Home cooking: Filipino women and geographies of the senses in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper considers how migrant women become embodied subjects in foreign cities. It draws on the experiences of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, and their active creation of places in the city that emulate a 'sense' of home (through sights, sounds, tastes, aromas and so on). Rather than explicate extreme forms of bodily experience some women mediate in their working lives -such as physical containment, hunger or violence -I interrogate unconventional forms of body politics that take place outside Hong Kong homes. In examining spaces of the city where Filipinas engage in mass leisure activities, I shed light on the relationship between space, bodies and sensory experience. The senses are not merely an intrinsic property of the body -they are a situated practice that connects the body to overlapping spaces of power in the cultural economy of labour migration. By linking sensory experience to urban culture and power relations in the city, I offer alternative maps of people and places that tell us something different about diasporic experience and the political importance of geographies of the senses.Architecture, because it is always assumed to be somewhere, is the first visual evidence of a city's putative identity. In this regard, the symbolic landscape of Central exerts a particular fascination not only for filmmakers and photographers, but also for the domestic workers from the Philippines who take it over on Sundays when it is closed to traffic. 1 My first visit to Hong Kong was in 1994. Like every dutiful tourist, topping my agenda was a Star Ferry ride from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island. The Star Ferry affords spectacular views of urban hyperdensity, and provides ample photo opportunities to capture the symbolic landscape that has come to represent the Hong Kong experience. One Sunday I boarded the ferry at Tsim Sha Tsui, took a few photographs as we crossed the channel, then disembarked at the Central terminal. As I wandered through the tunnels and streets leading up to the space-age architecture of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, my focus shifted from monuments to people as it became evident I was among an exclusively Filipino community. While stories of the gathering at Central are common in the Philippines, I was not prepared for the intensity of the crowd.My first and most profound memory of this experience was awakening to the phenomenon. In the distance a woman was bellowing 'peso, peso, pesooooo!' in the melodic tone used by street vendors to solicit business in the Philippines. The peso is the Philippine national currency, but this locution is difficult to express literally. In musical terms it is generally patterned in three measures of two beats, with the first beat of each measure somewhat staccatoed. The first five notes are the same, but are followed by a final prolonged note which ascends a full octave (this explanation, without doubt, will not do it justice). For me that voice, that particular rhythm and intonation, recalled the Philippines I had known from 1991 to 1993. My pace qu...

Identities in a Culture of Circulation: Performing Selves in Filipina Migration

“…Most tend to socialize -when permitted -with other migrants from their sending 17 locality in kin and co-religious groups (Constable, 1997(Constable, , 2003Law, 2001). …”

Translocal Circulation: Place and Subjectivity in an Extended Filipino Community

“…Filipino contract workers in Hong Kong typically live, as required by law, in their employers homes and the constraints and resubjectivations experienced by becoming a 'maid' in a live-in working relationship in Hong Kong have been described in detail by Nicole Constable (1997). Outside the workplace, Law's (2001) …”

“…With current NGO estimates positing over 160,000 Filipino migrants working in Hong Kong, a suite of speciality services, both formal and informal, has developed to meet their needs for 6 banking, shopping, socialising and finding 'a taste of home' (Law 2001 On Sundays, the informal and social aspects of the community erupt into the public space of Central. During the work week, Central is the business district of Kowloon.…”

“…Commensality is a key aspect of this cultural reterritorialisation (Law 2001). Some women bring Appadurai's (1995Appadurai's ( , 1996 conception of translocality, recreating a series of mini-neighbourhoods from the migrant workers of sending villages from across the Philippine archipelago.…”

“…Some women bring Appadurai's (1995Appadurai's ( , 1996 conception of translocality, recreating a series of mini-neighbourhoods from the migrant workers of sending villages from across the Philippine archipelago. Here, the overlapping of Filipino neighbourhoods onto the weekday spatial practices of Hong Kong's business district creates simultaneous and multiple versions of place (Law, 2001). Scholars theorising the urban are well aware of how such materialisations of circulation serve to produce the globality of urban centres (Liechty 1996;LiPuma & Koelble, 2005).…”