Travails of a Trailing Spouse

by Stephanie Suga Chen

  “At first they tried to appeal to my young, cool side,” Carys said.

  “I bet!” Sarah replied. Her friend was pretty cool.

  “But as soon as they saw that it wasn’t going to work, they then had the audacity to suggest to me that because they weren’t on school property, I had no jurisdiction over them,” Carys said. “Can you believe that?”

  “They actually said ‘jurisdiction’?” Sarah said. “I am assuming you didn’t let them get away with that.”

  “Yes, so I said to them, ‘That’s where you’re wrong. I could get you suspended right now. Put those cigarettes out immediately, and next time, change your clothes first, for God’s sake,’” Carys said.

  “Ha, I love it!” Sarah said, “Is that true? Could you get them suspended?”

  “Not sure,” Carys said with a smile. “But they believed me, putting out their cigarettes and scurrying away as fast as possible. When they walked into my classroom the next day, they didn’t make eye contact with me once.”

  The movie was called Baguio, the name of a town in the Philippines where the main character, a foreign domestic worker (or “FDW”, the official job title for maids/helpers in Singapore) named Maria who arrives fresh in Singapore at the beginning of the movie, hails from. She is hired by an abusive employer, a woman with a mean temper who lashes out at Maria repeatedly until one night, she burns Maria’s face with a hot pan, and the Filipina seeks refuge at a local humanitarian organisation for migrant workers. Unfortunately, while employment contracts between FDWs and employers were terminable by either party, if a contract were to be terminated, the FDW could only return back to her home country; she would not be permitted to stay in Singapore to try to find new employment.

  Since it had taken Maria over a year the first time she was brought over and thousands of dollars in loans that she had to work off to pay back the agency that placed her, her only hope was to try to get her abusive employer to sign release papers so she could legally transfer to another employer without having to leave the country. Calling the police to investigate the abuse she had suffered was out of the question; FDWs involved in a pending police action were not allowed to leave the country or seek new employment, so if she reported the assault, she would have to stay at a shelter for an undetermined amount of time, not earning money, an option she just could not afford.

  It was an emotional story and got Sarah thinking about her relationship with her own helper, Patricia. It was a tough life, not just the actual work – cooking and cleaning from morning until night – but also being away from her own children for so long. Patricia’s children were only a few years older than Ruby and Eric. Government regulations required that FDWs must be offered to return home at least once every two years, but many FDWs waived this “right” in lieu of extra salary, preferring not to be subjected to what sometimes amounted to their entire village coming out to greet them upon arriving home, looking for handouts. Most helpers who were married when they left home ended up getting cheated on or divorced; a relationship simply couldn’t survive under such difficult conditions.

  Sarah had heard her Singaporean acquaintances say that maids, as locals preferred to call them, were indispensable in today’s society; both parents needed to work and how else could they take care of their children or ageing parents? For the maids, the salary they earned far exceeded any job they could get in their home country, if they could even find a job there – at least that’s what was said.

  The expat community, too, fully embraced the helper construct; for most of them, it was the only time in their lives that they could afford live-in help. And if they could improve the life of a helper, paying her a much higher wage than the average local employer did, giving her a smartphone and a laptop, letting her have Saturdays and Sundays off, sending her home whenever they went on holiday, sometimes two or three times a year up to a month each time, then all the better.

  The dichotomy between the local vs. expat attitude towards FDWs showed itself when Patricia asked Sarah if she could extend her Sunday night curfew, which was 10pm, to 11pm. Sarah polled her expat friends, most answering in some variation of, “As long as it’s not affecting her job performance and you don’t suspect her of doing anything illegal, I don’t see the problem.” When she wrote to Ruby’s kindergarten parents’ group, however, the overwhelming response was, “10pm too late already, lah!”

  Sarah had also heard from friends that after just a few years working in Singapore, during which her salary was almost entirely take-home, as lodging, food and living expenses were all covered by her employer, an FDW could return back to her home country, buy a house for herself and her parents, send her kids to private school and even hire a maid for herself. Sarah was dubious about this; it seemed to be one of those urban legends that were passed around, perhaps to make one feel better about participating in what sometimes seemed, to her, like indentured servitude.

  When Sarah had visited her first agency to interview helpers, the agent had recommended she hire a “fresh” maid, one who had never worked in Singapore before, the rationale being that she would not have preconceived notions of how she should be treated, not have been “spoiled” by a prior employer, and would be available at a lower salary than if she hired a “transfer” maid, one who was currently employed already in Singapore. Sarah had been taken aback by the agent’s casual use of these words, even sending her friends back home an email about the experience, joking, “I’ll try not to ‘spoil’ our ‘fresh’ maid”, trying to use humour to cover up how uncomfortable she felt about the whole situation. Her friends couldn’t believe how little domestic help in Singapore cost: including a tax that the government collected – a flat levy per month, amounting to a whopping 50% of the average FDW salary – Sarah could hire a live-in helper available around the clock, seven days a week, for less than USD$20 per day.

  When Sarah asked how much the agency fee would be, the woman had replied back that Sarah would owe nothing; she would only have to pay an upfront amount of $3,000, supposedly what the agency had put up to source, train, and transport the FDW to Singapore. This amount, called the “maid loan”, would be repaid in the form of credited salary for the first seven months of her contract, meaning that the poor woman would be working for free that entire time. For some unlucky ones who didn’t fit well with their employers for whatever reason, and were sent back to the agency, the agent would tack on another month or two of salary in transfer fees to find her a new job. So, there were many FDWs walking around with over a year of loans hanging over them – if that wasn’t indentured servitude, Sarah didn’t know what was.

  Sarah knew she could be helping Patricia more, sending her for classes, for example, to learn a skilled trade, but there really weren’t that many options available for FDWs – cooking, baking, massage therapy, those were the typical offerings. A part of her thought the system as a whole was cruel and unjust.

  Sarah and Carys left the cinema deep in discussion over these topics, relaying thoughts back and forth about the lives of FDWs in Singapore.

  Carys’s own helper was “live-out”, meaning she had her own lodging arrangement and came to Carys’s at 8am and left after the dinner dishes were done, usually around 8pm. If Carys and Ian needed her for babysitting Noah in the evenings, they arranged it with her a few days in advance, sometimes setting up the pull-out coach in the living room if they knew they would be out late. It was a set-up that was similar to the nanny Sarah and Jason had hired back home (although the nanny did a lot less for much higher pay), and alleviated a lot of the anxiety that many employers had with having a live-in helper: no need to worry about what time she came home on her day off, how much of their food she was eating, whether or not to have a water heater installed in her shower.

  In Singapore, however, the arrangement that Carys and her helper had was actually illegal – FDWs were required under government regulations to reside at the employer’s residential premises. In practice, Sarah knew of quite a few expats
who had arrangements similar to Carys’s; some did not have a helper’s room in their apartments and didn’t feel comfortable with their helper sleeping with their kids, which is what some local families did, and some just preferred the live-out arrangement over having a live-in.

  The two women parted ways at the lobby of their condo, Carys saying she needed to pick up a few groceries before heading upstairs. When Sarah got home, she realised that she had not brought up Ian the entire night. Not wanting to hold it in any longer, she wrote her friend an email saying she hoped that Carys and Ian had sorted out whatever issues they might have been going through; and that she wanted her to know that if Carys ever wanted to talk about it, Sarah was here for her.

  Carys wrote back almost immediately, saying, “Thank you for your sincere note. There has been something that I have been wanting to tell you about the night of Chad’s birthday and I haven’t been able to. I am a terrible friend and I am so sorry. Can we meet this weekend?”

  chapter 24

  CONFESSION

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, a Friday, Sarah went through the motions of her usual routine – taking the kids to school, studying a little, running errands – all the while wondering what her friend had to tell her, and why it had taken her so long to bring it up.

  When Sarah arrived at Carys’s on Saturday afternoon, she was surprised when it was Eliza who opened the door. The stylish and elegant British woman, who was one of the first neighbours in the building Sarah had met, had earlier in the year enrolled her daughter, a cheeky redhead named Ava, at the British International School, which had a full day Infant School programme; as a result, she had not been attending the regular condo playgroups, so Sarah had not seen her in quite some time.

  “Oh, hi, Eliza, how are you?” Sarah said, exchanging air kisses with her.

  “I’m good, come in,” Eliza replied, holding the door open to let Sarah through.

  Sarah walked in and the first thing she noticed was a large vase of cut flowers on the counter; she greeted Carys, who was sitting on the couch with her legs outstretched, asking her, “Did I miss your birthday?”

  Eliza and Carys exchanged looks; there was a momentary silence, which Eliza broke by saying, “I think Carys has a bit to tell you, Sarah.”

  Sarah, her brain already churning with Carys’s email from the other night, couldn’t figure out what could be going on, how a vase of flowers could be related to the night of Chad’s birthday, or if it was something else entirely.

  She waited expectantly for Carys to explain.

  As Carys sat forward on the couch, Eliza said, “I’ll let myself out and let you two talk,” exiting quietly.

  Now that the suspense had built up to a truly impressive level, Sarah turned to Carys and asked if everything was all right. Carys took a deep breath and launched into a long and unexpected explanation.

  She and Ian had been having problems, it was probably no secret. The trouble had started shortly after they arrived in Singapore, over a year ago; Ian had his new job, which required a lot of socialising and entertaining at night, and Carys had opted to stay home on most week nights due to their helper, Marilyn, being live-out, and also because she either had to work or wanted to spend time with Noah the following day without being exhausted or hung over.

  But then Ian started coming home later and later, at times strolling in just as Noah was waking up. He wasn’t always drunk; sometimes he would say he had just been at a co-worker’s place playing video games, of all things, Carys said, rolling her eyes.

  “Wow, OK,” Sarah said. “Did you fight about it?”

  No, Carys said, she wasn’t that type of wife, no offence to Sarah, she just went along with it, hoping at some point it would tail off, perhaps after Ian settled into his job a little more. They had spent the December holidays last year in Wales, at Carys’s family home outside Swansea, where Ian didn’t have any friends, so he had actually stayed in the entire holiday, spending time with her extended family and taking on more than his fair share of minding Noah. Carys, thinking that the waves had calmed, looked forward to returning back to Singapore in January.

  A couple of weeks after they got back, however, she was in the kitchen one morning waiting for Noah to wake up, sipping her morning tea and idly scrolling through her Facebook feed, when Ian’s phone, sitting on the counter and plugged in to the wall socket, buzzed. She reached over, absent-mindedly glancing at the message that popped up on the locked screen.

  The message was from Janet Low, the finance manager for the hotel Ian worked for, and it said, “In budget meetings all day, c u at nicollo’s at 8?”

  The message on its surface was innocuous enough, Carys said, but the tone was too informal; the casual reference to a restaurant that Carys had never heard Ian mention before, for a dinner that clearly had been pre-arranged, the intimate use of “c” and the “u” – it was all wrong. Carys-the-linguist tore it apart in seconds.

  “Could it have been a company dinner or something?” Sarah asked. She wasn’t familiar with the restaurant, but it sounded like it could be an upscale sort of place.

  “I thought that, too,” Carys said, but she had looked it up and it was a little hole-in-the-wall Italian place located in Bishan, nowhere near Ian’s office, and not likely to be the venue of a corporate outing.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “I didn’t say anything to him. He came home that night quite late, and I was already in bed, knackered from a long day.”

  She paused, then said, “And then the night of Chad’s dinner, um…”

  “You guys seemed all right that night,” Sarah recalled.

  Yes, Carys agreed, it had started out fine, and even as they arrived at Orchard Towers, they were still getting on well; they had not been out that late together in a long time and it was actually quite fun, Carys said, getting a bit drunk together. But after Sarah left, Carys went to the restroom and when she came back, she saw Ian talking to Janet Low. Actually, Carys had met her only one time before; she hadn’t socialised with Ian’s colleagues much, but once last year, she had stopped by his office to drop off his phone, which he had left, again, plugged in on the kitchen counter, and he had been in a meeting. Janet had been in her office, two doors down, name and title on the door, and she had accepted the phone from Carys with a nod.

  “What did she look like?” Sarah asked, getting slightly sidetracked by her curiosity to know if it was the same woman that she had seen with Ian in the lift after Ashley’s party last year.

  “Professional,” Carys responded. “Not as pretty as you might expect,” she said, not hiding her bitterness.

  Sarah recalled thinking the same exact thing about the woman she had seen all those months ago.

  At Orchard Towers, Carys had slowed her steps coming back from the bathroom, waiting to see what would happen with her husband and this woman, but before she could step behind a pillar like a private eye, Ms Low turned abruptly and walked away from Ian into the crowd, leaving the man standing there, mid-sentence, mouth open.

  “Where were Jason and Chad?” Sarah asked.

  “Getting drinks, I think?” Carys answered. It must have been at that time that Chad had bumped into the large-nosed man at the bar.

  “Oh, and then you saw her again on your way out, didn’t you?” Sarah caught on quickly, piecing it together.

  Yes, Carys said. It was around that time that the four of them had decided to leave the club, Ian leading the way down the switched-off escalator and Jason and Chad trailing quite a bit behind.

  “When we got to the ground floor and out to the street, I saw her there again, staring at Ian,” Carys said, flatly.

  Her husband had walked up to Janet, saying loudly, “What are you still doing here?” either too drunk or angry to hide their obvious relationship from Carys. They had started quarrelling, quite noisily, and a crowd quickly formed around them.

  “So it was Ian that started the fight?” Sarah asked, uncertainly.

  “Sort of, at one point, h
e did reach for her face, but I don’t think it was to hit her, he’s not like that, maybe just to get her to calm down, I don’t know,” Carys said. “I was so shocked, that I stepped in, grabbed his arm, and it all escalated from there.”

  “So YOU AND IAN started the brawl?” Sarah’s eyes opened wide. She was in disbelief that all the turmoil she and Jason had endured had been as a result of her friend’s actions.

  Carys leaned back, saying, “It appears so; I’m so sorry, Sarah. As soon as I saw Jason and Chad coming towards us, I called at them to walk in the other direction, but it all happened so fast. I should have told the police right away. At the time, I was worried about implicating Ian and myself. If the police had called us in, I fully intended to come clean, but since they never called… I should have told you everything right away.

  “I panicked when the video surfaced,” she continued, “I thought that our faces certainly would appear, but when they didn’t, it was just easier to continue to keep silent.” Carys paused for a moment, then said, “I was a coward and I’m so sorry.”

  Sarah looked at her friend, who was clearly distressed. It was a lot to take in. While she couldn’t lay all the blame on Carys for her own marital problems, knowing this information might have lessened some of the strain between her and Jason surrounding the whole arrest. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered – she probably would have found something else to complain about.

  After a moment, she said, “Well, it doesn’t matter now, Carys. And I get it; it would have been hard for me if I had been in your position, too. I’m so sorry you’ve been carrying all this for so long. You hid it well, though. I wouldn’t have guessed that you and Ian were in a fight when I saw you at the police station later that morning,” she said finally.