Among the hundreds of shoppers there on a typical evening are the many Indonesian domestic servants — euphemistically called “helpers” — who share the tiny apartments with local families in the 10 grim, gray, Soviet-style towers.
For eight months, one of those Indonesian servants, Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, lived on the 38th floor in one of Beverly Garden’s buildings. Never once did she shop on Po Hong Road. Never once did she spend her Sundays with friends alongside the waterfront bike paths that lace Tseung Kwan O, a neighborhood in the New Territories of Hong Kong.
In eight months, she only left the 592-square-foot apartment twice. Once was when she tried to run away after discovering she would not be paid for her labor. A final time was in January 2014. That is when her employer put her in a diaper because Ms. Erwiana was too weak to use the toilet, dressed her in six layers of clothes to hide her emaciated body, and slathered her in makeup to hide the bruises on her face. Then she drove Ms. Erwiana to the airport and put her on a flight to Jakarta.
The employer, Law Wan-tung, 44, was convicted on Feb. 10 on 18 counts, including inflicting “grievous bodily harm” on Ms. Erwiana. She is set to be sentenced this Friday.
The case brought renewed international attention to the situation of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, where more than 300,000 women, overwhelmingly from Indonesia and the Philippines, take care of the young and the elderly and, like Ms. Erwiana, clean homes. By law, they are relegated to a second-class status: forced to live with their employers, often in tiny apartments like the one in Beverly Garden. With working hours that often exceed 70 hours per week, their pay is a small fraction of the minimum wage.
The women keep coming to Hong Kong because, even though their wages are low and working conditions far from ideal, they can earn much more than back home. Many send remittances to parents, siblings and children.
But the women, young, poor and too often ignorant of their rights, are vulnerable to gross exploitation by employers and by placement agencies in Hong Kong and in Indonesia. A 2013 survey of Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong by Amnesty International found widespread physical and sometimes sexual abuse.
Ms. Erwiana’s case was extreme, but her life circumstances were not. In an hourlong interview, she described how she became a modern-day slave. She spoke in her native Bahasa Indonesia, translated into English by Eni Lestari, an activist pushing for better treatment for migrant workers.
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“That is my dream,” she said, in English.
Sinosphere, the China blog of The New York Times, delivers intimate, authoritative coverage of the planet’s most populous nation and its relationship with the rest of the world. Drawing on timely, engaging dispatches from The Times’ distinguished team of China correspondents, this blog brings readers into the debates and discussions taking place inside a fast-changing country and details the cultural, economic and political developments shaping the lives of 1.3 billion people.
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