Yang told me that Cui Ayi and her daughter had left for Chinese New Year. And that when they said goodbye to the kids they cried. I told Yang that I guess they just quit. Occasionally I get asked on how to find a good ayi by someone who has just moved to Beijing. I give them the run down – mainly all the problems with finding a good one vs. the best way to actually find one. I then close by saying that Yang handles the ayi hiring thus significantly lowing the value of the wisdom I just bestowed. Then comes the whopper...I tell them we've had...give or take...15 ayis since 2005. At which point my "ayi hiring for dummies" is viewed as "dummies hiring ayis". And, well, the numbers actually get worse. We've had two ayis at a time, one live in and one that comes in during the day. Until two weeks ago, the one that came in during the day was the same person, Cui Ayi. So the other 15 were from the live in position. And even there, we had one ayi that was with us for a good eighteen months.  Here are the "long haulers" of our ayis:
Cui Ayi with Elisa and Xiao duo with Lydia. Cui Ayi was with us for almost four years, Xiao Duo for 18 months. So what happened to the rest? Honestly, once the number got more than ten I no longer can recall each one, name by name and face by face. Here are some of the cases I remember where the ayi quit.

• Four ayis moved back to their home towns. Two apparently because their husband wanted her home and Cui Ayi moved back to take care of her father. One ayi left to be a beautician.   Two quit because they quickly realized they could not handle the job. Two quite because they wanted more money. And the cases where we fired the Ayi

• One accidentally dropped Aidan on his head, leading to five stitches. She was our first live in ayi and in retrospect was about the best worker we had although she could get distracted from time to time. One could not get over car sickness. It is common for the ayis to get a little car sick at first since most have never ridden in a car. However, given that Beijing is flat as a pancake and laid out in a grid, a could of weeks should be enough time to adjust but we found ourselves having to pull the car over every few blocks so she could heave. One was dumb as a rock. Nice smile, nodded a lot. Could not sort the pots from the chopsticks. One refused to shower. She came from a water poor province and never adjusted to our style of living. One menstruated on the couch. In general she was not clean. One would not eat. Turned out she was pregnant. Yes, when we hired her not when she was living under our roof. One kept falling off the bed. Given that the bed was about four feed off the ground and there was no real option to move it, we had to move her. We awoke one night hearing a load thud, then her soft cry. Same thing the next night. We let her go. There are a couple common patterns. For the live in Ayi, we generally want a younger, more playful one for the kids sake. These ayis often have a husband and child back in their hometown. Our first live in – the one that dropped Aidan – was a single mom whose husband died young and with a young son. When Yang spoke with her about missing her son, she said that is something for you people from the west, for you people with money to care about. We are just trying to survive. Another ayi, Xiao duo – the longest live in one…had a son about Aidan’s age and would call him from time to time until he refused to speak to her anymore. She finally left to help her husband’s start business. In any case, it has always been a big adjustment for the live in. Many of these young women…and a few girls…come from a really, really different life style that we are expecting them to adapt to. Another common problem is the Ayis start to think they should be making more money because they are taking care of foreign kids. One saw it as a way she could make money on her next job (she just upped and quit one morning without any warning) and most see deserving more money now. This Ayi feeling has accelerated since we’ve moved to our new place in Lido because the Ayis often gather out in front of the building and gossip about how much money the make.  What we pay for ayis rate has doubled since we’ve moved to Beijing, so we already feel we are paying a fair wage. We certainly are compared to Yang’s friends. Yang has been amazing throughout all the hiring and training. It is essentially a management position to hire, train, and if need be fire these ayis. Yang has always treated them extremely fairly from ample time off, and in Cui Ayi’s case provide high quality housing and even a job for her daughter. Yang is always quick with some extra money for them around the holidays and we’ve paid for the passage home on multiple occasions. Someday I will write something sappy about the ayis…about how we take them away from their families so they can help with ours, about how they come into our world with the hope of making a better life for their own children, how when they leave they cry because of the attachment they’ve made to our kids. And how Aidan and Lydia still remember they ones closest to them and mention their names like old friends. But I don’t have sappy words right now and will save them for the day when they do come.
  Cui Ayi with a couple of the younger Ayis who lived with us. The one on the left left to be a beautician. Our new “come in during the day” ayi started last week. She came by our house to interview for the job and Yang’s mom was the only adult home. The ayi was told that our long time ayi had just quit. She looked a picture of the Allio Five. She pointed at Yang. “Is that the Ayi who quit?” she asked. No, that’s the mom.