Keywords

The continuous rise of the number of women leaving Indonesia to work as domestic workers in their richer Asian neighbours like Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan has not only revived the economy and propelled the development of the country; these women’s apparent upward social mobility has also brought about crucial shifts in the ways relations of gender and sexuality are perceived and discussed back home. The Indonesian government hails them as pahlawan devisa or wira kiriman wang (foreign exchange heroes; remittance heroes) as part of their official state rhetoric. However, this recognition is always haunted by anxieties surrounding gender ideologies that interrogate the government’s optimistic projections towards their citizen-breadwinners. These tensions are manifested in how their migrant women are also potential sources of shame in the Indonesian public sphere when they are represented as vulnerable victims or morally compromised women abroad in mainstream media and public discourse. During COVID-19, many Indonesian domestic workers abroad were particularly vulnerable and faced challenges such as discrimination and verbal abuse in Taiwan (Mulyanto 2022).

The contested images of Indonesian women abroad reflect the anxieties on their mobility, particularly heightened by expressions of malu (shame) according to the codes of morality and sexuality dominant in the Indonesian state and society. In this chapter, I examine how malu illustrates how gendered moral discourses shape the problematic politics of labour migration in the country. By analysing the Indonesian state rhetoric in news reports, mass media portrayals and Indonesian migrant women’s own social practices, I argue that shame not only reinforces several problematic gender and moral discourses imposed on Indonesian migrant women but also heightens their precarious role and place in their home and host countries. To counter these dominant narratives of shame and shaming, I probe into the possibilities opened by Indonesian migrant domestic workers themselves as they write, publish and circulate their own stories in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan as part of the emerging cultural production of Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia (Sastra BMI), Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Literature.

Writing fiction provides an avenue for Indonesian migrant women to narrate and negotiate questions about morality and sexuality in ways that offer spaces to reflect on and resist malu and being made malu through their stories. In these ways, migrant Indonesian women’s “fictions” are no longer just a “literary genre” but also a “narrative strategy,” as Visweswaran (1994, p. 62) argues, that can represent moments of mediation, contestation and even “disruption” within their subjectivity through the complex process of finding their own voice and portraying their social worlds through their own forays into literature. This chapter analyses selected stories culled from five short fiction anthologies of Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan: Forum Lingkar Pena Hong Kong’s Menaklukkan Ketakutan di Ranah Rantau (Overcoming Fear in Foreign Shores, 2013) and Penjajah Di Rumahku: Kumpulan Cerpen (Intruders at My Home: Short Story Collection, 2010), KUNCI Cultural Studies Center and Para Site’s Bacaan Selepas Kerja (Afterwork Readings, 2016), Grup BMI Singapura’s Ketika Pena BMI Menari (When Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Pens Dance, 2012) and Kwek Li Na’s Imaji Air: Kumpulan Cerpen BMI di Taiwan (Images of Water: Short Stories of an Indonesian Migrant Worker from Taiwan, 2014).

These short stories illustrate how Indonesian domestic workers receive, mediate and transgress the meanings of shame and the operations of shaming in their practice of sexuality in their everyday lives abroad. Through these literary works, I analyse the themes of subscription and subversions of malu in how they deal with instances of shame and shaming in their portrayal of their daily lives in these stories and in how they express through fiction their resistance to moral impositions of their body by narrating their encounter and practice of queer sexual identities and interracial intimacies in transnational spaces.

1 Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia

One of the interesting effects of the Indonesian diaspora in recent years is the emergence of Sastra BMI. In just a short span of a decade, there have been a considerable number of novels, short story and poetry anthologies written by Indonesian domestic workers that were published and disseminated within their community in their host countries. The authors of these literary works only started writing and publishing after they became migrant workers (Suryomenggolo 2012, p. 198). There is a continuous literary production and circulation of domestic workers’ writings in Hong Kong, although more and more domestic worker-writers have also started emerging in Singapore and Taiwan in the last few years.

Some claim that the emergence of Sastra BMI could be because of the receiving state’s relatively “hospitable” conditions that are seen as conducive for many of the helpers to pursue other persuasions outside their work in employers’ households (Murniati 2014). But it is also primarily due to the growing organising work and community building that Indonesian women in these host countries (Lestari 2013). Forum Lingkar Pena Hong Kong is a literary community of mostly domestic workers who meet every other Sunday at Victoria Park to read and give constructive feedback on each other’s works. The group has already published a handful of not only short story collections but also the novels and poetry of its members (Helvy 2007). Some of their works have also been part of more canonical fiction anthologies and included in collaborative projects of established artists’ collectives, one example of which is the Afterwork Readings of the Para Site and KUNCI Cultural Studies Center. Grup BMI Singapura started as an online community of Indonesian helpers in Singapore. Kwek Li Na, the author of Imaji Air, is a migrant wife who worked in Brunei as a domestic worker before transferring to Taiwan. Her inclusion in the group Forum Lingkar Pena Taiwan and her friendship with Indonesian domestics inspired her stories about household helpers and marriage migrants in Taiwan (Huang 2018).

Many of these writers first publish their stories in Indonesian community magazines in destination countries (Cummins 2013). Some of the authors actively maintain blogs where they post their stories for others to read and comment on, and there are online Indonesian writing communities which include profiles and writings of some of their more prolific writers. Independent publishing houses in Jakarta, Yogyakarta and Bandung then pick up and publish their manuscripts; some are distributed in local bookstores, but most go back to where the novels, stories and poems were written (Murniati 2012).In Hong Kong, for example, members of the writing group circulate and distribute their books at Victoria Park during their days off. Some of their books are also available in many of the perpustakaan mobil (mobile libraries) scattered all over the park, where their fellow domestics can borrow and read their works (Ginger 2015).

These writing groups of Indonesian migrant women would hold weekly writing sessions and workshops. Since most of these migrant women are new to the craft and have no prior training in creative writing, they only learn the conventions of the craft through their community whose members are, like them, mostly initiates to the literary world. They learn to write by self-practice and by studiously revising their works with the help of their community. They also hold their own writing competitions and literary festivals where they recruit new authors and showcase their publications to their fellow domestics and other Indonesian readers (Grundy 2014).

Indonesian authors and literary critics acknowledge the novelty of this emerging genre, but Sastra BMI’s place in the Indonesian literary canon is still in question. As Suryomenggolo (2012, p. 216) observes: “Indonesian domestic workers’ writings are often left out from discussions within established literary circles, and their works are not even listed in the catalogues of public and university libraries in the country.” While some of Indonesia’s established middle-class authors find problems with their works’ literariness, many of them sympathise with the difficulties and challenges these women had to go through just to be able to write and share their stories (Iswandono 2010). Though many of these domestic worker-writers have relative freedom and support from their employers for this kind of creative pursuit, others have to steal time or hide their writing from their bosses’ attention.

For many Indonesian domestic workers, writing and publishing literary works are important avenues where they develop new skills and knowledge, thereby creating new identities beyond their designations as mere household workers. Their thriving literary culture has given them an opportunity to challenge stereotypes about their illiteracy and even ignorance (Winarti 2011). Most importantly, creative writing offers them the irreducible freedom of finding their own voice, which is otherwise stifled and repressed in their everyday lives.

In many ways, the dominant aesthetics of their published work resonates with some of the characteristics of testimonial writing. Another element that contributed to the development of testimonial writing among migrants, particularly of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, is the outreach and community activities of non-profit and migrant advocacy groups in these host countries. Community organisers and support groups have always encouraged foreign domestic workers to keep a diary and document their daily lives as these writings could then be used as evidence, just in case they file cases of abuse and labour complaints later (Mission for Migrant Workers 2013).

These traditions and social practices filter through their writings as most of the published stories have retained their autobiographical quality. Most of these fictions are written from the first-person point of view, revolving around the authors’ own everyday experiences while inviting readers to peek into their private lives as women labourers in the intimate spaces of the household (Sawai 2010). However, as fiction bordering on the testimonial, the phenomenon of Indonesian migrant literature is itself contradictory. Even though many of these short stories are confessional, exposing very personal experiences, writing them as “fiction” has allowed these domestic worker-writers to employ the dis-identification effects of the genre in shaping their narratives. Most of their stories revolve around their trauma from their previous humiliating experiences with employers and personal tales about the racial, class and sexual discrimination they encounter on a daily basis in a foreign land. However, framing them as fiction has given them a creative space to detach themselves from these very intimate experiences, allowing them to render these real-life incidents imaginatively as short stories.

This “distancing” effect is important because it provides them with a space to mediate, contemplate and interpret their own everyday encounters of issues of class, race, gender and sexuality abroad from their perspective as both domestic workers and literary writers. As Antariksa of the KUNCI Collective states: “If we look a bit further beyond the surface of their works, we can see these written narratives as their attempts to engage with other forms of subjectivity as they continuously expose themselves to the distancing effects of the act of writing fiction” (KUNCI 2016, p. 22). In these ways, the literary aesthetics of taking on a new persona, imagining novel identities and weaving different life stories are very much connected to how many of the aspiring writers among Indonesian migrant women embrace a new subjectivity and enact their agency.

The majority of their short stories recount their experiences of abuse and exploitation, reproducing the clichéd narratives of the misery and victimisation of domestic workers present in their mass media and popular culture. The oversaturation of victim narratives can also constrain how their works are received, as most of their fiction tends to be taken merely for their value as ethnographic and social documentary texts. However, sifting through their anthologies proves that their literary themes and tropes have become much more nuanced and complex. There are a lot of short stories that have delved into seeing the difficulties of their labour through the daily and monotonous grind of household chores, as their writers explore the various facets of looking at how their time and space are structured by domestic work. Many stories have also shown the many-sided dimensions of living and surviving abroad, like finding their own community, adapting into a new culture, forging friendships, resolving conflict and tension with other fellow domestics, and coping with other problems like homesickness and isolation. While there are kisah inspiratif (inspirational stories) that are moral how-to’s of practising Islam and being a good Muslim woman even while working alone abroad, there are also love and romance stories that sometimes portray interracial and lesbian relationships that challenge normative ideas of ethno-nationalism and heterosexism.

The wide array of the themes, tropes, characters, narrative strategies and perspectives of Sastra BMI attest to the multiplicity of experiences and interpretations of their social practices in migration. While there are authors who constantly break down patriarchal and heteronormative gender ideologies when they write about stories about homosexual relationships and cross-racial desires, there are also those who hold on to traditional and hegemonic dictates of being a good Indonesian woman abroad by writing didactic inspirational tales. Even though migration has opened their world and challenged the worldviews they previously held back home, some of their short stories are still largely haunted by assertions of religious and cultural norms prevalent in their homeland. In these ways, the literary writings of Indonesian domestic worker-writers reflect complex negotiations of ideas of Indonesian morality and sexuality, where their various experiences of border crossings, on the one hand, do not necessarily translate as transgressions but, on the other hand, do not merely reiterate problematic ideas of what it means to be a good woman on foreign shores.

2 Malu, Morality and Mobility

The rise of Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan is not only a product of the increasingly feminised global labour market. It is also a consequence of the Indonesian state’s labour export policy and its active reconfiguration of its official ideologies on gender to align with the country’s development agenda. Since the colonial period, Indonesian men were viewed as the more suitable perantau (migrant) (Elmhirst 2007; Hugo 2006). This only changed in the 1980s as the New Order regime sought to take advantage of a growing demand for female domestic workers in the Gulf and Malay Straits regions (Hugo 2008). After the period of authoritarian rule, the succeeding reformasi-era (era of reforms) administrations have only become more and more aggressive in their deployment of workers abroad by pursuing familiar pathways in the Middle East, Malaysia and Singapore, but have also filled new demands in East Asia, as the Indonesian state responded to the increasing feminisation of the international global labour demand for foreign domestic workers (Hugo 2005, p. 57). And, with the 1997 Asian financial crisis leaving a trail of growing poverty in Indonesia, migration became a more permanent answer to the country’s dwindling economic prospects, with more and more Indonesian women, especially from the country’s poorer rural areas, can participate participating in rituals of merantau (migrating).

Statistics from mid-2020 on Indonesian migration show that 44% of the 4.6 million Indonesian documented migrants are women (Migration Data Portal 2022). At the end of 2021, the largest number of domestic foreign helpers in Hong Kong came from the Philippines, with a total of 191,783, followed by Indonesia, with 140,057 domestic helpers (Data.Gov.HK 2022). Figures from the end of 2020 showed that only 1.5% of the foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong were male (Women’s Commission 2021, p. 3).

Besides the state policies that created this gendered mobility, the Indonesian government had also actively realigned its official gender ideologies to encourage more women to go abroad for work. Silvey (2004) refers to this process as “transnational domestication” where state body politics are realigned to address the rural and lower-income class women targeted for transnational domestic work. The Indonesian government actively marshalled conservative Islamic beliefs on gender to merge with the state’s moral and economic ideology on women (Suryakusuma 2004; Blackburn 2004). As part of the state programme, women are legislated to take on economic roles to maintain both the nuclear and “national families.” The New Order’s “woman and development” programmes were used to highlight women’s economic roles through the concept of peran ganda wanita (women’s dual roles) in both the salary-earning and domestic fields (Sunidyo 1996, p. 125). This encouraged the growth of middle-class women, who, while earning incomes for the household, also maintain their domestic obligations as mothers and wives.

These gender ideologies were then reoriented in later decades to meet the needs of the state’s changing local relations to its women and the growing demand for transnational feminised work. Overseas work offers them a chance to become a different kind of wanita karir (career women): they can be a tenaga kerja wanita (overseas domestic worker), whose income might even surpass the salaries of middle-class women back home. While the likelihood of their long absence in their own domains of “home and hearth” could prove contradictory to their traditional functions, the state rhetoric sutures this by extending the social meaning of family into national family: “the state’s dominant vision of idealised femininity was translated into a migratory income-earning woman for the sake of the ‘national family’s’ goals of economic development” (Silvey 2004, p. 253).

The complex process of the Indonesian state’s transnational domestication would find affirmation in how the government celebrated their economic impact in the development of not only their own households but also their tanah air (homeland). In the period between 2015 and 2019, Indonesia received US$9.8 billion average remittances from Indonesian migrant workers annually, according to Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto (The Sun Daily 2022).

It is within the context of the upsurge of Indonesian women leaving the country and the expanding influx of capital from their remittances that the discourse of pride in the name of pahlawan devisa was coined by the state.

However, the pride accorded to migrant women workers as economic heroes is always haunted by the possibilities of malu (shame). Outside the optics of the state, community and even one’s own family, the Indonesian domestic workers’ absence in their traditional social spaces has shored up moral panic back home. Representations of migrant women in mass media and popular culture as wanita jalang (bad woman) or wanita tuna susila (woman without morals)—terms that are used to label prostitutes and single mothers—cast them as dodgy and disgraceful women who forsake the values of their family and nation once they get out of their kampung (home/village) and tanah air (homeland) (Constable 2014, p. 9; Ford 2003; Silvey 2013, p. 153).Perceiving Indonesian transnational women as heroic and, at the same time, dishonourable is possible in a culture of migration because both pride and shame are affects and effects of living up against a particular set of moral ideals. As Sarah Ahmed (2004, p. 109) argues, “shame and pride have a similar affective role in judging the success or failure of subject to live up to ideals, though they make different judgments.”

Shame is a particularly powerful affect in the Indonesian context. Classic ethnographic studies on “shame-embarrassment” show that the associated feelings of shyness and humiliation in the colloquial terms of the Balinese isin or the Javanese lek show how Indonesians are subjected to vulnerability in social interactions and the performance of public etiquettes set by cultural and moral norms in Indonesian society (Geertz 1983; Rosaldo 1983). However, the term malu, a Malay word that has become part of the Indonesian lingua franca, exceeds these abovementioned feelings as it goes beyond the tropes of performance anxieties to describe a sense of “failure” to live up to gendered norms of the Indonesian nation. Collins and Ernaldi (2000, p. 42) state that shame is intimately linked to sexuality, as the idiom of “private parts” in Indonesia (kemaluan) has the word malu in it, denoting how sensitive and easily shame-inducing the topic of sexuality can be. Furthermore, reactions to malu are highly gendered, as Indonesian males respond to shame through “aggression” while women respond through “self-restraint, reticence and withdrawal” (Ibid, p. 43).

Malu’s effect becomes even more pronounced as Indonesian women cross national borders. In transnational spaces, the feeling of shame does not just describe particular bodily responses to social situations for them but also prescribes them to follow social norms. As Johan Lindquist (2009, p. 59) claims, “malu connotes not only shame or embarrassment, but also piety and modesty.” This suggests how being a subject or a possible subject of malu can have a more lasting and enduring effect because it is an ongoing engagement with a social ideal. This is why a woman must always be on guard and follow and obey norms because she may easily fall into disgrace. In the case of a tenaga kerja wanita, the woman is always constantly bound to the ideals of womanhood that are drawn by cultural, national and moral scripts of being a good woman even if and precisely because she is not around. In this way, she does not need to be subjected to the gaze of the state and its moral norms. These ideals that produce the affective border demarcating pride from shame constantly regulate her subjectivity and body.

3 Shame, Submission and Subversion

Malu as an effect of mobility can be seen in many of the stories of Indonesian migrant women in anthologies set in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. For example, in Dik Meme Love’s Uncle Kurang Ajar (Brash Uncle), an Indonesian helper in Singapore recounts her experience when a stranger tries to sexually harass her inside the elevator when they were left alone. She fights back and escapes the assault. Towards the end, as if addressing her fellow Indonesian domestics reading her narrative, the protagonist declares: “Don’t be like me!” (Capriconidas 2012, p. 53).

The impression that one is “easy” just because she is all by herself can also be read in Erfa Handayani’s story Sopir Taxi (Taxi Driver). Here, the protagonist developed an almost paternal friendship with a Singaporean taxi driver. On one of her days off, she was left alone by her Indonesian friend who went out with her boyfriend. When the taxi driver texted and casually invited her to eat somewhere, she readily agreed. Because she completely trusts the old man, it took her some time to realise that the man was taking her to a shady guesthouse in Pasir Panjang. Once she realises this, she immediately protested and confronted the man, asserting that: “I am not that kind of girl!” (p. 71). As she was being brought back to MRT to go home, she was suddenly subjected to the complex feeling of malu, which she describes as mixed emotions of “trauma, sadness, frustration and fear of losing the purity that I have been so fastidiously protecting” (p. 72).

These narratives attest to how they have already ascribed malu on their bodies even if they got out of possible instances of shame. In Handayani’s short story, the woman was traumatised for being treated as a prostitute, being brought to a hotel and being offered money, which she threw back in the driver’s face at the story’s end. This anxious identification of possibly being immoral threatens her and she knows that her statement “I am not that kind of girl” is unstable because she could easily be perceived as such even by the person she trusts. The trauma of this sexual harassment then comes from the recognition that her kesucian (purity) is already contaminated by the possibility of losing it just as easily as she can slip into being a wanita tuna susila.

In Dik Meme Love’s story, the protagonist realised that, just because she is a foreigner and probably alone and single, the man could do anything to her. Although nothing in her story suggests that she actually encouraged the stranger to come and kiss her, her last words and moral warning to her friends—“Don’t be like me!”—is puzzling. If being a foreigner alone in an elevator is what made her morally suspect, how can her friends, Indonesian women themselves and vulnerably isolated in their places of work, not be like her? This demonstrates how shame can be internalised and how it bears insidious effects on how Indonesian migrant women act and react under its shadows.

Malu in these stories can then be seen as the moral boundary demarcating who are the “right” and “righteous” subjects of migration and who are not. The possibility of a woman slipping onto the other side is heightened as that moral border becomes permeable, particularly in spaces where domestic workers and sex workers abound and encounter each other. The anxieties of misidentification among women who are out of place in migrant spaces transform the affect of malu both as a discourse and as a discipline that they have to subscribe to or transgress.

To understand the complexity of how shame works among Indonesian women in transnational spaces, one can look into Lindquist’s ethnography of Indonesian migrant women applicants and sex workers on Batam Island. Here, he portrays how malu is negotiated through veiling. For the migrant workers, “wearing a jilbab protects women from being approached by men, or of running the risk of being identified as a lontong or prostitute” (Lindquist 2009, p. 57). In this sense, the practice of veiling is not so much a form of one’s religiosity but a performance of piety to separate her from being a lontong (prostitute) and shelter her from the social encounters of being misidentified as such. The strategies of moral distinction—from wearing a veil to openly claiming that one is not that kind of girl—reveal the power of malu as a consolidation of moral and national codes on Indonesian women’s migration.

The fear of falling into a life of disgrace as a tenaga kerja wanita becomes a way of both subjecting them to control and discipline according to gender ideologies of their homeland and making their experience of vulnerability their own personal dilemma while they are in their host countries. More than this, these ideas and practices also validate the stigmatisation, and sometimes even criminalisation, of sex work, which nullifies the female sex workers’ suffering and victimhood as migrant women workers themselves. After all, a lot of the women who ended up becoming prostitutes are former domestic workers who were, like them, victims of abuse and exploitation. Both domestic work and prostitution function as sexual labour, except that the latter falls out of the frames of what is moral and legitimate. And as in the case of how local economies operate, sex work only becomes a possibility when legal and “decent” work is impossible to secure. In this sense, both kinds of women share the same fate of displacement in their transnational context. As one of the authors of Forum Lingkar Pena Hong Kong, Pandan Arun, provocatively claimed in a writer’s forum, “Domestic workers and prostitutes are similar in that pride and poverty forced them to make tough decisions” (Arun in Grundy 2014).

Seen in this way, transnational prostitution is just a result of merantau’s promises going awry, and migrant women still have to live up to those promises even if or precisely because they failed them. We can see how, in Tiwi’s story Sebuah Surat di Penghujung April (A Letter at the End of April), Indonesian sex workers in Hong Kong mediate malu by keeping up with their economic duties to their families in kampung, even if they have no means to. Here, the main character is writing a letter to her husband to confess her bitter experiences. She became a kabur (runaway) and stayed at a shelter where there were many other runaways like her who could no longer apply to be a domestic worker in Hong Kong.

In her letter, she shares how her other Indonesian fellows in the halfway house earn their living even after their job contracts were terminated: “Prostitution, that was their chosen path, my fellow domestics, my countrywomen who have the same burden as me. Almost everyone I know there has to support her family. And they could not afford to just stop sending money, even for a month” (Megawati 2013, p. 23). Later on, she admits to her husband how she has also joined them, “There were times when I joined them in the disco where they hang out to wait for customers” (p. 23). This letter not only reveals the protagonist’s shame to her husband but also exposes how binding migration’s social ideals and promises are, even to individuals who failed them. For women in Tiwi’s story, remitting money to their family who are unaware of their source of income is a taking on of both their economic and moral responsibilities; they are still the breadwinners and the money that they send is the proof that they have not yet gone over to the “other side.”

Finally, shame’s cruellest effects take place in instances of sexual victimhood. Malu can affectively deform one’s body and distort the ways in which a migrant woman understands her victimhood in the experience of sexual assault or rape. Because the anxiety of being malu is such a violent condition, women are forced to fight in the name of pride just to stay away from falling out of it. Take, for example, Ukhti Fia’s Demi Sebuah Kehormatan (For the Sake of Honour), where the female protagonist has to somehow “entrap” her Singaporean male employer to be able to not just put a stop on his advances but also convince herself that his boss was really sexually assaulting her by pretending to be asleep as her employer approaches her, “By reflex, I grabbed my small alarm clock on top of the headboard and then banged it into his face with all the force I could muster” (Capriconidas 2012, p. 90).

Fighting back for one’s pride is subtler in the case of the main character in Nano Iyank Febriyana’s story “Trauma.” In the story, after the heroine overcame her shock after that her male employer’s mobile phone was deliberately left inside the bathroom to record her taking a bath, she “took a bucket, filled it with hot water and sank his iPhone in it. I let it drown there until I finished my bath. I dressed up, and then I took my boss’ iPhone from the bucket and placed it back in its place on the floor. Then I went straight to my room” (p. 56).

These responses could be seen as rightfully claiming one’s body against the threats of sexual assault and harassment. These women’s actions demonstrate how they craft certain forms of agency even in their isolated and precarious circumstances. Both the characters’ strategies of confronting the sexual predator or eluding the predatory gaze and technology effectively highlight their resistance even in such conditions of vulnerability. However, both of these women’s responses also reflect the dread of failing to live up to social and moral ideals and their fear of potentially becoming shameful subjects of migration. In “Trauma,” the main character felt angered and isolated, feeling her rage from her own helplessness (p. 56) while in Fia’s story, the protagonist has to second guess whether she welcomed such advances: “It was stupid of me not to think anything was wrong with what he was doing” (p. 89). Malu and its possibilities, most of the time, perversely transform the understanding of victimhood. As with most victims of sexual trauma and threats, “in experiences of shame, the ‘bad feeling’ is attributed to oneself, rather than to an object or the other” (Ahmed 2004, p. 104). While these women may have overcome their assailant, the ‘bad feelings’ come to them alone, which they have to negotiate and deal with themselves.

This is why stories of sexual victimisation of migrant women sometimes end up becoming cautionary moral tales of what happens when one gives in to majikan genit (naughty/flirty bosses), uncle kurang ajar (brash uncles) or foreign boyfriends for the people back in the kampung. Indicative of this is the casual but also ritual warning of sponsors and recruiters to prospective migrant women to never give in to the flirtations of male employers and strangers even if they like it, which is sometimes how many stories of sexual abuse are interpreted.

As Chan (2014, p. 6956) argues, “The dangers of physical or sexual abuse of female migrant domestic workers, most of whom are required by laws in destination countries to live with their employers, are represented mostly in terms of female promiscuity and moral weakness, in allowing themselves to be tempted or seduced.” This is how malu constructs what Chan describes as gendered moral hierarchies in the representation of Indonesian migrant victims. According to her, “The moral privileging of ‘successful,’ or ‘pitiable’ female migrants who is innocent, vulnerable, heroic, and/or selfless, produces their negative gender subordinates: immoral and ill-fated women who fall short of the ideal expectations of a mother, daughter, sister and wife” (Chan 2014, p. 6959). In this schema, the moral distinction that pride and shame create among migrant women victims polarises their narratives of victimhood in terms of who is innocent and worthy of justice against those who are to be blamed, and thus, deserving of their ill fates. Malu corrupts both types of victims. On the one hand, those who are innocent deserve social justice not because it is their fundamental right but because it is their moral qualities that make it so. On the other hand, those who are perceived to be immoral get to be doubly persecuted not just because they are seen to be deserving of their suffering but because they are also effectively marginalised, if not completely pushed out, from the discourses and mechanisms of rights and justice claims both at home and abroad.

This vicious system of victim blaming and shaming is what Kwek Li Na portrayed in her story Bunga Mimpi Luruh di Formosa (Dream Falls in Formosa). Anya, an Indonesian migrant wife and the protagonist in this story, describes her friendship with Ayu, an Indonesian domestic worker who works in the same neighbourhood as her in Taipei. However, they started to drift apart when she saw Ayu being dragged and pinned down by a man inside the apartment where she works. While she is able to stop the incident by coming into the scene and pretending not to have witnessed what was taking place, she starts to feel hesitant when talking to Ayu about it afterwards: “I did not dare ask her directly, I’m afraid she might be afraid of being shamed or just feel hurt if we talked about it” (Li Na 2014, p. 22). This leads to her estrangement to her friend, lessening her visits just to avoid feeling discomfort at broaching on the topic.

Even if she tries to actively forget about the incident, what she witnessed troubled her. By the time she overcame her hesitation by finally going over to Ayu and talking to her, it was too late. She sees Ayu being arrested and escorted by police out of her employer’s house. The mutual silence between the two friends is only broken months after when Ayu sent her a letter from prison explaining what Anya had seen “on that day she lost (her) honour” (Li Na 2014, p. 27). She was raped by the family driver and when the man tried to sexually assail her again, she grabbed a pair of scissors and stabbed him. At the start of her letter, Ayu gave the reason why she kept her sufferings to herself, “It’s been a long time since I wanted to tell you what happened, but I could not. I was so embarrassed and scared” (ibid). And towards the end, she is asking for Anya’s forgiveness, “Forgive me for making you anxious, for staying away from you, for not being honest with you… forgive my stupidity. Forgive me, Kak” (p. 28).

What is striking in both of these women characters is how malu has effectively subjected them both into the space of silence. This reveals the vicious power of shame in both women’s bodies. Anya, who has seen the sexual violence, was numbed into inaction. It is as if what she witnessed infused her with so much guilt that it made her reluctant and incapable of confronting the violence herself. It is as if her very act of witnessing has compelled her to share Ayu’s malu, making her feel ashamed of herself and also unwittingly taking part in shaming Ayu by making her know that she has seen it but does not know what to make of it. Ayu, the main victim of sexual violence here, was so violently subjected to malu that she no longer knows what to do and where to seek help. Even if she knew that she has a witness and her witness is someone she can trust, shame has already dominated her body such that the only way to fight is to take justice into her own hands.

This is malu in its most insidious affective form. Because it not only blames the victim and even its witness but also intensifies the guilt, and overpowers and victimises migrant women’s bodies again and again. Malu not only makes them turn away from themselves but also pushes them to fault themselves and make their suffering their sole culpability. Finally, malu relegates them to subaltern spaces of silence where they punish themselves by repeatedly asking for forgiveness for sins they did not commit.

The vicious consequence of cultivating shame for Indonesian domestic workers is in its capacity to make them feel that their vulnerability is theirs alone to manage and deal with. With the nation-state’s active reiteration of gendered moral discourses, shame becomes a discursive strategy of disciplining their migrant women to follow moral scripts even and especially when they are out of its gaze and monitoring. These moral scripts instruct women that their success as tenaga kerja wanita depends upon the upkeep of their own bodies’ dignity and morality on foreign shores. Yet, in reality, their living and working conditions as mostly isolated household helpers in households overseas make their bodies susceptible to shame, regardless of how much they follow and subscribe to these gendered moral norms. In these ways, the nation-state and its instruments of exporting female labour are free from responsibility and accountability when their women are trapped in experiences of abuse and exploitation. And it becomes up to these Indonesian women to deal with their own vulnerability as part of their destiny as displaced citizens and women in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.

These short stories, however, illustrate the contradictory ways in which Indonesian domestic workers respond to these moral dictates in instances where the threat of shame looms large upon their daily lives. On the one hand, there are stories that defer to these gendered norms as these women guard their bodies from the moral panic of malu. The fear of being shamed compels them to protect what they think is their moral integrity, compromised by their vulnerability by subscribing to these social ideals. Some of them reiterate these problematic gendered notions of keeping their pride against the possibility of being shamed through practices that distinguish them as moral subjects of gendered migration. While such practices reiterate problematic gendered moral distinctions that separate them from the precariousness of other migrant women like sex workers, it allows them a sense of agency that move them to protect their bodies from social threats, physical harm and sexual abuse. In these ways, avoiding shame can also be a way of actively negotiating their own vulnerability against the structural precarity of labour migration.

On the other hand, there are also narratives that engage with these gendered moral dictates more critically, particularly those of Pandan Arun’s statements and Tiwi’s short story. In looking at how their bodies are conflated with sex work, they show how shame operates much in the same ways to blame both of them, domestic workers and prostitutes, for their own vulnerability. In these ways, they also offer counter-narratives to the dominant discourses that illustrate how shame and being ashamed affect them as displaced women. By looking at the forces that both compel them to make “tough decisions” (in Arun’s words) or confessing to shame only to make their loved ones understand how they arrive at that fate, as Tiwi’s story shows, these narratives point to how shame and its discursive effects can lead not to an iteration of moral scripts but to an understanding of their precarious lives as migrant women.

4 Desire, Deference and Defiance

Out of senses of isolation, homesickness and also a newfound freedom to explore their sexuality, Indonesian household helpers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, who are most of the time confined to their employers’ homes throughout the week, find comfort and solace in romantic and sexual relationships with fellow migrant women or foreign male workers of other nationalities during their days off in public. According to Sim (2009), 40% of Indonesian migrant women in Hong Kong engage in diverse forms of lesbian relationships with fellow Indonesian domestic workers while many others have romantic interracial affairs with migrant men, particularly those from South Asia. These forms of intimacy “become ‘imaginable’ and popular among some Indonesian women migrants because it also provided a means of bonding under their unusual circumstances” (Sim 2009, p. 15). Ueno (2013) also points this out in her study of dominant patterns of either homosexual affairs or cross-cultural sexual relationships that are also present among Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore. Ueno claims that these forms of intimate relationships provide a “massage effect” for an Indonesian domestic worker, where affection, comfort and love from fellow migrant men and women contrast “sharply against the harsh treatment she might suffer from her employers or her own family back home” (Ueno 2013, p. 45).

Even with the prevalence of these forms of intimacy, a tenaga kerja wanita’s public performance of her sexuality, be it within the context of a heterosexual or homosexual relationship, remains a source of shame due to the conservative Indonesian norms. Thus, “it is precisely their sexuality and the potentially transformative spaces they create in their physical dislocation from home that causes unease to sending countries” (Sim 2009, p. 4). In other words, it is the visibility of her sexuality and her openness about it in public that sparks anxieties for people back home. One such example was when Indonesian diplomats visited Hong Kong in 2006 only to be shocked when witnessing the “casual lifestyles” their women have been flagrantly displaying in Victoria Park. As one Indonesian consul claims, “If you go to Victoria Park on Sunday, you can see that some can be quite intimate. Some were turning to other women for comfort. Others were developing casual relationships with men from other races… There was a worry that it would reflect poorly on the country’s reputation among foreigners” (Bok 2013). These alternative sexualities, for the Indonesian consulate, have become a cause of “national shame,” compelling them to conduct a 5-h “briefing” to guide their domestic workers about matters of morality and to stop their public displays of intimacy. The Indonesian diplomats’ reaction reflects the moral panic back home about the kind of sexual lives that their women are leading now that they are miles away from their country, and the public-ness of Indonesian migrant women’s sexual practices has obliged them to re-orient them back to the conservative gender values of their tanah air through public seminars.

These ambivalent feelings of being shamed or made ashamed by acts of lesbianism and interracial affairs set against the transformative possibilities that Indonesian domestic workers experience in their sexual practices are reflected and negotiated in their fiction. Take, for example, Juwanna’s short story Kerudung Turki (“Turkish Veil”), which portrays how Arda, an Indonesian household worker in Hong Kong, undergoes various sexual identities and enacts changing sexual desires, first to settle in but eventually to find love on foreign shores. In this story, the main character, whose real name is Anna Ayatul Nisa, packages herself as a butch lesbian, dressing up and performing masculinity each day to get by in a foreign city. She describes her bricoleur fashion in the following words:

I put on a long and thick T-shirt and ragged jeans torn at the knees, a trendy fashion in Hong Kong. Then, I added accents to my hair that was like a bird’s nest, a rusty yellow dye, European style. I did not forget to put on earrings at my left eyebrow and chin that made me look like an American… (Junaedi 2010, p. 153).

This get-up gives Arda a sense of confidence and a feeling of pride because, as she says: “At least people will not look at me as some kung yan, an employer’s usual term for maids. My rank rises up dressed like this. I am like a thug lost in the metropolitan land” (p. 154). Arda’s performance of her sexuality through her fashion allows her to transform into someone who is very much adapted to a cosmopolitan space, thereby also circumventing the effects of shame attached to being a migrant domestic worker from a poor country. Dressing up butch is not just a sign of sexual transgression but also a mark of modernity and upward social mobility.

But being a tomboi (masculinised lesbian) is more than just fashion for the protagonist. She also plays up her ritualised masculinity to be desired by her fellow Indonesian maids. For example, Arda becomes aware of the power of her performed sexuality as she openly flirts with another Indonesian woman on the train:

She was standing right in front of a bustling crowd in the metro. Her long flowing hair and her face immediately caught my attention. She is looking at me seductively. I guess my 165-meter height exuding with macho charm has made me a dream guy, despite being a fellow woman. (p. 154)

According to Amy Sim, there are two dominant kinds of lesbians that can be seen in Hong Kong: the sentul (butch) and the kantil (femmes). These sexual identities are distinguished by their fashion and social behaviour. Arda can be considered as a sentul or “masculinised lesbian or tomboi” who “dress up to capture a sense of carelessness, with what seems to be little attention to the attractiveness of their physical attire because it is ‘hip’ to be a ‘mess,’ underscoring their contrast with feminine women” or the kantil types. “Their appearances are self-consciously constructed as an integral part of the performance of a role, newly developed and deeply implicated in an emergent sense of self and agency” (Sim 2009, p. 17). Ueno observes a similar pattern in Singapore as many Indonesian women “who behave like men” can be seen openly displaying their intimacy with a more “feminine partner.” Ueno also sees that these kinds of alternative lifestyle and sexuality have become more visible because most of the Indonesian domestic workers can only find time to be intimate with their partners during their days off in public view. As a result, their “sexuality becomes not only of physical relationships in the private sphere but also has a performative nature in [the] public sphere” (Ueno 2013, p. 56).

In these ways, the meaning of malu in same-sex relationships is continually negotiated and challenged. While lesbian intimacy remains a source of shame and is frowned upon by the more conservative members of their community, the prevalence and visibility of this kind of romantic relationship constantly challenge the traditional gender ideologies upheld back home. Their public enclaves in parks have become sites of possibilities where they can enact, explore and practice new sexual identities that would continually contest the shame ascribed to alternative relationships. Furthermore, the public performance of alternative sexuality, through fashion and open displays of affection, offer ways for Indonesian migrant women to gain a sense of agency, where they can claim their own bodies and create new identities that will help them circumvent the effects of displacement and marginality in a foreign territory. As Sim argues, “The enactment of sexual choice in the direction of same-sex relations among Indonesian women can be read as ‘powerful’ because such practices ‘resist, reshape and re-appropriate for women their own bodies” (Sim 2009, p. 14).

However, the apparent sexual empowerment that Arda enjoys as a lesbian suddenly changes when she meets a man whom she would fall in love with. The protagonist was set up by her aunt working as a domestic worker in Jordan to meet the latter’s former ward, Ammar, in the guise of picking up a package which she sent to Arda through Ammar. Arda was at first struck by the handsome young Jordanian man who greeted her by brushing his cheeks against hers. This “unexpected gift” (“hadiah tak terduga”), which is a traditional greeting among Middle Eastern men, “sent electric waves to [her] brain and body” (p. 155). This innocent gesture would leave such an impression on Arda that it developed into a foreign attraction to the Middle Eastern guy that would make her question her own sexual identity:

I glanced again at Ammar’s face, who was standing right in front of me. I felt his strong charm. I like his jaw, chin, eyes, and all of his face. Ah, am I still sane? All my life, I have never fallen in love with an Adam! I'm a genuine lesbian with a manly spirit... I am a male spirit trapped in a female’s body. (p. 156)

The sudden transformation of her sexual desire would continue in the story, as the main character ponders on this newfound feeling, “Why am I feeling this… I paused for a moment as I touched my cheek. Somehow I imagined what if we kissed, maybe his rough face would feel messy and weird against mine” (p. 159).

Here, the fantasy of the liberated lesbian woman, with her fashion, demeanour and control of her body, would be replaced by the fantasy of heterosexual attraction that would render her passive to this alien desire. The very foreignness of Ammar’s maleness overpowered Arda’s ritualised machismo and transformed, or rather reformed, her back into heteronormative femininity. And to make her transformation into a “proper” woman complete, the protagonist discovers that her aunt has sent her, via Ammar, three Turkish veils. True enough, the main character started throwing away her street-thug sentul looks and reverted to being a good Muslim woman in the hope of attracting and pleasing Ammar in their next meeting:

I no longer have the earrings on [my] eyebrow and chin. There was no longer necklace a with jagged bike pendant. All of these I had put away. My clothes have been changed to a blue floral Turkish veil covering my head. Miraculously, I was transformed into a graceful figure. I no longer looked like a mental hospital patient with my long tunic and baggy trousers, which I purposely bought for this new life. All seemed odd, but I wore them beautifully (p. 162).

In the end, Arda chose to become Anna Ayatul Nisa again, leaving behind her femme flings and butch friends and changing back to performing the image of traditional Indonesian femininity for the love of a man she has just met. She plays up her womanhood, wearing a veil, a loose tunic and a long skirt, even though she is constantly chastised and called out for looking like she has “just been circumcised” (“habis disunat”) by her fellow Indonesian maids who have always known her as a sentul: “But despite all their laughter, harassment, humiliation, cornering, and embarrassing of me, I'm sure… Allah is not laughing” (p. 163).

In the story’s conclusion, the reader senses the protagonist’s determination to lead a new life as a changed woman. Her will, despite being shamed by her friends, is comforted by the religious certainty of her choice, something that she seems to have immediately adopted in her process of reforming back to being a morally upright Muslim woman. The didactic notion of morality has also transformed Arda’s motivation to being a proper lady: what was initially driven by a desire for a foreign male has changed into her submission to the morally sanctioned ideals of Indonesian womanhood.

The theme of “fake men” reforming into ‘proper women’ in Indonesian domestic workers’ fiction runs through Susana Nisa’s Tuhan, Aku Pulang (“God, I’ve Come Home”). Like the imagery of veiling, the author used the idea of “home” or “returning home” as a metaphor of feminine re-domestication for those who have “walked astray.” In this story, home is neither the literal repatriation nor coming back from one’s own “place” in society but a religious metaphor for the moral reformation of women who have engaged in haram (“forbidden”) relationships.

The story is told from the perspective of Kienan or Kie, a straight Indonesian woman, who professes to be “normal,” someone who has “never been attracted to anyone of the same sex” and whose desires are exclusively directed to “men and not fake men” (KUNCI 2016, p. 163). However, she became fascinated with one of her tomboi friends, Regha or Gha, a fellow domestic worker herself, who performs masculinity just like Arda in the previous story:

You were just an ordinary woman. But your situation transformed you into a male woman. A tomboy, that’s the cool name for your kind. Your trademark look was torn faded jeans, a long chain hanging from your front pocket to your back pocket. And a white, long-sleeved man’s shirt, not forgetting your close-cropped shiny hair that smelled of Gatsby hair oil. Plus the red Nike shoes with colourful shoelaces. That really finished your look. (p. 164)

Kie and Gha’s deep companionship blossomed and transitioned into love. The protagonist later realises that the kind of solace she feels when she is with Gha is something akin to her previous heterosexual relationship: “Only a month after we were introduced, I felt so comfortable spending my day off with you. It was a feeling that I had felt only when I was with my former boyfriend” (p. 165). Kie later narrates her own transformation from a plain, prim and proper woman into a kantil partner for Gha, while also detailing how their relationship has flourished in their performance of their respective sexual roles:

Ever since that night we became lovers. We changed what we called each other. It was no longer Kie and Gha, but ‘papa’ and ‘mama.’ We were like two infatuated young people. The world was ours, too. I no longer cared about the cynical looks from our fellow migrant workers who saw us displaying our affection in public. My appearance also changed totally. I, who had never dyed my hair, began to cut and dye my hair in the style of Hong Kong celebrities to please you. I even changed my clothes and make-up. In short, I transformed myself from a simple girl into a modern city chic. (p. 167)

This account reflects how in same-sex relationships, it is not just the sentul or the butch lover, like Arda and Regha, who can gain the mark of modernity in their performance of lesbianism but also their kantil or femme partner. Kie’s engagement in alternative sexuality also converted her into a trendy woman who has adapted well to the cosmopolitan lifestyle of Hong Kong. In addition, even though they are in a homosexual relationship, they have also enacted the familiar rituals of intimacy and endearment seen in heterosexual relationships. In these ways, their transgressive emotional bond has given her and Gha a sense of power to defy, or at least disregard, the imposition of malu and the acts of shaming from their own community.

No matter how empowering this relationship is for both Kienan and Regha, their queer transgression is repressed and later recuperated back into heteronormative conventions. Midway through the narrative, Gha suddenly dies from a mysterious illness. Kie, who is grieving alone in her room, found a letter from Gha addressed to her, hidden in one of her pants, which the latter had supposedly written a few days before her sudden death. In this letter, Gha explained to Kie why she chose to become a lesbian:

I was born Sulastri. I am a widow with a nine-year-old son. I changed my identity and fully pretended to be a man because I wanted to forget the hurt I felt when my ex-husband ran away with my neighbour. I wanted to prove that I could live without men. This is why I plunged into this world for so long. (p. 172)

The disillusionment with men or their experience of abuse has driven Regha, just like many other Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and Singapore, into the direction of same-sex relationships because it provided for their sexual and emotional needs without the pain and danger of falling into the trap of the violence and oppression embedded in the patriarchal culture and values of heteronormative relationships (Sim 2009, p. 19; Ueno 2013, p. 55).

In Regha’s letter, however, her conscience and guilt have overpowered her choice. She shared with Kienan how she has been dreaming about her dead father and her left-behind son telling her to “come home” (pulang). Her constant dreams of becoming both a disgraceful daughter and a negligent mother have made her “feel guilty” about her relationship with Kienan (p. 172). To be able to “come home,” she decided to end her immoral acts, but as the story shows, she died before breaking up with her lover. Towards the end of the letter, she also advises Kienan to “go home,” just like what she had set out to do before her untimely death: “Go back to being Kienan again, before you met me… Forget Regha. I want you to remember me as Ms. Lastri. May God still grant us forgiveness and bless us with a chance to return to Him.” (p. 173).

Here, “coming home” assumes different meanings underwritten by gendered moral ideology. The conscience of the hearth here is embodied by Regha’s father and her son, both figures of her left-behind duties, her gendered economic and moral obligations as a dutiful daughter and responsible mother that she strayed so far from when she became engaged in her alternative lifestyle abroad. Her idea of coming home, then, is shaped by the moral dictates of going back to what she used to be, the good Ms. Lastri. This is so even though transforming into a butch lesbian allowed her to escape things about that “home” that hurt her—her former husband’s infidelity. Finally, the morality of this decision in Regha’s mind is reinforced in her last words in the letter: this homecoming is also about gaining “forgiveness” and a “chance to return to God.”

However, as the story shows, death came upon Regha the moment she decided to come home and reform her “immoral” ways towards the story’s resolution. Kienan has been haunted by Regha’s last words in the letter, asking her to “come home” and forget their haram affair. Fresh from her grief, she decided to abandon her friends in the middle of their partying inside a disco, and leave all their aimless drinking and immoral coddling in public. The moment she stepped outside the place of “sin,” she started to feel dizzy and weak. She ran away from the red-light district until she arrived at a mosque nearby. She freezes and falls to the floor at the entrance after hearing the muezzin being chanted:

I spun like a windmill. My stomach rose, spewing the dirty food and drinks from the folds of my intestines. I stumbled, swayed helplessly as though my bones and joints were hit by a sledgehammer. Tears welled unstoppably. I crawled begging for mercy. Then total darkness enveloped me. I surrender if this is the end of my life... I felt the breeze caressing my face. I opened my eyes. Everything looked white. (p. 174)

While the story is obviously moralising, demonstrating how homosexuality makes one become out of touch from one’s home or moral grounding, the tragedy that ensues in both of the characters’ decisions to reform their immoral ways potentially contradicts the didacticism of the story. Death becomes the result of both their resolutions to leave their alternative lifestyle and go back to following the moral norms of a good Indonesian woman. In some ways, the death of the characters destabilises the moral certainty of Kienan and Regha’s homecoming, portraying it as a tragic fate for leaving behind their ‘immoral’ ways to be at peace with their conscience. This text that, on the one hand, intends to inspire morally compromised women to tread the path of good also, on the other hand, shows how returning to the moral righteousness of their patriarchal and heterosexist ‘home’ is not just constraining but, worse, can also have tragic consequences by showing that both of these reformed women ended up dying.

Juwanna’s Kerudung Turki and Susana Nisa’s Tuhan, Aku Pulang show the dimension of morality, through malu, in configuring and reconstructing Indonesian domestic workers’ sexuality, especially by the protagonists who directly engage in transgressive sexual relationships. In contrast, Kwek Li Na’s Mochi Kehidupan (‘Mochi Life’) offers a different perspective in looking at and understanding this kind of intimacy through the perspective of Lautin, a morally upright woman who ended up befriending a lesbian couple.

In this story, the main character is a domestic worker in Taipei who decided to break her contract and run away from her employer because she was about to be forcibly repatriated by her recruitment agency due to some minor health issues. With nothing and nowhere to run to, she approaches two fellow Indonesian women in a public park in the hope that they could help her. She later learns their names, Sabita and Angani, when the two decided to help her by letting her stay in their flat. It took her a while to discover that her saviours are a lesbian couple. Although they were busy embracing in public the first time she met them, neither Sabita nor Angani dressed up as stereotypical lesbians. Sabita was “a woman in yellow sporting a hairstyle similar to Lady Diana” while Angani “the other woman [was] wearing a short skirt and white T-shirt” (Li Na 2014, p. 33).

After Lautin realises that her newfound companions are “sexually-deviant,” she tries her best to defer her own moral judgment and suspend her thinking about acquiring malu in involving herself in this haram relationship. “At first I was amused to see both of their behaviours, but I tried to be as casual about it as possible. Slowly, they both started to respect me and do not become too touchy with each other whenever I’m around” (p. 34). Lautin finds herself incapable of morally judging Sabita and Angani because, after all, it was the two women who helped her in her time of need and, later on, paved the way for her to be able to find work in the mochi factory where the couple is also working.

Even though the protagonist tries to impress and gently influence her lesbian housemates and rescuers, Sabita and Angani’s kindness and generosity to her have also undermined and disrupted Lautin’s moral certainty and judgment about their sexuality:

I did not forbid what they’re doing but I also did not support it. I just did not want to interfere with their affairs... I'm just trying to give them an example without asking them to imitate me. Now they have begun to pray diligently, even fast. Allah may have sent me to them. Although I know that this reasoning is blurring what was right from wrong, I started to think that there must be a reason for everything. This was what I was thinking with Sabita and Angani. They must also have their reasons. (p. 35)

The protagonist realises that she is not the only one who has influenced the lesbian couple; Sabita and Angani have also made her question her own notions of goodness and moral virtues that she has been comfortably holding onto. Here, the reader sees how Lautin’s ideas on morality and sexuality have started to be challenged as she reflects upon the cultural and moral norms that she is so familiar with against the reality of support and comfort that her housemates have been providing for each other and for her.

After a few months of living and working with Sabita and Angani, Lautin has started to get to know the couple more intimately. They shared with her how they ended up in Taiwan. Sabita was raped by her brother and she hid this shameful secret from everyone because she neither wanted to cause trouble at home nor hurt her mother. To get away from her traumatic past, she decided to work abroad as a domestic worker. Angani, on the other hand, had constantly been let down by men which led her to feel disillusioned in heterosexual relationships. She grew up seeing her father ruthlessly beat her mother almost every day, then her husband cheated on her, leading her to divorce then migrate abroad to get away from her troubled home. Their traumas brought them together:

Sabita and Angani, having been equally disappointed by men, finally chose each other. At first they were just ordinary friends, but being together and their concern for one another eventually turned into love. What could not be accepted by other people have slowly rebuilt their devastated hearts in their own way. I could only be silent, listen to all their stories. I started to understand why they came to be like that. To me, whoever they are, they have kind hearts, and they love like everyone else. (p. 42)

From Sabita and Angani’s painful experiences, Lautin has started to make sense of their love for each other. Her silence translates into a deeper understanding, empathy and realisation their sexuality does not contradict their goodness. This wiped out the protagonist’s prejudices and perceptions of the malu that has been ascribed to Sabita and Angani’s relationship. Her friendship with the lesbian couple has transformed her profoundly, and she begins to see them as sisters, where her own past experiences connect to Sabita and Angani’s struggles to fight for their love. In a gesture of solidarity, she shares a piece of mochi that she has just made:

I wanted to eat this tiny mochi in my hand but, by some reflex, I put it down first. I pinched it into three parts. The first I handed to Sabita, the second to Angani, and the remaining portion I ate myself… I just wish they knew that I will forever be their friend, even if everyone would stay away from them when they discovered who they are. (p. 43)

Kwek Li Na’s story opens a new way of mediating and eventually challenging the impositions of malu on the alternative sexualities of Indonesian migrant women. Unlike the symbolism of the veiling in Kerudung Turki or the metaphor of homecoming in Tuhan, Aku Pulang, which both impart religious and cultural ideas in which shame reforms transgressive women’s bodies back to propriety, Mochi Kehidupan employs the imagery of sharing mochi to convey a message of openness, profound compassion, and a deeper alliance to the shared struggles of women who are constantly shamed.

5 Conclusion

While malu is a powerful affect that is constantly imposed on Indonesian women to discipline their bodies in transnational spaces, their everyday practices show that they do not just assume and receive this feeling and the discourses that inform it. As their real life and fictional narratives attest, they also constantly mediate, challenge and sometimes subvert shame and shaming in their daily lives. The short stories that have been analysed here reflect that negotiating malu is a complex process, one in which they constantly negotiate the gendered ideas of morality attached to their body and sexuality while also living up to the many demands and pressures of being a foreigner and a woman abroad. Finally, the very fact that they are telling their own stories and publishing them reflects a deeper transgression of the class- and gender-based shame ascribed to them both for being a lowly domestic worker and for having these kinds of narratives that can potentially bring them shame. In this sense, Sastra BMI becomes an important arena where impositions of morality and sexuality are continually contested.