“I grew up in London with a Filipina woman called Juning, who had four children of her own living on a small island in the Philippines seven thousand miles away. Juning's husband left her when their children were young, and all financial responsibility fell to her.

For several years she worked as a nanny in Manila while her children were looked after by her mother on her native island, Bantayan, but in 1974, knowing that a local income could not cover the school fees, she decided to look for work abroad. Her youngest child was two years old when she left for Hong Kong. In 1976 my parents and my brother moved from London to Hong Kong for my father's work; my mother soon became pregnant with me, and in the spring of 1977, a few weeks before I was born, she advertised for a mother's help at the local supermarket. Juning was one of four women who responded; she lived with and worked for my family for the next twenty-two years.

Now, as an adult and a mother myself, the notion that she lived apart from her children for three decades is painful to imagine.”