Amahs, Amen!

For generations the white women's burden in steamy Southeast Asia has been shouldered by amahs, the soft-footed, tough-fibered maidservants who were recruited from the Chinese main land. While the amah (literally, "little mother") cooked, cleaned and looked after the children, the colonel's lady or planter's wife spent her mornings at tennis, her afternoons at bridge, and appeared freshly starched on the veranda at sundown to greet her returning husband with cold stingers, hot curry and eternal complaint about the hardships of life in the tropics.

In Malaya and Singapore today, a mem-sahib is more apt to spend her day screaming at the amah, doing the housework herself, or else trying to poach the perfect gem who works for the Arbuthnots. For the old-style amahs, whose white tunics, black silk pajama trousers and smoothly braided hair made them look like pigtailed penguins, belong to a dying race.

Smashed Wedgwood. Most new nations of Southeast Asia have enough trouble already with Chinese minorities and are dead-set against bringing in more refugees from the mainland. Hastening their extinction is the fact that many of the finer amahs are Cantonese women who traditionally belong to kongsis, or sisterhoods, that pledge them to spinsterhood. Amahs from Hainan, on the other hand, are usually married. Their husbands used to be admirable Crichtons of colonial society, and their daughters in time used to follow mother's footsteps across the gleaming floors. Though well-trained amahs nowadays earn up to $70 a month--a high wage for Malaya--their daughters mostly prefer office and factory jobs that give them greater freedom with no overtones of colonialism.

Their places are being taken by a new generation of flibbertigibbets whose minds are apt to be more on men than helping the "mem." Mostly Malayan or Indian girls, with a sprinkling of untrained Chinese, they are prettier and more sophisticated than their forebears --and, say their mems, often downright insolent. For their part, the maids complain bitterly that the rapidly expanding Malayan middle class is even more tyrannical than the bossiest Britons.

If fledgling amahs have a talent for smashing the Wedgwood, the wives of British soldiers and technicians, coming from a land where servants have vanished from all but the stateliest homes, tend to be even clumsier at handling the help. Wailed one sub-lieutenant's wife who recently hired her first maid: "I don't know whether to treat her as a servant or a sister."

Fringe Benefits. The amahs' answer is that they should be treated as civil servants. In Malaya an army of 1,000 amahs donned Sunday-best sarongs, cheongsams and saris, piled into a fleet of busses and drove into Kuala Lumpur, the capital, where they minced prettily through the winding streets waving placards inscribed: WE WANT JUSTICE and WE ARE NOT ANIMALS. The demonstration, which left Blimps snorting and old-style amahs sneering, climaxed a complicated dispute in which the amahs' union is challenging a British War Office decision to abandon its practice of hiring and firing all the amahs employed by military personnel. Some 3,000 unionized amahs have already forced the British to boost their pay and cut their work time from 70 to 48 hours weekly. By remaining government employees, they hope also to win full civil service status, with its rich welfare benefits. In its zeal, the union even cabled London, "respectfully" requesting Queen Elizabeth to intervene in the dispute.

After unsuccessful talks with the military and British High Commissioner Sir Geofroy Tory, the aroused amahs last week direly threatened a walkout. For many of their mems, no help at all could hardly be worse than the helpless help they had.

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