Maid in China is much more than an ethnography of Chinese domestic workers and an analysis of media representations of maids in China. Sure to be of interest to a wide range of scholars of China and mass media, Sun's book beautifully captures the complexity of the contemporary social and economic transformations taking place in the People's Republic of China from the intimate and provocative angle of the maid and with an eye to the role of media. The subaltern figure of the rural migrant maid provides a compelling entry point through which to view the multiple tensions that emerge within the context of China's uneven modernization. This includes tensions related to shifting family roles as middle-class households consume readily available household help, tensions surrounding moral obligations of the urban middle class vis-à-vis poorer temporary rural migrants, and tensions pertaining to the role of mass media in relation to the post-socialist neoliberal state and the market.

Based on media analysis and ten months of ethnographic research in Beijing among domestic workers (baomu), employers, and others, spread over three years (2004–2006), Sun captures the critical significance of maids and the many discourses about them to the contemporary self-definition of China's emerging urban middle class in the post-Mao era. While pointing to several paradoxes of the maid as “intimate stranger” (e.g. she is indispensible to the household but threatens their privacy and security; her urban workplace is her employers’ private home), Sun draws important, much-needed, critical attention to media productions about maids, and to the consumption practices and everyday practices of “making do” (following de Certeau) among subaltern migrant domestic workers.

Particularly compelling and insightful, is Sun's treatment of the mass media as a context in which the moral economy of the urban middle class and the moral economy of the rural migrant worker come into conflict. Popular television programs (such as Professor Tian and his Twenty-Eight Maids) are revealed by Sun to be much more than commentaries on the qualities that comprise “good” or “bad” maids or entertaining stories about the laughable trials and tribulations that bumbling, naïve or uneducated rural women face in the big unfamiliar city. Instead, Sun's analysis reveals the subtle and complex questions that such productions raise about emerging middle-class identity, the constitution of suzhi (personal quality) and desirable citizenship, and how employers and workers should relate to one another on an uneven playing field. Although the media often reveals maltreatment of migrant maids, among the messages it conveys is that ideal solutions to problems maids might face are based on the practice of showing love and concern towards them rather than on “extending political rights and social privileges” to them or “distributing economic resources more fairly” (p. 60).

Despite the binary depictions of good and bad maids in colourful popular television serials and in lively discussions in the print media, the workers Sun encounters in real life appear to be generally quiet and thoughtful, accommodating, but not altogether submissive and unaware, as they window shop in malls, tap into the internet, gossip about their employers, turn down jobs with employers who give off the wrong clues, or opt to leave to go home or to find new employers in some cases when employers do not treat them well. Such domestic workers are constrained by the triple forces of global capitalism, state socialism and familial patriarchy, and, as Sun argues, they lack “a political language that allows them to understand their experience in terms of such concepts as injustice and exploitation” (p. 141).

As a scholar of Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers, I cannot resist pointing to three of many striking contrasts. First, whereas Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers are well known for their visible and audible activism, Maid in China reveals an apparent but unsurprising absence of grassroots activism among Chinese migrant maids. Despite Sun's mention of meetings at Beijing's Migrant Women's Club, there seems to be a lack of social spaces in which workers acquire or develop a language with which to voice their concerns or demand their rights. If at all, workers’ agency is primarily expressed in creative but subtle forms. Second is the contrast between Hong Kong's overseas migrant workers employment contracts and visas that tie them to one employer and thus prevent “job hopping” versus the relative freedom of Chinese maids to leave their employers and take up with new ones, despite the constraints that Sun argues are inherent in China's hukou (household registration) system. The third and final contrast is the seemingly innocuous or even positive depiction of Beijing employment agencies (gongsi or “companies”) by Sun, compared with the scholarly depictions of Hong Kong and overseas employment agencies as highly exploitative of workers, literally marketing them as objects of consumption for employer-clients.