this morning i woke up at 10.30 and immediately felt guilty. i know my parents must have been up for hours, and that the clothes have been washed and hung up, the porch swept, the water boiled and tea made, yesterday's laundry taken down, sorted and folded, ready for ironing. i hit check mail and dive off to the bathroom and come back to make my bed with a toothbrush sticking out of my mouth. my dad is already giving maths tuition in the study, and my mother has gone out. my dad comes out of the room for 2 minutes to tell me that there's bak zhang downstairs for breakfast. obviously everyone else has eaten. no one has had time for the papers yet though: i get my zaobao and my straits times from the living room still in their bundles. i wake up late, and i get to sit there reading about yesterday's world cup matches over my bakzhang while the rest of the family is working day and night to send me to university and isn't it the least i can do to do the housework while i'm home and save the old folks some pains? unfortunately, that's the sort of thing the parents would never say but i think to myself all the time.

after 8 months of being without a maid, my family is getting one again, and i'm very thankful for that. everyone assumes i've been going out everyday since i've come back. in fact, i've gone out very little, and most my day is spent indoors helping with the housework. we've got help coming in twice a week to iron, but otherwise the three of us do what there is to do. there's an unbelievable amount of things to do around the house, i just don't know how people who work do it all, it's a full time job in itself! we didn't have a maid till i was in sec 3. my mom never came home before 9pm when she was still working, and since they are both teachers and also had to make morning assembly like me, we're all out of the house by 6.30am. tempers flew very short. i resisted the idea of a maid in the beginning because i didn't want a stranger living with us and also, i admit it, i thought she would share my room, and at 15, oy, i don't want to share a room with anyone. (she got my grandfather's old bedroom) but it so easy to get used to having one. in the periods of time when we are in between maids, i do what i have to stoically but i'm really looking forward to the next one coming. i don't know how cindy does it all - doing all the cooking and ironing and cleaning for her dad and the two brothers since she was little. it makes me very annoyed too, especially when i read her recent entry about how, when she and her mom came back from china, she had to spend ages cleaning because the men had been sitting around leaving the cleaning for them when they returned. honestly, if that ever happened i can't imagine my mother not mauling her husband and sons. my dad might go to my aunt's for meals if my mom and i left, but he'd do the laundry, the ironing, and he already does all the sweeping and mopping around here, and all the dishes too. if cindy were my sister, i'd probably prostrate myself before her, not to mention drive her not only to tampines but jurong if she wants me to.

my grandmother got a new maid 3 weeks ago and they didn't get along, (this maid specialises in taking care of old people. my grandmother, however, isn't the kind who lies in bed letting the maid take charge. anyone who's had 14 children knows better than a 25 year old how to keep house, you see.) so while we're arranging for a transfer she came to stay with us. i come home at 2 in the morning, and toss my shirt in the laundry basket. the maid is asleep by then. the next day, at 5pm, i am dressing to go out. i open my closet, and last night's shirt is hanging there, washed and ironed to the last wrinkle. and i didn't even see her doing it. i thought my closet was magically generately laundered clothes or something. for all of one very comfortable week, after i put my plate into the sink, i could go back into my room and pick up my book where i left off. i wasn't needed for the weekly changing of the bedsheets. (or the curtains or the cushion covers) best of all, i didn't have to stay in the kitchen with the mater. i don't think i can keep house, or at least not the way my mother does it. trying to keep house with my mother is very frustrating. she's got a jie2 pi4, whatever you call that in english. obsessively orderly and clean (ordning and reda?). lots of things to do wrong around her, hanging the clothes up in an inefficient way (towels on the inside, undies and socks on the outside, so that the heavier load on the bamboo poles is nearer your body) or confusing the cloth for covering dishes with the one for drying them with the one you put them *on*. if you could pluck dao gay the wrong way, it would probably be when you're doing it with her. heh. sometimes i think she's a bit like nanny ogg when it comes to housework. she spring cleans with regimental efficiency. and if she sees a patch of dust that dust (and you who failed to clean it) is in trouble. eeks, i even remember the days when we cut the grass ourselves, and then rake them into giant black "corpse bags". we ironed the curtains, and stuck fat N-shaped metal pins into them and then climbed up to hook them on the sliding bar. and got down on our knees to scrub the porch, with huge buckets of water and tides of suds whooshing out to the drains outside. that was fun, by the way, but only until you're about thirteen.

a few months ago a bunch of us were talking about the maid problem in singapore, sparked off by this article cindy talked about in her journal, about how sporean teenagers sporeans are so dependent on maids they think it's their right to have maids wait on them hand and foot. addy says that in america, she's afraid to tell her friends that she has a maid because people would assume they must be fabulously rich and upper crust to have "live-in help". i do housework because it has to be done, but it's such a grind. nowadays when i eat dinner i'm mentally counting the number of dishes to be washed later, isn't that dreadful? it's not so much the housework itself but how it saps you of all your energy and time to do anything else. cindy pointed out that this is outrageous to say that your time is more important than other people's time, which can be bought to do what you don't want to do. afterall, she said, maids don't think, ooh, my ambition is to be a maid in singapore when i grow up. on the other hand, i don't see that we make so much noise about the garbarge collectors. and if it's so good in the kampung why would anyone leave home? su-lin is right that humans have always paid other humans to do things for them and that this isn't victorian england and we're not the new slave-owning class but i guess we're also afraid of this dependency and all the social problems. incidentally, i realised that addy poach su-lin me minyin have got maids, and the boys, von, kg, yt etc don't. i wonder why this is so. do their mothers do everything? if maidlessness means that everyone including the men do all the housework, maybe that's not too bad. but if it's either the maid or the mothers and sisters then why not the maid? at least the maids are paid to do it, it's a job. how many of you pay your mothers for doing the housework anyway?

i suppose mostly though we're appalled at the way young sporeans grow up with maids from the time they're babies and don't learn to do a thing and we sort of self-congratulatorily say aha see we didn't get maids till later and we could do it if we had to. i don't see how i can do without one in future though. i'll prob have a maid for the baby years and then let the kids manage on their own in primary school and get one again when they're in jc because they won't ever be home in jc and housework does get in the way of social life and ten years is enough training for them and i shall want to retire and kiao kah myself. i don't want to put my kids in childcare and i most certainly don't want to stay at home and be a tai-tai (or rather, tai-tai-hood and a life of high tea and mahjong is all very well but short of marrying the crown prince of brunei or something how is it possible in this country?) but if we aren't living with one or the other set of parents (what makes us think our parents want to mind grandkids anyway? i used to be the youngest person on our street. now i only need to walk home and there will be fifteen baby-carrying neighbours behind fifteen gates waving at me showing me how cute their grandkid is.)

what i don't understand is how people in other countries get by. this must be the only country in the world where it's the norm to have maids. how do american women do it? i just can't imagine it. are they so much more efficient or are the men so good around the house or do they just do less things than we do? argh.