The narratives she lives by: Identity, intersection and agency in the many roles of a Filipina sex worker in Hong Kong

This chapter focuses on the situated language practices of Mary, a Filipina living (for the most part illegally) in Hong Kong, via an autobiographical, book-length life history she furnishes to one of the authors. Our discursive focus encompasses the linguistic and narrative construction of her multi-layered and intersecting identities: as a domestic worker, personal caretaker, provider to her family ‘back home,’ red-light district party girl, sex worker, prisoner, and, finally, a foreign returnee to the Philippines. We examine how Mary uses language and narrative resources to navigate between and across her ascribed identities, as well as through the bringing together and juxtaposition of the various time-spaces (or contexts) to which her (sometimes necessarily performed) identities are aligned and configured. As such, we also interpret how, in the narratives she lives by, Mary traverses between dichotomies of oppression and empowerment, victimization and desire, and truth and fiction, allowing for a sense of her sexual agency to (sometimes unwittingly) emerge in the face of ‘enforced’ categories of gender, race, class and legality. Mary’s language and narrative practices work, we suggest, to make these unlikely (yet not exclusive) intersections visible, speaking back in this way to dominant readings of migration, race, domestic labor, and sex work in Hong Kong.