She’s my domestic goddess

She’s in charge of your washing your underwear, so treat her with respect

Over breakfast I made a list of things for my domestic helper to do.

1) Buy milk.

2) Pick up kids from school.

3) Solve world financial crisis.

4) Find cure for cancer.

5) Bring lasting peace to Middle East.

6) Make dinner.

I looked at the list for a while and then decided I was probably asking a bit too much of her. So I crossed "buy milk" off the list.

My domestic helper, like most of her counterparts, is far more capable than I am. There's pretty much nothing she cannot do. I'm thinking of loaning her to US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to sort out the whole GM thing for him.

Given the massive intelligence of domestic helpers, I was not in the least surprised that a columnist who was rude to them triggered an international incident. Hong Kong-based Chip Tsao wrote that the Philippines was "a nation of servants" and promptly got himself banned from that country.

He defended himself by saying that the column was funny, but his argument was severely hampered by the fact that it wasn't.
*
Domestic workers may be known by different names, such as helpers, amahs, ayahs and so on, but they tend to share one thing. They are smart with money. They live in the same cities as their employers do, but get by on a fraction of the cash AND save funds to send home.

They also have emotional intelligence. They just smile and nod, despite receiving steady streams of idiotic orders by idiotic employers, some of whom are toddlers, and the rest of whom behave like toddlers.

*
There are lots of acceptable jokes about domestic helpers, but all the good ones tend to show the smart maid outwitting the dumb employer. They have to be this way round to feel right, otherwise they are unjust and that means they are unfunny (as Mr Tsao discovered).

Some readers may be familiar with the cache of helper jokes found at www.maribet.com. These are stories of Maribet and friends, smart supermaids. Here are a few of the latest additions.

1. The employer's wife says: "My tummy looks so fat. I think I will have to diet."

Her helper Maribet shakes her head and replies: "It doesn't matter what color it is. It will still look fat."

2. Maribet goes to collect her employer's children from school.  The teacher approaches her and says: "Would you like to buy a ticket for the school raffle?"

Maribet replies: "What's the prize? A place at a better school?"

3. The employer's child approaches Maribet after school and asks: “Maribet, am I descended from a monkey?”

Maribet replies: "I don't know, May-May. I never met your grandparents.”

4. The employer's wife is having lunch with three friends. She asks Maribet to bring them a bottle of one‑calorie diet cola.

“Pour out a glass for each of us,” the employer says. “And make sure I don’t get the calorie.”

5. Maribet's friend Teresita is talking to her employer, who is an old man.

Teresita says: “The doctor phoned.”

The old man asks: "What did he say?"

Teresita says: "It's bad news. You've got cancer and Alzheimer's disease."

The old man looks crestfallen. He says: “Oh dear. Well, at least I don't have cancer.”

Comments

[fardel]

That was once upon a longtime ago, when I was still young and already divorced.
I had a domestic helper to help me sort out the mess I was disorganizing in the house.
She was a very nice person , but we could initially barely communicate due different languages.
She had patience, was very soft spoken,and had very good manners.
I left her in in charge, and would disappear when she would show up , just to make room; she had the key to the house and a "better pay than other".
Her husband was a very nice guy who was working in a shipyard.
They were living simply in a little shack he had built.
She was always on time, efficient , and happy looking.
When she had a baby girl, she stopped working for a while.
In the meantime I did not need any domestic helper ;I had become well organized.
(I.e I good re- married again)
I saw her 18 years later . she did not change a bit.
She still lived in the little shack which had become a small house,still made of zinc and timber , but neat with furniture and a flower garden and a garden where she was growing vegetables.
She was speaking a fluent French and was driving her own car.
Her husband and herself had mastered the French language and they had progressed socially; he was working as ( and still is ) a supervisor (Spare parts department ) for a car dealer.
The most amazing news were about the daughter: she was attending a University in France, in Medicine

They are not the exception.
My hat off to domestic helpers.
Hey guys ,( or ladies ! ) if you are happy with your domestic helper, do yourself a favor: give them a better pay.
You deserve them , they deserve it.

[Amy_D]

I could not believe how rude that guy chip tsao was. this whole 'nation of servants' thing, how can be not realize that this would be upsetting. and then he made it worst by saying that it was satire and people who were objecting to it did not understand satire. well let me tell him that satire is funny political comment and there was nothing funny abotu what he wrote.

[Karuna]

found the translation online of Chip Tsao's chinese article...

The article is really bad.

http://pedestrianobserver.blogspot.com/2009/03/chip-tsao-satire-sparking-controversy.html

[Rika]

Oh My,I read this article really carfully. I like to detect this line between being funny and being offence in order to learn to never cross it. However, in a lecture I would use this as a bad example. At the beginning I thought that I had found a spark of wit, but he screwed the knife deeper and deeper and killed it. If one would start reading after the first quarter one would not get the idea that this is meant sarcastic. This is not funny, not even taunting it is scathing. Well, at least how I understand it.

I guess his mention of his 'patriotic Chinese male' ego was supposed to be meant as making fun of himself. Well, it doesn't matter from which nationality a 'male patriotic ego' is decended - there are too many around in this world and whenever I came across one it never was funny.

So to make the world a funnier place, everybody with a patriotic male ego might want to cosider shoving the same into a very dark place where we can't see it anymore.

And how much fun and sunshine my Phillipine cleaner is bringing into this world. She is the loveliest person with a work ethic which is hard to find these days, and I wouldn't know what to do without her support. BTW: I'm a secretary - what makes me different from being a 'servant'? In a way every person who takes money from somebody else for a job is a servant.

[Vince A]

A couple of writing tips for Chip Tsao:

- Take a couple of Nury's writing classes. A good assignment would be to revise your article under his guidance.

- Read Nury's website or his books and learn how to write satire without being offensive.

Seriously, I have never come across someone with such an underdeveloped sense of humour.

Even infants can distinguish between funny and not funny.

[David]

"He defended himself by saying that the column was funny, but his argument was severely hampered by the fact that it wasn't."

Sheer brilliance, an argument that simply falls apart by not being intact to begin with.

[Karuna]

discussed with my maid on this and here is what she told me:
"I am just a maid working in your home and there are many like me in Hong Kong. But, there are also so many Phillipine people in Hongkong who are doctors and engineers. How can this man call all Phillipine people as servant. This is very rude. And why he apologized only in Spainish. He should also apologize in Chinese, since his article was in Chinese."

[David]

Actually, I think the article was in English?

[Paco]

it was translated

[Albert]

The Philippines got a heck of GREAT talents, and GOOD engineers, chemists, physicists, biologists, and, hell, boxers, too, pea-brained Chip Tsao! Not to degrade you, but it's just as if Hong Kong has not its own blemishes. After all, it's our "servants" that keep your households alive and going. , Chip Tsao!

[angela]

On Sundays I am a volunteer teacher for a not-for-profit organization dedicated to ‘enriching lives through financial education.’ The org serves women migrant workers by providing confidence-building, money management, and entrepreneurship training.

I teach basic computer skills (word, xls, using the internet, etc.) to domestic helpers. One Sunday I was teaching the girls how to create an email account and as we were going through the steps, Maribet calls my attention and said that she keeps getting error message about incorrect password. I went over to have a look and apparently she was having trouble on the part where you have to re-confirm the password.

me: type your password here then type it again here.
maribet: yes, but still the same error message.
me: ok, let me do it for you (thinking it was just a typo)
Maribet handed me her notes where she had written down her password: (dot) (dot) (dot) (dot) (dot) (dot) (dot) (dot) she had written down eight dots as her password.

I teach these girls but I ended up learning more from them.