I recall that when I used to work as a convenience store cashier back in Korea, customers from outside Korea visited the store from time to time, mostly late at night. They came by the counter, handed me a pack of gum, and asked me whether it had pork inside. Finding a product that did not contain pork in the store was difficult. The customer put the gum back where it was placed and left. There were multiple construction sites around that area as the government planned to build new buildings for international events such as workshops or summit meetings. And I remember thinking of the people who went out of the store with nothing. People who don’t have a piece of gum to chew. And I remember the scent of incense from their clothes. The wintry darkness they walked into from the store was brutal enough to erase the smell that was so exotic to the quiet place of old retired people who could not afford a better place.

I wonder, what colour is racialized manual labour?

Not so long after arriving in Malaysia, I found the small room next to the front door where my family stayed. The room had no air conditioner, no window, and no light. The washing machine, taking half of the space, was running with erratic vibration as if the space was smothering it. It was originally a room for a maid, my mom told me. There was a ring to it, a familiar but distasteful image – a woman of colour who accepts inhuman living conditions because she is in no place to claim benefits, as she is here to do manual toil. The Malaysian government opens the chance to be a foreign domestic worker, who is simply called auntie or maid in Malaysia, only for women, who largely come from Southeast Asian countries – Indonesia, Bangladesh, Phillippines, Nepal, India, Laos, and Vietnam – to stay in a household and take care of the home matters. They feed the babies or elderlies, clean the house, cook and do the dishes, do the laundry and buy groceries, and go out for a stroll for the baby or elderlies – to make the employer feel less stressed with the house chores and do what actually matters in their lives.

This mesmerized the current populistic government in Korea. After June, Korean private companies will start bringing foreign domestic workers from Southeast Asian countries to work in Korean households. The government promoted such a regime by displaying that this kind of docile domestic worker who can work for 1.9k per month will bring life back to the busy Koreans’ livings, emphasizing the successful examples from Singapore, as if it is a new labour that no one can miss. It is an eye-opening bargain because compared to the Korean home helper who takes care of nurturing and house chores, it would require 10k per month. However, Korea does not have legal protection for expatriate domestic workers against this new influx of labour. Unlike the country that sends their citizens as maids, reinforcing policies to protect their workforce at a national scale like the Philippines, the private companies in Korea do not harbour strong policies to protect the maids from sexual harassment, exploitation, and abuse outside the bright future of wonderful Korean society projected by the government. There are happy smiles of the employer living a quality life while she does the unseen work. She is no longer a human but rather an object that does our work even while we are not watching, as we always want to buy something cheaper but better. We do not wish to converse with her because simple communication with pleasantries would work fine. As an employer, we do not make eye contact. We do not stop what we are doing when they are around – it feels better not to notice her. We bought her time and labour, and we have the right to erase her. Therefore, she has to stay as invisible as possible. For everyone’s sake.

Next to the Monash University Malaysia campus was a construction site for the mall built by Sunway Property way before I started studying at Monash University in 2021. In the early morning in KTM, I saw the construction workers gathered in the broad space. I saw them stretching before work in a vast group. When I walked by the construction site to the campus, I saw they were mostly non-Malay and non-Chinese. It has been more than four years since the construction. The countless hammering, drilling, and manoeuvring of the delicate machine panels for the giant cranes by dark hands have raised a building with a white exterior.  

Besides the migrant workers from foreign countries, most are Malaysian Indians who serve as manual workers in Malaysia. There are not many people with brighter skin colour if not any. They work in the sun or in the shade. They wear uniforms or cheap materials that do not protect the skin. They hold construction tools or a broom. We walk by them casually but try not to make eye contact with them. Anyway, after a few seconds, we will forget them. No one remembers them, even though we live in the city they built, cleaned, and fixed. But I can’t stop asking: where would the construction workers go when their job is done? Where do the workers fixing the highway go? Where do the mechanics done repairing a streetlight under the scorching sun go? Under the shade made by the safety helmet, protecting their eyes from the sun, they go somewhere that they can belong. So, no change to the scene that is ingrained in our sight – a dark person will always be there – they work in different places as aunties, construction workers, cleaners, cashiers, oil station staff, grab drivers, factory workers, mechanics, handyperson – but they have only one face which we do not care. They are all the same colour. Darker than mine.

I, as a lighter-skinned person, specialize in detecting the spectrum of dark colours. It is a keen observation to see what colour that person is. It requires the embodiment of political hatred to discern all the intricate differences between the shades – whether the person is very dark, dark, medium, light, or very light, I so skillfully detect a person of colour. Therefore, I am the master of colours, the namer of creatures. Those colours are invisible, as they are not there to reflect the sun’s rays. But when the crimes are committed, adulterations made, their colours suddenly appears on the earth they corrupted with their dirty, barbaric, primitive, sly, lazy, untrustworthy colours.

It is a laughable matter to hear, “I don’t see the colour” – why does the colour matter so much to you that you proclaim that you are blind to the colour? Why can’t you see the colour? Does seeing the colour mean you are being racist? Why do people of colour suddenly become without colour? Why can’t the colour be the beauty? Why do the people of colour be bleached until it is comfortable for the people of white to see? Why must the people of colour try not to be seen as their colours?

And I painfully remember again: On the 30th of April 2024, an 11-year-old Indian student in a public school in Ampang Jaya was forced to stand in the sun as a punishment after he reported other students bullying him. He stood there from 10am to 12.50pm while his homeroom teacher let other students stand outside only for 10 minutes. After coming back from school that day, the student fainted and was admitted to the hospital. He was diagnosed with a nerve condition due to the heatstroke, and now he has permanent disabilities. The kid was forgotten because of his colour. He was erased from the mind of the ‘local male teacher’ for almost 3 hours. Justice is still not served – the teacher is not sued, the investigation is neglected by the police and the Ministry of Education, and the teachers in the school who had threatened the students who witnessed the incident. The face of the teacher is not disclosed until now. We only know the colour of the victim. But we already know what colour the violence is. 

Written by Juyeoung Kwak

References

DaHae, P. (2023, September 23). “Mayor Oh Se-hoon, Would You Like to Work as a Homemaker for 380,000 Won a Month?”. Hankyeoreh 21. https://h21.hani.co.kr/arti/society/society_general/54440.html

Immigration Department of Malaysia. (n.d.). FOREIGN DOMESTIC HELPER (FDH). Ministry of Home Affairs. https://www.imi.gov.my/index.php/en/main-services/foreign-domestic-helper-fdh/

Pola, S. (2020, September 7). Maids deserve better protection, more rights. New Strait Times. https://www.nst.com.my/opinion/letters/2020/09/622663/maids-deserve-better-protection-more-rights