ALSO BY MEGAN K. STACK
Every Man in This Village Is a Liar
This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
Copyright © 2019 by Megan K. Stack
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Cover photograph © Fuse / Corbis / Getty Images
Cover design by Jenny Carrow
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Stack, Megan K., author.
Title: Women’s work : a reckoning with home and help / Megan K. Stack.
Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018035800 (print) | LCCN 2018038585 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385542098 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780385542104 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Stack, Megan K. | Child care workers—India. | Child care workers—China. | Working mothers—Biography. |
Americans—India—Biography. | Americans—China—Biography.
Classification: LCC HQ778.7.I4 (ebook) | LCC HQ778.7.I4 S73 2019 (print) | DDC 362.71/20954—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035800
Ebook ISBN 9780385542104
v5.4_r1
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Contents
Cover
Also by Megan K. Stack
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part One: How to Disappear
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Two: Passage to India
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Three: The Women
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For my mother
Author’s Note
The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me.
—ADRIENNE RICH
I gave birth to my children in China and India. They are the sons of migrants, born into expatriation—Americans growing up in Asian megacities on the cusp of the Asian century. It wasn’t my goal to have children overseas; it just happened that way. I got pregnant when I could and gave birth in the countries where I found myself at the time. I am a journalist and a writer. I didn’t want to abandon my work for motherhood, and I didn’t. Since my first baby was born, I’ve written two books. This is one of them.
I wanted to keep working, and I wanted to have my children. It seemed simple before it began.
But then the babies were born. My husband came and went for work, traveling the way I had once traveled, the way we had once traveled together—across the country, around the world, bringing back the grains of roads I’d never walked, the fading ghosts of spice and smoke rising from his skin. I stayed home with my children and my writing and the women who watched our children and cleaned our house so that I could keep writing. These women and I had little in common. They were poor women, brown women, migrant women. And at first I pushed them to the edge of thought. They were important to me, primarily, because they made me free. I wanted them to be happy. I didn’t want to know the details. But that didn’t work for long. The women were there. The women were here. We are here, together. I understood all too well the functional purpose of our arrangement, but I wasn’t sure it made any sense.
Nor could I find the mess and nuance of our household reflected faithfully in any medium. Domestic workers are usually depicted in one of a few ways: essential financial investments made by guilt-free families; scrappy naïfs cruelly exploited by the heartless, clueless rich; or—most insidiously, I’ve come to think—“like family.” Fundamental female experience is forever reduced to its crudest caricature. Childbirth is screaming. Periods are blood. Domestic work is a fairy tale: Cinderella under the thumb of a ruthless stepmother is finally living the dream when she becomes a benevolent princess with smiling servants of her own.
Gradually I realized that our house was an enclosed landscape of working mothers. That was the basic thing. The most important employees who worked for me—women who shifted my thinking and cleared the way for my work and cared most lovingly for my children—were migrants who’d left their own children behind to work in the city, and ended up in my house. We spun webs of compromise and sacrifice and cash, and it all revolved around me—my work, my money, my imagined utopias of one-on-one fair trade that were never quite achieved.
When I was a reporter, there existed this cliché about women who covered wars and other humanitarian disasters overseas. They used to say—and we used to say sometimes, too—that we were a sort of “third gender.” We couldn’t dream of being men, of course, but we were also exempt from some of the constraints that bound the women we wrote about. We could bare our faces in the street or sit with the men at a segregated dinner. Maybe a commander who would never talk to a woman from his own country might grant us an interview. We were bridges between the tacit maleness of the news organizations that had sent us and the women who were affected by the news, the grieving mothers and worrying wives. We ourselves were neither here nor there.
No matter how much time I spent with a subject, no matter how intimate the interviews became, a yawning space separated me from the people I wrote about. They had one kind of life, and I had another. I was tethered to the concreteness of the newspaper, and to the abstractions of journalism. The particular troubles faced by women did not affect me, nor did my own personal struggles have anything to do with the women I was interviewing. I was just passing through.
After having babies, after raising children in close quarters with women I hired to help, this necessary distance began to warp and melt. I couldn’t maintain the sense that I was going along and everything was just fine. It didn’t seem fine. Sometimes it seemed crazy.
The immediacy of domestic life and the desperation of small humans left few opportunities to question our choices in real time. We stumbled confusedly through a house that was also a job site, grappling with the intimacy of underwear, bathrooms, feeding children, and cuddling them to sleep. Our routines were disrupted by pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, weddings, domestic violence, funerals, sick children, and school fees. Mine, theirs. The stuff of women the world over. We lived together in the space left by men who
were temporarily elsewhere. Men who beat and loved; disappointed and disappeared. The promise of men, the threat of men, the uncertainty of men’s actions.
We lived those years in China, a rising superpower, and India, an emerging economic engine. These places represent our collective future; they are the stuff of the world’s dreams and nightmares. They are also places that have made statistical headway toward erasing women. Female fetuses are aborted. Newborn girls are murdered. Older girls are denied food. Female life is stifled before it can reach womanhood. This systematic erasure of women is not a government initiative, but a wildly popular and only semi-underground grassroots movement. And, of course, women participate.
Meanwhile, we—the women who occupied my house—were left to improvise, to endure what we could endure, to become as monstrous as we allowed ourselves to become. Our existence and interplays were literally intramural—between walls, among ourselves.
We were not unique. Our private problems are no doubt duplicated in households all over our planet. And yet housework is seldom considered as a serious subject for study, or even discussion.
This is an injustice on a grand scale, for housework is everything. It’s a ubiquitous physical demand that has hamstrung and silenced women for most of human history. I’d love to believe the struggle for women’s equality is concentrated in offices and manufacturing plants, but I’ve become convinced that this battle takes place, first and most crushingly, at home.
When we are saddled with disproportionate work at home—and studies show that virtually all of us women are, particularly during child-rearing years—we are too embarrassed to say so out loud. We don’t want to complain. We don’t want to tax our romantic partnerships. And, in the end, we stand to be blamed. The fact of this disproportionate labor is further evidence of our incompetence. We didn’t choose the right partner (we are foolish), we didn’t stand up for ourselves (we are weak), we were outmaneuvered in our own homes (we lack tactical skills). It is proof that we are not sufficiently devoted to our children or to our careers, depending upon who’s doing the judging. It is proof—and there is ever more proof—that we ourselves are not sufficient.
Hiring domestic help is a stopgap and an evasion. The entire model does nothing for the middle class, since only women wealthy enough to pay for domestic help, or women poor enough to regard these jobs in terms of social mobility or survival, are affected. But for those who can afford it, paid domestic help takes the pressure off parents and marriage; off employers and society at large. I have seen online articles prescribing hired household help as a foolproof tonic for marital difficulties and even as the secret to life’s happiness. Whether these arrangements provide personal fulfillment and marital bliss to the domestic employees themselves—this detail is never mentioned.
I think about all the houses I’ve known since withdrawing from the world to work at home. I remember the scenes and the stories. And I think, somebody should investigate. Somebody should write about all of this.
But this is my life. If I investigate, I must stand for examination. If I interrogate, I’ll be the one who has to answer.
Prologue
————
LILOCUN, CHINA
FEBRUARY 2011
Dawn hadn’t broken yet, and the dim caverns of the Beijing bus depot mumbled in drowsy din. Travelers staggered under their loads: mounds of clothing bundled and tied with rope; boxes of cheap toys; bulging sacks of grain. Exhausted faces hunted anxiously for the right bus. It was the Chinese New Year, and China’s workers were going home.
It was just a few years ago, but that morning already seems like a very long time past. Another life, somebody else’s life. I was still a foreign correspondent then. I covered China for the Los Angeles Times. I was traveling that morning with colleagues—a photographer and a translator—but we hardly spoke to one another. We’d done our jobs a thousand times before. We stalked and swung through the crowd like pack animals, eyes on the prey.
A construction worker named Li Guangqiang was our window into the world’s largest human migration. We’d asked to document his journey home for the holidays, and proudly, ill-advisedly, he’d agreed. Every year, migrant workers pour en masse out of China’s cities and industrial hubs and travel home to far-flung families. Billions of odysseys crisscross the land in a bewildering tangle of traffic and trains and humanity.
Li’s eyes shot uneasily from gate to gate, but when he caught me staring he adjusted his posture into an imitation of ease. Short and stocky, he planted his feet and squared his shoulders with bullish determination. His smile was quick and true, but in repose, his features went grimly still and his eyes narrowed as if on the lookout for a trick.
He lived poor in the city, sleeping in a frigid shelter of cinder blocks and corrugated tin alongside a frozen canal. For his journey home he’d chosen clothes that gave no hint of hardship: dark jeans fashionably distressed, puffy down coat, and a black pouch slung over one shoulder.
Following Li, we tossed our bags into the belly of the bus, scrambled aboard, and elbowed down the aisle. The engine shuddered to a start and the bus roared through darkened neighborhoods to the edge of town, then spun outward on smooth freeways, a thread unwinding itself from the snarl of the city, stretching into emptier territories. Passengers twisted to click parting shots of the fading city lights on their phones.
“Are you sure we’re on the right bus?” somebody asked.
“I forgot my luggage! Can we go back?”
“Get somebody to send it to your village, or get off right now,” snarled the bus driver.
A cry went up: “Turn on the heat!”
“No,” the driver yelled. “It’s a waste of fuel.”
China rolled past—factories, construction sites, cranes. Billboards screamed their dubious promises to replace desolate roadside with luxury condominiums. It was a landscape of advertisements and gambles and works-in-progress.
I like to ride on roads through big countries—Russia, China, India, the United States. I like the vastness of the land and the isolation of large spaces under endless sky. I imagined the Middle Kingdom unfurling around us: land rolling west into the Gobi Desert, east to the Pacific Ocean, south to the Yellow River, north to the ends of the earth. Watching the world approach and vanish behind glass, I let my thoughts sweep over days and years gone and the unlived time that yawned ahead. Maybe the dislocation of a long drive opens the brain, encourages our minds to skim our private panoramas of time and personalities. We are used to the illusion that the world sits there, still and docile, while we charge through the scenes. We are moving; the earth is static. It’s a trick of perception, of course. Nothing is ever still.
I carried notebooks and pens that morning. I had a job that carved my path through life, prodding me into places and dictating what I should do when I got there. As a foreign correspondent I’d lived in the great cities of the world. I’d covered wars and natural disasters and moments that abruptly changed history. I’d given myself over to this work so young, and so completely, that I wasn’t sure anymore what would be left of me without all the journalism. I didn’t know, and I didn’t wonder. The job had become who I was; it was my organizing principle.
But now I’d quit that job, and everything was about to change. I was only working out my notice. The journey to Li’s village would be my last big assignment for the newspaper.
Beneath the padding of down jacket and scratch of wool sweater, my unborn baby curled and kicked. I was four months pregnant. I had begun writing a new book. A book and a job were work enough, but a book and a job and a baby? I knew it was impossible.
Job, book, baby: I’d forced myself to choose the one I loved least. It was a terrible choice, because I loved each of them.
It’s true—I loved my job. The travel, the restlessness, the writing. I loved the careless confidence of knowing that, whether an experien
ce was unpleasant or glorious, everything was always about to change. A new city, a new conversation, a new story. I lived in the flux, out in the world, and I liked it there. The rooms and the smells, the afternoons so heavy with duty you had to force yourself through them, running fingers over surfaces, making yourself try again, call one more time, take the chance, out among the pieces and scenes.
The hours of this last journey drained along. The earth rose into mountains and thicker trees, then flattened out into farming fields. I shot along the road in a shuddering chamber and remembered.
I had met Tom out there, out here, in the world. At the Baghdad airport, waiting for a plane to Amman, we sat side by side and stared at a departure board left over from the days of Saddam Hussein. Thin plastic letters advertised flights that never flew. Tom and I studied that defunct departure board together like it was a piece of art, with the war outside and Baathist dust fine as powdered chalk in the slanting light. Iraq had been invaded and its government overthrown. We were young Americans who’d come to document unthinkable things. Tom had a duffel bag and Dante. I had a backpack and American short stories. We met, we talked, we fell away. The world carried us off, washed us back together. Seasons, rooftops, mountains, fights in the street, kisses against walls. Beirut nights raw with rain, mountaintops in Yemen, bursting into the Moscow streets to feel the flakes of our first Russian snowfall melt on our faces. We were walking the canals of Venice when he asked me to marry him. A few weeks later we were driving north through South Ossetia, trying to reach the thickest fighting in yet another senseless war, when a Russian MIG fired a missile that only barely missed our car because Tom noticed the plane and hollered at the driver to turn. That night we sat on the floor of a hotel room in Tbilisi and booked a band for our wedding reception.
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