As you can see on the Popular Posts hit
parade to the right, this website’s Newbies Guide to Beijing has soared up the
charts to become the most popular thing on the internet since email.
Clearly there’s a clamour for my guidance on
how to live your life. With that in mind I thought I would humbly add to this
bank of knowledge with a more concentrated Part II. So here today is your guide
to that staple of expat life ...
YOUR
AYI
When you live in Beijing, you’re going to
need an ayi. The word means “aunty”, which fits if you can imagine your mum’s
sister working as your maid, with extras.
In fact you don’t really need an ayi, but we all hire one anyway.
Or two. And I’ve heard of three. That’s called “ayi creep”, and it works like
this: For a sometimes minimal wage, you too can be the proud employer of
domestic staff. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without one. Then, after about
6.00pm, you’ll wonder how you ever lived with only one, and you’ll hire another
one. If you become very used to this, your ayi will end up living with you.
On balance, they’re great to have –
provided all goes smoothly. And rest assured, all goes smoothly for at least
one in 10 ayi situations.
First you should interview. Find ayi numbers
on websites like the Beijinger, City Weekend, and email groups like Beijing
Mammas and Beijing Cafe. They also advertise in expat-friendly stores. Try to
have a Chinese speaker help you interview. Otherwise, beware of “Interview
Mandarin”. This is where your ayi speaks clearly and simply through the
familiar ground of interview-speak, but after getting the job lapses into a
home dialect which sounds like it could be Welsh. Or Wookie.
Prepare as many questions as you can. Don’t
so much gauge the words – they want the job so they’ll tell you what you want
to hear – but look for sharpness of response, how quickly they think of answers
to things like “What would you do if my child was injured”.
We once asked that question and the
prospective ayi laughed and said: “Oh no - if your child is with me, they won’t
get injured!” We weren’t sure if the phrase “accidents will happen” had been
banned by the government, but it was a ludicrous response.
Of course we employed her. And I can say,
hand on heart, that our relationship was a spectacular disaster.
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Hopefully your ayi should look something like this ... |
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... and not so much like this. |
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Here is the result of my erroneous google search again. As many an expat wife would say, these are not the ayis you're looking for. OK that's enough. |
When you find an ayi you like, work out their
salary and hours with pedantic detail. Wages can vary. At the lower end, especially
with a hard-nosed Chinese boss used to the ayi scene, the salary will be that of
a farm girl eager to help her family. At the higher end, depending on the expat’s
naïveté or fear of
China, and the ayi’s gall, it will be more like that of a mid-range Wall Street
CEO. Without lifting the lid on this can of worms I have in my Pandora’s Box,
something around 20 RMB an hour is in the ballpark.
With everything settled, everyone’s happy.
Then your ayi will meet other ayis and it will all fall to bits.
This is because a typical first
conversation between ayis starts like this:
“How much do you get paid? Hello, how are
you?”
Unlike westerners, the Chinese have no
qualms discussing, and usually complaining about, their salaries. And if your
ayi compares badly you’ll soon pick up on this. Most often she will
suggestively hint something like “HEY I MET ANOTHER AYI TODAY WHO’S GETTING
LOTS MORE MONEY THAN ME!”
She’ll ask for more. You should probably
stand your ground for what you’ve agreed, but be warned, this will lead to
consequences. One common consequence is that one of your ayi’s relatives will be
injured in a terrible accident. Or fall gravely ill. Your ayi will need to
leave your employ, or leave town.
Then you’ll see her around the corner in a
couple of weeks getting paid slightly more than at your place, their relative
having recovered like Jesus.
This isn’t just me, the Ayi Whisperer, speaking from a wealth of
bitter experience. Chinese people are famous for inventing things. One of them
was “the subject dodge”. To save face and a general hassle, they will mostly deal
with issues obliquely rather than head on, as many a westerner has learned to
their cost. A restaurateur friend here couldn’t believe the rotten luck her
staff had with infirm relatives. But then she paid them a little more.
(Such cultural matters are well addressed
in an excellent book: 101 Stories for Foreigners
to Understand Chinese People, written by a Shanghai woman and her American
husband).
Another friend’s ayi one day said she’d
have to quit because her husband had been injured in an explosion at work. The
woman sighed wearily and said that was a good one. She demanded to see
photographic evidence thank you very much. She was a little embarrassed when
her ayi returned the next day with a picture of her husband in his hospital bed
with his face bandaged. But he was an exceptional man.
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Another web pic of an ayi. Under a good ayi's care, your children should look something like this ... |
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... and not so much like this ... |
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... or this. |
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Ayis can also come in handy if, say, you write a blog on life in China and find yourself needing a photo of a Chinese ear, as I did one day. |
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Or if you need a pic of a nonsensical Chinese shirt. |
To generalise, ayis can fall into a couple
of categories. Beijingers generally are savvy, will get you better bargains at
the markets, but want more money. Those from provinces like economically
depressed Anhui will generally work very hard for less. But you often can’t
understand a word they’re saying, and you wouldn’t want your children learning
Mandarin from them. It would be like moving your family to America and having
your child speak like Jed Clampett.
It sounds harsh, but often because of
impoverished backgrounds, ayis from the provinces will often lack the sophistication
of Beijingers. Ayi stories abound. A western diplomat friend and her husband
once came home to find their ayi ironing their treasured Egyptian cotton
bedsheets. Nothing too unusual about that, except she was holding them up and
ironing them against a wall. Still nothing too horrid about that, except that
between sweeps of the iron she was taking a big mouthful of water and
spit-spraying it across the sheet. “It’s the best way to get these creases
out,” she said happily, as our friends pondered how long they’d been sleeping
on so-ironed sheets.
I once took our new Anhui ayi through her bed
linen routine, saying she should wash the sheets and put them in the dryer for
about 40 minutes before re-making the bed. Putting our girls to bed that night,
we were surprised to find their bedsheets wet. Sure enough, ayi had dutifully taken
them out of the dryer after 40 minutes and re-made the bed, without stopping to
notice they weren’t yet dry.
In fairness, she seriously might have
thought this is how westerners like their beds. So much is lost in the mire of
cultural difference, as often in language barriers. This doesn’t quite explain
our friends’ ayi spitting on their sheets, but still.
Provided agreements have been explicitly
reached, your ayi will generally be a great help. She’ll clean, cook,
shop, do school runs, and perhaps act as a Mandarin teacher and surrogate
grandmother to your kids.
Then you’ll repatriate and she’s the grandmother
your kids will never see again, which is weird. So this expat life can be
strange. Ayis can be problematic. But then again, if you can’t remember a time
when you didn’t have domestic staff to complain about, things can’t be too bad.
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