********************************* UPDATE*********************************
Wilma’s employers have changed their minds and allowed her 14 days’ leave to include her mandatory quarantine. She WILL be able to go to Evie’s graduation. Annie is helping her to try and find a more reasonably-priced ticket. So this story will have a happy ending after all.
In the end, Wilma* will not make it to Evie’s* graduation next month. Unable to square the current 14 days’ mandatory quarantine in the Philippines with her Hong Kong employers, she will stay here and hope to see Evie later in the year, when she will have worked long enough to qualify for a week off. Rules are rules. Instead Evie’s proud grandmother will be in the audience to see the first member of their family to go to university receive her degree in Information Technology. Wilma will Skype, perhaps, and see the photographs, sharing her joy and tears with the other Aunties. This is what it’s all been for.
It’s been a difficult year all round in Hong Kong, what with the anti-government protests and now the coronavirus, but Wilma has seen off more personal challenges. She hopes that she’s now turned a corner. She first left her baby son several years ago to come and work in Hong Kong. Her husband having left for the US, she was left as sole provider for her family, and caring for an elderly ye-ye 爷爷 seemed like the obvious route. She quickly made friends among the communities of Foreign Domestic Helpers (FDH) here.
A few years later, with the demise of her patient, she was extraneous to requirements, since her employer already had one longstanding helper, so she was looking for another post. If you lose your job here you have only a few short weeks to find another position before your visa expires and you have to return home to the Philippines or Indonesia or wherever and look for a job and visa from there.
Last spring Wilma learned that her brother was on his deathbed in hospital in the Philippines. He’d avoided going to the doctor about his thyroid condition – doctors are expensive and men you just do – and now was breathing with difficulty through his last days. Wilma Skyped him for a day and a night until he lost consciousness. She managed to get back home to her family but only after her brother was dead and buried, and the grief weighed heavily. Luckily she found a new position with a Chinese family in Hong Kong soon after this and waited for the paperwork and visa.
A few weeks later she’d returned to Hong Kong and, having finished her duties for the day, waited for her boyfriend Fernando* to Skype. It was a special evening, their first anniversary, and she couldn’t wait to speak to him. The call never came. The following morning she heard that he’d been shot dead in their home town in the Philippines. Months later no-one has got to the bottom of the story but there’s speculation that Fernando, a recovering addict clean for years, had become entangled with the drug gangs in their hometown through an addict friend who’d just returned from the US. It was August, Ghost Month here in Hong Kong, the month where the gates of Hell open, and the superstitious believe that unexplained deaths are more likely. Her Chinese employers were likely to be superstitious and not want to be associated in any way with such an unexplained and unexpected death as Fernando’s, so Wilma kept her grief to herself in order to hold on to her new job. If she left abruptly to go to Fernando’s funeral she’d be unlikely to get a good employment reference and therefore another job and visa to return to Hong Kong. Besides which, she couldn’t afford the fare. A bereft and suicidal Wilma, in deep grief for the second time in four months, could not say her last goodbyes to Fernando. All she had left of him are memories of the evenings of long Skype calls.
Wilma took comfort and support from her friends. On her weekly day off she’d go bar-hopping with the new friends she’d made around this different part of town. She’d drink too much and dull her pain, and once received a huge telling off and a warning from her employer for breaking a curfew. (FDHs are supposed to have a 24 hour free day off but this is widely flouted by some employers, who are “protective” of their helpers.) Wilma found that trying to fit in with these new girls, most of whom were several years younger than her was increasing her financial difficulties.
She turned to a long-standing friend, Annie* who’d known her since Wilma had dated her brother some years previously. Annie had spent most Saturday evenings with Wilma before she’d moved and felt a little resentful at being dropped by her old friend in favour of local girls who loved to party. Annie was shocked to discover that Wilma was heavily in debt to an “informal loan provider,” who had taken Wilma’s passport as security, and that this was another reason why she could not return to the Philippines when Fernando was murdered.
Wilma was in a bind. Already in debt, without her passport, having exhausted her friend’s goodwill she still had to meet payments for Evie’s university fees and provide for her mother who was looking after her son. She couldn’t ask for help from the Philippines Consulate, because this would mean admitting that she’d given up her passport, still technically the property of the Philippines Government. There had recently been a raid of loan providers in Hong Kong and passports belonging to several Phillipinos had been confiscated so by asking for consular assistance it was entirely possible that she would incriminate herself further and risk being deported.
Hearing this story, just one among so many others, Annie’s employer was appalled at how vulnerable Wilma now was, the increased precarity of her existence added to the precipice of her grief. Mr Wong’s* interest rate was so shockingly high such that Wilma would not be able to repay him for years, all for the sake of a few thousand HKD, a huge sum for a helper but not extortionate to an expat. The employer somehow found the cash to pay off Mr Wong, who was quite pleasant and approachable in the end, and returned Wilma’s passport immediately, meaning that she had some security away from the threat of being deported. Wilma repays her in manageable instalments.
A few months later, Wilma has even managed to buy a graduation ring for Evie, the tradition in the Philippines. Despite the coronavirus quarantine, it’s a relatively happy ending.
*This is a true story of real people, though quite a common one. Names have been changed to protect identities.