WHEN THE LIGHT OF THE HOME IS ABROAD:

UNSKILLED FEMALE MIGRATION AND THE

FILIPINO FAMILY

Maruja Milagros B. Asis1, Shirlena Huang2 and Brenda S.A. Yeoh3

Scalabrini Migration Centre, Quezon City, Philippines
1

Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore

2

3
Department of Geography and Asian MetaCentre for Population and
Sustainable Development Analysis, National University of Singapore,
Singapore

ABSTRACT

The migration of women engaged in transnational domestic work reveals how the uneven impacts
of globalisation have intruded into the micro-world of families and households. In this age of
globalisation and migration, family membership has become multisited or transnational, with members
dispersed in space. The migration of workers and the separation this entails has raised challenges
to notions and ideals of “being family”. Unlike other workers on the move, the migration of
domestic workers has some distinctive characteristics. It can be framed in terms of women moving
between families and households; workers whose departure from their family of origin and insertion
into their family of employment reconstitute the structure and content of family relationships in
both material and imagined ways. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in the Philippines
and Singapore, we explore how migrant women and their family members define and negotiate
family ideals, gender identities and family relationships, given the family’s transnational
configuration. Our findings provide some support to the notion that individual members in
transnational families resort to “relativising” in fashioning responses to their situation.

Keywords: transnational domestic workers, migration, gender, family, Philippines, Singapore

INTRODUCTION

Until recently, most analyses of the
socioeconomic changes that transformed East
and Southeast Asia into economic tigers and
dragons have given little weight to the role of
intraregional migration in sustaining the
development of the region’s high-performing
economies. The links between intraregional
migration in the past 30 years and structural
changes in the region are, however, now
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 25(2), 2004, 198-215
 Copyright 2004 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and Blackwell Publishers Ltd
receiving attention (e.g. Iredale et al., 2003).
The road to industrialisation in East and
Southeast Asia has been marked by labour
shortages not only in small and medium-sized
industries but in households as well and, like
the path taken by the now developed countries
in the west, industrialising Asian countries
have had to import workers from less
developed countries to fill chronic labour

Asis et al.p65 2 6/23/2004, 3:00 PM

 Unskilled Female Migration and the Filipino Family
shortages. Both male and female migration in
Southeast Asia have been associated with the
transfer of less skilled labour to fill low-waged,
low-end jobs rejected by local workers, with
female migration concentrated in domestic
services (aside from entertainment work) as
local women are increasingly absorbed in paid
work outside the home. For this reason, female
migration is mainly associated with the transfer
of reproductive labour, or what has been
dubbed the “care work” needed to maintain
and sustain human beings throughout their
life-cycle (Truong, 1996:32).
The gendered nature of labour migration in
the region calls to mind the productive/
reproductive or public/private divide in the
spaces inhabited by men and women, and how
their location in these spaces define their life
chances. Women migrants fill a very specific
labour niche in the countries of destination,
viz., caregiving or reproductive work which is
very much associated with women. Thus, we
see labour migration in Asia proceeding along
two tracks: male migration responding to
labour shortages in the public/productive
sectors of the economy (e.g. construction,
manufacturing, plantation) and female
migration responding to labour shortages in
the private/reproductive sector. Given the
primary role women play in the family, female
migration has touched off questions and
concerns related to the family. We see in the
migration of women engaged in transnational
domestic service how the uneven impacts of
globalisation have intruded into the micro-
world of families and households. In Asia’s
developed economies (such as Hong Kong,
Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia), structural
changes demand women’s increasing
participation in the labour market, thereby
creating a crisis in reproductive or care labour
for which one solution is the importation of
women from less developed countries. At the
same time, unemployment and low wages in
the region’s less developed countries have put
families and households at risk of minimal to
no income. Labour migration is one way of
minimising economic uncertainties.1
Asis et al.p65 3 6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
199
Recent work (e.g. Yeoh & Huang, 2000;
Parreñas, 2001) locates women migrants at the
centre of this multitiered transfer of
reproductive labour. In this paper, by framing
the transfer of reproductive labour in terms of
women moving between families and
households, we focus on domestic workers
whose departure from their family of origin and
insertion into their family of employment
reconstitute the structure and content of family
relationships in both material and imagined
ways. Drawing on in-depth interviews
conducted in the Philippines – a major country
of origin of women migrant workers – and
Singapore – a major country of destination of
foreign domestic workers, this paper examines
how the multitiered transfer of reproductive
labour impacts the family as a unit and its
individual members. Specifically, we explore
how migrant women and their family members
define and negotiate family ideals, gender
identities and family relationships, given the
family’s transnational configuration. In other
words, with women – regarded as the “light of
the home” (ilaw ng tahanan) – away from the
family, how is family constituted and family
life crafted by its constituent members both at
home and abroad?
Unskilled labour migrants and their
transnational families
It is increasingly acknowledged that the
transnational family – generally one where
core members are distributed in two or more
nation states but continue to share strong
bonds of collective welfare and unity – is a
strategic response to the changing social,
economic and political conditions of a
globalising world (Parreñas, 2001; Bryceson
& Vuorela, 2002; Ho, 2002). It is also recognised
that efforts to create familial space and network
ties are especially difficult in transnational
families, because the lack of spatial proximity
and face-to-face interaction compounds the
differences between individuals and
generations that already exist even for the non-
transnational family. As such, rather than
working to maintain ties with one another,
members of a transnational family may allow
 200 Asis, Huang and Yeoh
these to lapse and/or choose to replace them
with non-blood ties (Bryceson & Vuorela,
2002). Bryceson and Vuorela (2002:14) suggest
the term “relativising” to refer to the variety of
ways employed by individual members of
transnational families to consciously
“establish, maintain or curtail relational ties”
with one another, either through “active
pursuit” or “passive negligence”. Thus, they
argue, different individuals within the same
transnational family may imagine their family
differently, depending on how they “centre
their family stories and sense of belonging”
(Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002:15) in the family,
leading to very fluid conceptions of who
constitutes the family and the different roles
members within it play.
According to Bryceson and Vuorela (2002),
such fluidity not only characterises the way
the family is (re)constituted in the minds of
family members, but there is also a continual
negotiation and definition of the roles of, and
relationships among, different family members
– both present and absent – through an
individual’s life cycle. For some, however, their
conceptions may be “unyielding” and not
subject to any revisions, or new roles are
quickly retracted upon family reunion
(Bryceson & Vuorela, 2000:16). Such
relativising of familial roles and relationships
is also tied to material economic conditions as
maintaining contact over geographically
distant places requires money. For less well-
off migrants (such as unskilled labour
migrants):
Once the migrant locates away from the
core family the cost of international
telephone calls, faxes, emails and
airfares may serve as barriers to
communications within low-income
transnational families. On the other
hand, they may feel greater insecurity
and more compulsion to retain links
with distant family members than higher
income families. They may be exposed
to a more pronounced cultural divide
in their adopted country and have more
Asis et al.p65 4 6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
need for a fallback in case they lose
their livelihood or residential rights…
[but] they find means to keep in close
contact despite their tighter financial
circumstances (Bryceson & Vuorela,
2002:18).
These notions of relativising are pertinent
to the phenomenon of transnational labour
migration in general and will be examined in
this paper to extend our understanding of how
female labour migrants and their families
negotiate family relations over transnational
space. The current body of research generated
by transnational female-led labour migration
has tended to take the perspective of either
the migrant or her family “left behind”, and
does not often take the perspective of both
sides into account simultaneously. The
research by and large implicitly implicates the
family members in the worker’s migration
process (for example, in terms of how they
feature in the decision to migrate) and in her
attempts to negotiate her obligations to, and
sustain her relationships with, her family “left
behind”. More specifically, work on unskilled
female labour migration often emphasises the
migrant’s role, both real and perceived (by self
and family), in relation to the family – as martyr
mothers, dutiful daughters or sacrificial sisters
(Barber, 2000; Yeoh & Huang, 2000; Parreñas,
2001). Similarly, a study of Moroccan
emigration found that women are much more
tied to family relations than men not just “in
their traditional role as being subordinate to
their husbands, or as dependent daughters to
their parents [but] even in their relatively new
role as foreign workers, these family ties are
binding” (Heering et al., 2004:335)
Focus has also been given to transnational
migrants’ strategies (and less often, that of
their family members) in coping with the
absence from the family and the impact on
dependent family members – usually children
– who are “left behind”. As some studies
have shown, while the mother’s absence need
not have negative consequences (Hugo, 2002)
and migrant families are on the whole able to
 Unskilled Female Migration and the Filipino Family
cope with the challenges of family separation
(Asis, 2001), the children’s longing for and
resentment of the absent parent(s), however,
often does not disappear (Parreñas, 2001).
There is some evidence that young children
(those still in grade school) left behind by their
mothers have more difficulties in school and
in social adjustment than other migrant
children whose fathers are abroad (Battistella
& Conaco, 1998). Overall, transnational
families – especially those with an absent
mother – are regarded as needing to negotiate
more issues than other families (Asis, 1995;
1997; Nagasaka, 1998; Yeoh & Huang, 1999a;
Parreñas, 2001).
While limited, some attention has also
been paid to the impact of female labour
migration on reconfiguring gender roles,
identities and hierarchies in terms of power
and status within the family once migrants
return – whether temporarily or permanently
– to the family. For example, a Malaysian
study (Yayasan Pengembangan Pedesaan
cited in Hugo, 2002:33) found that although
there was a breaking down of traditional
family labour along gender lines while the
women were absent, and also that husbands
often had increased respect for their returning
migrant wives, most women were quickly re-
established as the family’s homemaker upon
returning to the family.
A common feature lying at the heart of
these various studies is the importance given
to social expectations of women as res-
ponsible for the family, whether it is sited at a
single location or distributed transnationally
across different countries. Thus, while
women have pushed the gendered frontiers
of the productive sphere forward through
their participation as independent labour
migrants across international borders, little
has been done to move the borders of
gendered norms with respect to women’s roles
and identities in the reproductive sphere.
Just as a woman’s decision to leave for
overseas work (re)shapes the family in the
long term and over long distances, the family
Asis et al.p65 5 6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
201
continues to play a major role in defining the
migrants’ identities – often in relation to the
family and gendered family norms – while they
are away.
In this paper, we draw upon Bryceson and
Vuorela’s (2002) ideas on “relativising” to
better understand, in a more holistic manner,
how female transnational domestic workers
and their family members negotiate their
family roles, identities and relationships
relative to one another. We endeavour to do
this not only through the perspectives of
women migrants, but also through those of
different family members to arrive at a more
complete portrait of the impact of migration
on women and their families. The notion of
relativising allows us to examine how female
labour migration challenges the theoretical
seamlessness between “individual” and
“family” often claimed for the Filipino family
(as discussed in the next section). We
recognise that the family can be both a cradle
of support and security as well as a locus of
conflicts and inequalities; hence, the
experiences and perceptions of individual
members may vary.
After discussing the importance of the
family as an institution in Filipino society in
the next section, the paper provides some
background on the migration of female
domestic workers from the Philippines to
Singapore. The empirical section of the paper,
based on data collected from in-depth
interviews and as well as observations of
migrants and their family members, focuses
on the negotiations of migrants and their
family members in navigating new roles and
identities for themselves across transnational
space. The empirical discussion is divided
into three sections: the first highlights family
members’ struggles to uphold notions of the
family which continues to be a paramount
feature in their lives; the second examines
the impact that the transfer of reproductive
labour among family members has on gender
roles and identities within migrants’ families;
and the third appraises the migrant’s
 202 Asis, Huang and Yeoh
negotiations to maintain a sense of family
across transnational space.
The importance of family: The
Filipino perspective
Much [sic] of our national traits – both
good and bad – spring from our sense
of family. On the negative side, this
has tended to breed nepotism, over-
dependence and parochialism, stunting
the growth of a dynamic, entrepre-
neurial culture. On the positive side,
this strong sense of family has made
us rather sensitive – what we might call
a “feeling” (more than a “thinking)
people. When pulling together, we can
be a caring, hospitable, closely-knit
community founded on a strong sense
of kinship (ex-President Aquino,
2002:109).
Despite the many changes that have taken root
in Filipino society, no other social institution
in the Philippines commands as much loyalty,
sacrifice and affection as does the family
(Miralao, 1997:193). Multiple sources – from
the constitution of the Philippines to casual
comments in everyday conversation – point
to the importance of the family in the individual
and collective life of the Filipino people. For
example, a 1997 nationwide survey of Filipino
well-being found family related variables
dominating the top ten components that
respondents considered to be “extremely
important” or “important” to have a good life;
these included “respect from family” (cited by
99.9 per cent), “love of parents and siblings”
(98.8 per cent), and “love of children” (98.5
per cent) (SyCip et al., 2000:33).2
The concern that Filipino youth may not
be as family centred as the older generation
has also been dispelled by the findings of the
2001 Filipino Youth Study (cited in Abrera,
2002). More than half said that they would
want to emulate their parents: 57 per cent of
the female respondents specified their mother,
while 52 per cent of the male respondents
mentioned their father. The other role models
Asis et al.p65 6 6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
mentioned by respondents were other family
members; less than 10 per cent mentioned
people outside of their family circle. According
to Abrera (2002:223), this finding suggests
that:
For all their exposure to stars or
celebrities who are praised for various
capabilities ranging from physical skill
to “coolness”, young people tend to
count the people close to them as their
heroes. That says something about the
steadfastness of strong family ties as a
part of our culture. Family ties are still
a tremendous comfort. Mom and dad
are important, coming home is
important, precisely because the youth
have so much freedom.
As Filipinos trace their ancestry bilaterally (that
is, through both paternal and maternal lines),
the notion of family membership is rather
expansive, encompassing grandparents, aunts,
uncles, married children or siblings (Medina,
1991:19). The notion that Filipinos are more of
a “feeling” than a thinking people may come
from the close interactions of family members,
which socialise Filipinos into the importance
of maintaining good interpersonal relation-
ships (Ventura cited in Miralao 1997:193).
Furthermore, reciprocal exchanges and mutual
assistance among kith and kin not only cement
the ties that bind family members, but also
sensitise family members to one another’s
needs, thereby encouraging individual
members to pursue ends that are intended to
uplift the family, not just the individual. The
individual-family nexus thus is theoretically
seamless: the family is a source of emotional,
economic, material and social support for the
individual; in return, individual members strive
to promote the interests of the family. In a
society where institutionalised social security
arrangements have yet to develop fully, the
family performs a variety of functions to take
care of the needs of individual members
throughout their life stages. Beyond the
support and security that the family bestows
on its members, affective ties are also
 Unskilled Female Migration and the Filipino Family
important, and remain strong even in the
context of the Filipino transnational family, as
our study demonstrates.
Female migration from the
Philippines to Singapore
The Philippines is one of three countries in
Asia – along with Indonesia and Sri Lanka –
where women migrants comprise between 60
and 80 per cent of legal migrants deployed to
other countries every year. In the 1970s, the
typical Filipino migrant was a male in his 30s
and 40s responding to labour needs in the
Middle East. The profile changed in the 1980s
due to the demand for domestic workers in the
industrialising countries in East and Southeast
Asia. At about the same period, the declining
demand for construction workers and the
shifting labour needs in the Middle East
heralded greater female participation in labour
migration. Thus, from 12 per cent in 1975,
women’s share of Filipino migrants increased
to 47 per cent in 1987. By 1992, 50 per cent of
new hires were women and, thereafter, women
have formed the majority of newly hired
overseas workers.3
Singapore has consistently ranked among
the top ten destinations for Filipino migrants.
In 2000 and 2001, 22,873 and 26,305 Filipino
workers respectively left for Singapore
through official channels. The estimated stock
of the Filipino population in Singapore (as of
December 2001) puts it at 128,446,4 though no
official estimates are available of how many
are domestic workers.
Along with Hong Kong, Malaysia and
Taiwan, Singapore is one of the countries in
East and Southeast Asia which allows the
importation of foreign domestic workers. Since
the late 1960s, Singapore has designed a
migration policy to respond to labour shortage
and has managed migration through the quota
system (to ensure that local workers are not
displaced by cheaper foreign workers) and the
imposition of a levy (to discourage continuing
reliance on less skilled foreign workers).
Despite these measures, the demand for less
Asis et al.p65 7 6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
203
skilled foreign workers did not decline. As of
the 2000 census, foreign workers comprised
29.2 per cent of Singapore’s 2.1 million
workforce (Leow, 2001:43). Among the foreign
workers are some 140,000 foreign domestic
workers, with the majority coming from the
Philippines and Indonesia, and the rest from
other countries in the region such as Sri Lanka,
Thailand, Myanmar and India. This demand
has been linked to the rising labour force
participation of Singaporean women, the
shrinking pool of local women willing to
undertake paid domestic work and smaller
families with fewer extended family members
who can share domestic work (Huang & Yeoh,
1996; 1998).
As the lynchpin in the transnational
transfer of reproductive labour, women
migrants take on the care work traditionally
performed by women in industrialised
countries, while women migrants’ reproductive
roles are assumed by other women in the
country of origin. Inequalities are produced
in the process – privileged women in indus-
trialised countries pay low wages to Filipino
domestic workers, who in turn depend on the
unpaid, or low paid, family members who
replace them (Parreñas 2001). We further
examine these transfers in the transnational
context of women moving between families
located in the Philippines and Singapore to
undertake paid domestic work.
The arguments are primarily based on 36
in-depth interviews completed between
January 2001 and June 2002 that included
women migrants who had returned to the
Philippines from Singapore (9), current
migrants in Singapore (6), and members of their
families, including spouses, parents, siblings
and children (21).5 The interviews with the 36
respondents provided information on how 18
families have been affected by migration. Two
respondents were chosen per family – the
migrant and one family member – with the
exception of two cases, one which included
only the husband in the Philippines (because
the migrant recently moved from Singapore to
 204 Asis, Huang and Yeoh
the United States) and the other, only the
returnee (whose relationship with her family
has been severely strained). The interviews
conducted in Ilocos Norte and Iloilo,
provinces in the Philippines with a long
history of out-migration, targeted families with
members who had ever worked in Singapore
as domestic workers (that is, migrants who had
returned within twelve months of being
interviewed and those who were currently
working). In the absence of available
information to identify families with migrant
members in Singapore, we asked for references
from the local offices of the Overseas Workers
and Welfare Administration (OWWA) and
recruitment agencies. Our regional colla-
borators – the migrants’ desk of the Social
Action Commission of the diocese of Laoag
in Ilocos Norte, and the University of San
Agustin Center for Research and Publications
in Iloilo – also helped by mobilising their
contacts in the different communities. Once
some migrants and families were identified, we
asked them for information on other families
with migrant members who had ever worked
in Singapore. Interviews with family members
and returnees were usually conducted in their
homes, which also allowed us to observe
material conditions and some family dynamics.
For families who had migrant members
working in Singapore at the point of the
interview, we asked for the migrants’ contact
information with a view to interviewing them
in Singapore. Eventually, six current migrants
agreed to participate in the study. The small
number of completed interviews and the
process of selecting the respondents through
personal networks rather than a sampling frame
do not allow us to generalise our findings to
the larger population. The data, however, are
indicative of the evolving configurations of
transnational families.
The notion of family in a
transnational social field
While transnational migration is reshaping the
contours of the Filipino family, it has in no
way diminished the importance of being, or
the desire to be, “family”. So natural and
Asis et al.p65 8 6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
secure is the notion of family that interviewees
thought it surprising, even absurd, to be asked
such questions as “Who is family to you?” or
“Is it important to have a family?”. There was
frequent reference to the family as a refuge
and a source of emotional support, even if one
is physically absent from the family. The sister
of a current migrant in Ilocos, Chit’s response
is typical:
It is also difficult if you are alone
[because] you would have no one to
tell your problems to. And you won’t
have anybody to share whatever
difficulties you experience. So you
would feel better if you have someone
to confide in... If you were happy, you
would be happier if there are many of
you; you understand each other. Even
if you were poor, if you understand each
other as one family, it would be better
also.
Often, physical separation from the family is
countenanced and justified by recourse to
the idea that seeking work overseas is a
household strategy to better the lot of the
family. Respondents often explained their
migration stint as a means of fulfilling a family
project, whether it was to put their children
or siblings through school and college, or lift
the family’s economic circumstances. How-
ever, as has been pointed out in the literature,
the idea of initiating migration simply “for the
sake of the family” is likely to constitute a
partial picture; instead, while pursuing family
goals, women migrants also manage to
pursue personal goals and interweave these
in the migration project (Tacoli 1999; Asis
2002). Studies on female migration in
Southeast Asia also confirm that, rather than
households imposing migration decisions on
individual members, it is the women
themselves who initiate the idea of migration
(Oishi, 2001; Wille & Passl, 2001). Our
findings concur with these studies; inter-
views with migrants and their family members
revealed the latitude and autonomy inherent
in women’s decisions to work abroad.
 Unskilled Female Migration and the Filipino Family
The role of non-economic factors in the
women’s decisions to migrate emerged for a
minority of cases where family members did
not think it was necessary for them to have
left, as in the case of Lisa (returnee, Ilocos),
Tessa (returnee, Iloilo) and Marivic (current
migrant, Ilocos). In all three cases, family
members thought that their families would
have done well even if the women had stayed
in the Philippines. Lisa and Marivic come from
a municipality in Ilocos where working abroad
is prevalent. Lisa related that she had really
wanted to go abroad because she noticed that
those who did had a different aura. She and
her aunt made arrangements for her to seek
work in Singapore, and she only informed and
sought her parents’ approval after these had
been finalised. In the case of Marivic, her
mother-in-law, Fe, contended that Marivic
should not go abroad because her husband, a
seafarer, was already frequently absent from
home. Fe, who ended up taking care of
Marivic’s two children, thought that Marivic
was enticed to go to Singapore because many
people in their community were working
abroad. Similarly, Tessa’s mother Flo (Iloilo)
considered Tessa’s migration as something her
daughter pursued for her own personal
development rather than to meet a specific
family goal:
It was her own wish to go abroad.
Because you know, some members of
the family [her cousins] are there
already… You know, she really had the
intention to go to other countries.
[Interviewer: Just to be able to travel?]
Yes, it’s not exactly that she really
wanted to go abroad to work… just so
she may go out of the country. Had
she remained here, we could still
survive. [Interviewer: How do you
view this?] Well, if it will be for her
own good (laughs) it’s just alright… it
was her own decision to go.
For the most part, however, there was much
convergence between family aspirations and
individual aspirations, especially where
Asis et al.p65 9 6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
205
economic reasons prevailed. Thus, there was
usually no need for the family to pressurise
family members to migrate because helping the
family was seen as the “natural thing to do”.
Indeed, “for my family” was a common refrain
in the interviews. As Dina (returnee, Iloilo)
noted, she migrated to Singapore to work as a
domestic worker because working in the
Philippines was
only for your own self. You could not
help others. But [working] there [in
Singapore], you could help everyone
[in the family].
Other than as a means to help promote their
family’s well-being, women also see in
migration a journey of self discovery and an
avenue to experience a different culture in
ways that “symbolically invert the hierarchies
of class and status… [by] undermining the
exclusivity of the elites’ tourist experience”
(Aguilar, 1996:127). The women who had
returned from working abroad talked as much
about the positive consequences for their
families (particularly economic benefits) as
about the personal rewards that migration had
afforded them: knowing their self-worth,
gaining confidence, becoming stronger and
more self-reliant, and being drawn closer to
God (Asis, 2002).6 Despite, and probably
because of, its malleability, the notion of family
is hence not only inextricably implicated in the
motivations behind women’s migratory
moves, but also remains a stable, largely taken-
for-granted “given” in the way these women
made sense of their lives and livelihood
patterns as they negotiate transnational
borders.
Negotiating care work in the
transnational family
Compared to other demographic changes that
have shaped Asian families, migration has the
distinction of reshuffling the family’s internal
structure, which in “breaking it up” physically,
exacts an emotional toll on individual members
because of the impact it has on the family roles
and responsibilities, and the relationships of
 206 Asis, Huang and Yeoh
its constituent members. In our study, even
migrants and family members who had been
separated for an extended period expressed
pain and a sense of dislocation with these
departures. In fact, in our interviews we were
struck by the emotional display of respon-
dents when talking about the difficulties of
being away from family – many cried, or tried
to keep themselves from crying, at various
points in the interviews. Because of the
separation, they felt their family as “not
complete”. However, between the migrants’
departures and their eventual return,7 both
they and their families learned, to varying
degrees, to adjust to the separation. The
adjustment process varies for different family
members and depends on a variety of factors
including the family’s migration experience,
whether the migrant is single or married, the
relationship between migrants and their
families prior to migration, and the degree to
which ties are maintained (this last point is
further discussed in the next section) until the
migrants’ return.
The impact on the family of single migrants
and rearrangements in family roles and
relationships appears less significant as
compared to married migrants. Family members
left behind feel their absence, but otherwise
“life goes on for them” (in the words of Emma,
returnee, Iloilo). In the migrant’s absence,
mothers and/or other siblings (including
brothers) assumed the migrants’ respon-
sibilities in the household as a matter of course,
and in most cases, while family members
acknowledged the migrant’s sacrifices for the
family, this did not necessarily elevate the
migrant above other members of the family. In
general, however, parents felt their daughters’
absence more than did siblings. Aware of the
hardships their daughters experience abroad,
parents tended to express more longing for
the family to be together. Among the siblings,
the response to the migrant’s absence is more
variable, running the gamut from deep pain of
separation, to indifference, and even
ingratitude. Antonio, one of four siblings that
Clara (returnee, Ilocos) put through school,
Asis et al.p65 10
related that he missed his oldest sister during
his growing up years. When Clara returned
after about a decade of working in Singapore,
Antonio felt that it was his turn to go abroad
so that his sister could pursue her dream to be
a nun. At the other extreme – and more atypical
– is Fannie’s reaction to her sister Dina
(returnee, Iloilo). Fannie noted that she did
not feel Dina’s absence because Dina was not
that “important” to the family. She said that
Dina’s working in Singapore did not benefit
their family because she did not send
remittances, nor did she help any of their
siblings who asked for some support, a view
countered by Dina and her mother in our
interviews with them. In fact, the mother
mentioned that Dina had sent money for the
tuition fees of Fannie’s son. These different
points of view suggest something about family
dynamics and highlight how relativising may
take place within the transnational family
depending on the vantage point of different
family members.
In the case of married migrants, husbands
often spoke of the loss they felt when their
wives left. The seven husbands in the study
had to manage without their wives for between
two to 12 years, and for all except one, their
wives’ migration initiated their entry into the
world of “women’s work” as the reproductive
work previously managed by their wives was
transferred to them. However, only one (Rollie,
husband of Clarissa, current migrant, Ilocos)
became a full-time caregiver; the rest had
continued to engage in paid employment while
also taking on the challenge of household
responsibilities.
Andy’s case is typical. When his wife, Edna
(current migrant, Ilocos), left, his immediate
experience was one of confusion when the
domestic chores she previously took care of
were suddenly transferred to him:
When she went to Singapore, I was
taken aback. Who would take care of
the children when they went to school,
things [like that]? [I realised that] I
6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
 Unskilled Female Migration and the Filipino Family
would be the one to take care of them...
Yes, when nobody could wash clothes,
I would wash clothes. Suddenly [Edna]
was not here. As I mentioned earlier
about the children, all the chores in the
house, such things… I am the one who
[had to] perform all those.
Andy claimed it took him about a month to
adjust to Edna’s absence and all the changes
that this implied. Having adjusted, he noted,
“I feel good because I have [something to do]
(laughs), even if I wash clothes, cook”. Andy
continues to farm and operate a “tricycle”
(motorbike with sidecar used as public
transport in the Philippines) but acknow-
ledged that the remittances from Edna “mean
so much” – these went into the construction
of a bedroom, the children’s school expenses
and food. Despite the inversion of family roles
– with Edna now the family’s main breadwinner
and Andy the one shoring up the domestic
front – Andy still regarded himself as the head
of the family because he saw his paramount
role as teaching and advising the children.
Andy rationalised that Edna’s being in
Singapore did not change her role in the family,
in particular her overseeing of the children:
“even if she’s there, she still says what she
likes to say, and also she says what she likes
for the children”.
For Jun and Hilda (returnee, Iloilo) who had
older children – sons aged 15 and 13 – the gap
left by Hilda’s two-year stint in Singapore was
filled by her husband and sons. Jun’s daily
schedule included making breakfast for the
children, coming home to buy them lunch and
then returning to his construction job, while
the two sons helped in the household chores
like cleaning. In learning to manage the
household in Hilda’s absence, Jun came to
appreciate Hilda and claims that her absence
has enabled him to better appreciate their
respective roles:
for example, regarding your expenses
in the household… as a man… when
you were together… you only give her
Asis et al.p65 11
207
[money for] the provisions… Later,
when she left, you do everything; you
would see… [the difficulties involved
in] how she spends the income you
provide… You realise... that as a man,
you must, that’s it, you must take care
of the woman… that if you had already
given her the money, don’t do the audit
anymore… When you are away from
each other, you may be able to identify
the adjustments you have to undertake.
Their sons, however, began to play truant from
school without his knowledge, something he
attributed directly to Hilda’s absence. With
Hilda’s return, both resumed schooling after a
time, but the older one had quit again by the
time of the interview. Jun admitted that his sons
were initially distant with their mother after her
return but later claimed that that they were
becoming “mother and sons” again. Hence,
even after the migrant has returned to the family,
it could take time for family members, especially
children, to readjust to the reconfigured family
and to restore their relationships.
Children may either actively negotiate, or
passively yearn, for their mother’s return,
particularly when a permanent reconfigura-
tion of the family – whether through
migration, marital separation, divorce or death
– takes place during the migrant’s
transnational sojourn, thereby “removing”
the main caregiver(s) “left behind”. Jenny,
the eldest child of Anna (current migrant,
Iloilo), acknowledged that she and her
siblings understood their mother’s departure
as something that she had to do so that they
could finish college. However, she wistfully
recalled, it was not until the time of her
father’s death eight years after Anna had first
left for Singapore in 1992 that her mother made
her first return trip home. Jenny noted that
while Anna would call and write regularly –
and would reprimand them if they did not
write – she and her siblings missed their
mother very much, and that there were many
times when she wished that her mother was
physically present, simply because
6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
 208 Asis, Huang and Yeoh
a daughter needs a mother… Mothers
are supposed to take care of you. I am
a girl, so, she’s the one who could
understand my concerns.
Jenny felt this emotional void regardless of
how good her father had been as a caregiver
(as she said several times in the interview,
“Father is good in taking care of us… making
our breakfast… preparing our food”) and the
fact that their grandmother and aunt who lived
next door also provided care and support to
her and her siblings in her mother’s absence.
The desire for the family to be physically
intact may increase when the relativising
process becomes complex as the burden of
care work is repeatedly transferred when
family members who have taken over the
caregiving role leave at different stages.
When this happens, migrants’ children appear
to have a threshold beyond which they are
no longer willing to participate in the
relativising of the family. Daniel, who was
ten years old when his mother Marissa
(current migrant, Ilocos) left for Singapore in
1993, is a case in point. To help her husband
and Daniel cope with her absence, Marissa
had them move into her parent’s home, with
her parents as the main caregivers to Daniel
when she first left. When her parents
subsequently migrated to join one of her
sisters in America, her husband and Daniel
continued to stay in the family house, and
Marissa sent money to her eldest brother to
contribute to food expenses. When she and
her husband separated in 1997, Daniel moved
with his father to another province but after
a year returned to the family house, with
Marissa’s eldest brother taking care of his
meals and another sister (who lives next door)
serving as a guardian, primarily to manage
Daniel’s finances. Daniel subsequently
dropped out of high school8 because he saw
his mother’s sojourn as motivated by the
need to support him in school and he wanted
her to return home. He also felt that his aunt
probably had a “hard time” taking care of him
since she also had her own children to care
Asis et al.p65 12
for; rather than the fact of his mother’s
economic contribution, Daniel argued,
[my]cousins are better off because when
they come home from school, somebody
helps them with their assignments [but]
as for me… [there is] no one.
What mattered to Daniel was for his mother to
be at home with him so that
she will do everything [for me]… she
will be the one to do the cooking, she
will wake [me] up in the morning.
His ideas about what a mother’s role and
responsibilities should be were centred on
everyday domestic realities that required her
physical presence. However, his mother has
not been willing to return to her domestic role
at home, and has chosen to continue to work
as a paid domestic worker in Singapore. While
he and his mother communicate regularly (and
when he has problems, he “can just call her”
on her cell phone), this is not sufficient for
Daniel. He feels that being distant to each
other has affected their closeness as mother
and son (“the last time she came home we
always quarrelled”) and he blames his mother
for the breakup of the family:
If she didn’t go there, maybe our family
is still complete. Even if we don’t have
money but at least we are complete.
It is apparent that relativising is a more
manageable process for adult family members
than for the children of the transnational
migrant when it is the mother who migrates.
While efforts are made to actively ensure that
care work and responsibilities are transferred
to other family members, the “intangibles” of
the mothering identity are less yielding and
not so easily reassigned. This can leave the
children of transmigrant mothers in an
indeterminate state of being “neither here nor
there” – of having a mother, yet not being
able to enjoy her daily involvement in their
lives.
6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
 Unskilled Female Migration and the Filipino Family
The family unbound?
The uncertainty and strain of occupying
transnational space and being “neither here
nor there” was also a central thread in the
experience of almost all the migrant women in
the initial phase of separation from their
families in the Philippines, particularly for
those who had never lived away from home.
Given the strong embeddedness of the
women in their “home” families, a sense of
loss and dislocation as a result of the
uprooting and transplanting process
inevitably led to many similar accounts of
“homesickness” during the period of
adjustment. It also resulted in considerable
efforts on the women’s part to try to collapse
the intervening distance and remain in contact
with their family members in the Philippines.
Marissa (current migrant, Ilocos) shared that
she was so homesick that she wrote not only
to her family members, but also to her neigh-
bours. Regular communication – whether
through remittances, phone calls,9 letters and
photographs, and visits – allowed the women
to conjure up a sense of remaining within the
locus of family as lived, if not as an active
participant in the physical sense, then as an
involved and committed member in the social
sense. For example, Clarissa’s (current
migrant, Ilocos) frequent phone calls and
annual vacations home during her 12-year
stint in Singapore, have somehow compressed
the distance and time that separate the family.
According to her husband, Rollie, Clarissa
usually reminds him, in her calls:
to fulfil my responsibility to attend to
[the children’s] needs. “Just look after
them”, she would say. “I know what
is supposed to be mine but I can’t do
anything, it will have to be you. You
remind them, you see to their needs,
you are my guide there now… and
avoid your [vices] there”… Yes, every
time she calls, she would check. “[I
am afraid that] you might not be
around for the kids”, like that, she
would say. No, I am here, a maid and a
mother to boot.
Asis et al.p65 13
209
The (re-)enactment of episodes of family
interaction through distance communication is
further reinforced by material ties that bind in
the form of remittances. The expectation to
send money to their families – the very reason
why many of the women went to Singapore –
not only kept them from giving in to pain and
loneliness but provided an economic
framework holding the family together. Except
for one returnee (Jenna, Ilocos) who felt that
her efforts for her family did not go anywhere,
the rest felt that their earnings had been
invested wisely and had contributed towards
strengthening family relations.
The possibility that migrants, particularly
over time, may wish to distance themselves
from their families is not borne out by the data
from our interviews.10 In the case of Andrea
(returnee, Iloilo), she religiously sent all her
monthly earnings to her family, save for the
SGD 10 that she allotted for the purchase of a
phone card to call them. Communication by
phone between family members is often
initiated (and paid for) by the migrants.
Interestingly, telephone companies in the
Philippines taking note of this practice have
put out advertisements urging those left
behind in the Philippines to call their loved ones
abroad on special occasions.
While the motivation to sustain the
transnational family across borders remained
strong, the road towards adjustment for many
migrant women was also characterised by a
gradual re-working of the notion of who and
what constitutes “family”. First, for the majority
of the women, the idea of “family” was soon
augmented by the active pursuit of kinship ties
with other Filipino domestic workers in
Singapore. Almost all the women laid claim to
having some form of kin, however many times
removed, in Singapore. On their Sundays off,
meeting up with sisters, aunts, nieces, cousins
and so forth was a central feature of coping
with life in Singapore and the absence of the
“family” left behind in the Philippines, for these
relatives provided social and emotional
support, and a sense of the familiar. For many
6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
 210 Asis, Huang and Yeoh
of the women, the first six months in Singapore
were the hardest, contributed in part by the
fact that they had to pay their fees to their
employment agency, and that during this time
most employers generally would not allow them
to have any days off. For Tessa (returnee,
Iloilo), her adjustment in Singapore was helped
greatly by the support extended by her aunt,
who was also working in Singapore: “She
helped me; my aunt would always call so that
I will have someone to talk with”. In the case
of Emma (returnee, Iloilo), she considered her
church in Singapore as her family:
I can say that I know God well… I
always go to church. And my family is
there, in the Apostolic Pentecostal
Church. [Interviewer: Why do you say
that they are family?] You know why?
Because we believe in one God. I was
happy that I got to know them because
if you have problems, you help each
other out.
Andrea (returnee, Iloilo) was about the only
migrant we spoke to who did not make any
attempt to contact other Filipinos. In her words,
her purpose for coming to Singapore was
“purely for family reasons”, and thus, for the
two years that she was in Singapore, she never
took a day off and, as she repeatedly described,
“just worked and worked”.11 For the rest,
claiming and pursuing “family ties” with other
Filipino domestic workers in Singapore
through informal networks was an important
means of “being family”, particularly important
given strong barriers against other forms of
association available to the foreign domestic
worker in Singapore.12
Second, while any incorporation into the
Singapore family that employs the women is
at best temporary (given the short-term
contracts governing the employment of
foreign domestic workers) and often fraught
with ambiguities (given the flexibility
expected of the performance of reproductive
labour, even the paid variety), most of the
migrant women find themselves negotiating
Asis et al.p65 14
relationships with members of the employer’s
family beyond the sphere of work. Echoing
the common refrain heard among Singaporean
employers of foreign domestic workers that
“the maid is one of the family”, most of the
migrant women also considered their
employer’s household as “family”. In both
instances, the use of the term “family” to
describe employer-employee relationships is
part of a discourse that often concealed
underlying tensions (Yeoh & Huang, 1999a)
while presenting a positive framework within
which the relationship could be negotiated.
Most of the women (except Emma, returnee,
Iloilo, and Lisa, returnee, Ilocos) felt that their
employers were “like family” because they
showed them trust, openness and concern.
The women, including long-term migrants like
Clara and Elsie (both returnees, Ilocos), were
also quick to clarify that this “family-like”
relationship was not automatic but hard-
earned and subject to limits, and that while
they enjoyed it they were also conscious of
being at the same time, inescapably, “still
employees” in the eyes of their employers.
Conversely, many of the migrant women
claimed that the work they perform for the
families in Singapore was “more than just paid
work”. In particular, those taking care of
young children professed a strong emotional
attachment to their charges and projected
themselves as surrogate mothers, each
woman reiterating that they treated their
employer’s children “as though they were my
own children”, or even “better than [my] own
children”. As Romero (1992:125) has argued,
some domestics willingly exchange
certain types of emotional labor for
respect, status, and influence, for
instance by manipulating traditional
“feminine” qualities attached to
housework. By being “motherly”, they
support and enhance the well-being of
others while eliminating many negative
and harsh attacks on their self-esteem.
The search for respect and dignity in
domestic service leads most household
6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
 Unskilled Female Migration and the Filipino Family
workers to trade additional physical
and emotional labour for psychological
benefits.
Andrea’s (returnee, Iloilo) sentiments resonate
with Romero’s observations:
I treated [the children] like my own; I
just focused my attention to the
children. I took care of them just like
my own, so that [my employers] would
be able to see how I attend to them, in
order that they would also trust me.
Andrea did earn the trust of her employers so
much so that eventually she considered her
employers as her “brother and sister”. She
ate the same kind of food as her employers;
she had easy access to loans when she needed
money. She was trusted with duties outside a
domestic worker’s normal scope of work: in
addition to her household responsibilities (like
cooking, cleaning, doing laundry and taking
care of the children), she also tutored the
children and was drafted by her employers into
helping to run their employment agency. Due
to her many duties, she often did not get
enough sleep. Furthermore, in her words: “I
sleep with the cell phone, telephone, paper,
ball pen, cooking wares (laughs). I had very
terrible work there”. One could argue that in
Andrea’s case (as with others in our study),
both employer and domestic worker drew upon
the rhetoric of “being family” to rationalise
why the latter would contribute more than is
expected of a “mere employee”.
At the same time, trading emotional labour
for the psychological benefits of being “part
of the [employer ’s] family” has other
repercussions on the women’s relationship
with their own families in the Philippines. In
particular, the women spoke of the accom-
panying sense of irony and guilt that they are
caring for other people’s children while leaving
their own children behind in the Philippines,
usually in the hands of other relatives (cf.
Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002). In their day
to day lives in Singapore, ordinary acts like
Asis et al.p65 15
211
feeding their charges would remind them of
their own children and make them wonder
whether their children are eating well (Rosario,
current migrant, Iloilo). As the notion of the
family becomes unbound in transnational
space to include those who are “family” by
dint of becoming a reproductive labour
substitute, new ambivalences have to be
negotiated. While the pressure for incor-
poration into their employer’s family is ever-
present given the day to day demands on
emotional labour necessary to the carrying out
of reproductive work, such incorporation is
transient and unstable given that they are
primarily framed by the conditions of the work
permit. Ultimately, this perpetuates the sense
of transnationality – forever “in between”
families and never quite embedded in one set
of family relations or the other.
CONCLUSION
The persistence of family ties has been a
constant in Filipino life through periods of
social change (see also Miralao, 1997). The
present study on the migration of women
emphasises the continuing importance of the
“family” amid changes in the form, composition
and locale as well as economic status of the
family. In this age of migration, family member-
ship has become multisited or transnational,
with members dispersed in space. Migration
has rendered it impossible for the family to be
physically together all the time, a departure
from the ideal which raises important
challenges to “being family”.
Although the process of relativising has
been argued to be a strategy employed by
transnational families to keep their sense of
“family”, not everyone is able to participate in
it with equal facility, particularly when it is the
mother who is away. While most adult family
members manage in the absence of the “light
of the home”, the separation of the mother
from the family is especially difficult for the
children. Despite the rearrangement and
reassignment of their gender roles to husbands
(if present) and other family members, the
6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
 212 Asis, Huang and Yeoh
transfer of reproductive labour raises some
questions as to the limits on relativising.
When women migrate to perform work as paid
domestic labour in the families of their
employers, their work usually entails taking
over the more mundane demands and
drudgery of household responsibilities of their
female employers, rather than the qualitative
aspects of child care which then become a
luxury their female employers can now enjoy
(see Yeoh & Huang, 1999a). The female
transmigrant’s children, however, do not have
this benefit and are forced to reconceptualise
their notions of who constitutes the family as
well as of what the roles and responsibilities
of its constituent members are. These issues
suggest the central role that transmigrant
women play not only as a critical link in the
transfer of reproductive labour at multiple
levels, but also in the changing configurations
of families in both their societies of origin and
destination.
Outside of their “own” family, migrant
women experience a semblance of family life
among non-kin, thereby minimising the
dislocating impacts of migration. The Filipino
transmigration experience has “unbounded”
the family in several ways – by making it
necessary to maintain family ties astride
borders and across space, by expanding
“family” to include kin many times removed,
or by regarding non-kin as “family” based on
“family-like” relationships. While in Singapore,
migrant women made families out of other
relatives, friends, employers and members of
the employer’s household with whom they had
established supportive, open and trusting
relationships. The whole notion of “family” is
opened up to take into account migrant
women’s double, or multiple, presence in the
family in the country of origin as well as in the
other families they construct in the country of
destination. Migrant women are hence not
only the critical link in the global transfer of
reproductive labour but also a major lynchpin
of changing family configurations throughout
Asia. In sum, transnational families remind us
of both the flexibility of family forms and the
Asis et al.p65 16
stickiness of gender identities, as women
migrants constantly (re)construct and
(re)negotiate the ties that bind in and across
the multiple spaces of everyday realities.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
An earlier version of this paper was presented
at the 2002 IUSSP Regional Conference on
Southeast Asia’s Population in a Changing
Asian Context, Bangkok, Thailand, 10-13 June.
This study would not have been possible
without the cooperation of the women
migrants and their families who allowed us the
privilege of knowing and writing about their
experiences. We thank the University of San
Agustin Center for Research and Publications
and the Social Action Commission of the
diocese of Laoag for their valuable assistance
in collecting data in Iloilo and Ilocos Norte
respectively. Brenda Yeoh and Shirlena Huang
will always remember, with gratitude, Natalie
Yap for her assistance in managing the myriad
tasks which a transnationally structured
research project entails. Maruja Asis is grateful
for research support from the Isaac Manasseh
Meyer Fellowship and the Department of
Geography, National University of Singapore.
The authors also acknowledge funding
support from NUS Research Project R-109-000-
008-112.
ENDNOTES
1
As the Asian economic crisis has shown, the demand
for transnational domestic workers in Asia is less subject
to economic fluctuations than the demand for male
labour.
2
Similar findings were obtained in the 1996 Philippine
Values Survey where almost all of the 1,200
respondents identified the family, religion and work
as very important/rather important in their lives
(Miralao, 1997:205).
3
As of 2000, for instance, women’s share had risen
to 70 per cent of the 253,030 new hires deployed
overseas (<http://www.poea.gov.ph/ar2000.pdf>).
Overseas Filipino workers are classified into new hires
and re-hires (or recontracts), and land-based and sea-
based. Considering all these types, 841,628 workers
were deployed in 2002 (<http://www.poea.gov.ph/
AnnualReport2002/htm/deployment.htm>).
6/23/2004, 3:00 PM
 Unskilled Female Migration and the Filipino Family
4
This total included 152 permanent residents, and
56,377 temporary, and 71,917 irregular, workers
( < h t t p : / / w w w. p o e a . g o v. p h / d o c s / S t o c k % 2 0
Estimates%20of%20Filipinos%20Overseas%
202001.xls>).
5
Interviews were conducted in Filipino and English
in Ilocos Norte and a combination of Hiligaynon,
Kinaray-a and English in Iloilo. In Singapore,
interviews were conducted in English. Interviews
ranged from 60 to 120 minutes each.
6
A different view of the family – as a site of
inequalities, violence and gendered surveillance – is
suggested in the works of other researchers such as
Suzuki (2002). Under such circumstances, women’s
migration may be a flight from oppressive
conditions or “pained memories” associated with
the family (Aguilar cited in Suzuki 2002:101). None
of the women migrants in our interviews fall into
this category.
7
The contract is for two years, but many migrants
tend to renew their contracts. Among the migrants
in this study, of the nine returnees, only two returned
home after completing one contract; also out of
the nine, six mentioned that they definitely wanted
to work abroad again, and two might consider it.
Only one (Andrea), said she had no plans of working
abroad again. Of the 12 who are currently working
in Singapore, nine had worked in Singapore (and in
some other countries) for more than two years.
One migrant (Clarissa), worked in Singapore for
ten years and is now working in the United States.
8
The problem of children dropping out of school
was also a problem for Vina (current migrant, Ilocos)
and Hilda (returnee, Iloilo). In both cases, their
eldest sons quit attending school.
9
Phone calls are becoming the most preferred mode
of communication. Developments in telecom-
munications have greatly eased the communication
between migrants and their families. Many family
members we interviewed in the Philippines had mobile
phones, and in Singapore we reached the current
migrants in this study through mobile phones.
10
Other studies have suggested that after some
time, migrant women may withhold or even stop
sending remittances to their kin left behind to shore
up their own personal savings (e.g. Sim & Wee,
2004).
11
Andrea was exceptional because she realised her
goals in one contract – she was able to build a house
and buy a motorcycle – in the one year and 10
months that she worked in Singapore. She returned
home when her mother became ill, something that
she did not mind doing as she was already missing
her son very much.
Asis et al.p65 17
213
12
For instance, community space available to
Filipino domestic workers is highly limited to church-
based fellowships and the embassy supported
Bayanihan Centre which provides a range of skills
classes and opportunities for social interaction. For
more details, see Huang & Yeoh (1999b).
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Abrera, E. (2002) ‘The interactive generation:
New mindset, traditional soul’, The
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Tribute to the Youth of the Philippines,
Makati City: Salesian Society of Don
Bosco, 218-25.
Aguilar, F.V. Jr. (1996) ‘The dialectics of
transnational shame and national identity’.
Philippine Sociological Review, 44(1-4),
101-36.
Aquino, C. (2002) ‘Family and values: Changes
and challenges in shaping the youth’, in
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