Amah

Other agencies which provide domestic cleaning services such as Amah On Wheels, on the other hand, are enhancing their services.

Channel NewsAsia Front Page News 2009

Jim has led a privileged existence in a luxurious house with nine household servants, whom he knows not by name but by function or position, such as Amah, Number One Boy, and Number Two Boy.

City Journal 2009

But even as a small child Pearl liked her fairy stories more closely rooted in reality, and she pestered Wang Amah to tell her about when she was little and how she grew up into a flawless young beauty with pale porcelain skin, plucked forehead, black braided hair that hung to her knees, and three-inch-long bound feet, so lovely that she had to be married off early for fear of predatory soldiers.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

One year Wang Amah developed symptoms overnight and would have died if Carie had not risked her own life to fight the fever, shutting herself up with the patient for a week in a stone shed at the bottom of the garden, gripped by a bitter avenging rage for the lives she had already lost and the ones she still had to lose.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

Wang Amah made the child put on a fresh white muslin frock, a petticoat and leather shoes for these inspections; she combed her long hair free of tangles and pinned a fat yellow curl in a sausage shape on top of her head.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

Pearl learned to talk from Wang Amah, who fed, bathed, and dressed her, crooned tunes to her, and taught her riddles and rhymes.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

Interrogated by Pearl about the smell of roasting men and whether the Chinese variety smelled different from white flesh, Wang Amah replied confidently that white meat was coarser, more tasteless and watery, “because you wash yourselves so much.”

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

Wang Amah lost her family—parents, parents-in-law, husband—and with them her means of subsistence.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

Wang Amah explained that her father made her sleep alone in the kitchen outhouse from the age of three so as not to disturb the rest of the family by her crying at night.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010

By the time Pearl knew her thirty or forty years later, Wang Amah was wrinkled and practically toothless the heartless little Sydenstrickers laughed when she knocked out all but two of her remaining teeth in a fall on the cellar steps, with scanty hair, heavy flaps of skin over her eyes, and a protruding lower lip.

PEARL BUCK IN CHINA Hilary Spurling 2010