Interrogating Emotional Labour: Sacrificial Labour and the Ethics of Care in Chan Ho-Kei’s Second Sister

Abstract

This essay discusses representations of labour within the capitalist system of contemporary Hong Kong as portrayed in Chan Ho-Kei’s Second Sister. It shows how these representations take the forms of what I call sacrificial labour on the one hand, engaged in by working-class characters such as Nga-Yee, the protagonist of the novel; and ‘uncaring’ labour on the other hand, engaged in by N, the complex hacker-investigator at the centre of the novel. The essay compares these representations of labour with Hochschild’s definition of emotional labour in The Managed Heart, and explores how rethinking and re-evaluating the former can also help defamiliarize and interrogate the latter. The essay also argues that the novel highlights the inadequacies of the concept of emotional labour in truly addressing people’s emotional needs, and that it suggests that only labour that comes more from the ‘heart’ (161)—with less ‘management’ than in Hochschild’s model—is adequate for this purpose. This remains a difficult, and perhaps even impossible, task, but is posited as an important ideal to be aware of.

Keywords:

• Chan Ho-Kei’s Second Sister
• Hong Kong capitalism
• social inequality
• emotional labour
• ethics of care
• Chinese family values

Notes

1 Such directionality is, however, far from straightforward. In the essay ‘Can Emotional Labor Be Fun?’, for instance, Hochschild writes both on having a natural ‘affinity’ for one’s job, and on being drawn into a job first ‘on pragmatic grounds’, and only subsequently discovering its joys (2013: 25).

2 As a specific example, see Goodstadt’s discussion of what is informally known as the ‘bad son statement’, an official ‘statement on non-provision of financial support’ of the elderly that had to be signed by their family members when they applied for social security financial assistance, the social effect of which was to further stigmatize receiving such money (2013: 179–80). The ‘bad son statement’ arrangement was cancelled in 2017.

3 For instance, in 2003, ‘a 31-year-old unemployed man’ had to steal from a supermarket, because he ‘refused to receive public assistance in order to preserve his dignity’ (2011: 29). In 2004, there was a newspaper report about ‘a man who claimed that his wife strongly resisted obtaining public assistance even though all family members were starving, because she stressed having self-reliance’ (2011: 29).