6 - In Praise of Trans-Asian Sisterhood: Labor, Love, and Homecoming in Jasmine Ching-hui Lee’s Money and Honey

Summary

“Money and Honey is a song of work by Asian Mothers.”

“Mother Theresa said she is a revolutionary and the one thing she advocates for is Love. Love is also the motivation and strength in my films.”

—Jasmine Chin-hui Lee

Abstract

Chapter 6 discusses Jasmine Ching-hui Lee's critically and popularly acclaimed documentary Money and Honey about her friendship and filmmaking praxis with several female Philippine workers in a Taipei nursing home and their homeland. A culmination of her extended “women and homeland” documentary series, the decade-long trans-Asian project harnesses the melodramatic power for changing public attitudes and influencing government policies on immigrant labor.

Keywords: epic documentary melodrama, care workers, sentimentalism, “women and homeland” series, trans-Asian sisterhood, religion and feminism

Seconds into my first viewing of Jasmine Ching-hui Lee's 李靖惠 widely acclaimed documentary Money and Honey 麵包情人 (2012/2015), about several female Filipina care workers, or Feima 菲媽 (Filipina mom), in a nursing home in Taipei, memories of my experience in a similar setting in Stockholm in the 1980s rushed back. For a new immigrant to the Nordic welfare state, the job was among the easiest to find without a college degree and prior work experience in a post-industrial affluent country with an exponentially increasing aging population. The first thing I noticed was that there were many immigrants like me of varying racial and ethnic backgrounds working as nursing home assistants, often on late evening or night shifts, shunned by local Swedes. Seeing how “Baby”, Lolita, Marilyn, Arlene, Onie and other women care workers in Money and Honey help the Taiwanese elderly to bathe and eat, I recalled the short intensive training we had and similar tasks we performed, including changing diapers and beddings, lifting the patients from beds to wheelchairs or walkers, and so on. The work was demanding but the emotional rapport with some of the elderly people and co-workers was heartwarming. I wept a lot watching the film. More than my identification with them as nursing home workers, the heartache of homesickness struck a chord in me. One precious thing that sustained them, which I sorely lacked, is the sisterly bond among them and with the filmmaker, whose grandparents lived and died in the nursing home where they worked for many years.