HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL! It has been a very shocking one for me and my family this festive season.
You will be shocked, horrified and utterly disgusted if I let you in about what happened last Friday night that really made the whole family upset.
We returned home in my dad's car after having reunion dinner at my aunty's. We reached home at about 10:40pm. My sister and I went into the house first, totally unaware that something was amiss.
She went in to my maid's room, which my grandmother also shared. Upon switching on the lights, she saw my maid and a Bangladeshi man nude and being intimate. Shocked, she switched off the lights and came to tell us.
The tone of voice with which she told us about what she saw was so unbelievably calm I initially thought she was joking or exaggerating. But she insisted that it was true. My dad and I rushed to my maid's room after a while and found my maid dressed and crying. She was saying sorry to us and we knew something really happened.
We gave chase. The guy slipped out the back door through the kitchen and made his way to the gate. My dad and I went the same way the man did but we were slower. My mom was at the front gate and saw the man approaching. She held on to his arm but the man wrenched it away from her and took flight.
After a brief moment to take in the shock, she finally found the sense to shout to my dad that the man had escaped. Both my and I dad ran barefoot after the man. We shouted robbery and rape as we tried to catch up with him.
I was so angry I uttered a Hokkien vulgarity, proving what Apostle James said about "the wrath of man not producing the righteousness of God" true. I have not uttered a vulgarity for two years, since my conversion to loving Jesus the One true God. And I was even planning to give him a beating he would never forget, with all my strength and without holding back.
The man escaped and jumped into the bushes of a hill leading to the main road below. My dad stopped because he had no footwear on and he might get ambushed in the dark.
We ran back for help. By this time, the neighbours had awakened and came out to look. We sat in the car of one neighbour who drove us to the bus stop at the main road. The 'rapist' was not to be found and we suspected that he was still hiding in the forested hill.
We went back to our home. My mom had called the police. Upon questioning my maid, we found out that it was not a rape/molest case. She confessed that she had brought the man in; she knew him for 7 months from her last employment.
The police came and questioned her. More details came in.
She had no idea where the man lived or what was his name. She knew his age. I believe she was holding back information from us. How casual sex has become if you make love with a stranger?
And this was not the first time the adulterous pair had done this in our house. They would have continued their sexual liaisons if they had not been discovered. You could tell that she was sorry not because she did something wrong, but because she was caught in the act.
What made it hard for us to believe that this actually happened was the fact that this maid has only been here for less than 2 months and she looked decent.
You know what's the biggest shame they never felt? They did it in front of my grandmother, who though being physically unwell was not mentally undiscerning. My grandmother was asleep when we came in.
We found semen stains on the floor and the guy's sandals. But we found out we could not arrest the guy even if we found him and handed in the evidence. The reason? The statutory law has a loophole. We cannot sue him for trespass of property though he indeed came in without our permission and invitation.
My dad explained my maid’s invitation invalidated the trespass offence. The thing I am really mad and unjustified by this law is its assignment of authority unto my maid the same rights as the owner of the house.
Can any one explain why my maid, who does not own the house nor is responsible of it, can betray our trust and get away with it? And the guest cannot even be sued for the breach of security. Parliament should change the law.
We were all shaken and felt insecure and unsafe. I asked my dad to check out the rest of the house, like our creepy backyard, for any more unwelcome intruders. I did not even dare to be in any place dark because I was afraid one or more of his other friends would be hiding in the shadows. No racist innuendos meant or intended.
However, I am beginning to become more wary of the many Bangladeshi men who can be seen loitering in our estate at night. The area we are living in seems to be one of the few inhabitations, if not the only one, in the whole of Kranji. The rent costs more than $1, 000 so foreign workers would never spend their hard-earned money on housing like this, even if shared by a few people.
We were all so tensed up and worried for our safety by the time the police left. I truly understood the beauty of precision in the understanding of human nature found in Maslow’s hierarchy. We were afraid the man would come back for revenge.
We tried to relieve our fear by doing various absurd things.
My mom kept calling every relative she knew to tell them about what happened. I even filled the fish tank with water when it was half full. We blamed my sister for telling us the news like she was joking.
My sister cried and we apologized. She must have been too shocked to react normally. Please pray for her. The images she saw are more potent than video pornography. I have been through the experience where just one glimpse of the naked human body can tempt you to find out and get bound even more. And the devil will of course play and replay that scene, which she admitted she cannot get out of her head.
We decided to send the maid back to Indonesia but we have to keep her until Saturday, thanks to Chinese New Year celebrations. That night, all 4 of us cuddled together in my room behind a locked door. We could not get to sleep until 3 in the morning. We all had bad sleep and bad dreams.
We feared she would either put poison or dirty stuff into our food or she might run away in the night. This is not all that imaginative and paranoid since we have had a really bad history with maids.
One agency hired us two maids who both ran away within the first working day. We changed two maids within one week. One of the maids had the brass audacity to run to the Muslim council and accuse us of ill-treating her, which was actually published in the newspaper. We did not do anything of that sort. If we would do that sort of thing on the first day, why have we other maids who stayed on to fulfill their contract term of 2 years? We never went back to the agency again.
My dad told us that our area had another incident where 2 Bangladeshi men had sex with 2 other maids. They were not so lucky though; the owners made sure they remembered the price for trespassing by giving them a mighty wallop.
What is wrong with our foreign workers? Where is their dignity? Is it because we are ill-treating them with no leave, meager pay and little freedom? Or were they not morally educated in their country?
It is hard to put myself in their shoes after being through such a traumatic incident. I really pray I will not turn racist because I believe that there are dignified and honourable Indonesians and Indians around.
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