"I grew up in London with a Filipina woman called Juning, who had four
children of her own living on a small island in the Philippines 7,000
miles away. Juning's husband left when their children were young, and
all financial responsibility for the family fell to her. For several
years Juning worked as a nanny in Manila, but in 1974, knowing that a
local income could not stretch to cover her children's school fees, she
decided to look for work abroad. Her youngest child was two years old
when she left for Hong Kong. In 1976 my parents and brother, who was
then a year old, moved from London to Hong Kong for my father's work
with Barings Bank. My mother soon became pregnant with me, and in the
spring of 1977 she advertised for a 'mother's help' at Waitrose in Hong
Kong; Juning was one of four people who responded to the post. My mother
tells me my brother hid each time someone arrived for the interview,
until Juning came, when he headed straight for her lap. I'm grateful for
my brother's discernment, and that in response it was Juning who my
mother chose to employ, because though I have complicated feelings about
growing up with someone else's mother and benefiting from her attention
while her own children could not, Juning was certainly a very sound and
loving person to entrust childcare to. Two or three years after Juning
began working for my family in Hong Kong, we moved back to London, and
Juning came with us. She continued to live with my family for twenty two
years, until 1999. [...] Now, as an adult and a mother myself, the
notion that Juning lived apart from her children for three decades is
painful to imagine, and I can't shake off a feeling of strangeness that
their lives and mine carried on in tandem for all those years, mine with
their mother, theirs without. My parents chose to employ Juning, and her
influence on my life has been so extensive, I can't say where it starts
or ends. Juning chose to leave her children in order to financially
support them, and the effect of this decision on her children's lives is
also impossible to measure. We are all part of the same curious
equation, we are all impacted, and after decades of living in tandem but
remotely, I wanted to try to understand how."
