Ah Lan, the faithful servant in Lily’s house, has played a crucial motherly role for both Lily and Serena and is thus confined to the house. As a Chinese immigrant just like Tak Sing, Ah Lan leaves Guangzhou for Hong Kong to find a servant job in a rich family for survival and the support of her own family: “With free meals and
lodging, I would be able to send most of my monthly wages home t:o [sic] help my
folks” (23). She takes care of baby Lily as a substitute mother who shoulders most of
the maternal responsibilities and spends almost the whole day with Lily: “From thetime she was a month old, I took care of her. I bathed her, changed her, washed her
clothes and diapers, rocked her to sleep. I got up in the night to give her a bottle”
(23-24). For Ah Lan, she loves Lily “as her own daughter” (142); as for Lily, she is her amah (grandmother) who “is as dear to [her] as [her] mother” (134). So after Lily decides to marry Tak Sing and leaves her own parents, Ah Lan moves out with Lily and goes to work for them because Lily is all she cares for and she will serve Lily “till the end of her working days” (147). After Serena is born, Ah Lan, once again, plays the role of the substitute mother for Serena. The double maternal role played by Ah Lan illustrates how devoted she is to Lily and Serena, and how she is confined to the house. In other words, Ah Lan is domesticated and bonded to the house for her entire life.
Although Ah Lan is hired as a paid servant, the nature of her work has similarity with that of a mui tsai (female servant) which is long outdated in Hong Kong. Ah Lan follows Lily wherever she goes because Ah Lan cares about her the most. She is responsible not only for caring the baby but also for tending to the housework, such as cooking and cleaning. In addition, she makes it a routine to go to the market to purchase food for the family (166). She devotes herself unconditionally to “active service” and registers “her uncompromising loyalty” to them for her entire life (3). All these deeds can be analogous to that of a mui tsai: following her mistress to serve her needs, doing all the housework according to a routine, and showing permanent loyalty to the family which pays her for her service. Therefore, Ah Lan embodies the old mechanism of the employer-employee relationship, an out-of-date relation that does not fit in the present capitalistic system which is based on mutual agreement and contract basis between the employer and the employee.
Ah Lan serves Lily, Serena and Tak Sing as someone from the low social class, which epitomizes the “old-fashioned” Chinese tradition. Differentiating herself as a servant from the masters, Ah Lan refuses to dine with them until 1996, a year she has
worked for them for over fifty years (268). Her manners not only reveal her low position in the house but also, according to Serena’s delineation, illustrate how she belongs to the group of outmoded and extinct elderly: “. . . [S]he belonged to that now-defunct school of amahs [sic] who kept the least desirable parts of the meat for themselves and ate leftovers from meal” (3; emphasis added). Her refusal of dining with her masters exemplifies that she still conforms to the long abolished master-slave relationship, and her eating of leftovers from meal suggests that she places herself in a defunct position which deserves no privileges.
Ah Lan’s concepts confirm her traditional value judgment. Living in a westernized city, most Hong Kongers prefer seeing a doctor when they get sick, whereas Ah Lan “would walk a good mile and back to the herbalist down the hill for medicine” as she believes more in Chinese herbs than in Western medicine (3).
Besides, she urges Serena to wed Richard because of her traditional Chinese way of thinking: she believes a mature woman in a marriageable age should get married as soon as possible and give birth to a grandchild as a respect to her parents: “Don’t mind Ah Lan telling you, but you are not young, and your Papa probably wants to hold a grandchild soon” (256). And she feels uncomfortable with young couples living together without getting married (256). When having dinner together with Richard, an Englishman, the whole family conducts conversations using “various forms of English . . . except Ah Lan who would make comments in Cantonese” (266).
All of these reconfirm that Ah Lan belongs to the old generation who are inculcated with Chinese traditional ideology.
In the end of the story, Ah Lan is left alone in a nursing home for the rest of her life due to her role of an “old-fashioned” servant who can be regarded as the
madwoman in the attic. As soon as Serena makes the decision of migrating to Britain with Richard, she decides to send Ah Lan to a nursing home. Serena understands that
Ah Lan is not able to assimilate into the westernized Hong Kong, not to mention Britain. From a capitalistic viewpoint, Ah Lan’s affinity to the long abolished master-slave relationship is rendered extremely foolish, or even mad. She is left behind because she belongs to the defunct and obsolete old generation. Like Bertha who is a Creole and considered the other in Jane Eyre, Ah Lan becomes the Other in Hong Kong and is destined to be confined in the house as she has no way to go. In
The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard proffers the function of a house which
“constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (17).
On the one hand, Ah Lan is willing to continue to live in the house as it is her comfort zone that offers security and stability; on the other hand, she chains up herself to the house and does not intend to leave “till the end of her working days” (147), which can be argued as a madwoman in the attic, being left alone and ignored like Bertha.