The effects of a merciful heart

Three homes for poor children

Unlike other South East Asian countries, such as Thailand or Indonesia, Malaysia is not overridden by “street children”. ² Certainly, an overall prosperity in a small population plays a role in keeping very young people from a life on the street, but wealth wouldn’t be meaningful if there weren’t a specific capacity in Malaysian multi-ethnic society to care for children who cannot rely on their immediate kin, which includes the state and a lively and complicated social network of fosterage and homes (Vignato, 2014). Large “orphanages”—more precisely, homes for poor children—with hundreds of residents each, exist under the Ministry of Welfare (Jabatan Kebajikan Malaysia, often called by the carers “the Kebajikan”) and most religious groups run shelters funded through specific networks. Recently, while homes with huge numbers have begun to seem inappropriate and insufficient (Alyaa, 2013), another category of grassroots institutions, often but not always inspired by a religious goal, has become more and more visible. They are sometimes structured as NGOs, sometimes as associations (Persatuan) and sometimes don’t have any official recognition (Raj and Raval, 2013). These homes for children are private, ethnically connoted and small in size, often being run by families. They welcome babies as well as older, sick or disabled children, and cater for a great number of volunteers—tutors, baby sitters, medical staff and domestic helpers. Since 2009, when the National Child Policy and the National Child Protection Policy were approved (Azizah and Kadir, 2010), the Kebajikan has made an effort in the identification and control of possible partners, but many homes don’t want to be listed for fear they won’t be able to match the standards concerning hygiene and the possession of suitable diplomas and qualifications. This is why it is difficult to count them. To my knowledge, in Penang, the Kebajikan officers are aware of most of the (in my estimation) 10 homes located on the island and on the closest part of the mainland. In fact, the Kebajikan cooperates with them in an uneasy relationship, with the same neo-liberal attitude that the Malaysian state has towards the health system: private health structures are considered as a fundamental asset for the country but are meagrely funded and thus encouraged to make their own profit (Rajah et al., 2011). But while health structures can rely on insurance schemes provided by employers and families’ willingness to pay for treatment, private programs for childcare receive no funding. Certainly, when they comply with the hygiene and security rules, they are partly funded by the State, but even then on unclear, unstable grounds which makes long term planning difficult for the caregivers. This is why charity, in Malaysia, is a vital part of the national welfare system of childcare and is accordingly designed by the government, as we shall see.

Faridah, and partners Ganisma and Mary and Jayesh and Daniel are founders and leaders of small homes for children in difficulty and their mothers in the area of Penang and its mainland. They started their activities in different contexts and with different personal backgrounds, but with a clear humanitarian mind: they wanted to help needy people, as they explain.

In 2004, Faridah, a Malay and a former factory worker, reacted to a situation specific to Penang where the massively industrial female population was not only often involved in unplanned pregnancies, particularly if migrant, young and single (both Malaysians and foreigners), but also in early marriages and rapid divorces (especially the Malays) ³ (Khalid, 2012; Vignato 2008, 2012). Relying on a Malay traditional attitude of mothers who protract their fertility through fosterage and adoption (Massard 1988), Faridah has started to foster babies whose mothers were not able to look after them because they were on the run, in prison, had a drug dependency or were socially jeopardized because of their sexual behaviour. In some cases, she has registered the children as her own biological offspring or as those of her own children. Until recently, a child with no birth certificate could easily be registered as someone’s biological child without evidence and the procedure, though illegal, was much easier than a proper adoption. Faridah has now become a sort of super-grandmother, with 20 adopted or fostered boys and girls between the ages of one and 13. They live in a village house with her and her family. Fifteen more children, in their teens, are lodged in nearby boarding schools. Faridah runs her home as a large, inflated family, with her husband and some of her own children being appointed as the children’s guardians, adoptive parents or biological parents, making use of Malaysian laws allowing an easy shift from fosterage to adoption and consenting person-to-person adoption. All the members of the family are engaged in Islam and some are trained in social work. Faridah often shelters pregnant women, as she is determined, so she explains, to fight forced surrendering of babies and baby trafficking.

Elsewhere in Penang, Ganisma and Mary, two former social workers, an Indian and a Chinese Malaysian respectively, also run a home for children. They started it in 2004, as while still working, “they had seen too much” of the same environment as Faridah: suddenly unemployed single mothers, drug addicts or sex-workers (often both) who could not cope with their children, jailed parents and neglected disabled children. The two associates mainly cater for the Indian and Chinese populations, and alcoholism is often one of the causes of distress in the families of those they assist. Their place hosts 45 girls and boys aged from one to 17, including three autistic girls, as well as a few elderly ladies. Ganisma, the practical arm of the duo, lives in the home, while Mary, who stays somewhere else, looks after fundraising and accountancy. Ganisma and Mary also do outreach work and rent some flats in low-cost apartments on the mainland, across the bridges. Unlike Faridah, who is constantly referring both to Islam and to Malay tradition, Ganisma, a Hindu by birth, and Mary, a practicing Christian, claim to have no religious background in their activity. Certainly, a reference to Indianness sets the dominant cultural environment of their home. Ganisma, dressed in a white sari and without a single jewel as a Hindu widow, affirms that she has devoted her life to serving (in Tamil: sevva) and draws her charitable inspiration from Indian Tamil saint and preacher Ramalinga Swami (1823–1874), whose life-size portrait can be seen in the hall. She and the children are vegetarian and the main language spoken in the home is Tamil.

Fifty kilometres from Penang, on the mainland, Daniel and his wife Jayesh have been running the Gunung Love home for children since 2009. They are Indian Malaysians, originally Christian, formerly living in Kuala Lumpur as successful middle-class professionals. They host about 100 children aged from two months to 16 years old, some of them disabled. A few single mothers live there with their children, helping out with the work. While Faridah, Ganisma and Mary reacted to a demographic and sociological change in their own living area, Daniel purposely chose a target area (mainland Penang) for his activity when he decided to “leave it all” and “fulfil his dream” of charity: Penang mainland and Kedah were both cheaper and highly problematic because of their poor industrial population. Moreover, the introduction of migrant labour in industrial plantations has specifically accrued Indian unemployment, poverty and dependence both on alcohol and drugs. Daniel’s home receives the same categories of people as Ganisma, that is, Indian or Chinese Malaysian children or single parents. Like Faridah, Ganisma and Mary, Daniel too is fuelled by an ideal of altruism and humanitarianism, which he relates to theories and techniques of self-improvement and modern new-age non-theistic Hindu ideas (“cosmic energy”, “spiritual reality” and “the journey within” are some of his basic notions). In order to raise funds for his home, he also holds seminars on self-awareness and coaches clients.

Charity rituals

The homes I studied would not survive without the small, individual donations that for some of them constitute the totality of their income and, for others, a fundamental part of their income alongside the allowances they irregularly receive from the Kebajikan on a per-person, per-month basis (100 to 300 MYR/month). Admittedly, they do well during the main yearly religious celebrations, particularly Aidul Fitri (Faridah), Thaipusam and Christmas (Ganisma and Daniel, because they are Indian or mainly Indian and Chinese and can therefore be both Hindu and Christian) and Chinese New Year (all, because the Chinese give to all and they hardly have any “ethnic” children’s homes to give to). Nevertheless, they also face periods when, so they say, even rice is not assured. For the moment, none of them receives corporate donations, although Ganisma and Mary’s upgrading effort aims at this.

One way for the homes to make donations flow constantly is to host weekend charity functions. Although each home is sometimes involved in larger events, especially during important yearly ethnic/religious celebrations, these small ceremonies of giving go on all year around. Here are some examples.

Sunday. Sunder and Rajes arrive at Rumah Matahari with a large family group, the women in saris and jewels, the men in smart trousers and shirts. They are celebrating their daughter’s successful application to an English college. They carry big sacks of raw rice and pots of cooked vegetarian Indian food, pay respect to Ganisma and are brought to the “prayer room” decorated with generic symbols such as a lotus, a pyramid and flowers but no statues of deities and no offerings, where they sing a devotional song for the god Ayappan. A volunteer writes their names down in a book. Little by little, children flock in. Sunder and Rajes serve food to the children, who are asked to say “thank you” (in English) all together. Eating is fast and each child washes their dish before leaving.

The ceremonies described above stage the act of giving according to a specific script that entails the donors’ relocation at a given time (weekends) and place (the donors leave their dwellings to visit the children’s home), their encounter with some of the children, some physical work (carrying bags, cooking, washing up) and an explicit but meek acknowledgment of moral and spiritual values: (1) a general “Indian” spirituality, (2) interethnic voluntarism, (3) the importance of self-improvement and (4) the Malay Muslim neighbourhood. According to Victor Turner, what makes rituals important is their “transformative performance revealing major classifications, categories, and contradictions of cultural processes” (Turner, 1988). In the next section, I will detail what categories are disclosed by these minor rituals of charity with a common syntax and what transformations they both allow and signify, trying to focus, as suggested by Bornstein (2012: 4), on what transforms the intimate impulse to give into a series of actions knitted together in a reliable “politics of pity” (Boltanski, 1999: 22–33), structuring a wider moral economy of charity.

The Malaysian heart and its ethnic deployment

The weekend functions stage generosity, that is, the enactment of the impulse to give. In Malaysia, generosity is an explicitly national moral value. A political construction of feelings aims to enhance individually-driven mutual help among its citizens, as expressed in the 7th goal in Mahathir’s developmental manifesto, Malaysia: The Way Forward (Vision2020) (Mahathir, 1990), so as to achieve a “caring society”. Alongside becoming highly productive, as explained in the Vision2020 manifesto, Malaysians are supposed to learn to “care” for each other from a young age and thus provide a family-centred, grassroots, non-funded welfare system. “Co-curricular” activities ranging from charity to cleaning are a duty for them from primary school to college. The Malaysian National Service, a compulsory three-month residential training undertaken by one out of three randomly picked 19-year-old Malaysians, lists as two of its main objectives: “To build character through imparting core moral values” and “To instil a spirit of volunteerism” (http://www.khidmatnegara.gov.my/plkn/objektif/). “Volunteerism” is described as part of a good character, as constitutive of the Malaysian subject, not as a political or religious choice. ⁴ Still, it is fundamental to sustain a neo-liberal project of welfare.

In line with these statements, the name of the university students’ program described above, “There still are those who care”, emphasizes the idea that the volunteers are acting out of a feeling that is not ethnic or religious, but universally empathic and implicitly menaced by an indefinite modernity (“still”, as if caring was a characteristic of the past, when “values” were regulating people’s behaviour and feelings). The word used is sayang, meaning affection, care and, sometimes, compassion. The students whom I met in Faridah’s home said that what they were doing with the children came “from their heart”. Hati (“heart”), ⁵ is the name of a large NGO network, which tries to stimulate communication about charity within Malaysian society (http://www.hati.my). The “heart” was mentioned to me by many volunteers both at Ganisma’s and at Daniel’s. In Faridah’s Muslim environment, those who give money call it sadaqah ⁶ and say that, unlike zakat, which is a duty one can be dispensed from, sadaqah comes from their heart (hati) and if you have a good heart, you give, if only a very small amount of money.

If the individualized heart-building process designed by the liberal state in Malaysia is ethnicity-blind, when it comes to choosing what charity action is to be done individually, the merciful “heart” becomes ethnic (Cogswell, 2002). Ethnicity permeates most domains of public life in Malaysia. It is a controversial and discriminatory binary category of citizenship that further divides the Malaysian “ethnic communities” of colonial origin and of post-independence definition (Malays, Chinese, Indians and “Others”) into bumiputra (“autochthonous”; the Malays and the populations of Borneo) and non-bumiputra (“of foreign descent”; the Malaysians of Chinese, Indian and other descent). It is also a daily practice embedded in locality, religion and kinship that is relevant even for the people who do not actively position themselves within one of the acknowledged “communities”.

Ethnicity, with its religious implications, is of course relevant for grassroots structures of childcare where ideas about gender, home, family, education, morals and love are constantly at play. Each “ethnic community”, so stiffly defined as a political category, is composed of a very large spectrum of different groups and variations within those groups. Through their choices, the homes I describe here express a specific interpretation of their ethnic background and tradition. ⁷

For the donors I met, ethnicity was an active and conscious choice in their acts of charity. Sunder and Rajes (ritual 1) say that they feel “they” (the Indians) have to look after themselves because the state only cares for the Malays. “Our poor children do not have zakat and state allowances like the Malays”, says Rajes. This is only partly true: as non-Muslims, “their” poor children do not rely on the zakat-funded institutions, but as Malaysian citizens they are entitled to state allowances. Conversely, zakat does not flow easily to small private institutions even if they are Malay. Faridah, for example, does not even apply for it, but relies on informal Muslim solidarity and its sadaqah. If Sunder and Rajes support Ganisma according to their idea of Malaysian Indianness, which they see as being unjustly discriminated against, the donors who give to Faridah support her original interpretation of what Muslim solidarity might mean outside the Malay-oriented state.

Whatever her institution, any charity-assisted child acquires a Malaysian ethnic identity. Should she come from a foreign group—Myanmar, Batak, Jawa, Benggali, mixed or otherwise—she is nonetheless assimilated into the “community” which takes care of her. If she is taken by a state shelter and carries no indication on the mother’s side, she is made a Muslim and a Malay. Besides, parents in distress tend to turn to what they know in their immediate life environment or are so directed by social workers who know that a Muslim cannot be brought to a non-Muslim shelter. The link between donors and children is then unavoidably and, largely, intentionally ethnic. Most donors at Faridah’s are Malay (with the exception of an old friend of hers, a Chinese woman she met as an activist in factory strikes); Ganisma and Daniel receive from both Indian and Chinese, but volunteers are mainly Indian, and in Daniel’s case, some Malay neighbours sometimes stop by and donate something. Although ethnicity-blind in its formulation, when it comes to children, the merciful “heart” is an emotional political project, which contributes to the construction of ethnicized citizenship and makes way for the neo-liberal project of a private, family or community-based welfare.

Luck, merit and social success

The national “heart” doesn’t explain why donors bother to cook and wash up or play with the children. Why do they not simply give some money? Why does their generosity need an embodied action? In order to answer, it is important to examine how charity, a state project, becomes a part of individual life-projects.

Ideas of luck and merit play an important role (Boltanski, 1999: 10). “We were so lucky [in our life] that we feel we must do something”, maintains donor Sunder (ritual 1) when explaining why he was celebrating his daughter’s achievement by personally offering food to the unfortunate children. While saying that he is lucky, Sunder uses the Tamil idiomatic sentence “koduttu vaittu irukkunum” that in a literal sense means “having given, I receive”. Luck, he explains, while certainly needing an auspicious astral background (nalla nakshanda), must be deserved. He and his wife have painstakingly worked and saved money for their children’s education (he works in a biological lab and then drives a taxi, whereas his wife has moved up positions in her factory through a series of self-funded re-qualifications). However, to preserve and enhance such deserved luck, Sunder must “do something” more, something of a different order. In the Hindu devotional world that he inhabits, giving food creates an ambiguous but fundamental symbolic relationship: the giver is inferior to the receiver and powerless, because it is the devotee who offers food to the gods; but the giver is also superior and powerful, as through the offering of food to the gods, the devotee enables other devotees to receive and eat the “leftovers” of the sacred meal. This resonates deeply in Sunder’s choices. He and his family cook and provide a vegetarian meal (“temple food”, that is, pure and suited to the gods) as if the orphanage was a sacred space. ⁸ He often says that the children are like gods that he serves, and the Lady Mother (Amma) presides over them. Therefore, by serving them, he serves her too. Devotion is about offering oneself (or the countless possible symbolic substitutes of oneself) in sacrifice to the divinity: in this light, Sunder and his family’s cooking, handing out food and cleaning up for the children-gods in a sacred space are true acts of devotion and embodiments of sacrifice through self-sacrifice. Charity becomes a repetition, a continuation and a reinforcement of the chain of giving and receiving, which founds their personal “luck”. ⁹

Sen, one of the five birthday-celebrating friends at Daniel’s home, draws on a different, less religiously inspired “Indianness”, when compared with Sunder, and chooses different actions. He offers an ordinary (Indian-spiced) meat meal, that he lets Jayesh cook, and organises a dance akin to a house party for the middle-class Penang Indians. His friends, two of whom are Chinese, ¹⁰ say that they joined because they were curious: it was a “nice way to spend a Saturday evening”, and besides, “Daniel is a very good man”. Mostly, for them, it was a “good action”, inspired by a general idea of God (they were, respectively, two Christians, two Hindus and a Buddhist) as well as a civil idea, in agreement with their “culture to care about the others”, as they put it in a joint conversation we had a few days later. Within and, to a certain extent, despite such moralising discourse, the emotional experience of the function was deemed important by all. Curiosity and fun were often brought up as important positive motivations, as they signified a feeling of equality with children. Sen and his friends underlined their strong emotional involvement. They played and danced with the children and enjoyed their presence (unlike Sunder, who essentially enjoyed his own work for them) and being surrounded by their childish innocence and exuberance. It made them feel happy and virtuous, as if through charity they were practicing otherness – poverty, misfortune – while staying safe. As one of them said, “all these little children…they could be my little brothers and sisters!”. But they were not, and the charity ritual made it clear through allotting a finite time frame to the emotional encounter with them. Actually, through the Indian cultural environment provided by Daniel, the birthday-celebrating friends, all non-Muslims and non-Malays, all salaried workers with some higher education and younger and far less wealthy than hard-working Sunder, seemed to celebrate a non-Malay middle-class social position that they were still consolidating. While Sunder identified with children as avatars of divinity, they identified, and then dis-identified, with the poor children as the embodiment of their own still possible bad luck.

The processes of symbolic identification and differentiation between the helper and the helped were articulated differently at Faridah’s, where equality was often emphasized, however implicitly. In a very specifically Malay attitude, Ifa (ritual 4), a former state-employed accountant enjoying a (today no longer possible) Malaysian early retirement behaved like a neighbour who paid a visit (she lived miles away), and the food giving took place as if it were not the real purpose of the visit. While we were sitting on the veranda, occasionally interacting with one of the children, Faridah informed Ifa that she was organizing umrah, a shorter pilgrimage to Mecca than haj, for a group of friends. Authors observe that in the Malay world, in the communal meal called kendhuri, the power that one gains by feeding other people is denied by the constant referring to all Muslims being equal in the eyes of God (Carsten, 1997; Geertz, 1976; Siegel, 2000). Similarly, at Faridah’s, the symbolic value of the donated food and money was framed by an insistence on an egalitarian idea of Muslim community. Faridah organized a pilgrimage where she would be on the same level as her actual donors. Certainly, as Faridah’s donors told me on other occasions, a Muslim knows that by taking part in charity she gains pahala, the reward that a Muslim enjoys after the Universal Judgment (khiamat) precisely for behaving as a good Muslim and, for example, giving sadaqah; but that, according to Faridah, should not be the reason that moves people to give. Alms should come from the heart, as we have seen, in any form and quantity. Many small Malay entrepreneurs hear of Faridah’s home and share whatever they can with her.

As we see, the quality and form of ritual involvement varies from case to case, but it is always related to the personal positioning of the donor within his or her society, in accordance with the codes of his or her ethnic surroundings, including the kind and depth of his or her religious engagement. All the donors I described here are first-timers and bring a personal touch to the ceremony: Sunder by singing to the god Ayappan, of whom he is one of the main sponsors in the area, Sen with his games and dancing and Ifa with her delicacies, thus testifying to a personal cognitive effort to better define themselves as ethnic subjects through charity. They also strive to acknowledge inequality by experiencing a regulated proximity with the very embodied archetype of the harmless victims of their society’s imperfections—poor children. Through the charity functions, they make some sense of their luck and merits, as well as of their risks, and are made morally and socially stronger by these encounters. At the same time, they generously help private institutions of childcare and strengthen a social habit of giving, or politics of pity, which grants their survival.

The ambiguous caregivers: Disinterested volunteers and poorly paid professionals

As Luc Boltanski’s (2009: 11) analysis of charity underlines, “communitarian figures” such as Ganisma, Mary, Faridah and Daniel are the pivotal articulation of reliable politics of pity, as they choose and embody specific material and symbolic strategies, which enable charity to become a concrete social aid. Within the state policies of fostering acts of generosity that are community-related, Ganisma, Mary, Faridah and Daniel are also sharp individual strategists. For them, there is no question of feeling emotionally happy at the weekend functions. Although the rituals are their fabrication, the home-leaders do not take the donors’ pleasure in them, but find them tiring and burdensome, and would prefer to receive bank transfers (Ganisma and Daniel) or, even better, to hand out a list of goods to be delivered, so as to use their Saturdays and Sundays for rest (Faridah and Ganisma). In their view, ceremonies are an indispensable marketing action. Daniel explains that people see the children, feed them, feel happy in the home and talk about their experience, show pictures of the function to relatives and friends, post them on social media and, thus, more people become involved. The rituals seem to structure a relationship which goes beyond the specific actors insofar as giving to that institution becomes a possibility available to all the members of a group—kinship groups, ethnic groups, religious groups, student groups and so on. Although all the donors of the cases I describe here are doing this for the first time, they contribute to a larger scheme inscribed in a social, ethnicized pattern.

The rituals are vital in securing a flow of donations on another level, too, as they show the donors who they are giving to. This is important in religious approaches: giving to the pure is a fundamental religious act in Hinduism, as is strengthening the ummah, the group of believers, for the Muslims. In a more secular understanding, the caregivers prove their accountability through the charity functions, as they very well know. The functions stage the caregivers as enduring, dedicated, holy, self-sacrificing volunteers, not as professional help and caregivers. “We accept everything”, says Faridah, pointing to a pile of useless shower curtains in her garden. “We must be humble”, she adds (“rendah hati”), not without some irony. Ganisma considers the act of receiving as a moral position she and her volunteers have to endure with a cool head in order to survive (“We receive, we say ‘thank you’”).

In fact, the caregivers stand in an ambiguous position. In the register of the “heart”, while they need to be considered pure, disinterested and generous in order to be trusted, they are also liable to be suspected of exploiting the children to make money. In the register of the real economy, this is, in fact, exactly what they do. They are actually working, often giving up jobs to perform their tasks and become poorly remunerated professionals. Daniel’s wife, Jayesh, quit her prestigious job in Kuala Lumpur to become a tired full-time cook for 100 children; Faridah started being a foster mother by profession when she quit the factory; and Ganisma quit her job in social help to run her own charitable association. This is sometimes lacerating for them. Jayesh is exhausted but cannot complain. Once, Faridah, exasperated with people accusing her of hosting pregnant single mothers so as to “sell” their babies, showed me her counsellor’s diploma, which enables her to enter hospitals and talk to young mothers who might decide to give up their new-borns. This came as a surprise, as so far she had chiefly played out the selfless grandmother with me too. Ganisma, in our first encounters, said she was lucky to have been a young widow so she knew personal motherhood before embracing a collective one; but when in action, she often commented, regarding others, how unprofessional they were—unlike herself.

Despite professional pride and suffering, Faridah, Jayesh and Ganisma choose to consider and present themselves as self-sacrificing mothers and Daniel is called “Father” by “his” children. Even though professionalism is what the recent requests of the Kebajikan expect (for example, a diploma for taska “(kindergarten”) hygiene norms to be respected), mere skills would not enable the charity to take place in a ritualized, personalized way, involving the “heart” and its cultural frame and thus stimulating generosity. It must be remarked, though, that because all the caregivers emphasize that childcare takes place within the ideology of parenthood, they finally take it out of both merciful charity (a parent loves her child, does not pity her) and of state professionalism (a parent is not a social worker), into a personalized idea of spontaneous love.

“We are not good”: The standardized rescued children and their critical awareness

Children are a most effective symbolic image of an unquestionable and urgent need for a charitable action, as massive fundraising campaigns focused on children show throughout the world (Bornstein, 2001, 2011; Manzo, 2008). Unlike many such campaigns, though, what the rituals display in the Malaysian homes is not the icon of a distant needy or suffering child, but a happy neighbouring child with a healthy and unharmed body—disabled ones are an exception and donors do not tend to ask to see them. During the functions, the children are instructed by the caregivers to behave themselves, as a group of restless, violent or distracted youngsters would cause donors to suspect the institution. Overly well-behaved children (too quiet, not playful) would also raise suspicions of an old-minded idea of institutionalized children, unsuited, Faridah says, to “family-oriented community care, focused on the child’s well-being”—hence a certain tolerance of awkward behaviour during rituals. Ideas of childhood and good childcare are at stake, which, again, underline the children’s proximity to their donors: unlike distant suffering children, who are imagined primarily as needing to be saved (Manzo, 2008), these young Malaysians are entitled to enjoy a happy life like the donors’ and the caregivers’ own children. All the caregivers at some point mentioned the International Convention of the Rights of the Child, which they are supposed to have read and translated into their own “vision and mission”, as requested by the National Child Protection Policy.

When discussing how the children might experience being involved in charity functions and in charity at large, Ganisma and Faridah say that their girls and boys have to learn who they are—poor children in a rich society—and acknowledge that they must appear virtuous in order for the external society to care for them. Never steal a pencil at school, never be late, never complain in case of pain, says Faridah: make people understand that they are not bad, dangerous children. Be good at ceremonies, put up with the hassle. However, through the very discourse about what they should not look like, the children are indeed confronted with the alternative image of themselves: the failed-to-be-rescued children, those who are poor and dangerous—especially when adolescents, as will appear in some girls’ words—and the offspring of impure, immoral, weak, unlucky mothers.

I often heard them described as such by both donors and caregivers. “They are innocent. But their mothers…” says Sunder, “they should commit suicide! They ruin Malaysia”. In the moral economy of charity, the happy rescued child obliterates her disturbing mother and original family, as well as the disabled children, the older ones (as old as some of the younger children’s mothers) and the complicated social cases that Ganisma in particular assists with in her outreach work. In her village, Faridah is felt as a disturbing presence, not because of her mass of children, but due to the young pregnant women whom she sometimes hosts and because of the children’s kin, as a neighbour told me.

The exhibition of children in functions aims to be reassuring for donors. Owing to their high emotional impact, babies and small children are often on display. For example, although little Raja (ritual 3) is not an average child in Gunung Love home (he is Daniel’s favourite and often sleeps with him and his wife), Daniel exhibits him as a virtuous example of a whole category of rescued children, as if to show what good charity can turn “them” into. In this representation, not only do the homes save needy children, but they also save the donors and the whole society from what the children could turn into: disturbing creatures at the very least, if not menacing criminals.

The children I met responded in various ways to the double experience of themselves as figures of need, virtue and innocence, but also of risk and social menace. ¹¹ Exemplary little Raja comes to me and tells me, in English: “I am not good, Teacher”. I ask him why and other children explain, in the mixture of languages that is our means of communication (Tamil, Malay, English), that he is capricious, never obeys but is never punished, is only nice when Daniel is around and sometimes pees in his pants. They laugh and yet are serious. “We are not good children”, says a 12-year-old girl, “but when one looks, we are veeeery good!”. They hastily underline they were only joking. Indeed, they were, as they were playing with the virtuous image of themselves that they learn to stage before the donors.

Some children claim theirs is a positive condition not in spite of, but because of its specific nature. During the birthday party at Gunung Love, musical chairs are set out and when the music stops, all the children sit down with two or three on the same chair, invalidating the basic point of the game that one player must be left standing up. When told how to behave, a six-year-old boy bursts into tears because, so an older child explains to me, it is unfair that one is left standing. He quickly learns the rules of the new game, but afterwards, when eating their cake, I see many children share a chair while other chairs are left empty, as if to reconstitute a good feeling of intimacy that the outer intervention had shattered.

Similarly, at Faridah’s, many children do not eat the snacks that they are given during charity functions. When I ask 13-year-old Zarizah why, she disdainfully says, “I can’t be bothered (malas)” (this, as I observe over time, is part of a worrying anorexic attitude); Herlina, 10, says the snacks are not nice (tak sedap). On a different day, I found a whole wall of uneaten pizzas in their cardboard boxes. “We don’t like pizza here”, said Muhammad, seven years old. These refusals underline the donors’ disregard for what the “needy” children might need or like but also, and primarily, the children’s affirmation that they are not needy at all, but have an abundance of food and are free to eat to their taste.

Self-affirmation can also imply a thorough reversal of virtuous standards. Vijay, nine, is serious and concentrated in the middle of 25 squatting children, who are variously chatting, playing, crying and grabbing each other’s exercise books or pens. She is focused on her tidy exercise book, which she is often asked to show to the visitors, and looks both proud and stressed. After we have been drawing together for a while, she calls over “her best friend” Nila and compares her own exercise book to Nila’s crumpled, dirty and half empty one. They laugh at the differences and hold hands. Then Nila, not Vijay, tells me “Never mind, she is my best friend”. “Never mind what?”, I ask. Nila points at Vijay’s exercise book and lists: she irons her shirt, she gets good marks, she sits properly and so on—“never mind” her compliance to the standard expectance, in sum.

Of course, each child has a specific experience of the home and a recently arrived adolescent is hardly comparable to a locally-raised baby, but life experiences outside the home are an important issue for all. At Gunung Love, some older children have learned how to bring their former background into the picture on display. Ranjitham, 16 years old, has lived at Gunung Love for two years now. Daniel introduced her to me as a good result of his home care. From Daniel, she has learned to speak about herself, comparing the “before” and “now”, dramatizing her dreadful “before”:

I was in gang. I smoked. I never meet my mother, never see a picture. Father lives with my auntie (Fz) and sometimes has a lover. He says my mother is dead but she ran away. I was brought to a home and I fight fight fight. No option. I had discipline problems. I was beaten, no holiday, can’t go out…I ran myself! But here…here we are happy. We cook. Here is heaven. (2013)

Now I want to follow Father [Daniel]. I want to give conferences like him. I have learned to cool down, but sometimes I still get angry. I am learning. (2014) ¹²

Subhashini, 17, has learned an official self-narration much along the same lines as Ranjitham. She talks of her difficult past in her remarried, alcoholic father’s flat and of her flight. Contrarily to Ranjitham, she does not speak of gangsterism, but describes actual gang activity (late night outings, drugs, some thefts). She emphasizes that she “liked girls, felt like a man and wanted to do men things”. When she was brought to Gunung Love by her father she “learned to cool down” thanks to Daniel’s teachings and “stopped being a lesbian”, which was considered as mistaken, deviant behaviour. She talks of the home in terms of gratitude: they are never beaten, they eat well, Daniel is great and so on. I later spot her in an intimate situation with a girl and a third girl who sees me says, “It’s terrible! Nobody likes her because she loves girls. They are evil! [in Malay, jahat]” but then adds, “For me it’s the same. To me she is nice. Here we are ‘all equals’ [in English]”.

The children and adolescents described above prove ironic, reflexive and able to play on different registers through attitudes and words, language shifts and emotional engagements. It is well known that groups of children develop specific and changing cultural strategies and imaginaries, through which they process their own and the adults’ words in original and often oppositive ways (Bolotta, 2015; Reynolds et al., 2006; Stodulka, 2015). Each in her or his specific context, Ranjitham, Zarizah, Vijay, Subhashini and Raja all appear engaged in a process of self-care, which establishes them as autonomous from the image that their caregivers and their charitable donors need to construct in order for charity to happen and to serve their various purposes. Together with other experiences where charity is staged, in schools for example, participating in the charity functions helps them detail their relationship of double dependence, on a donor and on a caregiver, and contributes to teaching them actively to manipulate their own image so as to influence those they depend upon (they are good when somebody is looking). It therefore teaches them, to some extent, that they are partly responsible for the continuation of their structure of care.

Conversely, many children express a kind of passionate loyalty to their home and caregivers—they like what they eat, they want to be like their carers, they feel in paradise—which can hardly be seen as a manipulative effort or a mere survival tool. At Gunung Love and at Faridah’s, some of the older children have experienced other homes and have learned to differentiate between better and worse foster institutions, as evidenced clearly in Ranjitham’s words. More importantly, from the angle of emotional structures, many children seem to acknowledge, like Nila and Vijay, that their own experience of suffering before and outside the home is what includes them in their valued institution, regardless of how well or badly they behave. In various ways, they obtain whatever love they receive not in spite of what they were “before”, but because of it, all differences considered.

Unreciprocated love and the clockwork child

I suggest that we frame the understanding of the effects of the Malaysian merciful heart in the language of gift and reciprocated exchange, not only because charity is about giving, but also because the specific case of child rearing challenges modes and needs of reciprocation. Authors show that in traditional South East Asian fostering and adoption, the displaced children have to play an active role in “buying back” their care, whether in the form of free labour (Schrauwers, 1999), of general support to the household (Beatty, 2002; Carsten, 1997) or of care for elderly parents (Schröder-Butterfill and Kreager, 2005; Vignato 2008, 2012). In many such examples, the foster children’s obligation to reciprocate exposes them to exploitation and negatively influences the way they grow up. In all cases, it plays a relevant role in their social and personal identity process.

The Malaysian charity children whom I met are caught among an ethnic institutional practice of child rescue, a modern idea of home-based foster care and traditional practices of adoption. They survive through charitable donations. What are they expected to do, so as to compensate the care they receive? How does their position of being charity receivers influence their growth? Do different ethnic traditions function differently in this regard?

From a material angle, the children I met are pure receivers, and as such, are evocative of the classical figure of the assisted poor, regardless of the ethnic and religious symbolic background that frames their experience. Bourdieu has argued that the impossibility to reciprocate what is given in a rich-to-poor relationship of help generates oppressive violence on an imaginative level: instead of fighting for equality, the receivers feel grateful and perpetuate their condition of subalternity, whereas the givers feel good and morally satisfied. This helps maintain a system of inequality (Bourdieu, 1980: 218–220). We have seen many examples of this pattern in the ethnographic materials presented in the former paragraphs. The importance of finding a moral justification in the experience of inequality by getting involved in charity appeared in the donors’ and the caregivers’ words and attitude alike. Conversely, we have seen that children apprehend themselves as needy not only in charity rituals but also through the caregivers’ words and teachings and their wider experience as “rescued” children. They are taught to feel grateful for what they receive and often express a strong emotional dependence on their caregivers. Through embodied charity, they incorporate their weak social position and are likely to perpetuate it. As in Bourdieu’s understanding, this is a part of a more general social pattern: lonely migrants, terrified pregnant teenagers, drug addicts and the ill-employed—the institutionalized children’s parents—are a corollary of Malaysian modern neo-liberal work and immigration laws, of the death penalty and the prison-based war on drugs and of a mainstream moralism. The Malaysian state does not change the laws but constructs the merciful heart as a structuring characteristic of citizenship, so that inequality is handled but not uprooted.

However, while a structural reading in terms of oppression and policies of unequal economic development cannot be dismissed, it does not account for the actual complexity and variety of giving and receiving that I have encountered in my research and formerly described. More importantly, within the small groups of assisted children with whom I worked, I encountered a lively critical awareness and a great deal of agency that do not fit with the idea of the poor as trapped in an unbreakable “habitus”. Resuming the question about gift and reciprocation, two further points can be made to account for the children’s agency within the homes.

First, as Fassin has pointed out, feelings or other tokens of intimacy (playing together, telling one’s story, asking to be cuddled) can be a valuable form of an immaterial counter gift that does not liberate the receivers from an internalized domination, but empowers them with a manipulative agency vis-a-vis their donors and benefactors (Fassin, 2001; Fassin and Pandolfi, 2010). As we have seen, the children learn how valuable their own demonstrations of affection and their control over their staged image can become in an economy of charitable exchange and grow acquainted with their own manipulative power over the donors and the caregivers. They are good when necessary. We saw how they play along with their image of the assisted poor, putting on their mask of good unfortunate children. However, once the mask is removed, the game is over and appears for what it is—a game. Through emotional reciprocation, they thus acquire some autonomous strength while not running the risk of exclusion: seeing their caregivers’ adamant insistence on the necessity of weekend functions, they learn that their caregivers materially and symbolically need them to keep on with their own projects. These, as we have seen, are both personal and professional. Faridah considers her children as part of her family, as well as people whom she assists in her professional capacity. Ganisma has empowered herself by turning her early widowhood into a holy condition and asserting her specific skills. Daniel makes his personal “dream” come true. The children develop a form of cynical trust in their own value in the caregivers’ eyes, like when they refuse pizzas because they know that they will be nicely fed in any case.

Second, even receiving an unreciprocated gift does not uniquely or necessarily imprison the children in a position of subalternity and oppression because of the specific quality of the ethnic foster homes. The caregivers’ self-positioning as part of the children’s residential community emphasizes their common belonging, at least when relating to the outer groups such as the donors, the neighbourhood or the school. This attitude of “commitment” (Boltanski, 1999: 11) is fundamental for the children, as it is the caregivers who embody “the giving”, much more than the distant donors. For a variety of different intentions and motivations, the caregivers join their own lives to those of the children. They share their kin and wealth with them, defy state laws for them and join them in everyday washing, comforting and feeding. Their and the volunteers’ giving is a self-giving that constantly subverts their position of superiority and power vis-a-vis the children. This is true in family-like structures like Faridah’s, in community-like groups like Daniel’s and in more typically Indian orphanages like Ganisma’s. It’s a quality which is expressed in ethnic modes, but is not, in itself, related to a specific ethnic background. Parallel to this reassuring equality, an absolute difference is also deployed. From their caregivers, the children deeply and repeatedly experience some gratuity in the care that they receive. On the caregivers’ side, in fact, no reciprocation is expected to compensate for their generous self-giving, neither on a symbolic level nor at a later time. Ganisma says that many girls who grew up at her place finished school and simply vanished, and that is the way things go. The same is claimed by Faridah, too, who cannot anyhow take care of grown-up former foster children. Gratuity in self-giving is not about affective bonding. Gratuity, “pure gift”, ¹³ is precisely giving help without establishing social bonding. ¹⁴ Many children do develop strong affective bonds with their caregivers but not necessarily all of them do, and besides, not all affective bonds are positive. I met children who were angry at their “mother” (Ganisma) or who wanted to go back to whatever family they had outside (Faridah and Ganisma). Still, they were never, to my knowledge, required to leave or ill-treated. Children are not subjected to any kinship or kinship-like obligations towards the caregivers. They fall outside a transgenerational symbology and its long-term engagements. They would not have to look after their ageing parent-like caregivers; the institutions do not expect them to come back, although individual caregivers might do. They are free.

Such suspension in the expectation of emotional and practical rewards recalls Boltanski’s understanding of agape, unrelated “love” as a practice of giving that does not seek to re-establish balance in an unequal relationship. Agape, for Boltanski, is not concerned with the past and future, it has no anticipation of later consequences and no specific desire (Boltanski, 1990). Therefore, it bears no oppressive consequences. Agape precisely describes how children develop a trust in their caregivers that is unrelated to affect—cynical, as I call it. They trust their condition and their institution—if not directly, their foster parent. When Ranjitham says that Gunung Love is “paradise”, and both she and Subhashini strive to change because of Daniel, when the small children feel comforted by sharing a chair, and in countless other episodes I have attended or participated in, the children seemed to enjoy a protective and affectionate situation that frees them from depending on unsafe backgrounds, while not compelling them into forging affective bonds and exposing them to future obligations. Although distant in the children’s view, the donors themselves are not extraneous to making this possible through their donations.

This is not to plead for the existence of pure love that transcends historical constructions. The unrelated love of agape, in Boltanski’s idea, invariably shifts into a “regime of justice” with its expected or calculated rewards. Such is the case of the homes. Childcare is indeed a profession for the caregivers, and the moral desire to gain merit is acutely fundamental for them and for the donors. In fact, giving to children with no expected return is essentially made possible not, or not only, by the caregivers’ good heart and deep involvement but also by an internationally defined structural limit that is intrinsic to childhood itself. Children are symbolically and politically constructed as clockwork devices: in a legally framed, given time, when their biological and psychological growth is supposed to be completed, at the age of 18, they would disappear as charity targets and subjects of Children’s Rights, and at worst, fall into other categories of vulnerability or exclusion (the gangsters, the pregnant single mothers, the drug addicts, the disabled or the “simple” poor). Caregivers would no longer be interested in them, nor would they be needed: they would neither raise funds nor be able to be staged during rituals. Unlike in regular family structures, gratuitous giving does not establish a permanent relationship beyond the frame of childhood. If it does not bind the receivers, it does not bind the givers either.

To conclude, I resume Bourdieu’s argument and remind that in spite of its core of gratuitous love, in many regards, ethnic, grassroots and charity-funded childcare is not really to be regarded as an ideal model that enables children to grow up in love and freedom despite being far from their biological families. As we have seen, a great deal of symbolic violence takes place in the homes, both in general and specific ways—Subhashini is made to despise her homosexual feelings, little Raja is at odds with his image of the perfect rescued boy, whereas anorexic Zarizah, as Faridah says, “fights her own battle against everyone”. Besides, interactions with state regulation constantly affect the homes’ often voluntaristic configurations, and some of this uncertainty unavoidably marks the children beyond their trust in gratuitous care. When Faridah took all 12 of her very small “grandchildren” to live in a house in Kuala Lumpur that had been given to her for free by a donor because she feared government inspections in Penang, the children—who all got afflicted with dengue fever—became nervous and angry at her for taking them away from “home”.

However, the homes I studied do seem to create an alternative space where the merciful “heart” is more than a political project or, maybe, suggest an alternative political project in which charity “morphs into radical solidarity” through ethnicity (Muehlebach, 2013: 462). Structures that allow the donors’ personal involvement and help the children understand their positioning in society while providing them with some sense of being loved for what they are, not for what they should be, point in that direction. As long as the children’s homes that I studied keep their actual form, the logic of a pure gift, whether it is called radical solidarity brought about by engaged caregivers or agape allowed by a structural suspension based on the political agenda of global childhood, would resonate in the children’s daily lives. They would experience the possibility of non-oppressive unequal relationships within the complex exchange of goods and feelings that constitutes charity.