Profile: Super Yaya
Originally posted March 10, 2014
When I think about my childhood, one person looms large: Elmie, our housekeeper-slash-nanny, who has worked for my family off-and-on for thirty-five years now. We are distantly related on my mother’s side, but it’s the kind of distance that needs a piece of paper to be calculated, and is better left to the imagination.
When you first see Elmie, the first word you might think is “plump.” She is short, brown, and round everywhere, and has the softest arms and chest to lay your head on. Her curly hair was cropped close to her head when she was younger, but she has now let it grow long and wispy.
Don’t be fooled, though. The softness of her image masks the strength and toughness she’s had to develop over the years. Those very arms that cuddle and soothe can carry a 5-gallon water dispenser bottle across a hallway, or a 100-pound luggage down our stairs. Her round, rather protruding eyes, can flash quickly with a terrible temper when angered.
Yaya in Filipino means nanny, and I tend to think of Elmie as “Super Yaya,” because she can do almost everything. She cooks; she cleans; she sews; she repairs furniture. She does a little plumbing, and she even knows how to troubleshoot the electrical circuit breaker.
As a child, I thought she was some kind of all-powerful goddess. It hardly even occurred to me to make mischief, because she could make me quake in fear at the very thought of getting caught by her and scolded. She had the uncanny ability to seem to be in the room even if she wasn't. This power was most evident during siesta (nap time). I hated to take naps in the afternoon, but I would keep my eyes tightly shut, anyway, because I thought I could still hear her breathing in the room. It was only later that I found out Elmie didn’t even stay in the room the whole time.
With all the fierceness of her temper, though, was also the fierceness of her love. Her soft arms were the one place I could run to whenever bullies harassed me at school, or whenever my parents started shouting over the dinner table.
She still lives with and works for us, and the last few years, she’s been telling me, “You know, my life could be made into a telenovela.” Finally, one day, I said, “OK, tell me about your life.” She demurred for all of five seconds, but then she started talking and didn’t stop for two hours.
I always think that Elmie started being a yaya when she started working for my family. But as she talked, I realized she had always been a yaya, even when she was very young. Her father was a laborer at a coconut farm, while her mother was a dressmaker. At age seven, she was already taking care of her three younger sisters, aged 1-4 years old. She would feed them condensed milk from old ketchup bottles. In the summers, when she wasn’t in school, she would sell ice candy and harvest coffee beans to earn additional income.
Elmie never did well at school, but I think it had less to do with a lack of intelligence than with the fact that her parents kept pulling her out of elementary school to take care of her siblings, of which there are seven total. She was the third eldest child, but the eldest girl, which I guess made all the difference because she was the one who stopped studying in sixth grade to take care of her two cousins, in exchange for her oldest brother’s tuition fee. She described it as a miserable time, because her aunt would punish her for any corresponding scrape or bruise on her two cousins’ bodies, and had her collecting water and doing the laundry in the afternoons.
When she was fifteen, my grandmother visited their house in the province and asked her if she wanted to go with her to Manila, our country’s capital city. She eagerly came along, thinking my grandmother was just taking her for pasyal (a tour). This marked the first time she ever rode in a car. Little did she know my grandmother would take her to our home, and eventually leave without her.
“That day, in this very room,” she said of the spare bedroom where I was conducting the interview, “was when I first saw your sister Rica lying in a crib.”
And so began her career with my family. She said my older sister Rica was a quiet but active child, who loved to chase our eldest sister Cherryl around the house. Things went well for the next four years but, a few months before I was born, she had a violent row with the other maid we had at the time, Merly. Because Merly lived much further away, it was decided that Elmie would be the one to leave, but she didn’t know that my mother was already pregnant with me when she left. She was enticed back a year later when my grandfather came to visit her and told her about my Dad being assigned to work as an expatriate in Hong Kong. Did she want to go with us?
At the time, she had a boyfriend, and eventually the choice boiled down to whether she would stay with him and get married, or go with our family to Hong Kong.
At this point in the interview, I exclaimed, “What? This is the first time I’ve heard this.” Elmie is unmarried, and I’d honestly thought she’d never had a boyfriend. “Why didn’t you stay with him?” I asked.
“I’m not the type who falls in love,” she scoffed. “I was only with him to pass the time.”
Maybe it really did work out for the best, because when she talks about the three years we spent in Hong Kong, you can tell it ended up being a special period in her life. It was her first time out of the country, and it was a strange land where people spoke another language and even the public transportation system was different.
“How did you survive if you didn’t know English before you went there?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I just learned.”
Because my mother was working in the US at the time, Elmie had to assume full run of the household—buying groceries, taking care of the children, etc. It was also this time that the two of us were left alone together a lot and bonded, because my Dad would go to work and my two older sisters would attend school. Every time she needed to go out and do errands, I would have to be carried along.
One of her favorite anecdotes is this: When I was about two years old, she came back from the market one time to find my Dad alone in our apartment. “Where’s Aisa?” she asked.
“Down by the pool,” my father answered.
She rushed down to the main pool, where my two older sisters were playing. “Where’s Aisa?” she asked again.
“Over there,” they said, pointing to the kiddie pool. When she looked over, my head was bobbing up and down, staying longer submerged in the water each time. Without even bothering to take off her muddy sandals, she jumped into the pool to haul me out of the water (which came up to about her waist).
“How angry the other tenants were,” she said, “because I dirtied the pool when I jumped in.”
But that was the time Elmie saved me from drowning.
* * *
After we came back from Hong Kong in 1988, my father paid for her to finish high school, but she missed out on the passing score of the National College Entrance Exam (NCEE) by one point. Elmie never admitted it as such, but I think it was around this time that she started to become dissatisfied with her life and want to become more than a maid.
Elmie is the savviest person I know. She reads people well and can manipulate them into doing what she wants. She does this with everyone—from the mailman to my father (her alleged boss). It’s a survival skill she’s honed in an occupation where you could get sent packing for the smallest of infractions. All of our relatives know and love her—in fact, it’s she and not us who receives texts from them during Christmas! It’s my opinion (and I know it’s hers, too) that, if she had only been able to get a better education, she could have made much of her life.
When my father opened up a food stand in their home province in 2001, he asked her to manage it, which she did successfully for the next three years. This must have been a great time for her, because Elmie loves to cook; she has told me that she would cook for a living, if she could. Unfortunately, even though the food stand turned a modest profit, it had to be closed in 2004 when the government rezoned the area.
It was also around this time, she said, that her family’s string of bad luck started. In 2003, her father died, and then ten years later, her mother. Her siblings contracted various health issues, including diabetes and problem pregnancies. Elmie herself had to have a hysterectomy. Throughout this time, our family has provided financial support. I think now, even if Elmie wanted to leave, she has too much utang na loob or “debt of gratitude” to our family to do so.
Technically, she is probably still working off all her debt to us, but we don’t really track or collect payment. We rightfully treat her as part of the family. To some extent, I know she considers her life to have been a failure, because she was born a maid, and a maid she still is at more than fifty years of age. I hope she realizes, though, that she has made all the difference in my own life. She really is my second mother. Even if the Philippines is known for its maids abroad, I can guarantee that there is no one quite like Elmie. All-around woman around the house, wise-cracking conversationalist, and Machiavellian genius combined. As my uncle once said rather patronizingly, they don’t make ‘em like her anymore.
She is simply…more.
At the end of our two-hour interview session, she stopped rather abruptly and asked me, “Do you have everything you need? Do you think you can,” she said, making a circular motion with her arms, “put everything together?”
“Yes,” I told her. My heart was full after listening to her pour out her life story. “I have enough material. Besides,” I added, “if I have any questions, I know where you live.”
