It’s the maid’s day off.
To be honest, her brief absence has shown that I already got used to having her around.
But then again, it’s not hard to get used to such a luxury. You wake up and feel like eating something, and she’ll have it ready by the time you’re dressed and finished brushing your teeth. She draws your bath water. She irons your clothes while you wait. She picks up the groceries for dinner when you decide what to eat. Some of the dishes are so complicated that she begins cooking the night before, and has her niece (my aunt and uncle’s maid) come over to help.
Nothing needs to be said when it comes to chores around the house. When a meal is finished, everyone gets up and heads to the living room. The next time you come back, the dishes are gone and the table wiped clean1. I fold my sheets before leaving the house, and when I get back they’re refolded, only neater.
My grandmother has a history of live-in servants, although there haven’t been any wet nurses, gardeners, or chauffeurs for a while. Ever since her children grew up and left the house (or country), she’s only needed one maid at a time. It seems to be a great relationship, as there’s a respect that goes both ways; the maid is extremely good at her job, and we treat her like family. When the last maid died after 30 years of service, all her funeral arrangements were taken care of. In the last years of her life she had gone blind from diabetes, and was then served herself. That’s how we found the current maid, who’s been with my grandma ever since.
One of my favourite rituals2 is the way the maid is given dinner. After all the food is cooked, the maid lays the dishes out on the dinner table, but doesn’t take any for herself. So my grandma will take a plate, pile food onto it, and bring it to her.
Everything in this post resonated with me. When I visit Goa, our live in staff take care of everything. At first I tried to help out, but would often get funny looks from family.
The cook never served himself either. After someone served him, he would say thank you, politely excused himself and would leave the table to go and eat alone in the kitchen — something I never got used to.
Yeah, sometimes I wonder if I’m just getting in the way and making things harder for the maid to work when I try to make myself some toast and somehow screw it up because I’m not used to the toasters here.
I guess you either spend all your time making enough money to afford a maid, or you keep more private time so you can do the household chores yourself.
I’m sure that at some point, if you make enough money, then your time is actually more valuable earning it than doing things like cooking dinner or cleaning, because the potential monetary gain would be more than the expense of hired help.
Private time is something I never considered though, maybe because I’m used to living with people here already. If it was just me and a maid, I’m not sure if that extra person would be worth the loss of privacy, even if everything else is taken care of.
Unless there were at least two more people in the place, I’d be uncomfortable with it.
My current Hong Kong friends’ families don’t have servants; they weren’t able to do well enough because some members of their families and large properties and businesses were lost in the cultural revolution times. They fled Guandong province to get there. But they still mention when they were little, how they had servants that would carry them to school on their backs, and take care of absolutely anything.
It’s lovely that your family shows them such a relationship.