By Menchu Aquino Sarmiento
Jacinta “Cin-Cin” Panares is a bagong bayani: an on again-off again OCW (Overseas Contract Worker) for nearly half her life. After high school in Basak Pardo, Cebu, she was an artist designer in a small woodcraft factory. By age 20, she was a garments factory worker for the next five years in Malaysia, becoming fluent in Bahasa and Malay. There was also a brief interlude of forbidden love with another Filipino OCW.
“Men will be men.” she shrugs. “I didn’t know my child’s father was married, but I loved him then.” Their child died in early infancy from a congenital heart defect. This personal tragedy did not stop Cin-Cin from taking another two-year contract in Brunei, still as a garments industry drone.
Back in Cebu, once more in Cebu handicrafts exports, she had a Belgian pen pal. He came to visit, but it turned out that she was not his one and only. He was already 5,000 miles away and no longer replying to her e-mails when their daughter Luc, whom Cin-Cin named after him, was born. This baby also had a congenital heart defect.
Fortunately, little Luc lived past infancy. At age four, her atrial septal defect was surgically corrected through a private charity. Meanwhile, the Panares family’s debts had piled up during the years when this once blue baby was in and out of the hospital. Luc was in pre-school when Cin-Cin went to work as a DH (domestic helper) in Hong Kong. She is now in Grade 3 at a private school in Cebu.
On weekends, Cin-Cin is not among the thousands of Filipino DH swarming Statue Square, and the Causeway Bay shops. She works in the remote New Territories and would rather save the bus and MTR fare. There are around 175,000 Filipina DH in Hong Kong, slightly outnumbering Indonesians. Together, these domestic migrant workers are almost five percent of Hong Kong’s seven million population, and make up its largest single socio-economic minority class.
Instead of picnicking or shopping with the other Pinays, Cin-Cin uses her few precious free hours to paint. Her employers only allow her a day off when it’s convenient for them. She paints for the sheer joy of it: bright and cheerful renderings of kittens and flowers, which do not recall her daily struggles. The canvasses are small because she paints while lying on her stomach, up in her narrow bunk bed. She has the upper berth while her employers use the lower one for storage. The bunk bed is perpendicular to the apartment’s front door and serves as a divider. They are six in this 20 square-meter flat, smaller than a low-cost socialized housing unit in the Philippines: the spouses (her employers), their two daughters (the youngest around her own Luc’s age), and the husband’s mother whom Cin-Cin calls Mama. The family toilet is visible to the left of the photo of Cin-Cin’s painting of the Tea Cup Kitten.
In early 2015, the contemporary art space Para Site launched the Hong Kong Domestic Migrant Workers Project: A Room of Their Own, something which most domestic migrant workers don’t have. This is a long-term initiative to “build connections between the arts community, the city’s wider public sphere and the domestic worker community.” No Filipino DH joined the predominantly Indonesian reading group, which runs a mobile library out of a suitcase from a bench in Victoria Park, nor the Sunday writing and photography workshops at Para Site.
Last May, I met with Cin-Cin in Para Site for the show After Work. Except for the self-taught photographer Xyza Cruz Bacani, the featured Filipino visual artists were all professionally trained, and not DH. Cin-Cin’s small colorful pictures would have been swallowed up in the black voids of Maria Taniguchi’s huge canvases, which purportedly express the bleak pointlessness of repetitive drudgery through tiny painstakingly conceptualized brushstrokes.
Although her vivid paintings lack bitterness and angst, Cin-Cin knows only too well what awaits her when her contract ends and she returns to Cebu later this year. She plans to study driving and get a professional license, hoping to tap the niche market for female passengers who prefer a lady driver. But because life is ever in flux for those like her with no bedrock of financial stability, she might just end up again in a handicrafts factory again.
“It won’t be easy without a regular salary to look forward to. But Luc is growing up, and we need each other. Our suffering is multiplied when we are apart. When I paint, I forget the pain. When I paint, I am happy.”