From National Book Award finalist Megan K. Stack, a stunning memoir of raising her children abroad with the help of Chinese and Indian women who are also working mothers
When Megan Stack was living in Beijing, she left her prestigious job as a foreign correspondent to have her first child and work from home writing a book. She quickly realized that caring for a baby and keeping up with the housework while her husband went to the office each day was consuming the time she needed to write. This dilemma was resolved in the manner of many upper-class families and large corporations: she availed herself of cheap Chinese labor. The housekeeper Stack hired was a migrant from the countryside, a mother who had left her daughter in a precarious situation to earn desperately needed cash in the capital. As Stack's family grew and her husband's job took them to Dehli, a series of Chinese and Indian women cooked, cleaned, and babysat in her home. Stack grew increasingly aware of the brutal realities of their lives: domestic abuse, alcoholism, unplanned pregnancies. Hiring poor women had given her the ability to work while raising her children, but what ethical compromise had she made?
Determined to confront the truth, Stack traveled to her employees' homes, met their parents and children, and turned a journalistic eye on the tradeoffs they'd been forced to make as working mothers seeking upward mobility—and on the cost to the children who were left behind.
Women's Work is an unforgettable story of four women as well as an electrifying meditation on the evasions of marriage, motherhood, feminism, and privilege.
From National Book Award finalist Megan K. Stack, a stunning memoir of raising her children abroad with the help of Chinese and Indian women who are also working mothers
When Megan Stack was living in Beijing, she left her prestigious job as a foreign correspondent to have her first child and work from home writing a book. She quickly realized that caring for a baby and keeping up with the housework while her husband went to the office each day was consuming the time she needed to write. This dilemma was resolved in the manner of many upper-class families and large corporations: she availed herself of cheap Chinese labor. The housekeeper Stack hired was a migrant from the countryside, a mother who had left her daughter in a precarious situation to earn desperately needed cash in the capital. As Stack's family grew and her husband's job took them to Dehli, a series of Chinese and Indian women cooked, cleaned, and babysat in her home. Stack grew increasingly aware of the brutal realities of their lives: domestic abuse, alcoholism, unplanned pregnancies. Hiring poor women had given her the ability to work while raising her children, but what ethical compromise had she made?
Determined to confront the truth, Stack traveled to her employees' homes, met their parents and children, and turned a journalistic eye on the tradeoffs they'd been forced to make as working mothers seeking upward mobility—and on the cost to the children who were left behind.
Women's Work is an unforgettable story of four women as well as an electrifying meditation on the evasions of marriage, motherhood, feminism, and privilege.
Reviews-
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June 17, 2019
Journalist Stack (Every Man in This Village Is a Liar) reflects in this painfully forthcoming memoir about her own domestic employees. From her position as a white American expat in Beijing and Delhi, Stack documents the trade-offs, exploitative dynamics, and conflicts that arise when the home is also a workplace. After leaving her job as a foreign correspondent, she hired local women to perform the domestic work that would otherwise keep her from freelance writing, including watching her child
. The first two sections of the book record in punctilious detail the draining physical labor of childbirth and new motherhood (C-sections, sleep training) and Stack’s interactions with Chinese and Indian nannies—cropping them out of photographs and treating their personal problems callously (later in the book, she acknowledges one nanny’s sick daughter as “the girl whose rightful allotment of nurturing care I had rented and whose brush with death had been a household inconvenience”). In part three, Stack activates her journalistic lens, exploring the nannies’ lives and the sacrifices they made to work for her. Stack indicts this system and her family’s participation in it (“I can’t shake the feeling that I bought something... that should not be for sale”) but shies away from actually considering any alternatives. This memoir will appeal more to parents in similar situations than to readers seeking ideas for social change. -
March 1, 2019
Stack (Every Man in This Village Is a Liar, 2010) built a career as a war correspondent and investigative reporter. While living in Beijing, she quit reporting to write a book right before giving birth to her first son. So that she could continue to work while raising a newborn who barely slept, she hired a Chinese nanny who had a young daughter of her own. For the first time, Stack relied on another working mother in order to pursue her own career. Here Stack explores the work that falls to women?raising children, managing the home, organizing social connections?by chronicling her relationships with housekeepers in China and India. Stack profiles three women who were not quite employees, but not quite family, with care and vivid detail. More memoir than investigation, it may leave readers wishing for additional context on domestic work more globally. Stack's talent for storytelling comes through in her evocative prose and her unflinching examination of the trade-offs for women who have few good choices.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.) -
April 1, 2019
An American woman and new mother living first in Beijing, then in New Delhi, journalist Stack (Every Man in This Village Is a Liar) is overwhelmed by parenting and writing, especially as her husband, also a journalist, travels frequently. Domestic labor is cheap in China and India, where local women care for the children of affluent Westerners while their own offspring are raised by relatives. Stack critiques this system as unjust yet participates in it, conflicted by, on one hand, the unfairness of using other women's labor to maintain a lifestyle inaccessible to them, and on the other, her insistence on this privileged lifestyle. In writing a memoir about herself and Xiao Li, Angie, and Poonam, the women who worked for her, Stack travels to visit Xiao Li and Poonam in their own villages, observing the women mothering their own children. She concludes that the unquestioned absence of men's labor in the domestic sphere compels women to achieve fulfillment only with the help of other women. VERDICT This vivid, candid narrative of intertwined lives demonstrates that such relationships are transactional yet intensely intimate, with fuzzy, complex roles, and enormous implications about some people's power over others based on affluence and gender.--Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus
Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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April 1, 2019
Quitting her big-time job as foreign correspondent to write a book at home in Beijing while having a baby, National Book Award finalist Stack soon faced a conundrum: to do what she wanted to as a successful, upper-class woman, she had to hire cheap Chinese labor to handle the child care and housework. The woman she initially hired left her own daughter in the countryside to earn much-needed cash, and others who worked for Stack over the years eventually revealed hardships ranging from domestic abuse to medical and family emergencies.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from February 1, 2019
A self-critical and heartfelt narrative of the author's life in China and India and the impoverished women she employed as her nannies and servants.For the majority of the wealthy, white, privileged women who employ these women, "help is affordable, help is cheap," and learning further personal details about their servants and nannies seems to be an unnecessary headache. However, former Los Angeles Times reporter Stack (Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War, 2010), a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, has sought to sincerely empathize with and find similarities in their lives and her own life through an investigation of what she terms "women's work." The author divides her eye-opening book into three parts. In the first part, she thoroughly engages readers with the story of the birth of her first child, in China. These chapters are beautifully written, informative, and sometimes harrowing as she recounts the joy, fear, and exhaustion of becoming a mother. Her chronicle of how she found her way out of depression offers wisdom that new mothers will find supportive and enlightening. Throughout the book, Stack writes compassionately about her encounters with her nannies, Xiao Li (China), Pooja, and Mary (both from India), as well as her struggle with a "postmodern feminist breakdown." The author demonstrates how her concepts of gender equality and sisterly connections ran head-on into her need to run her home and control her time. In the second part of the narrative, she relates her time in India and her second pregnancy. By that time, she had found it easier to relegate some household authority to her husband. In the final section, Stack discusses her decision to write about the women who worked for her and provides moving details of her relationships with them.What women--and men--can learn from Stack's story is that "women's work," in all of its complexity and construction, should not be only for women.COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
