Hong Kong was a very strange place to spend the summer of a recession. It is a city deeply obsessed with conspicuous consumption, perhaps best encapsulated in the Queen’s Road Central Coach store, a building wrapped in a multi-story flashing neon version of its own overlapping “C” logo. Hong Kong’s artfully lit banking towers and designer shopping complexes are a large part of what have allowed it to stand as a capitalist gateway to the East — and a beacon of affluence in the minds of poor women from across Asia.

Roughly 71 percent of immigrants to Hong Kong from the Chinese mainland in 2004 and 2005 were women. Immigration from Southeast Asia, which comes predominantly from the Philippines but also from Thailand, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, shows even more gender imbalance.

Abuse of migrant workers is prevalent worldwide, but seems particularly and problematically rooted in Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s proximity to the Southeast Asian countries from which domestic workers are sourced helps to facilitate this immigration, and its supposed minimum wage attracts more domestic workers than other nearby countries like Malaysia and Singapore. Hong Kong’s exaltation and preoccupation with wealth also socially justifies the subjugation of these women. To have a domestic helper is a status symbol much like the logos that proudly adorn everything in the city from buildings to napkins.

Women from the mainland, the other kind of female immigrant to Hong Kong, occupy an even more complicated position. Most these women have married Hong Kong men who have gone to the mainland specifically on a trip to find a bride. Many of these cross-border families then settle in Tin Shui Wai, a housing project in the northern New Territories, an outlying area of Hong Kong that borders on the mainland city of Shenzhen. The place is notorious for having the highest levels of domestic abuse in the entire Special Administrative Region. Harmony House, the oldest domestic abuse shelter in Hong Kong, has a special office in Tin Shui Wai because the area is so high-risk. Tin Shui Wai sees so much violence because of its role as point of contact between mainland women and the much-older Hong Kong men whom they have married. It is a place where the mismatched expectations of the two groups clash.

Mainland women are being imported to fill a role — that of the traditional, submissive Chinese wife — that local Hong Kong women, viewed as harder to control and more independent, are expected to have outgrown. Yale Professor of Anthropology Helen Siu suggested that in the case of new and female arrivals, male-female gender hierarchies are “combined with the Hongkongers’ own arrogance towards the mainland.” Tradition is projected onto mainland women by Hong Kong men who believe themselves and Hong Kong women to be more modern. Paradoxically, Hong Kong is a place where the obsession with modernity has, consciously or not, engendered a parallel obsession with tradition.

While dissimilar, Hong Kong’s governing attitudes of splashy consumption and patriarchal Chinese tradition are both principles exclusionary to women, especially to poor and to newly arrived women. Female immigrants to Hong Kong have been left out as the city speeds eagerly and aggressively forward. Power requires inferiority — domestic workers or obedient wives — to exist, and Hong Kong, as a city deeply concerned with power, both financial and patriarchal, needs to take advantage of female immigrants to maintain its upward momentum.

As China’s mainland economy continues to grow, Hong Kong will look less golden by comparison and immigration from the mainland will begin to slow. However, migrants from Southeast Asia will continue to arrive in Hong Kong to become servants and domestic helpers like their predecessors. Hong Kong, forever in need of both an inferior class and an inferior gender, will always be able to attract newcomers to play these roles. It is, famously, a beacon of wealth in an area of poverty and as such is both irresistible and incorrigible.

Alexandra Rose is a senior History of Art major in Branford College.

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