Lan, Pei-Chia. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan.

• Author: Uneke, Okori A.
• Position: Book review

Lan, Pei-Chia. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 304 pages. Paper, $22.95.

Historically, in most cultures, women have performed the bulk of household work. Today, migrant women are the primary source of paid domestic labor around the world. With the rapid and successful economic growth in the newly industrializing countries (NICs) of East Asia, the rising middle and upper classes have increasingly recruited hired help from Southeast Asia. In Taiwan, many of the foreign household workers come from the Philippines and Indonesia.

Pei-Chia Lan's ethnographic study, Global Cinderellas, illuminates the boundaries of class, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship encountered by Filipina and Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Taiwan. The author demonstrates, through vivid ethnographic accounts, how the relationship between migrant domestic workers and their Taiwanese employers are mediated by strict immigration policies, economic disparities, ethnicity, and gender. To understand the relationship between migrant domestic labor and the Taiwanese nouveau riche, the author provides a sociological analysis as a backdrop to the entry of Taiwan as a growing market for international domestic-labor migration.

With industrialization and the growth in women's waged employment, coupled with the increase in dual-income families and the growing trend towards the nuclear-family unit as the dominant family configuration, the need for paid domestic labor has increased significantly among the newly rich in Taiwan. Furthermore, because of the growing shortage of labor in the domestic-service industry, it has become even more difficult to recruit local middle-aged women as domestics (obasans), who, regardless of the wage, have no interest in working as live-ins. Thus, a financially affordable solution to the demand for child care, housework, and elderly care is sought in foreign domestic workers.

The author's reference to migrant domestic workers as "global Cinderellas" is a metaphor, designed to convey the complexity and mixed experiences of the migrants on several fronts. First, migrant domestic workers venture abroad to escape poverty at home. International labor migration also benefits sending countries. For example, the Philippines ranks second in the world after Mexico as the biggest labor-exporting country. The estimated number of overseas Filipino workers is about eight million...