Some of my friends say that after four years of choosing and observing ayi I must have developed an ability to quickly spot the best and the worst. There is some truth to that, and I essentially developed some rules of thumb for reaching such conclusions. Honesty was the most important thing I looked for, and I reckon I can discern that from the eyes.
For me the ideal age range was 40 to 55. Early on I reckoned that women of that age are generally more stable, but it eventually became clear that this is not always so.
Next came physical condition, including the candidate's weight and face, and her family circumstances.
The look was also highly important to me, someone who was neither pretty nor ugly.
The candidate needed to be neither too skinny nor too fat, and at least strong enough to help my father practice walking. I felt that in the interests of finding a stable candidate it was best to avoid single women.
After eventually plumping for someone, all I could do was pray that I had made the right choice.
There is a Chinese saying that wherever there are people there is trouble, which means that the more people there are under one roof the more conflicts there will be. My role was akin to that of a United Nations peacekeeper. I would have to monitor the relationship between my father and the ayi and between my mother and the ayi, and keep an eye out for any hostilities between my father and mother engendered by the ayi's presence. On top of that I needed to field any queries from the ayi and go into crisis management mode when she suddenly announced she was quitting.
Complaints
My parents, like most people their age, like to compare today's ayi with the fiercely devoted maids who were around them in their childhood.
Almost always when I was at my parents' place they would have a lot to say about ayi, some of it good, but most of it bad. In turn the ayi would complain that my father had a bad temper.
Eventually, I was so worried about conflict that I felt I could not leave Beijing longer than seven days.
According to a report from the Ministry of Civil Affairs there were 222 million people aged 60 or above in the country by the end of last year, 16.1 percent of the total population. The report says that the country has about 116,000 nursing homes with a total of about 6.7 million beds. That means there are little more than 30 beds for every 1,000 senior people.
It is obvious that in addition to the healthcare programs for the ageing population there is huge demand for nurses and home-stay ayi .
I am unsure how long my father will stay in the rehabilitation center, but whenever he returns home there will be more ayi hunting to do. A pretty robot called Jiajia was on display in Tianjin recently, and I am beginning to think "she" may be a candidate as housemaid No 22.
I once joked that when I retire I will set up a firm to train ayi. The beauty of such an idea is that if I ever need care myself I will have plenty of talent on tap, knowing that if I have been responsible for their training, if they have to look after me I will be in very good hands.
