Maid Sex

[Chase]

KO LYN CHEANG 11:42 PM, JUN 16, 2021
First Place Nonfiction | Wallace Prize 2021
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2021/06/16/when-pregnancy-is-a-crime/

In the cramped bathroom of a condominium apartment in Singapore, Annisa stared at the pregnancy test she had purchased from the Guardian pharmacy. She had suspected she might be pregnant, having missed her period by one week and then two. Now, the double pink lines were incontrovertible evidence. It was November 2014. In January, she would have to go to a neighborhood clinic for her regular medical examination, mandated by the Singaporean government for all foreign domestic workers. There, the government would find out she was pregnant and deport her.

Under the conditions of the work permit issued to Annisa and the 261,800 other live-in domestic helpers like her in Singapore, Annisa could not marry a Singaporean citizen or permanent resident without government approval. Employment regulations further state that “If the foreign employee is a female foreign employee, the foreign employee shall not become pregnant or deliver any child in Singapore during and after the validity period of her work permit,” unless she is already in a government-approved marriage to a Singapore citizen or permanent resident.

A small-boned Javanese woman with glossy waist-length hair, pecan-colored skin and a thick Indonesian accent that made her self-conscious, Annisa had come to Singapore to work hard, pay off the bank loans she had taken to support her husband and two sons, and keep her head down. Pregnancy was not part of the plan.

The Ministry of Manpower requires all domestic workers to undergo medical examinations twice a year, to be conducted by any Singapore-registered doctor. The women would be tested for pregnancy and syphilis twice a year and HIV and tuberculosis every two years. At a clinic, Annisa would be required to sign away her medical privacy rights, pee on a stick and have blood drawn. If any results were positive, the doctor would be obliged to report them to the Ministry of Manpower. The state enforces the policy with an iron-fist: two doctors faced disciplinary inquiries from the Singapore Medical Council in 2000 for failing to report pregnant domestic workers they treated during the Ministry-required check-up.

Annisa remembered a classmate from the English language course she attended at a Queenstown neighborhood mosque who got pregnant. Afraid of being sent home, the woman underwent an abortion at Lucky Plaza. Many domestic workers know that if you do not have the money for an abortion, you can use a quick-and-dirty, clandestine solution: abortion pills. It is “a do-it-yourself method, which involves looking for somebody who would give you a tablet,” said long-time migrant worker activist John Gee. A Filipino domestic worker told me of a friend who “drank something just to get rid of the baby” and started bleeding uncontrollably from her vagina as a result. A case manager at a domestic workers’ nonprofit recounted another case where a domestic worker was hospitalized for trying to use a metal tool to get rid of the fetus.

Annisa never contemplated such gruesome means of solving her problem. She knew her religion, Islam, forbade abortions. “God will punish me next time if I do this,” she thought. “Every day, I cry, cry, cry, especially at night,” she recalled. Sometimes she called her friend from English class who would cry with her. Did she want to go back home, leaving the country before her employer could find out and report her to the Ministry of Manpower, where she would be blacklisted from returning to Singapore to work again? Did she want to have an abortion? She didn’t know.

She was not led to this situation by ignorance. Before arriving in Singapore four years prior, she had spent a month at a center in Jakarta undergoing training organized by her employment agency. There, maids learned English and received training in elderly care and infant care, laundry and ironing, cooking and cleaning. Staff drilled the newly-recruited domestic workers on the rules: “cannot get pregnant, cannot make relationships with Singaporean people.” They call it “house break,” Annisa recounted. They were not to participate in “illegal, immoral or undesirable activities, including breaking up families in Singapore,” as the regulations put it.

About 100 of roughly 200,000 domestic workers who work in Singapore are sent home each year for getting pregnant, according to the latest government-provided data from 2015, though the number could be much higher given unreported cases like Annisa’s. The Ministry of Manpower did not respond to my repeated requests for more up-to-date statistics or the policy’s rationale. The public is reminded of these women’s existences mostly through news fragments and provocative headlines. “Maid hides her stillborn baby in drawer,” read one newspaper article from 2015. When the fetus was found, the 33-year-old Indonesian maid was arrested for “concealment of birth by secret disposal of a dead body” and investigated by the police.

Another pregnant domestic worker threatened her employer and her employer’s eight-year-old with a knife when she did not allow the worker to return home in May 2019. At six-months pregnant, she was sentenced to four months in prison. Self-induced abortions, knife threats, and concealment of stillborn babies are just some of the ways that these desperate women try to fix their desperate situations.

Many, like Annisa, cannot afford to lose their jobs in Singapore. A domestic worker who gets pregnant risks being blacklisted by the Ministry of Manpower from ever returning to Singapore to work. Four of the 15 domestic workers and three of the five non-profit workers I spoke to know about the “blacklist,” though no one knew how long the ban would last because the list is unofficial. When I asked for confirmation on the existence of the blacklist, a Ministry of Manpower spokesperson pointed me to the Ministry website, which states that domestic workers who break any of the work permit conditions “may not be able to enter or work in Singapore” in the future.

“I think this law is really wrong,” said a former domestic worker who now works at Yayasan Dunia Viva Wanita, a shelter for stranded domestic workers in Batam. She added, “Being pregnant is not criminal, not like stealing.”

Annisa found employment with a Singaporean-Chinese couple whose daughter, coincidentally, was adopted from Indonesia because the mother could not have children. Looking for an employer is like entering a lottery: Some bosses beat and verbally abuse domestic workers, withhold their wages or confiscate their phones. Yet other employers treat the hired help as part of the family, bringing them on vacations and instructing the children to call them “auntie,” a nod to their roles as second mothers. Annisa got lucky. During Hari Raya, the Muslim celebration commemorating the end of the festival of Eid, her boss gave her $50 in a traditional red envelope, called a “hong bao” in Mandarin. She fondly remembers giving massages to her Ma’am, the lady boss, who had pancreatic cancer and feeding the family’s small dog, who she treated “like my child,” she said.

At the end of the two-year contract, she managed to pay off the $800 loan. Around that time, she met the man who would change her life in the best and worst ways. --------------------------

 

[Chase]

The day before she graduated from her mosque class, Annisa decided to visit the neighborhood market to buy a new watch; she hoped to look nice for the graduation photographs. She weaved between the throngs of Saturday shoppers, racks of clothing, mounds of garlic and ginger and frozen heaps of fresh fish, to a small watch shop. She picked out a cheap one, which at just six dollars was within her modest budget. Then she noticed a tall Chinese man with thick forearms, a crown of silver hair, and the sun-kissed skin of a day laborer staring at her.

He said he wanted to buy the watch for her. He asked, “How much is this one?”, she recalled. “Six dollars?” he said, apparently incredulous. He bought it for her, but not before slipping his number into her Nokia cellphone. She never got his name and so saved his number as “Bapaku,” meaning “my father” in Indonesian, so that when he called, her friends would not ask questions. The nickname felt appropriate and made her laugh. After all, he was in his mid-50’s, around her father’s age, and made her feel cared for in a way she had not since her father remarried. She also would get “malu” around him — slang for ‘embarrassed’ — “like he was my own father,” she said.

Eight years later, Annisa would speculate that he wanted her because “he think I small small girl, haven’t married.” With a petite 4-foot-9 frame and big, doll-like eyes, Annisa had a ferocious energy and cackling laugh. She started calling him “darling” and he reciprocated with “sayang,” a Malay term of endearment. His English was poor and so was hers — sometimes she would not understand his text messages. But they still wished each other good morning and sent kissy face emojis. After a year of Annisa talking to him almost every day, her friends asked her why she did not save her “darling’s” name in her phone. Annisa said she did not know it. “I think it’s not important. He call me ‘sayang’ and don’t know my name,” she recalled years later, laughing.

One Sunday two years after they first met, he pulled up outside her condominium in his Hyundai — a car he bought on his crane operator’s salary, which Annisa said made him seem “like he’s rich people.” He had taken to ferrying Annisa to her weekly English classes at a mosque in Queenstown. She slid into the passenger seat, and he pulled out two crisp Singapore $50 bills, slipping it toward her bag.

“I give you,” he said. Annisa asked him, “You give me this for what?”

“Ya. Never mind, not a problem. To buy things with,” he said, she remembers.

After class that day, she went to Clementi, a residential and shopping neighborhood with two of her friends and spent all the money on food, a new T-shirt, and a pre-paid StarHub card to send $20 of text messages. She lent $50 to a cash-strapped friend.

That night, she could not sleep, the thought of the unpaid debt growing weightier in her mind. As a Muslim, she believed that “I cannot take the money free,” she said. But she also could not afford to return it. She even contemplated asking her boss for a loan. After several sleepless nights pondering this question, she decided to become his girlfriend. The debt had to be repaid somehow. It was only right.

Later, when they had been together for six years, she would stress that she did not just love him for his money. “I became very in love with him, love like ‘black magic’,” she said. “I don’t go to other boys.” Annisa would occasionally wonder about the deeper psychological reasons she had for loving him. One of her speculations: “I had no love from my father and mother, so maybe I want love like this.”

They started having sex, meeting on Sunday afternoons at Hotel 81, a budget hotel chain best known for being the location of choice for paid sexual rendezvouses in Singapore’s red-light district. For $30, they would get two hours uninterrupted in a soft bed — a rare chance at privacy. Being intimate in her employer’s home was unthinkable and showing affection in public even more so.

Sex with her husband had been very different, she said. “He is Muslim, when make love is simple one.” But with this much-older Singaporean-Chinese man, she experienced for the first time intimacy with someone that “wants to make me happy,” she recalled. It was during these afternoons, sealed off from the rest of the world, that Annisa fell in love. When he fell asleep, she would study his bare feet. They were extremely small in contrast to his tall Herculean build. “I see the feet, then I like, very pity him,” she recalled years later, laughing. “Maybe I like him because he sayang like that. I fall in love with him because he is good.”

Whenever Annisa had sex with her boyfriend, he would give her a pink-and-white blister packet of two round pills, reassure her that it was not poison, and tell her to take one before and one after sex. She complied. It was Postinor-2, also known as the “morning-after-pill,” which prevents pregnancy with minimal side effects. The problem? Both pills are meant to be taken after sex; one within 72 hours and the other less than twelve after the first. ---------------------

 

[Chase]

Less than two months after they started having sex, Annisa learned she was pregnant. She consulted her auntie, her mother’s youngest sister, about what she should do.

Her auntie told her over the phone, “Then you have the kid. I look after for you, then next time you can come back to Singapore to work,” Annisa recalled. Her friends from the English courses at the mosque encouraged her to keep the baby. “The Chinese baby will grow up beautiful,” they said. Annisa concurred: she envied fair skin.

She decided she would return home to give birth. To protect her ability to return to Singapore to work, she lied to her employer and told him that her mother died and that she needed to return home, the same mother who had died almost two decades earlier.

“He was sad because his wife died, and I looked after her and his mother. So he believe me,” Annisa recalled. “He said, ‘You good to my family, I also want to return you back.’”

Annisa asked him for a loan of $1,000. She needed the money to pay for prenatal care and the birth. He gave it to her, just as he had given her a red packet four years prior. The debts owed were an unspoken promise between them that she would return again to work for him.

She left Singapore on a plane to Jakarta with a secret growing inside her. Women who are less fortunate than her, with less sympathetic or gullible employers, get sent by ferry to the nearest Indonesian island of Batam because it is the cheapest way to repatriate someone. Like Annisa, they are often alone and ashamed to return home. A staff member at Yayasan Dunia Viva Wanita, the Batam shelter for domestic workers, said they would house about 10 pregnant women each year, feeding them, bringing them for medical appointments and when the time came, driving them to the hospital to give birth.

The last Annisa had spoken to her boyfriend, the muscular man with the small feet, he had said he did not believe her, that the morning-after pill should have worked, that the baby must be from infidelity. Enraged and indignant, she told him, “You don’t believe me? I’ll go back, give birth, and be healthy. Never mind you never take responsibility for me, never mind, as long as God give me long life and health, then I can go back to kampung and give birth.”

 

[Chase]

A strain on the system
Even if Annisa wanted to marry her boyfriend and even if he could divorce his wife, the couple would face immense legal challenges. The reason dates back to 1973. Singapore, then an eight-year-old, newly independent country, was facing “a big shortage of servants,” according to a newspaper report in the nation’s second-largest English paper. Amid rapid post-independence economic development, locals aspiring to the middle-class did not want to work as low-paid domestic help. Singaporean women torn between the competing demands of being mothers and being productive workers were increasingly hiring foreign maids as a solution to their childcare needs. They were aided by the 1978 Foreign Maid Scheme, which allowed locals to import foreign maids on special visas, subject to less stringent work regulations. Within 10 years from 1978 to 1988, the number of foreign domestic workers would grow from almost zero to 40,000 and with it, so did the number of romantic relationships between Singaporeans and foreign workers.

To control legal immigration into the country — a nation the size of New York City — the government decided to restrict the ability of low-wage migrant workers to marry into Singapore’s resident population. Thus, the government unveiled the Marriage Restriction Policy of 1973. The law is enshrined within Singapore’s Employment of Foreign Manpower Regulations, which state that a work permit holder “shall not go through any form of marriage or apply to marry under any law, religion, custom or usage with a Singapore citizen or permanent resident in or outside Singapore, without the prior approval of the Controller” of Immigration. These rules apply even after the work permit is canceled, unless the worker acquires a S-Pass or Employment Pass, which are work visas for more highly skilled and highly paid foreign workers. In effect, work permit holders face a virtual lifetime restriction on marriage to locals.

On March 28, 1985, then-Minister for Home Affairs and Second Minister for Law Shunmugam Jayakumar delivered a speech in parliament justifying the marriage restriction policy. It was the second of many parliamentary addresses made by ruling party politicians over the years that would appeal to pragmatic, Singaporeans-first justifications for excluding low-wage, low-income foreign workers from the right to marry Singaporeans. “Is our policy strict? It is strict,” said Jayakumar. “But for whom is a strict immigration policy designed? Is it designed for me? No. Is it designed for the Cabinet Ministers? No. It is designed to promote the well-being of Singapore citizens.”

The island-state had to avoid being “swamped with hundreds of thousands of people who want to come to Singapore,” who would “put a strain” on the country’s resources, minister Jayakumar said. Yet, the country seemed to have ample space when it came to marriage for the rich — the criteria for immigration was one’s potential to contribute to Singapore’s “economic advancement,” Jayakumar said. Today, more highly paid foreigners seeking to marry Singaporeans need only find a fiancé, file a notice with the Registry of Marriage, and hold a solemnization ceremony.

In contrast, the application for work permit holders to marry more closely resembles a welfare application than one for wedlock: the couple have to submit pay slips and education qualifications. The local financé has to hand in their income tax bills and statements of Central Provident Fund contributions, which are government-mandated savings for working Singaporeans and residents. A ten-minute-long online application form and four-week wait later, the couple will receive an email informing them of the outcome.

Although not explicitly stated in the government regulations, the factor that determines whether couples can marry is not strength of love or length of relationship but the income level of the Singaporean or permanent resident spouse. One Singaporean man who applied to marry his Filipino domestic worker girlfriend was rejected 20 times over four years by the Ministry of Manpower. He was told that “his monthly $1,700 income was deemed too low to support a family,” according to a 2008 article published in the Singaporean newspaper The New Paper.

 

[Chase]

Legal barriers aside, Annisa saw marriage as more trouble than it was worth. Even if she were free to marry without government interference, she is not sure she would have wanted to marry her tall boyfriend with the small feet.

“Next time husband not good, I also suffer,” she said. Her estranged first husband had taken a second wife and used to regularly ask her for money—Annisa had paid for his motorbike in monthly instalments. “That’s why I single. Better independent. Independent, happy, good working, nobody control.”

Six of the 12 domestic workers in relationships who I interviewed wanted to be married to their long-term Singaporean partners; one already was. But only three had gained government approval to do so. One who didn’t was Dian, a 36-year-old Indonesian domestic worker with a Skrillex haircut, who did not want her real name published. She realized that to marry her boyfriend, she would face a troublesome array of obstacles, which caused her to give up her dreams of a Singapore wedding.

In 2017, a year after Dian met her Singaporean partner, a 56–year-old university social studies professor, the couple decided to get married. She loved how he would deliver kueh — Malay cakes — to her ahmah, the elderly woman she worked for, to win her over. He gave her old Indonesian novels which she would carefully store in her suitcase, wrapped in plastic, to add to her treasured book collection back home in the rural province of Lampung, Indonesia.

But she heard from friends who were married to Singaporeans that the process would involve being unable to work for at least six months, during which she would not be able to support her two sons from a previous marriage. She would have to cancel her work permit, apply for a long-term visit pass, wait up to six months for it to be approved, then wait another three months before being eligible for legal permission to work.

“I don’t want to make my boyfriend support my sons, because this is not his sons. This is my sons,” Dian said.

For now, Dian and her partner have their hearts set on a new dream: getting married in Indonesia and settling down in her hometown after he retires. He had fallen in love with the laid-back “kampung” lifestyle, Dian said, and liked hiking the padi fields and mountains surrounding her village when he visited. In preparation, she is teaching him the local dialect, Javanese, so that he can speak to the neighbours.

Dian will be taking a risk by getting married without the Singapore government’s permission, which is required even if she gets married overseas. If found out, her privilege to work in Singapore could be withdrawn and she may be prevented from entering Singapore for a period of time.

“Every human should have that kind of right to have relationship with anyone,” Dian said. “The law should not be driven by [the Ministry of Manpower] or the status of you working as domestic worker. I feel very sad about that. I feel so dispirited. Because I’m a domestic helper, it’s very difficult for me to get married to people who we love to.”

 

[Chase]

As I approached her in the food court for our interview, Annisa seemed like any other carefree, young domestic worker on her off-day. She wore bright purple cosmetic contact lenses that made her irises glow and a sunflower-print dress that swept her ankles. She showed me a photo of a chubby-faced, fair-skinned baby, smiling in her arms. In another, the girl is older, squatting against a craggy concrete wall. Two tiny ponytails sprout from her head and with big black eyes, she stares at the camera, mouth agape as if in shock.

“Next year maybe, after COVID-19, I want to see her because … long time,” Annisa said. A gold necklace given to her by her boyfriend — the one who got her pregnant — clung to her collarbone. The pendant was heart-shaped with ribbons of gold that adorned a gem set in the middle. Annisa had no explanation for why her boyfriend, in her words, “become good” after she returned to Singapore. He could never marry her, Annisa said, but told her he wants to give his CPF savings to her when he dies.

Her boyfriend has urged her to find a younger man. “You go lah, find some man lah, I old already,” he would say. But Annisa would repeat that she “don’t go to other boy.”

“I feel the love is grown now,” she said about her boyfriend, who has since bought a $50,000 house in Batam in her name. “He say, ‘if I die or anything, I already bought a house for you and your daughter.’ With this one, I’m happy.” She plans to move there when she retires from work as a domestic maid. She wants to open a shop with the money she has earned from giving her prime years to a city that wouldn’t let her stay, even if she wanted to. One day, if her little girl with fair skin wants to meet her father with the small feet, Annisa will bring her to Singapore for the family reunion.



KO LYN CHEANG

 

[Chase]

100 pregnant maids sent home a year​

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/maids-fear-losing-job-when-they-get-pregnant

 

[laksaboy]

A small-boned Javanese woman with glossy waist-length hair, pecan-colored skin and a thick Indonesian accent that made her self-conscious, Annisa had come to Singapore to work hard, pay off the bank loans she had taken to support her husband and two sons, and keep her head down. Pregnancy was not part of the plan.

Typical of libtards to portray her as a victim. Was she raped? If not, she's an adulteress.

Poor hubby.... enjoy the topi hijau, chump.

 

[rushifa666]

Whats wrong with cloth hangar?

 

[trishababe]

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