Word: amah
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...generations the white women's burden in steamy Southeast Asia has been shouldered by amahs, the soft-footed, tough-fibered maidservants who were recruited from the Chinese main land. While the amah (literally, "little mother") cooked, cleaned and looked after the children, the colonel's lady or planter's wife spent her mornings at tennis, her afternoons at bridge, and appeared freshly starched on the veranda at sundown to greet her returning husband with cold stingers, hot curry and eternal complaint about the hardships of life in the tropics...
...Malaya and Singapore today, a mem-sahib is more apt to spend her day screaming at the amah, doing the housework herself, or else trying to poach the perfect gem who works for the Arbuthnots. For the old-style amahs, whose white tunics, black silk pajama trousers and smoothly braided hair made them look like pigtailed penguins, belong to a dying race...
...called her two servants, a smiling, white-jacketed No. 1 boy and a greying, gold-toothed amah. "Here," she explained, "are Lao Wu and Amah. Lao Wu has been in the family for 45 years, Amah for 34. What would they do if we ran away and left them...
...member of the distinguished Soong family, she cavorted to feasts, rode in jodhpurs. But as a girl with a rigid conscience, she joined the Y.W.C.A. and the Child Labor Commission. She had a horror of untidiness: an English friend describes how she impatiently snatched a dustcloth from a shiftless amah one day and dusted a whole room, exclaiming against dirt...
...what he thinks are the most useful ingredients for a Chi-nese-American way of life. Banning Buddhism because "it is too sad," he likes the Taoist-Confucianist view better, but cheerfully admits that he has taken many of his opinions from humbler authorities who include "Mrs. Huang, an amah in my family; a Soochow boatwoman with her profuse use of expletives; a Shanghai street car conductor ... a lion cub in the zoo; a squirrel in Central Park in New York. . . ." But his main guide is himself...