No Cinderella Story

I admit some initial attraction to the idea of hiring domestic help when I first learned of the (practically legendary) cheapness of domestic labourers in Singapore. The Government calls them Foreign Domestic Workers (FDW) but everyone else calls them maids. And they are everywhere. If you want English-speaking, then Filipinos are recommended, otherwise Indonesians.

You see them on the street and in shops and restaurants in their uniform of T-shirt and oversize shorts, both washed to the point of grayness. It's defensive you see; better to avoid attracting attention of _any_ kind. It's the same tactic hostages are taught; Andy McNab talks about becoming the grey man in Bravo Two Zero. Any suggestion of sexuality risks comparison with the female employer or attracting unwanted attentions of the male employer.

I'm going to call it a plight, even though I know most welcome the opportunity to earn foreign currency to send back home. Many are married (or thereabouts), often they have their own kids. Standard contracts are for 2 years with no home leave, but some stay for decades; it really varies.

There are few absolute regulations involving where they sleep. They should have a space to themselves but it can be the windowless bomb-shelter (I'm not kidding) built into many condos.

Where possible, your FDW should be given a separate room of her own. In the event that one is unavailable in your home, you should respect your FDW's need for privacy and ensure that sufficient private space for sleep is provided.

They don't need a TV or radio as they will be up to cook breakfast for the kids are 5:30am and might still be washing up or ironing at 9pm.

The duties of a maid are to assist the household which means cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, childcare, nannying and care of pets and the elderly. It excludes duties outside the home like cleaning the car (much flauted), caring for a non-household member (say, a neighbour) or supporting a business (baking cakes for a shop). You are not allowed to loan out or share a maid.

Which brings us to a contemporary issue of whether to give your maid any time off. Actually, more a long-standing issue as this BBC story from March 2006 shows. When I was in China/Hong Kong, the Filipino maids used to gather every Sunday at Causeway Bay on the island for a packed rice lunch and a chat with fellow natives. In Singapore, accredited agencies are supposed to create contracts with paid rest days included but you try enforcing it; a maid can go for 2 years without a day off. There is even a website to highlight the issue and a recent Government review concluded the status quo was reasonable:

most maids are happy working in Singapore and the reported cases of abuse have remained low. 'There is therefore no need at this point for MOM to legislate a mandatory rest day'

Officially, the Ministry encourages rest days:

A well-rested Foreign Domestic Worker (FDW) is more productive and better adjusted. Hence, you should ensure that your FDW has sufficient rest, especially during the night.

Sufficient rest days should also be catered for, as mutually agreed upon between yourself and your FDW. Such rest days should be in addition to any family trips and outings which you may take your FDW on.

That's all well and good but the word from taxi drivers is that Singaporeans are getting a bad reputation for maltreating maids and many are now learning Cantonese to seek work in Hong Kong where conditions are better. Singapore is therefore having to consider other sources of cheap and pliant female economic migrants such as Nepal to fill the strategic maid gap.

A steady supply of maids is important since the tax benefits for a working couple are considerable and the FDW policy underpins the Government's desire for the Dual-Income-Lots-of-Kids Singaporean family unit. The new worry is of a generation of kids brought up by untrained nannys, but the English aristocracy mostly survived this issue so I imagine Singapore will also.

China Graduates

My recent posts on Hong Kong and China were really only pond-skipping a few impressions of changes in the last 10 years. In more reflective mode, I am struck by how little Hong Kong has changed since reunification in 1997. It's still pig ugly above the ground floor glitz and is a tiring, heaving mass of people, tourists, delivery guys, self-appointed recyclers, copy-watch vendors, tailors and potholes. Cellular antennas crudely bolted to building tops point their signals directly down into the tight, old streets or, when mounted at street level, point up at 45deg into the glass skyscrapers. The new airport is a vast improvement over the old Kai Tak "strip of fear" and the AsiaWorld Expo next door is even better than the visually awkward, downtown Convention Centre. They still do a mean Double Skin Milk desert, almost as good as the Guangdong shops. HK is more exciting than Singapore, but also more tiring, ruder, dirtier and the weather (i.e. pollution) is astonishing.

China, on the other hand, feels like it has come of age. So many things have improved and developed it's hard to relate. If you want, you can talk about the quaint anachronisms that persist such as the office worker eating lunch from the obligatory oval lunch box (rice, green veg & a couple of strips of pork) while sat on the Ronald bench outside McDonalds; there are kids in punky hairdos jaywalking across roads openly ignoring the traffic cop and his hi-viz flag. People still fly kites over the river but now they're plastic sports models, not traditional square bamboo & rice paper. Poor people scratch out a living, collecting cardboard and scrap metal at the base of Executive Condos.

But these are old images with new twists and the juxtaposition of traditional and Western is no longer even news. When I first visited in 1991, China was badly under capitalised and with a vast labour pool, really would employ 6 women with scissors to cut a lawn (I have the picture). There were spittoons everywhere, public buses needed to be pushed up hills and all cars were Government vehicles. But there was a collective hunger for better times which has blossomed into the current national pride, so much pride in fact that the sense of hurt over the disrupted Olympic Torch tour is in danger of escalating out of Beijing's comfort zone.

As a footnote, much as I enjoyed the retrospective tour (despite 3 days of wicked gastroenteritis) I am glad to be back in Singapore. It's home, it's safe and the sun is shining but modern China left a deep impression on me. China has embraced capitalism and nationalism to become a self-sufficient and bold world player. Learn Mandarin, go East.

Two great takeaway ideas from the trip: the electric scooters in NingBo and the stencil of a house fly on the urinals at Singapore's Changi airport; it just invites you to take aim and thus ensures as splash free a visit as possible. Both are winning ideas.

(Ch)internet

I had pretty high expectations on this trip for being able to remain connected and continue the e-mail, blogs and such like. Now back in Singapore, I can report it's been a very mixed bag. The Hong Kong hotel had wired Internet for £2.66 / hour, or £8 / day, but that was per computer, so 2 travelers would need to pay separately. I'm 60% confident that my Apple Airport Express wireless router would allow 2 computers to share a connection so mental note for future trips, but don't tell anyone heh?

The Guangzhou hotel was similar to HK: £2.66 / hour, £4 / day but now behind the Great Firewall of China, blogger.com was inaccessible and my GMail went AWOL as well, staying in "Maintenance Mode" until well after I left China. I haven't figured out who to blame for the GMail blackout; it might be a defensive posture when Google suddenly sees a login from an IP address within China, or just a technical burp, but the timing suggests a Chinese connection. Whatever, I'm now far less keen to recommend GMail for business use unless you have a backup as I was locked out for over 3 days.

If you are wondering, the selective Internet blocking in mainland China won't affect Olympic visitors as they plan to derestrict the IP addresses for the buildings and hotels reserved for foreign visitors for the duration of the games.

Despite the room rate being fully one third that of HK, the NingBo hotel Internet was wired and free, as in, without charge. But with all the services I needed (blogger, GMail, encrypted tunnels) not working, it was the most frustrating of times. It seems free Internet and Internet freedom are mutually exclusive.

Back in Hong Kong, working feverishly in a daily 1 hour window, everything came back online. Hong Kong advertises a free (no cost) GovWiFi network, whose phase-1 works from libraries and some of the larger Government buildings. I never found the signal and couldn't connect.

A local HK telco, PCCW, has WiFi-enabled phone booths that provide access to their subscription and Pre-Pay services, but as a visitor, I might as well use the hotel rather than sit on a kerb.

I held out some hope for 3G cellular data and popped into a 3 shop, the retail front of the local 3G telco. They had the same Huawei 3G data modem that I have in Singapore, and their hardware is not networked locked like mine, but they don't do the 3G data tariff on a PAYG basis.

Throughout all of this, Google defaulted to a Chinese language interface. Everything is in the same place on the page and the search results are still English but it slows you down a tad. Geographic language selection is a sound technical choice, but I should learn how to force revert to .com or at least English at the .com.hk domain.

After 10 days of this, it was looking pretty grim leaving me in the mood to be pleasantly surprised when the Hong Kong airport offered free WiFi Internet with nothing blocked so I blogged and e-mailed and talked to my machine at home until the gate boarding queue for the plane was down the last 3 people. Finally.

Chinese Electric Dreams

Touchdown in NingBo, Zhejiang province and straight off I liked the place because the of blue skies; Hong Kong and Guangzhou were under a permanent grey-on-grey sky, polluted pall quite different from 10 years ago. It's literally dismal [from the Latin dies = day, and mali = bad, hence "bad day"]. Guangdong is called the Factory of the World but you don't even need to see a factory to appreciate the industrial activity.

NingBo, twinned with Nottingham, is an ancient Chinese port city, south of Shanghai and is now an economic zone with sprawling factories (chemical, plastics) over the river delta. Hence the visit. It's also the site of the world's longest road bridge that just opened this week.

Our hotel had a decidedly local character; the lobby, lobby cafe and lobby bar were all smoking areas, a stark contrast to Hong Kong where smokers have to do the outside-the-door huddle. The bar, actually a Cigar Bar, offered a happy hour (between 5pm and 8pm?) and a live 5-piece guitar band with 2 gals on vocals, one with a flute. And it really was a cigar bar; I got dizzy just poking my head through the door but by compensation, the Japanese restaurant was really good and the expat business community seems well served; there's even river-side condos.

Downtown remains non-industrial with some historic sights, pagodas and the like. Our hotel was next to the TianFeng Tower (pagoda) but I didn't have the 5 yuan (30p) entrance fee. There's a confluence of 2 rivers, forming a third so there's a 3-rivers theme, and a bull fighting theme, captured in a large bronze ox sculpture outside the No. 2 NingBo dept. store.

The most remarkable sight was not bovine but the omnipresent 50W electric scooters. The city has banned all motorbikes from the downtown apparently to cut down on dangerous driving but these scooters can do 25mph, perhaps 30 downhill. They are nearly silent, apart from the crappy bicycle-style caliper brakes and I would question the effectiveness of the policy's aims as these things weave around the roads, cycle lanes and pavements.

They certainly are a hit here and I'm amazed this is the first place to mandate their use. One problem, they are nearly silent so you won't be bothered by any tinny 2-stroke clatter just before they run into you on the pavement. Caveat pedes.

Heroic Litter Collection

China's road manners haven't changed much; the roads here in Guangdong are much improved with the previously isolated stretches of highway now linked up. The animals, bicycles and farm tractors are elsewhere and this alone accounts for most of the improvement but they can still clog a 4 lane highway with 3 vehicles with their lane discipline. In England, the outer lane is lane-#1, then lane-#2 towards the centre. The Chinese highways, driving on the right but same principle, are signed as:

Lane-#1: Slow (Max 80kmph, Min 60kmph)
Lane-#2: Fast (Max 100/110, Min 80)
Lane-#3: Car lane (100/110, 80)

So you get cars in lane-#3 doing 80, trucks in lane-#2 doing 100, and cars undertaking both of these in lane-#1 doing 120. And that's without such wild cards as people who can't drive, Public Safety (police) cars doing whatever they want, people on the phone, undertaking on the hard shoulder and trucks on the hard shoulder reversing to get back to a missed exit.

England has a single speed limit (not even a weather dependent one which I think is an excellent idea) and a Keep Left rule. It does't work as people still hog lanes but at least it's simple. Hong Kong has inherited the English rules but this Chinese system is over-engineered and even less effective.

On a plus point, while paying road tolls are little fun, the toll booth ladies return change and ticket then wave the vehicle away with a firm hand/arm gesture, almost Japanese like. It's an uncommon courtesy, having little practical benefit, but further evidence of China's high aspirations filtering down to everyday work and behavior.

Incredibly, while all this freestyle driving is going on, there are guys picking up litter on the hard shoulder using a hi-vis jacket as protection; such selfless heroism is rare and in time of conflict one could form these men into a fearless fighting force, the only rival to disgruntled US postal workers.

Little Hearts Everywhere

Going to China from Hong Kong has always been pretty easy. Our route was best served by a boat from the Kowloon Ferry Terminal for a 2 hour cruise up the coast. It's a medium sized catamaran, non-smoking with some straight-to-VCD Chinese movie on screens at the front. The Chinese port is the same building as years ago but everyone seems more ... at attention. Smart uniforms, no loitering, efficient customs (better than Chep Lok Kap airport) and they even had a beagle sniffer dog. I'm thinking Olympic effect but it's early days.

The hotel was really nice with boiling hot tap water and a huge staff:guest ratio. Reception was staffed by Fiona, Sean and Jack. Later at dinner, the server was Wendy, assisted by Trainee Wong, leaving me to conclude that front-line staff with some English use solely Western names, while others are mono-syllabic Chinese surnames. It doesn't much matter to the Chinese, they will just called out "xiao jie" (little girl) to summon a waitress of whatever linguistic ability; the name tags are strictly for foreigers.

The in-room information pack listed Internet access at RMB40 (£2.60) for one hour, and a fairly reasonable RMB60 (£4) for a whole day. The system had to be retro-fitted onto the older hotel infrastructure by using ADSL over the extension wiring which I thought was neat and perhaps ensures greater accountability than wireless. Strangely, they also listed the prices for many of the room's fixtures and fittings, such as net curtains, bath towel, bath robe, kettle and shoe basket (RMB70 £4.60). I can only presume this is charged for missing items so it was reassuring they didn't give a price for the mini safe.

What is also striking are the nannying warnings. Hong Kong ferry terminal kept repeating annoucements about slippy floors (never seemed an issue 10 years ago). The hotel bathroom had the same warning above the toilet (literally: little heart ground wet). The dinner table warned not to let children run around as it can be dangerous. Did Asia suddenly get lawyered up and litigous? Prohibition signs are found in all countries but petty warning signs are pernicious and self-defensive. It's a bad sign.

HK Streetlife

Hong Kong. It feels like the monoogue at the start of Apocalypse Now where Captain Willard talks about Saigon and the dread of being in the jungle only being equalled but the dread of not being there. Last time I was here, the red letterboxes had Royal crests and Governor Chris Patten was talking up democratic reforms with his Legislative Council (LegCo). Now as a Special Administrative Zone with China, both are gone, interestingly, to no obvious ill-effect.

There's new parking meters (nice digital ones where you select the left or right parking bay so you only need half the number of meters). The airport staff have a mainland-like surly authority and the roads and pavements have the same ruts and ridges. Hong Kong puts function over form; there's little aspiration to beauty except for the space 1" from the ground to about 12' up. The shops go for light and neon to hawk their wares, but above is a tangle of old business signs, window air con units, balconies converted to granny flats and tatty facades. The Star Ferry hasn't changed so much as a rivet and is still a fun ride for HK$2.2 (44p) although you can now use an RFID touch card called Octopus that has been retrofitted into the old mechanical turnstiles.

There are the Indian guys standing on street corners and outside shops offering tailored suits and shirts - for around £70 you can get a suit, trousers, couple of shirts. To my surprise, there was even a guy offering cheap Rolex knockoffs at pretty much the same corner of Nathan Granville that I remember from pre-unification. It's the same technique that the drug dealers in the Casablanca medina use, a half-whispered "watches", "Rolex" just as you pass leaving you unsure if you really heard anything at all. Total deniability. Counterfeit watches and software were readily available in the mid nineties but the authorities had even then pushed the merchandise out of sight leaving just a salesman on a street corner or a shop with pictures.

The electronic shops are still here. You can get a unlocked (jail broken) iPhone for HK$3150 (£210), an Apple iPod Touch 32GB for HK$4000 (£260) and an Apple iMac 24" 2.4GHz HK$14,500 (£967). That's pre-haggling prices but still pretty much parity with Singapore.

If Hong Kong was a person, it would be Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses. A bit wide, always on the lookout for a deal, desparate to be rich and famous, but with a heart of gold. Singapore is more like an estate agent. Still trying to cut a deal but with class and respectability in mind. I can see why people like Hong Kong and describe Singapore as uptight. For sure, if you want to slum it for a bit, HK is the place to go but I'd be loath to leave SIngapore's excellent administration and security behind.

HK is almost all Chinese, whereas Singapore is over 20% Indian and Malay. This makes Singapore natively far more cosmopolitan. HK is Cantonese, Singapore is Mandarin and Hokkien and there's cultural differences galore. There are a few non-Chinese HKers; Indians came and stayed years ago and I remember meeting one working on the Star Ferry years ago speaking fluent Cantonese to a passenger, which is as remarkable a juxtaposition as hearing a dog miow.

Terminal Confusion

How hard could a 10 day jaunt to Hong Kong be? Quick taxi to Changi T3, drop off fellow traveller and then SkyTrain to T2 for shuttle bus to the Budget Terminal as per instructions. Except JetStar flies from Terminal 1, so back outside onto the same shuttle to T2, then the cute, runs-on-rubber-wheels Skytrain over to T1. Talk about unnecessary. Fortunately it's all eTicket these days and without check-in luggage I was in the 25min immigration queue tout suite.

The lady at the neighbouring check-in was being stung S$200 (£70) for excess baggage (box of business samples). Seeing me unencumbered, I was propositioned as a courier but declined on good sense grounds and departed with sympathies towards her wallet.

The departure lounge had free, working Internet access and a free, non-working drinking water fountain. Given the restriction on carrying fluids onto planes it was misjudged priorities.

They called for boarding, starting at the back; there's only about 30 rows in an Airbus A320 so first up were rows 20 and up. But this is a budget flight from Singapore to Hong Kong so the passenegers are a cosmopolitan lot and announcing only in English is, frankly, a mistake. English speakers in rows 20+ and everyone else in all rows raced forward with those ineligible for boarding being asked to wait (in Cantonese). The effect was to create an increasingly dense scrum of people just standing around the door, each held by the invisible force of authority like mimes pressed up against glass windows. Welcome to queuing, Chinese-style.

The flight was okay, 3hours, 20mins but JetStar takes no frills flying to heart. There are no drinks, snacks or food available free of charge on board. Canned drinks: S$3. Tea: S$3. Mars bar: S$3. Tiger beer: S$4. Hot meals: S$8, Those in the know, despite several announcements to the contrary, brought food with them but you can't bring drinks, hence the skewed priorities back at the terminal.

The Chinese aunties all had plastic bag bundles of green vegetables as hand luggage and bid a collective "bye bye Singapore" on takeoff. About 1 hour to go, I had the thought that being stuck in a confined space, surrounded by strange people speaking in tongues, unable to leave and at the mercy of the staff is possibly as close to being in an insane asylum as most people experience.

No frills landing means no jetway, but rather bus to the terminal, mocking the efforts of the people who pushed their way along the aisle to get off quickly. All airports look the same these days because the design requirements are the same. Dash up to immigration and you were cattle-prodded into what turned out to be 3 or 4 TensaBarrier mazes with, in our case, 1 guy, yes, 1 immigration official on duty processing the queue. To say the crowd was restless is an understatement. The Aussie cricket team dispersed through the queue kept up a running commentary, checking their watches anxious that the bars were going to close. When a second immigration official turned up he received a round of applause and assorted "Good on yer mate" endorsements. I got through in 45mins which I felt was lucky in the circumstances.

I think we were ripped off on the transport into town. The (newish) airport was an engineering marvel at the time, levelling mountains and reclaiming acres of land. The train was HK$90 each (£6) but would drop off at Kowloon station so add HK$40 for the taxi to the hotel. The bus was direct drop off but HK$130each. Still, a bit of devine intervention on the way into town as the driver triggered the Gatso on the approach road to the pretty Tsing Yi suspension bridge. That'll teach them to overcharge tourists.