MALAYSIA - FOREIGN workers are so much a part of life in Malaysia that it would be hard to imagine the country without them. The official statistic of 2 million foreign workers (and that's not including illegal migrants) does sound alarming when the local population is merely 27.7 million.

Nevertheless, regardless of how we feel about the issue, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the country would probably come to a standstill without them.

This dependency became all too obvious when I renovated my apartment recently.

The ceiling plasterers were from Vietnam, kitchen cabinet-makers from Myanmar and electrical technicians from Indonesia. The guards, as expected, are from Nepal. In fact, the only local workers I met were the team of skilful carpenters from Klang who constructed my wardrobes.

Household maids are, of course, the most visible foreign workers and maid problems are a perennial hot topic of conversation. Not so long ago, a proposal to import household workers from China created a furore among certain segments of Malaysian society.

Many of the concerns are, without doubt, justified, with much of the resistance based on reports of opportunistic women from the country working illegally in bars and worse, and of no-holds barred behaviour when it came to money.

The itinerant vendors of cheap goods in pasar malam and on the streets certainly do nothing to help the image either. I still remember, three or four years ago, noisy young women from the Fujian counties loaded with huge bundles of tea, dried produce and small goods made up the bulk of passengers on many of the flights from Xiamen to Malaysia.

The notorious reputation these women have acquired is largely of their own making, yet there are, as always, two sides to the story and some of my acquaintances in China have quite different tales to tell.

Going the extra mile

Several years ago, I met a Beijing-based couple who, after living and working all over China for 15 years, bought an apartment in Kuala Lumpur thinking to enrol their children in a local school to help them re-adjust to life in Malaysia.

As it turned out, not only could their young daughter not adjust, but the wife nearly had a breakdown over her Indonesian maid. She missed her Beijing friends, especially her ayi (as domestic helpers are called there) whom she said, was fast, efficient and honest. In fact, so smart and so honest that all her employer had to do was give her money to buy groceries whenever she had to entertain and the requisite number of dishes would appear on the table. The ayi would return any change down to the last fen (cent). Within six months after returning to Malaysia, she moved back to Beijing with the children.

Another Malaysian working alone in China for over a decade, told me she treats her ayi like family because once she was so ill that she was unable to get out of bed and the maid devotedly nursed her back to health with all kinds of nutritious soups and herbs for which she refused reimbursement.

The helper's loyalty was such that despite my friend telling her time and again that there was no need to go to such lengths to save a few yuan, she insisted on travelling out of the city just to get the best prices when shopping for fresh produce for her employer.

Then there was the temporary ayi I hired to help my wheelchair-bound mother when my parents and I rented a service apartment in the heart of Beijing one summer.

Her name was Shulan, and typical of domestic workers in China, she did not live in with us, but turned up for work each morning at 7am, returning home at 7 or 8 in the evening.

One Sunday, after learning that it would probably be my mother's last trip to China, the kind woman arranged for her son to drive us around the city on his day off. And like my friend's maid, when Shulan discovered I shopped at a nearby supermarket, she was adamant that I was paying too much and insisted on bringing me to a fresh produce market further away.

Not all women from China are fox spirits seeking to snare hapless souls and empty their bank accounts. Good Chinese maids certainly don't come cheap - friends in China tell me salaries run from 1,500 to 2,000 yuan (RM750 to RM1,000) per month for a trained and experienced day maid.

However, with the increasing cost of household workers from traditional sources like Indonesia and the Philippines, it may be worthwhile to look at alternatives and pay extra for quality.

There are many positives in having helpers who come from a culture with strong work ethics and who basically speak the same language, eat the same food and who share a similar cultural background.

Ultimately it is a question of screening and training, and for the employers, of treating them with fairness and dignity to earn their respect and loyalty.