The auntie that cleans my home every Monday and Thursday most certainly has a unique story on how she got to work in Hong Kong in this day and age.
Her story starts in a village in remote Thailand, where her family work as farmers for a living. She’s the eldest sibling in her family, and she wants to live a better life than the one she has right now. She doesn’t want to be a farmer all her life. To pursue her dream of living a better life, her friends suggest moving to Bangkok and work as a domestic helper, since the pay is good. She decides to do this but leaves her family and friends behind, promising that she’ll send money home to improve their lives.
Arriving in Bangkok, she is in awe of the hustle and bustle in the capital city, as she begins her work, cleaning in households around the city. She spends four years in Bangkok cleaning households when she hears of an offer from a friend. She learns that by coming to Hong Kong, she could be making way more money than she was making currently.
This was a difficult decision, since she had to borrow over 8000 baht to fund the price of the agent that was taking her to Hong Kong. Not only that, there is the difficulty of uprooting to a completely new place, where she didn't speak the language, had no family or friends there at all, and had to work for 6 days a week, for not that good of pay.
Despite all this, she decides to uproot herself from Thailand, and moves to Hong Kong to pursue this economic opportunity. She continues cleaning households for better pay. She also picks up the Cantonese dialect as she spends more time in Hong Kong. While cleaning households, she also meets her future husband after 5-6 years of working. When they marry, she gains the status of HK Permanent Resident. She begins to raise a family with her husband and has been doing so for the past 25 years.