I’m visiting a close friend’s home for Chinese New Year. A Marvel movie is playing on TV—I have lost track of which one, but it’s pre-Thanos—and the kids are climbing over one another from their spots on the living room floor to get the best view. I stuff another pineapple tart into my mouth and turn to my friend, but she has disappeared into the kitchen. I go looking for her and find a familiar sight.
Women of all ages crowd around the kitchen counter. As they chat, they are transferring food from serving plates into storage boxes, taking turns to wash and dry dishes, then putting them back where they belong. A teenaged girl is instructed by her mother to retrieve a big bowl from inside the fridge, which turns out to be brimming with glistening balls of tangyuan and sweet milky broth. Her mother starts to spoon the dessert into smaller bowls, all the time showing her daughter where the nice crockery reserved for guests is kept, reminding her that it’s not for daily use.
In Asian culture, guests are treated with great reverence. They are to be served the finest of delicacies and never expected to lift a finger. Still, watching them milling about in their host’s kitchen, doing what they could to help lighten her load, it strikes me that even as guests, women cannot escape their duties of domestic labour. Unspoken and inherited, it is the thread that defines modern womanhood.
“My husband has been called ‘hen-pecked’ countless times by his own family and friends just for helping out around the house”
“I call the time that my sons were growing up my ‘zombie years’,” laughs 60-year-old mother of three, Lina*. “I would work the early morning shift—7am to 3pm—six days a week, before I got home and cooked them dinner. Then I’d make sure they had their uniforms ready for the next day, all their homework was complete and they had done their corrections. I had to be a strict mum with them. I didn’t have the time to be any other way.”
At the time, Lina and her husband had similar jobs and working hours. They both worked extremely hard—Lina just had an extra shift to do at home after the one at work ended. “I had a vision of being the perfect mother like what my own mother did, but it’s really tough. I think it actually might be impossible. There were days when my sons would be crying for me in the morning and I’d have to leave for work. Those are painful memories.”
Lina counts herself lucky as her husband has always completed any domestic tasks she delegates to him without complaint. She describes his share of chores: “If I did the laundry, he would help with the ironing. Or he might vacuum the house if I was still on my shift and it was not yet time for his. I could give him a grocery list whenever I needed to and he would do the shopping. He might not get every item I needed, but he would try his best.”
I observe to Lina that she positions her husband’s domestic labour and parenting work as help—almost as favours to her—when it is his home and his children as well. “That is weird, isn’t it?” she muses. “But it’s a societal norm. My husband has been called ‘henpecked’ countless times by his own family and friends just for helping out around the house. They’d ask him: ‘Why are you doing this? Why do you have to wash your wife’s clothes?’ But that was back then. Things must have changed by now, right?”
“I was putting pressure on myself to be who I thought would be a perfect mother—someone whose only priority would be the kids and the home”
I met Amelia Chia for the first time over Zoom in 2020. We had just joined the launch team behind Vogue Singapore, me as a writer and Chia as the deputy editor. Chia’s role was a big one—she would oversee the operations of the publication, mentor the team and keep things running smoothly.
We had gone through just about all our agenda points for the meeting when a tiny head popped up on the screen. It was Chia’s daughter, aged two at the time, who wanted to say hi.
Today, I’m speaking to Chia on yet another Zoom call— though in a post-COVID-19 era, we meet regularly in person—when she shares that she is going for her first personal trip without her husband, daughter and two-year-old son since her kids were born.
“I’m going to try not to backseat-parent while I’m away,” she laughs. “I know my husband is a wonderful parent. But I’m a planner and he’s a doer, so I want to set him up the best I can before I go.”
Before she leaves on her weekend-long trip, she plans to check a few things off her list. She will plan a playdate so that her husband can have a break from solo-parenting, and put all important appointments that the kids have in their shared calendar for his easy reference. She’ll do a big online grocery haul—“He’s better at cooking than I am, so I do the RedMart order and he makes dinner”—so the fridge is fully stocked, and fill up his car with petrol so he isn’t stuck at the petrol station with two kids in tow.
I ask if her husband would need to go through a similar checklist if he were going on a trip without her and the kids—or would he be able to pack up and leave? “Yes,” she smiles. “He’d be able to pack up and leave.”
Chia’s husband is from Australia, and she had moved to Melbourne to live for a few years when she gave birth to her first child. “My husband’s mum was an excellent homemaker and raised three kids almost single-handedly. His father worked a job and was less involved in running the household.”
“The work my mother did as a homemaker was not valued. Only when things went wrong would anyone notice her role”
She reflects: “There was a point when I was genuinely questioning if I could have a career and still be a good mother. I was putting pressure on myself to be who I thought would be a perfect parent—someone whose only priority would be the kids and the home.”
“Today, my husband does lots of chores around the house—he is more particular about keeping it tidy than I am. But the balance we have now has come out of years of conversation and deliberation. I told him that I wasn’t going to be entirely like his mum. We are hands-on parents and both spend a lot of time with our children. But I wanted to prioritise my career too.”
I am lounging in my cousin’s apartment, glass of wine in hand. Sitting next to me, she looks comfortable—like she is one with the admittedly very plush couch we are on. Her feet are bundled under a blanket, her glass nearly empty. We have not moved from our spots in the last hour.
Sreejata Chatterjee had migrated from Kolkata, India, to Canada at the age of 18. Today, she is director of product at a tech company and the co-founder of a successful start-up that has since been acquired. She shares a beautiful home and lively dog with her partner, who works in finance, and reports happily that they play an equal part in maintaining their domestic life.
“I love to cook and I love cars so anything car-related is my job. My partner takes care of all cleaning, and everything related to the outdoors like snowploughing, mowing the lawn and any plumbing and repairs. I’d say I’m happy with that division,” she laughs. “Equality does not mean that both of us have to do the exact same thing, but that we equally distribute tasks and planning,” she shares. “The planning piece is key—although I have seen many families distribute tasks, the woman is always the manager. This is a huge unseen mental burden. Managers get paid more at work and there’s a reason for that.”
Growing up, Chatterjee saw her mother take on all the domestic work at home. “My mother has a master’s degree in biochemistry and is one of the smartest people I know. She knew she was signing up to be a homemaker when she got married and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the work she did was not valued. Only when things went wrong would anyone notice her role. My dad retired early. Even when he was not working, he didn’t help with any domestic tasks. It wasn’t expected that he would.”
The delicious scent of onions caramelising in an Indian spice mix makes its way into the living room, and I can see Chatterjee’s partner pottering around in the kitchen. I ask what’s for dinner and she replies sleepily: “I’m not sure, but I’m sure he’ll figure out something good.”
*Lina’s name has been altered for privacy.
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