My father, his neck and the 21 housemaids
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E-mail China Daily, July 24, 2016
Xiao Jia finally left my parents after my father decided to move into a rehabilitation center.
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Li Feng/China Daily |
We called her Xiao Jia (Little Jia) instead of using her full name. The woman in her late 40s from Gansu province, followed a string of 20 other ayi, or housemaids, I had hired for my parents after my father fell and damaged cervical vertebrae, making it difficult for him to move around unaided for the past four years. When Xiao Jia left she had worked for us for little more than a month.
"She was slow, a bit dumb and lazy, with a step-mother's face," my father said after she left. My mother complained: "She never followed my instructions in doing the chores," adding that she was hard to communicate with and her cooking was dreadful.
"We tried to put up with her because we knew it's hard for you to find another one," my parents, both 84, said.
They were right, and it was also one of the main reasons my father decided to go to the rehabilitation center.
Anyone setting out to look for an ayi for their parents is embarking on a mission that can be highly stressful.
I had a contract with a housemaid agency to which I paid an annual service fee of 600 yuan ($90). Whenever I was looking for someone new the agent would refer potential candidates to me. Over the four years wages for the ayi rose from 2,500 yuan a month to 4,000 yuan a month, on top of free accommodation and food.
In that time I interviewed more than 30 rural women. Most of the 20 lasted less than four or five days and two stayed for a year, but in those two cases I had to find a replacement during the Spring Festival holiday period. During the absence of the housemaid on most public holidays and at weekends I took care of my parents.
Professional training
I did not mind paying high amounts of money as long as those I was paying were conscientious in their work. However, I feel none of them was satisfied with what they got and gave little thought to what they needed to do to merit it. Few of the women had had any professional training in caring for elderly people either.
Once when I asked one of the ayi whether she had any such experience she replied:
"It's an easy job; I just do exactly what I do at home."
Many of them promised to treat my parents as though they were their own, but of course I knew that was not only an exaggeration, but almost an impossibility. In fact I generally gave short shrift to such talk and said that all they needed to do was follow instructions and work to the best of their ability.
The skills needed to be an ayi should not be underestimated. They include knowing how to behave appropriately, how to cook and how to communicate with elderly people, many of whom can be very set in their ways. To do these things you need training, and for things to work properly I think there needs to be a certain distance between employer and employee, notwithstanding the mutual respect required.
Some of my friends say that after four years of choosing and observing ayi I must have developed an ability to quickly spot the best and the worst. There is some truth to that, and I essentially developed some rules of thumb for reaching such conclusions. Honesty was the most important thing I looked for, and I reckon I can discern that from the eyes.
For me the ideal age range was 40 to 55. Early on I reckoned that women of that age are generally more stable, but it eventually became clear that this is not always so.
Next came physical condition, including the candidate's weight and face, and her family circumstances.
The look was also highly important to me, someone who was neither pretty nor ugly.
The candidate needed to be neither too skinny nor too fat, and at least strong enough to help my father practice walking. I felt that in the interests of finding a stable candidate it was best to avoid single women.
After eventually plumping for someone, all I could do was pray that I had made the right choice.
There is a Chinese saying that wherever there are people there is trouble, which means that the more people there are under one roof the more conflicts there will be. My role was akin to that of a United Nations peacekeeper. I would have to monitor the relationship between my father and the ayi and between my mother and the ayi, and keep an eye out for any hostilities between my father and mother engendered by the ayi's presence. On top of that I needed to field any queries from the ayi and go into crisis management mode when she suddenly announced she was quitting.
Complaints
My parents, like most people their age, like to compare today's ayi with the fiercely devoted maids who were around them in their childhood.
Almost always when I was at my parents' place they would have a lot to say about ayi, some of it good, but most of it bad. In turn the ayi would complain that my father had a bad temper.
Eventually, I was so worried about conflict that I felt I could not leave Beijing longer than seven days.
According to a report from the Ministry of Civil Affairs there were 222 million people aged 60 or above in the country by the end of last year, 16.1 percent of the total population. The report says that the country has about 116,000 nursing homes with a total of about 6.7 million beds. That means there are little more than 30 beds for every 1,000 senior people.
It is obvious that in addition to the healthcare programs for the ageing population there is huge demand for nurses and home-stay ayi .
I am unsure how long my father will stay in the rehabilitation center, but whenever he returns home there will be more ayi hunting to do. A pretty robot called Jiajia was on display in Tianjin recently, and I am beginning to think "she" may be a candidate as housemaid No 22.
I once joked that when I retire I will set up a firm to train ayi. The beauty of such an idea is that if I ever need care myself I will have plenty of talent on tap, knowing that if I have been responsible for their training, if they have to look after me I will be in very good hands.
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