We Hired a Nanny

A Chinese ayi and two white children cooking together. Image source.

So when I was pregnant, my mother-in-law came to live with us, because this is basically what you do in China. The grandma takes care of the child while the parents are at work.

I have heard of daycares in Shanghai, but seems like this is very rare. And when the child is 3, they go to kindergarten (in China the term "kindergarten" is used for what we would call both "preschool" and "kindergarten" in the US- 3 years long, from ages 3 to 5) which is for the full day, so I guess that's kind of like daycare. But younger than that, it's not very common to put the kid in daycare.

So basically, the other option besides the grandparents doing childcare (or being a stay-at-home parent) is to hire a nanny. In China a nanny is called an "ayi"- and actually "ayi" 阿姨 has a lot of meanings. A dictionary will probably tell you it means "aunt" but oh wow what a bad translation. Sure, sometimes it means aunt- but family vocabulary in Chinese is complicated, there are different words for if it's a relative on your mom's side or dad's side, if they're older or younger, if they're your parent's sibling or in-law, birth order, etc- so in practical terms, most aunts actually are NOT "ayi." Sure, some are. But most aren't.

And most of the time when you say "ayi" it should very much NOT be translated as "aunt." It's often just used as a friendly term of address for any random stranger who's a woman your parents' age. (Oh wow, this confused me SO MUCH when I first came to China- I had Chinese friends talking about "aunts" and "uncles" who weren't actually their aunts or uncles, and I thought maybe it's like, sometimes you have a friend of the family who's so close and involved in your family's life that basically you do think of her as an aunt even though she's not technically biologically related... lol, no. No, nope. Nope, that is not what "ayi" means. It's literally just any stranger off the street.)

And "ayi" sometimes means a woman who works as a cleaner- like in the office building where I work, if someone says "I asked the ayi..." everyone knows they mean the cleaning lady. And it can mean a domestic worker like a maid or nanny. People talk about "we're going to hire an ayi" and you understand they are talking about hiring someone to do housework or cooking or childcare.

So anyway. My mother-in-law watches the baby when we're at work. But recently she's been having some health problems, so we decided to hire an ayi to help.

There are ayis who specifically work with international families, and expat moms have social media groups where they post ayi recommendations or search for an ayi to hire. So that's what I did, and I found several ayis to interview.

Even though they work for international, English-speaking families, most of these ayis don't speak English. (I'm talking specifically about Chinese women working as ayis- but Filipino ayis are also a thing, and there is a market for them because they speak English. However, as far as I know it's illegal for Filipinos to work as ayis in China.) In their letters of recommendation, the expat moms say "she doesn't speak English but we had no problem communicating with WeChat translate." That makes me wonder, why would you choose to work in a job where you and your boss literally don't speak the same language? I guess it's because they can get paid more than if they worked for Chinese families. Still, it doesn't really seem like an ideal job situation.

And this whole process really makes it obvious how there are very unequal economic classes of people, and it's effed-up. Like, how could it possibly make sense to hire *another person* to spend her entire day watching *my child* while I spend my entire day at my own job? Well, obviously the reason it makes sense is that my salary is MASSIVELY HIGHER than what I pay the ayi. And isn't that messed-up? That's extremely messed-up. Nobody "deserves" to have a salary twice as high as another person, if both of them work hard at what they do.

We rely on the ayi, but no matter how good she is, we'll never pay her a good salary like what I'm paid. Because if it cost us that much, then instead of having an ayi, me or my husband would quit our job. (Or, actually the math is a little more complicated than that, because you have to take into account the long-term effect on my career if I stayed home for a few years, and we could have a whole discussion about how women's careers aren't valued as much, and people think the wife has to quit her job and stay home because "that's how the math works out", but that's a separate topic, we won't get into that.)

I guess I'm extremely privileged... when I was little and I heard about economic classes, I thought that was just like back in medieval times when there were kings and peasants, and nowadays it's not like that. Well, it's like that. I have a good education in a field that society values, and so my options for jobs and my salary range are completely different than, for example, the options available for a woman who works hard as an ayi. And we can't move from one level to another. We're stuck in our own economic classes, and that's the way it is. (Actually as an immigrant I am not able to get a "low skilled" job in China- work visas are only available for jobs that you can't easily find a Chinese person to do.)

Also, many of the ayis we interviewed told us about "I worked for a family with 3 kids", "I worked for a family with 5 kids", etc. Again, this is messed-up, because China still has a two-child policy (the one-child policy was changed in 2016). So you have these Chinese ayis taking care of 3 kids for a foreign family, when they're not even allowed to have 3 kids of their own. (Note: When I say "this is messed-up", I don't mean the ayi did anything wrong, or the foreign parents with 3 kids did anything wrong. I mean it exposes the reality of the world itself being messed-up.)

Also, who watches the ayi's child? (I say "child" instead of "children" because even though the one-child policy isn't in effect any more, more families still only have 1 child because of financial reasons.) Some ayis send their own kid back to their hometown for the grandparents to raise; that's seen as normal in China. Isn't that messed-up, that they're watching someone else's kids, when for financial reasons they're not even able to watch their own kid.

Another aspect of this is how the expat ayi market has been severely impacted by COVID19. In March, China closed the border. International people are not allowed to enter the country, because of COVID19. In the months since then, the rules have been changing, and gradually there are more and more exceptions- so yes, they are letting some international people in, but you have to jump through hoops.

So there are lots of international families who left China back in February or March to get away from the pandemic, and now are stuck in other countries. And their ayis are still here in China, trying to find new jobs now- but it's not a good market for the ayis. Actually most of the ayis we interviewed told us this same story- their current employer is stuck overseas somewhere.

So... this is the world we live in, and it's not fair. But still we hire an ayi and participate in the system. Like, it's not like *not* hiring an ayi is going to help address the economic inequalities of the world.

And also, I'm not like, "ah I feel bad for the ayi so I won't hold them to a high standard"- no, we're talking about finding someone to care for my child, who is the most perfect and precious thing in the world- well, in my world, not ayi's world, and isn't it messed-up that it makes financial sense for someone who doesn't love him to be the one who takes care of him. Actually the first ayi we hired didn't really seem to be, shall we say, interested in doing a good job, so after a few days we told her it wasn't working out, and we found a different ayi. So yes, this is my precious child we're talking about, and I'm going to make sure we get the right person to take care of him.

So. Going through the process of hiring an ayi has been a lesson in class inequality and how effed-up that is. But there's not really anything we can do about it. This is the world we live in, and we are in need of this service and there are ayis providing the service. The system is effed-up, but within the context of this effed-up system, it makes perfect sense for us to hire an ayi, so that's what we're doing. My point isn't that ayi employers (like me) are doing a bad thing. It's the entire system that's messed-up.