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Transcription: [00:24:08]
{SPEAKER name="Stacilee Ford"}
But I..I..think there is something to learning how to harmonize.
[00:24:21]
{Male Speaker} Speaking of harmony, can you talk about the culture of harmony in Hong Kong? Is that pretty much the same as what these ladies experienced then? Is that a general cultural thing?
{SPEAKER name="Stacilee Ford"}
Yes
{Male Speaker} Is it primarily the women, or the men or is the whole culture like that? You [[coughing]] try to get along, you try, it's not just these ladies were sticking out in the fact that they're not harmonizing as a female.
[00:24:34]
{SPEAKER name="Stacilee Ford"}
Right
[[Cross talk]]
{Male speaker} As a society for example.
[00:24:37]
{SPEAKER name="Stacilee Ford"} Right, right. I think there's definitely a whole societal ethos. I think the reason I focus on women, and by the way, there's a book to be written about troubling American men. And men can be troubling too in all sorts of other ways. And sometimes I think about writing about that, but I think there are men who are actually better qualified to do that.
[00:24:53]
So you raise a really important point. I think there is a general expectation, first of all, that foreigners, and foreigners are given wide berth, particularly Caucasian foreigners, so my phenotypically Asian-American colleagues are expected to speak Cantonese and English and Mandarin at this point.
[00:25:13]
If I make the slightest attempt to speak any Chinese, like, I'm literally applauded when I go to conferences in the mainland if I speak the slightest [[??]], so white girls get a lot of flexibility, and it's a very privileged world.
[00:25:28]
Having said that, I think there is, there's, you know, harmony good, which is let's all get along, and then there's, there's a patriarchal ethos which says, women still, they may go to work, they may lead out, they may be in the political sphere, but they are responsible still for the home front.
[00:25:47]
And what's happened in Hong Kong is you have, sort of the importation of domestic helpers, originally from the Philippines, but now from Indonesia and other places in Southeast Asia, so whereas in the United States men and women are arguing about who's going to take out the trash, that argument is over in Hong Kong.
[00:26:05]
And not just in the elite levels, but I would say in a large swath of the middle class as well. Because you can bring in, mostly women, from poorer countries to do domestic labor. So the harmony, harmony is preserved, because we're not really having the friction around gender roles in Hong Kong that we had for a long time in the US, and that I still think we're having her to some extent.
[00:26:31]

Transcription Notes:
I'm not sure why this was marked complete, there was a lot of it that hadn't been transcribed.