On March 9, 1996, tens of thousands of readers of a daily newspaper
in China's Anhui province saw a photograph of two young women at a
local long-distance bus station. Dressed in fashionable new winter
coats and carrying luggage printed with Latin letters, the women
were returning home from their jobs in one of China's large cities.
As the photo caption indicated, the image represented the
"transformation of migrant women"; the women's "transformation" was
signaled by their status as consumers. "New Masters, New Servants"
is an ethnography of class dynamics and the subject formation of
migrant domestic workers. Based on her interviews with young women
who migrated from China's Anhui province to the city of Beijing to
engage in domestic service for middle-class families, as well as
interviews with employers, job placement agencies, and government
officials, Yan Hairong explores what these migrant workers mean to
the families that hire them, to urban economies, to rural provinces
such as Anhui, and to the Chinese state. Above all, Yan focuses on
the domestic workers' self-conceptions, desires, and struggles.
Yan analyzes how the migrant women workers are subjected to,
make sense of, and reflect on a range of state and neoliberal
discourses about development, modernity, consumption, self-worth,
quality, and individual and collective longing and struggle. She
offers keen insight into the workers' desire and efforts to achieve
"suzhi" (quality) through self-improvement, the way workers are
treated by their employers, and representations of migrant domestic
workers on television and the Internet and in newspapers and
magazines. In so doing, Yan demonstrates that contestations over
the meanings of migrant workers raise broad questions about the
nature of wage labor, market economy, sociality, and postsocialism
in contemporary China.
General
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