The wave of globalisation that the world is currently surfing is clearly to the benefit of global capitalists.’ they wrote. ‘But it is also to the disadvantage of developed market labour, especially at the lower end of the food-chain.’