An Expat Journalist and His Servant

Expat stories about maids and servants who come with a house abroad almost always make me wince. Alternately condescending, clueless and gloating, the stories are often never more than apologist reactions to a complicated cross-cultural issue.

But I warmed up to Eric Weiner’s essay in The New York Times Magazine about his fatherly attachment to Kailash, an 11-year-old orphan who worked as his servant in India.

Yes, the Western paternalism is still here; Weiner himself originally imagined the story playing out this way: “Orphaned Indian boy has fateful meeting with bighearted American; boy finally perserveres and is eternally grateful for bighearted American’s help.”

But Weiner is honest about how his own biases (and continued financial support of Kailash 12 years later) have both helped and jarred a young Indian man from a lower caste trying to live under his own country’s very different rules.

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* The Road to Happiness

Photo by babasteve via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

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