THE MAIDS' DIARY

She left us when we moved to Johor Baru. Her family didn’t want her to be too far away from them. She was from Dusun Tua in Selangor. She joined our family when we moved from Kelantan to Kuala Lumpur in the mid-1960s.
Kak Hasnah was mom’s helper when we were growing up in Kuala Lumpur. She was our favourite among those that we had before or after her.
She was not the maid, orang gaji or amah. Kak Hasnah was like a big sister to me and my brothers.
I grew up with a helper in the house until I was in Standard Five. We didn’t hire one when my father retired from government service and we moved to Kempas. From then on, I had to do stuff by myself like making my own bed in the morning and washing my own school shoes. As I grew older, I had to do my own laundry with the exception of my school clothes. Mom did those.
Back then, we didn’t have major problems with the hired help. In fact, they were taught to cook, to iron and do housekeeping.
My uncles and aunties who hired helpers to look after the children never had any major complaints. If any, these hired help were embraced into the family. They were all addressed as “Kakak.”
Of course, back then, they were locals.
But this changed as the country slowly became industrialized. Factories were in need of workers.
Those in the kampong who thought their way into the city was being an orang gaji in someone’s house had found an alternative.
They prefer to work in the factories instead especially after finding out that there were benefits to it. They became known as Minah Karan as they were mostly working in electronics factories and were among others getting off days and paid overtime on top of their salary.
I haven’t researched enough to tell you when exactly we started “importing” foreign maids. It must have been in the late 1980s. Still, during those years, there were little or no complaints at all on foreign maids. It was only recently that we heard or read stories of employers abusing their maids.
While we are reading some of these horror stories, there are some comical ones too.
A maid employed by a friend of mine had to unpick the hem of all her clothes after her employers found out that she kept the money she stole from them this way. The maid confessed of her wrongdoings after my friend’s husband threatened to report her to the police.
Her employers not only found denominations in ringgit but also US dollars and pound sterling as the couple had traveled quite extensively.
The maid was thrown out of the house that very night.
Another friend hired two maids, one for his family and another to look after his mother at her house. When his mother’s maid went back to Indonesia recently, his own maid complained about her and what she had been doing at his mother’s house. “I nearly kicked her out of the car for not telling me earlier,” he said.
His maid was not too happy that he had given the mother’s maid a bonus for thinking that she had done a good job. What was more hilarious was when he was told by his maid that she decided to spill the beans because she was jealous after seeing him hugging the mother’s maid goodbye at the airport!
And he found only recently that his own maid has a boyfriend, a policeman. “I was at home when I saw a squad car in front of my house. When I got out, the policeman was surprised. When I gestured asking him what was wrong, he pointed to my maid who was already outside the house. She was waving at him. I must say my house is the safest on the block,” he said.
Another friend in Shah Alam caught her maid sneaking out of the house through the back door at night to meet her boyfriend. My friend was curiously as to why the maid was heavily made-up for bed. She and her husband pounced on her when she returned after her “date.”
Meanwhile, a cousin, thinking it was a smart way to get her children to speak English, hired a Filipino maid. Her idea backfired somewhat because her children were speaking English with a Filipino accent instead.
The late Hani Mohsin proudly told us when we visited his house at Bukit Antarabangsa that his daughter can speak three languages: Bahasa Malaysia, English and Bahasa Indonesia. She had just told him that she was taking off her “celana” (seluar or pants).
Beyond these, they are thankful that they have not had problematic maids.
None of the guys reported of their maids looking like Jennifer Lopez. Then again, they don’t live in Manhattan.