A Brock researcher is helping amplify the voices of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong expressing their lived experiences through a new collection of creative writing, poetry, photography and visual art.

Ingat: An Anthology of Works by Migrant Domestic Creatives in Hong Kong was co-edited by Assistant Professor Julie Ham in the Department of Sociology, who has spent years engaging with arts-based and participatory research methodologies.

“I like arts-based methodologies because the work has a life after the project,” Ham says. “Compared to an interview, which is grounded in a particular moment in time that probably has more utility for the researcher than the participant, these are methods that can travel beyond the project and be carried on by participants.”

The anthology is particularly meaningful because the act of making art as a migrant worker in Hong Kong can carry risks, Ham says.

“The idea of creative work by domestic workers is still out of the ordinary in the Hong Kong context because anything outside of their labour is sometimes regarded with suspicion, skepticism or indifference,” she says. “There are still instances where creative work or community work can be criminalized — if domestic workers are not focused solely on their domestic labour, they can come under greater scrutiny or even surveillance from law enforcement.”

The Migrant Writers of Hong Kong, a network founded by migrant domestic workers Maria Nemy Lou Rocio and Ailenemae Ramos, first invited Ham to collaborate on a collection in 2021.

The book project soon extended to include photography by members of Lensational, as well as co-editors Yvonne Yu and Christine Vicera and designer Daniella Bilo.

“Ingat: An Anthology of Works by Migrant Domestic Creatives in Hong Kong” was published by Small Tune Press earlier this spring, funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Research Grants Council, General Research Fund, Hong Kong. (Image courtesy of Small Tune Press)

“I can speak for myself and for other non-domestic workers on the team to say that we always wanted to make sure that this project was migrant worker-led,” says Ham. “It would be the decisions of Migrant Writers of Hong Kong at the centre of this initiative and the co-editors would provide labour and help by taking on the editorial work or the administrative work of contacting contributors and so on.”

The anthology is modelled after a balikbayan box, a care package sent from migrant workers to family members in the Philippines, which Ham says is an “iconic and enduring symbol of both labour migration and transnational care circuits.”

“The process of packing the box is so meaningful because what you put into the box is a way of sending your love across borders back to your family, carefully packed so that items are protected,” she says. “For the anthology, we wanted to put pieces in the right order, protect each work and make sure that each piece was showcased.”

According to Ham, the anthology’s title, ingat, is a word in both Tagalog and Bahasa that has different meanings for Filipino and Indonesian workers but broadly refers to care.

“For us, there’s so much work being done by that little word, because there are so many types of care,” she says. “It reflects all the different forms of labour that domestic workers do in Hong Kong — for employers, in communities, maintaining families across borders and producing culture through art. We used that one word and all these different meanings to really structure the anthology.”

Ham’s focus on knowledge production by migrant workers through art and culture continues this summer, when she travels to Hong Kong for a series of creative writing workshops with Migrant Writers of Hong Kong as part of her Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Partnership Engage Grant, “Migrant Domestic Worker Creatives in Community,” which is funded by the Government of Canada.