Women's Work, by Megan K Stack
YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM
Women’s Work: A Personal Reckoning with Labour, Motherhood and Privilege Scribe £16.99 It’s always a pleasure to read a piece of writing by a hard-nosed female war correspondent who’s been immersed in all the horrors of war, but for whom nothing has ever been as tough as being a first-time mother to a screaming baby who won’t sleep.
This was the case for Megan K Stack, who left her job as war correspondent for the Los Angeles Times to enter the imagined idyll of being a mother and writer-from-home. She soon found herself in a domestic mini-war zone: holed up in a rented apartment in a high-rise block in the business district of Beijing, going mad with exhaustion and despair thanks to the constantly crying baby: ‘Aerial bombardment had been easier for my nerves to withstand. Lord, somebody deliver me into a fighting zone. Shove me between life and death. Not half-awake-life-with-crying. Not this, please.’
Like many mothers, she was shocked and affronted when her husband went back to work a couple of weeks after the birth. How dare he? Parenthood should be more equal than this. But she depended on his salary. And, like many
mothers, she describes all this as if she’s the first person ever to have had a baby.
It’s gripping, though: admirably honest and guilt-ridden. It shouldn’t really be called Women’s Work. That makes it sound too general and polemiclike. There are a few Big Feminist Observations: ‘No woman needs to convince me that she would give her life for her children, because every mother has already given her life for her children. When it comes to time, it is almost always the woman who pays.’ But mainly, it’s a personal memoir of one mother and her three female migrant domestic helps, one in China and two in India (where she and her journalist husband moved next), and it reads like a novel, with snappy dialogue and lots of small, character-revealing incidents.
If you’re fascinated (as I am) by the
absurd global economic situation that forces mothers to leave their children and travel thousands of miles to look after other people’s children and clean their houses, you’ll be riveted. ‘Help is affordable,’ Stack’s friends remind her when she’s at the nadir of desperation, and she knows they mean ‘Human beings are cheap here.’ But she can’t resist.
Xiao-li, the agency cleaner she employs in the depth of despair, is as soothing to the pain and chaos of early motherhood as was the epidural to which she’d succumbed (having vowed not to) before going in for an emergency C-section. Suddenly the flat is sparkling and the cooking is done, and soon the family can’t manage without her. Xiao-li’s two-hour commute across rainy, smoggy, traffic-clogged Beijing doesn’t bear thinking about, but
Stack does think about it, unlike her husband who refers to Xiao-li simply as ‘the full-time maid’. This drives Stack mad. She watches with appalled fascination as, each afternoon, Xiao-li puts her head down on the kitchen work surface, her neck wrenched round in an ‘impossible twist’, and has a nap, refusing Stack’s offer of the spare bed.
Xiao-li has left her own three-yearold child with her parents in the provinces. The cruelty of this makes Stack feel grubby: ‘Like Apple computers or Goodyear car tyres, I reaped the benefit of cheap Chinese labour. I fretted over the condition of my soul.’ Fretted; but didn’t do anything about it, as Xiao-li was her life raft.
I did slightly think ‘Diddums’ when, on moving to Delhi for husband’s new job, they found they struggled on Sundays when both the nanny and the cook (Mary and Pooja) had their day off. On one stressful day when the nanny is ill with typhoid, Stack has to miss a day’s writing and take her own child to the park. But again, I admired her honesty in admitting this total dependency.
Both Mary and Pooja have children whom they’ve abandoned in order to earn the money to pay for their education. Mary lives on the other side of Delhi, near the airport, and Pooja lives in the servants’ quarters behind Stack’s house, a stifling hellhole where she gets beaten up by her husband who suspects her of having an affair, which she’s not.
Stack becomes more and more fascinated by these women’s personal lives, and the final section of the book is devoted to her interviewing all three of them. ‘I left him when he needed me most,’ says Pooja, of her own son. So it’s a chain of guilt.
There are 100 million domestic workers in the world, 80 per cent of them women and, in this clear-eyed microcosm, Stack has forced us to think about them.