Surprisingly, more women than men migrant workers stay in the North. In staying, these mothers remain separated from their children, a choice freighted, for many, with terrible sadness. But as much as these mothers suffer, their children suffer more. And there are a lot of them. An estimated 30 per cent of Filipino children—some eight million—live in households where at least one parent has gone overseas. These children have counterparts in Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union.
How are these children doing? Not very well, according to a survey which the Scalabrini Migration Center in Manila conducted with more than seven hundred children in 1996. Compared to their classmates, the children of migrant workers more frequently fell ill; they were more likely to express anger, confusion, and apathy; and they performed more poorly in school. Other studies of this population show a rise in delinquency and child suicide (Frank 2001). When such children were asked whether they would also migrate when they grew up, leaving their own children in the care of others, they all said no.
Faced with these facts, one senses some sort of injustice at work, linking the emotional deprivation of these children with the surfeit of affection their First World counterparts enjoy. In her study of native-born women of colour who do domestic work, Sau-Ling Wong (1994) argues that the time and energy these workers devote to the children of their employers is diverted from their own children.
But is it only time and energy that are ‘drained’ or is it love itself? In a sense time and energy are resources like minerals extracted from the earth. The nanny cannot be in two places at once. Her day has only so many hours. The more time and energy she gives the children she is paid to love, the less time and energy she can give her own children. But is love itself also a resource? And if it is a resource, can children have a ‘right’ to it? In its wisdom, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of the Child implies that love, too, is like a resource. It asserts all children’s right to an ‘atmosphere of happiness, love, and understanding’.
But if love is a resource, it is a renewable resource. For the more we love and are loved, the more deeply we can love. Thus, love is not fixed in the same way that most material resources are fixed. It creates more of itself. We are talking, then, of a global heart transplant, and one which will bear on the lives of many people for years to come.
But how are we to understand the ‘extraction’ of love from the South and its import to the North? We get some help at this juncture from Freud, according to whom we don’t ‘withdraw’ and ‘invest’ feeling but rather displace or redirect it. The process is an unconscious one, whereby we don’t actually give up a feeling of, say, love or hate, so much as we find a new object for it—in the case of sexual feeling, a more appropriate object than the original one, whom Freud presumed to be our opposite-sex parent. While Freud applied the idea of displacement mainly to relationships within the nuclear family, it seems only a small stretch to apply it to relationships like that of nanny and the employer’s child.
The way some employers describe it, a nanny’s love of her employer’s child is a natural product of her more loving Third World culture, with its warm family ties, strong community life, and long tradition of patient maternal love of children. In hiring a nanny, many such employers implicitly hope to import a poor country’s ‘native culture’, thereby replenishing their own, rich country’s depleted culture of care. They import the benefits of Third World ‘family values’. Says the director of a co-op nursery I interviewed in the San Francisco Bay Area,
This may be odd to say, but the teacher’s aides we hire from Mexico and Guatemala know how to love a child better than the middle-class white parents. They are more relaxed, patient, and joyful. They enjoy the kids more. These professional parents are pressured for time and anxious to develop their kids’ talents. I tell the parents that they can really learn how to love from the Latinas and the Filipinas.
When asked why Anglo mothers should relate to children so differently than do Filipina teacher’s aides, the nursery director speculated, ‘The Filipinas are brought up in a more relaxed, loving environment. They aren’t as rich as we are, but they aren’t so pressured for time, so materialistic, so anxious. They have a more loving, family-oriented culture’. One mother, an American lawyer, expressed a similar view:
Carmen just enjoys my son. She doesn’t worry whether he’s learning his letters, or whether he’ll get into a good preschool. She just enjoys him. And actually, with anxious busy parents like us, that’s really what Thomas needs. I love my son more than anyone in this world. But at this stage Carmen is better for him.
Filipina nannies I have interviewed in California paint a very different picture of the love they share with their First World charges. Theirs is not an import of happy peasant mothering but a love that partly develops on American shores, informed by an American ideology of mother-child bonding and fostered by intense loneliness and longing for their own children. If love is a precious resource, it is not one simply extracted from the Third World and implanted in the First; rather, it owes its very existence to a peculiar cultural alchemy that occurs in the land to which it is imported.
