The current field of labor migration in Asia has placed a strong emphasis on the feminization of labor, the heterosexual family, and motherhood. Lesbian workers and alternative family structures remain largely invisible within this framework. Francisca Yuenki Lai's timely study Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires bridges the gap between Asian labor studies and lesbian and queer studies by examining the lives of queer Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong and their changing notions of family and marriage in migratory processes. The book brings together important questions of queer migration, gendered and sexualized division of labor, community and kinship making, as well as uneven distribution of materials and desires across regions in Asia.

The book includes four major chapters. In chapter 1, Lai provides a broad-stroke picture of both the Indonesian and Hong Kong societies regarding discourses of family, marriage, transnational migration, and LGBT rights and citizenship. From chapter 2 to 4, each chapter zooms in one of the ethnographic sites where Lai explores the ways in which Indonesian queer women negotiate their gender and sexual subjectivity. These sites are Sunday's pop dance group, Champion, whose members gather at Kowloon Park and Victoria Park; Indonesian women's negotiation of the rules imposed by religion, their Hong Kong employers, and business owners at various places; and, finally, the women's imaginings of home and reconciliation with family expectations.

One of the most significant interventions that makes Lai's work unique is her emphasis on the ways in which the very process of migration enables the women to articulate their gender, sexuality, and desire for same-sex relationships. Contrasting with other prominent scholars of queer migration, such as Martin F. Manalansan IV, whose informants are individuals who already identify as gay men before moving to the United States, the female live-in domestic workers in Lai's book produce a particular understanding of gender identity and sexual knowledge through their experiences of working at the training centers, participating in community-building activities, and providing care and support for one another when they confront legal and other vocational predicaments.Footnote ¹ An interesting example is that since sex is strictly policed in the training centers, tomboi—women with more masculine traits, as opposed to cewek, who embody feminine gender expressions—often receive extra surveillance by the trainers. Yet, this type of surveillance gives same-sex intimacy more visibility and allows the women to cultivate a sense of their subject positions (pp. 50–53). Challenging the male privilege of gay migrants in urban space, Lai's work shows the agency of female migrant workers in making sense of their new gender image and sexual desires, negotiating the moral expectations and constraints, and finding their own voices.

The “sexual fluidity” and the feeling of “being otherwise” (p. 4), however, do not confirm the teleology of queer liberalism, whereas queer subjects in repressive regimes or underdeveloped regions “move up” and achieve equality in a liberal state by embracing certain LGBT identities. Lai shows that queer Indonesian migrant women are marginalized in Hong Kong as racialized others and excluded from entering mainstream society. Yet, by creating a space for an alternative masculinity and sexuality, Indonesian women “queer” the home of the employer and public space, as such Victoria Park in Hong Kong, not merely with regard to race and class oppression, but also desires and hope.

Another merit of the book that should be highlighted is the research methods deployed in the study. Lai immersed herself in the Sunday life of the Indonesian women, learning about their activities while performing what Marlon Bailey calls “kin labor” and providing social support for the people she studied.Footnote ² This shared time and labor allowed her to critically examine her economic, educational, and linguistic privilege and to form community with the queer women during and after her fieldwork. Lai's ethnography is a form of scholarly activism that is much needed for rethinking the intersection of migration policymaking, gender and labor equality, economic justice, and academic knowledge production. While the book paints a colorful picture of the liveliness of Indonesian queer women and the complexity of their everyday struggles, I would be interested in seeing a more nuanced depiction of Hong Kong society and the individuals whose lives are entangled with and inseparable from the migrant women. Similarly, as the book does a remarkable job of showing the multiplicity of the different gender positions of tomboi and cewek, including their gender expressions, mannerisms, and the ways that their sexualities are policed, I would like to know more about the impact of gendered differences among the women on the ways in which daily domestic and kin labor are carried out. Additionally, although the women in Lai's study belong to the general category of migrant domestic workers, an investigation of the class and geolocational differences among them and how the nuances may or may not inform their gender positions of choice, and vice versa, might shed light on the outlook of larger transregional labor division in Asian and the transnational queer “chain of care.”Footnote ³

Perhaps becaue of space limitations, some important topics and arguments are unfortunately glossed over and left unexplored, especially when Lai crams the intriguing discussions of religion and Hong Kong home employers into one chapter. Despite these blemishes, Maid to Queer offers an exciting intervention to the studies of queer migration, same-sex desires and kinship formations, as well as gendered and sexualized labor division in Asia.