Abuse is rampant in Singapore as well though. For example, if a maid becomes pregnant, they have to leave Singapore immediately and the employer gets fined -- so it's common to lock them in the apartment 24/7/365 for however many years their contract is.

Legally, they're supposed to have one day a week off, but in practice this is not enforced and the maid has no leverage: many have paid large sums to brokers and need to work several years just to repay their debts.

Yes, I've seen families in Malaysia and Singapore that really treated their housekeeper badly. In a lot of cases, they are not allowed to go out of the apartment either because of potential pregnancy or because they are scared of the housekeeper stealing things from them.

They bring housekeepers from Indonesia and pay them very little. The housekeepers have to work a lot of hours and are pretty much treated as slaves. Often, the housekeepers are not allowed to eat at the same table, they have to eat after everyone has eaten, they don't sleep in a proper room but rather in a storage room.

At least, there's a contract and they do get money at the end but it's really a hard life and hardly more freedom than being a prisoner.

It always shocked me when I saw people that I thought were educated and friendly treat their housekeepers this way.

I only can speak for malaysia and yes this issue doesn't get brought up much, it's quite sickening to be honest. What is even more interesting is that most of the housekeepers are hired by the middle class, the same middle class that is wants racial equality in malaysia..

Exactly, it's the cognitive dissonance of those people wanting racial equality: being open minded and then hiring housekeepers and treating them badly. That cognitive dissonance surprises me and shocks me.

I have no issue with people hiring housekeepers but the work conditions absolutely need to be decent. And if for some reason they feel that there's too much risk in being decent, then they shouldn't hire a live in housekeeper, they could also easily hire locals to help with some housework.

Of course, that's not everyone, I have some Malaysian friends who treated their live in housekeeper with respect, let her take some holidays and even helped her set up her own business when she went back to Indonesia. But, that's the exception rather than the norm.

You'll find that a lot of people want equality when it means they gain something, but get quiet when equality means they have to do something.

Middle-class non-ethnic-Malays?

No middle class malaysian citizens.

wouldn't Malays and non-Malays have differing enthusiasm for racial equality?

urban malays although less enthused about it tend to skew towards having an equal playing field.

Very true; a former coworker grew up with a "housekeeper" in HK. She told us stories about how her dad slipped the housekeeper extra pay and Christmas bonuses because her mother refused to allow it. She said her mom would have been irate if she had found out. To her mother such people were disposable servants not worth consideration.

I really can't understand such a mentality.

I would add the counterpoint, however, that HK housekeepers can live lives much better than some HK citizens.

Room and board is given to a housekeeper. That in and of itself can translate to thousands a month in rent and many times, are better living conditions than HK citizens can afford.

Humanity is both so strange and so static. We got 'rid' of slavery in most of the world no later than a century ago. It was bloody and difficult to do, but we managed it. Yet, there are still people living as just the same as slaves century or more ago, in a world of space ships and the internet. Yeah, tech has helped, we don't have smallpox anymore and the mass famines have stopped recently, but the deeper gestal psyche is the same. The old saying of history repeating itself if you do not listen to it comes to mind. But, what can we do, humans are still humans, basically the same for the last ~10k years. No matter how much we want to change, how much time and effort and writing and money and sweat and blood and death and war, we cannot. Its not that we are dystopian now, maybe, its that we have always been so.

When you go searching for meaning, chase all the leads, trying to separate wrong from right. What you find is that beyond all the pop culture tropes, the outrage and terror about the latest and greatest paedophile revelation, evil greedy capitalists banker stories, murderous terrorists and backstabbing trophy wives and all the other stories about 'true monsters'. You'll find that all the monsters are just humans. Just like you and me.

It's easy to see from far away what is bad, people all over the western world can point at Hitler in their history books as an example of absolute evil. But then we'd be missing the complete picture, which is so much worse if you cling to a traditional view of good and evil. Normal school curriculum (at least where I'm from) does not teach about the horrific things Belgium did in the Congo up until the 1960s Or any of the other decimations/genocides caused directly or indirectly as a result of occupation by the various colonial powers. Or all the terrible things our ancestors did even further in the past when news spread so much slower or not at all.

There was a Byzantine king named Basil. Who, after defeating a Bulgarian army and capturing a number of their soldiers, blinded 99 out of every 100 captured soldiers and sent them back to Bulgaria to cripple their economy and to sabotage future war efforts. Man is a savage evil creature imo. I don't think we ever truly can change. The civilization I and many others enjoy in the western world is a fragile thing I think. And if we can't make it stick and spread, and I don't think I can, then when the troubles get too bad we'll be back to savagery soon enough, or not as the bomb is still hanging above our heads even if it doesn't feel like that any more.

There are good people and bad people. There are monsters and humans even if monsters may have human shape and form.

There is good and there is evil.

One evil act does not absolve another.

Goodness lives forever and evil does not die either

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

Jordan Peterson talks about how one of the most important things you can do to become a well-formed person in terms of moral reasoning is to realize that you're a Nazi. You're a concentration camp guard. You'd do it, by choice. It takes a lot of discussion and examples and thought to get to the point where this is really understood, but it's true and it's important.

I'd say the main thing that convinced me is that I realized that there are people I'd like to see suffer. Not because it'd lead to some external outcome, but just because I want them to suffer. You can see this every day in politics too. People who want to hurt just for the joy of hurting. You can hear it in their voices when they knock people down at a protest and hurl dehumanizing snarl terms at them.

And this is present on every 'side'. The only possible difference is in how much each side embraces this impulse.

Once this is understood - that people aren't divided into good and evil groups, but rather that every person is both good and evil - a lot of questions and problems look quite different from the common "good people vs evil people" frame. A lot of policies and historical judgments start to look pretty dumb.

And, in fact, the idea that some people are evil is a foundation of evil acts. The false belief that someone is pure evil is what gives you the excuse to feel good about making them suffer.

It's ironic that wrong beliefs about the shape of evil in the world are themselves a foundation for evil.

Thank you for that. It is very hard to remember that good also lasts just like evil. So, I guess, choose what you will and know that they both will live on past yourself.

When I was in the Boy Scouts, we had this saying for when we were out camping and hiking. It was "you're only as fast as your slowest hiker". I realize that the context here isn't the same but the concept is still very much applicable. We as a species can only be judged and advance as fast as our as the 'slowest' of us are willing to move.

This is a very good point! Thank you. If this is the case, that we can even be judged as a whole, then it is sad. But it gives the proper perspective on what our species should be working on in a moral way. Bringing up the 'bottom' though difficult, is much more noble and better for us all than the efforts of trying to get the 'top' even higher. Maybe this is something many older religions have recognized

The past is still with us, it just isn't evenly distributed any longer.

While Lola's story is certainly tragic, it's a tangibly different class of slavery than that which existed in the western world 2 centuries ago. Chattel slavery is far, far crueler and not comparable

The dystopia has been abstracted.

Having lived in Brunei, culturally very similar to Singapore, I know a thing about this. I was a kid at the time and we had an "amah" and her family living in our house (or rather, in the servants' quarters on the ground floor, while we lived in the main residence on the floor above that). Most of the foreigners were Dutch and English people, in the employ of Shell. For us, a Dutch family, the concept of having a servant was a very alien concept.

Our amah was a very friendly lady and had a relatively easy life with us -- helping with the cleaning of the house, doing the laundry, and washing the dishes, no cooking or raising us kids -- and was paid quite well. Even though it's been 30 years, I still remember helping her out by drying the dishes and visiting her family.

What shocked me personally was the exploitative nature of many other families, from what my parents told me, the British tended to have this more than the Dutch, though I can't be sure. My parents actually got in trouble with others who didn't appreciate their "spoiling the market" -- by paying wages that they considered fair, which was at approximately 250% of the going rate -- and by not working them to the bone. It still boggles my mind.

Can you elaborate on why some live-in maids in those countries are effectively slaves, but a maid that comes to the house daily would not be?

What is the significance of the live-in part?

It makes the maid dependent on the family -- you can't quit or look for a better job because you'll be homeless.

It is very similar to the now illegal idea of a Company Town, but at a smaller scale.

You're trapped in a house with no way to leave, no money, no options.

If they live elsewhere they definitely have freedom of movement.

> Many Asian countries have the concept of live-in housekeepers.

As educated as the HN crowd is, I'm surprised so many people are susceptible to stereotypes.

Perhaps because most people on HN are rather wealthy and well off, when they visit Asia they hang around other rich Asians.

So yes, among rich Asians, the idea of a live-in caretaker maybe common, but they are the minority.

This would be like some rich Asian people hanging out with rich Westerners and saying, "many Western countries have the concept of live-in butlers and maids."

It's incredibly common. A live-in caretaker/helper in Hong Kong is about $500 USD/month. In South East Asia, it's a fraction of that.

You are completely ignorant of the situation if you think otherwise. The Hong Kong government has even set up special visa programs for helpers: http://www.immd.gov.hk/eng/services/visas/foreign_domestic_h...

As others have mentioned, it actually is quite common. Part of the reason is that the going rate for hiring any sort of unskilled labor is much lower in Southeast Asia and South Asia, compared to North America. (Another way to say this is that income inequality is greater.) So if you're "middle class" in South/Southeast Asia, you're more likely to be able to afford a domestic helper than if you're "middle class" here (where you could only afford to hire your own domestic help, say a babysitter or a nanny or a maid or a food delivery guy, for only a small portion of your time) simply because of the wage differences.

Incredibly ignorant statement. In many parts of Asia, including South Asia, having live in servants is very common. Philippines and Indonesia are just two examples.