Why No China Maids?!

According to an article in TheStar today, our government has rejected the proposal to employ women from China as maids. The first thought that occurred to me was that Wanita MCA had something to do with it. They had previously complained that allowing Chinese maids would not be good for local families. Wanita MCA has been besieged with complaints from women whose husbands had been stolen by little dragon ladies from China.

So at first, I had a good laugh. I was laughing at the silly notion that barring China maids would do the situation any good. If a man chooses to leave his wife for another woman, the source geographical location doesn't really matter. The root of the problem is rarely a third party but something else and the dragon lady is merely an excuse. So, I thought about it a little more. Maybe, this whole business with dragon ladies was just a smoke screen.

The fact is that we're going to bring in maids from India, Nepal, Laos and Vietnam. This indicates that marital indiscretions are not the main factor in the consideration. There are plenty of problems with Vietnamese mail order brides in recent years. Like I said, if a man wants to cheat, nationality is just a minor administrative detail. Also, It doesn't seem to be in line with the normal operating procedure of our government. It just doesn't fit in with their known character.

So, taking a page from history, I think that the whole business of barring maids from China is just to stop another mass exodus of cheap Chinese labour into our country. The last time our country allowed the inflow of Chinese labour in, during the tin-mining boom, it almost turned Malaysia into a province of China. The government has spent a lot of effort correcting the imbalance through policies that encouraged, directly or otherwise, certain groups to increase their birth rate. They aren't about to destroy all the decades of back-bending work.

The only anecdotal evidence that I have to support this idea is the fact that the current influx of foreign workers has helped the government correct the imbalance. Many Indonesian, Bangladeshi and other migrant workers have ended up settling down in Malaysia (through marriage of locals or other means). So, it would be logical to think that at least some of the Chinese maids might end up settling down in Malaysia. The local women already suspect them of stealing their husbands anyway. So, it isn't too difficult to make the leap from A-to-B.

Funnily, I'm fairly certain that the Malaysian Chinese community (at least the women) would lap this all up and thank the government for doing a good thing to help preserve marriages. The government, ended up not having to come up with any silly excuses to bar the entry of more young ladies from China. Lecherous men will now have a selection of even more exotic women to choose from. So, in the end, it's a win-win-win situation for everyone.

I would never have been able to come up with a solution like this. Thank goodness we have the Barisan Nasional government! Satu Lagi Projek Kerajaan BN.

Dragon Lady is a term used in English to describe a stereotyped caricature of an Asian woman: mysterious, cunning, beautiful, seductive, and cruel.