Asian Education on Film Episode Five

Ilo Ilo (爹妈不在家) (Anthony Chen, Singapore, 2011)

In the previous two episodes of this series, I’ve discussed films dealing with aspects of Asian women’s experience of education and its effect on broadening the opportunities available to women. In the previous episode, on Ann Hui’s Song of the Exile, we saw this illustrated in the story of a complicated mother-daughter relationship, played out against the backdrop of the political upheavals of twentieth-century East Asia. But when it comes to the emancipating effects of education for middle-class or professional women in contemporary Hong Kong - the home of the women depicted in that film - what is often overlooked is how this may depend on the exploitation of other women: a female underclass of maids or nannies. In Hong Kong, Singapore and other major cities in East and Southeast Asia, many of these maids come from the Philippines. These ‘Filipina maids’ are often themselves quite highly educated and fluent in English, so that their duties include not just cleaning, cooking and caring for their employers’ children, but also informally supporting the education of those children through speaking English to them. But at the same time as the economic dysfunction of the Philippines impels these women to seek employment overseas, caring for the children of strangers, they are often forced to leave behind families and children of their own.

In Ilo Ilo, Anthony Chen explores the relationship between one such Filipina maid and her Singaporean employers, Heck and Leng, and their primary school-aged son, Jiale. It’s a film that superbly captures the dependence of many middle-class families in cities like Hong Kong and Singapore on their Filipina maids, and how that dependency can lead to exploitation and abuse. But Chen also sensitively depicts the stresses affecting the Singaporean parents, as they struggle to maintain their status and livelihood in the intensely pressured, competitive and uncertain economic context of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Those stresses affecting the parents inevitably affect their young son, Jiale. The central focus of the film is the relationship that develops between young Jiale and Teresa (or Terry), the family’s new maid.

The film can be viewed online on Amazon Prime or Netflix (depending on your region). Options for free viewing appear currently to be unavailable.

Further reading:

Ju, B., Yang, X., Pu, X. H., & Sandel, T. L. (2023). ‘(Re)making live-in or live-out choice: the lived experience of Filipina migrant domestic workers in Macao’. Gender, Place & Culture, 31(12), 1713–1734. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2023.2265581

Maca, M., & Morris, P. (2012). ‘The Philippines, the East Asian “developmental states” and education: a comparative analysis of why the Philippines failed to develop’. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 42(3), 461–484. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2011.652814