I was raised by domestic servants — whether or not Roma wins Best Picture, we need to talk about the reality

Even though I have followed the success of Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s drama of a household maid in Mexico City, with fervor, I still find it difficult to grapple with the diametrical opposites I see. On one hand, there’s the sympathetic, saint-like domestic worker figure of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) in the limelight. On the other hand, there’s the current plight of domestic workers around the world and throughout America — one which feels like an afterthought.

The domestic worker has been in our gaze before; I saw her as Terry in Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo; Lola in Alex Tizon’s viral essay about his family’s slave; Viola Davis’ character Aibileen Clark in The Help. Onscreen, the lives of domestic workers capture our attention and our hearts, and it’s easy to see why: depicted with patience and grace, they are stoic in the face of quotidian middle-class family drama, and often rise above the occasion to show the pettiness and selfishness of the family by contrast.

While these narratives of maids resonate—and Roma is certainly making waves with an impressive run for 10 Oscars this weekend—their actual lives remain difficult. If Roma is able to nudge families to see the harsh reality of how maids exist within our lives, if it can hold a lens to how current legislation may operate in a way to perpetuate this societal hierarchy, then it will truly be a winner not only at the awards ceremony on Sunday but also in terms of the power of cinema in inspiring introspection and change.

I was raised by live-in maids in Singapore and was always troubled that my mother would instruct them to “treat the children like your own” but not, in turn, treat our maids like family. An employer’s kindness is not a part of the contract, yet a caretaker’s role often demands that they be patient and warm towards their, however unruly, wards.

I knew that my parents did not have much. However, my brother suffered from kidney failure and diabetes and my grandfather was in a wheelchair at home: my mother concluded that the best way to provide care for them was to hire a maid, even though our family was already in debt. There were months where we missed paying our maids because of that. I remember one woman named Mun, who came from Indonesia, and how she confided in me that her daughter at home couldn’t buy a school uniform and therefore could not attend school because my mother wasn’t able to pay her in time. I begged my mother then, but we all needed money, and my mother decided her immediate family’s needs came before the maid’s.

It made me sick to see maids I shared rooms with treated unkindly. Many of them were barely any older than me; we could have been friends. If we were born in the same country we might have attended the same school, worn the same starched uniforms that they cleaned and folded, shared $1 fries from McDonalds together while gossiping about our parents. But they were told to work long hours without access to a phone, friends, or means to procure better food than the leftovers we proffered. I could attend my classes, leave home when I wanted. The maids kept laboring anyway, cleaning and cooking, muttering “Yes ma’ams,” tucking my shoes away at whatever ungodly hour I returned.

Eighty per cent of the 67 million domestic workers around the world are women. If they are live-in domestic workers such as Roma’s Cleo—two million in the US are—they have to give up their privacy and leave their children back home in the care of others, to be absorbed into someone else's family routine, to care for their employer’s child instead of their own. Despite their sacrifice, their labour is matched only by their invisibility: from waking up in the morning before anyone else to fix food for the family (and their pets), to eating leftovers alone in the kitchen and sleeping only after each family member has retired.

In America, live-in caretakers who are subject to extraordinary acts of cruelty, from sexual assault to starvation to non-payment for their work, often also lack legal protection or recourse. This is made more difficult by the fact that a majority of domestic workers (57 per cent) do not have secure documentation status in the country. When wage theft occurs—when employers refuse to pay—maids choose to keep quiet instead of risk deportation. I know this heartbreakingly well in my home country at least, where employers can easily deduct expenses (a broken glass, a toilet that needs repair) from a vulnerable maid’s salary, leaving her with little or nothing.

It is, of course, important to note that domestic workers in Singapore live a wholly different reality to those in the United States. The system is similar to Saudi Arabia’s sponsor system where their legal status in the country is tied to their employer, and therefore their bosses have near carte blanche as to how to deal with them. But the US has its own problems with immigration and domestic workers which shouldn’t be ignored.

In comparison to the unstinting presence of live-in maids from foreign countries who come to toil in Singaporean homes, here in America, domestic help can look more like a ghost: on-call, ad-hoc, invisible. Apart from nannies, there are also cleaners and elderly caregivers. I have worked as a child caretaker and a cleaner. I also briefly worked as a program manager at a start-up in San Francisco, overseeing elderly care workers who the company scheduled through an app. Such women come into affluent homes in predominantly white neighbourhoods, an hour or more drive from their own, and perform very intimate and demanding tasks, from cleaning an older people’s behinds, to carrying their bodies to and from their potty, to refreshing their bedpans. Yet they were told by the company not to rest or sit down and watch TV with their older clients, not to share food, to always find something to do and keep busy.

Of course it is natural that when someone pays for a care service, they expect caregivers to be on their feet, delivering. What is more perplexing is that no one talks about the emotional relationships that form between caretaker and client—whether an elder or a child—and the value and emotional labour that goes into forging this bond. Multiple women used unexpected windfalls (such as a large MacArthur Genius grant) for childcare so as to focus on their more ambitious projects, but I’m wondering how to put a price on the substitute caretakers hired in their place.

It perplexes me to think that domestic workers—often underprivileged, vulnerable women, who take home $9,000-$12,000 on average in the US and are often unable to pay their rent at some point in the year— fill gaps in the American family so better-off can be free to do more.

Alfonso Cuarón and Participant Media, the studio behind Roma, have partnered with the Domestic Workers Alliance to use the film’s visibility as grounds to discuss the pressing challenges that maids face in the US and abroad. Senator Kamala Harris and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal have also co-sponsored a National Bill of Rights for Domestic Workers to secure contracts, paid sick days, retirement benefits and healthcare.

As someone who was raised within a system so skewed to take advantage of foreign maids, and who later worked in the industry, I am truly excited to see all the thoughtful conversations Roma has ignited surrounding maids and domestic work. Now we must support the bills that can protect the women who do the important and necessary domestic work that we often do not have the time or energy to do.