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The markets on Po Hong Road that spill onto the sidewalks sell fresh meat, fresh fish, fresh vegetables — essentials for the nearly 4,000 kitchens that soar hundreds of feet above in the publicly subsidized Hong Kong housing estate called Beverly Garden.

Among the hundreds of shoppers there on a typical evening are the many Indonesian domestic servants — euphemistically called “helpers” — who share the tiny apartments with local families in the 10 grim, gray, Soviet-style towers.

For eight months, one of those Indonesian servants, Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, lived on the 38th floor in one of Beverly Garden’s buildings. Never once did she shop on Po Hong Road. Never once did she spend her Sundays with friends alongside the waterfront bike paths that lace Tseung Kwan O, a neighborhood in the New Territories of Hong Kong.



In eight months, she only left the 592-square-foot apartment twice. Once was when she tried to run away after discovering she would not be paid for her labor. A final time was in January 2014. That is when her employer put her in a diaper because Ms. Erwiana was too weak to use the toilet, dressed her in six layers of clothes to hide her emaciated body, and slathered her in makeup to hide the bruises on her face. Then she drove Ms. Erwiana to the airport and put her on a flight to Jakarta.

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The employer, Law Wan-tung, 44, was convicted on Feb. 10 on 18 counts, including inflicting “grievous bodily harm” on Ms. Erwiana. She is set to be sentenced this Friday.

The case brought renewed international attention to the situation of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, where more than 300,000 women, overwhelmingly from Indonesia and the Philippines, take care of the young and the elderly and, like Ms. Erwiana, clean homes. By law, they are relegated to a second-class status: forced to live with their employers, often in tiny apartments like the one in Beverly Garden. With working hours that often exceed 70 hours per week, their pay is a small fraction of the minimum wage.

The women keep coming to Hong Kong because, even though their wages are low and working conditions far from ideal, they can earn much more than back home. Many send remittances to parents, siblings and children.

But the women, young, poor and too often ignorant of their rights, are vulnerable to gross exploitation by employers and by placement agencies in Hong Kong and in Indonesia. A 2013 survey of Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong by Amnesty International found widespread physical and sometimes sexual abuse.

Ms. Erwiana’s case was extreme, but her life circumstances were not. In an hourlong interview, she described how she became a modern-day slave. She spoke in her native Bahasa Indonesia, translated into English by Eni Lestari, an activist pushing for better treatment for migrant workers.

Ms. Erwiana comes from an extremely poor family that lives in a small village in the middle of Java, the most populous island in Indonesia. Her father, a farmer, told The South China Morning Post in an interview that he makes less than $300 a year growing chili peppers. She worked as a waitress in Jakarta, the capital, “but my income wasn’t enough to send money home to my family,” she said. Her family needed that income to pay school fees for her younger brother.

So she decided, like hundreds of thousands of her compatriots, to become a domestic worker in Hong Kong. Here, she would earn at least $530 a month. But first, she would have to pay back the fees for the training courses that all domestic workers are required to take. That would take away more than half of her monthly pay for the first six months of her time in Hong Kong.

She arrived in Hong Kong in May 2013. She was given an Indonesian-language pamphlet at the airport that explained her rights as a foreign domestic worker, but, she says, her Hong Kong employment agency took it from her. Soon she had her first look at Ms. Law.

“She looked like a person who was always angry,” Ms. Erwiana said. “She wasn’t smiling.”

The work schedule was strange from the outset. She was only allowed to sleep for a few hours in the afternoons, on the floor in a closet. Ms. Law told Ms. Erwiana that if she broke anything in the house she would have to pay for it. Ms. Law closely supervised her as she cleaned bathrooms, floors, cabinets, shelves, doors, windows, tables, mattresses. Every day.

“She made a schedule for my work, saying how long I spent cleaning certain items. And I had to follow that schedule exactly.”

Ms. Law lived there with her son and daughter, both teenagers. Her husband never showed up in the eight months that Ms. Erwiana lived there.

As bad as the conditions were, the prospect of earning thousands of Hong Kong dollars kept her there. But after a month, Ms. Erwiana said she did not receive her pay. She decided to leave.

But she had nowhere to go. Her passport had been confiscated. She went down to the security desk in the apartment building’s lobby and called the employment agency.

“The agency sent me back to the house because I hadn’t finished paying off my debt,” she said. “I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have my passport, I didn’t know anyone in Hong Kong.”

Ms. Erwiana felt “very disappointed” at having to go back, but she felt “there was no choice.”

She was an indentured servant slipping into slavery.

Soon after she tried to run away, Ms. Law started to hit her. The first time, Ms. Law punched her on the mouth.

“She was angry at me when I fell asleep while I was working,” Ms. Erwiana said.

Another time, when Ms. Erwiana was on a ladder, cleaning an air-conditioner, Ms. Law grabbed her by her clothes, causing her to fall down onto the floor. Another time, Ms. Law punched her in the mouth, fracturing two of her front teeth. “She hit me on the head with a clothes hanger,” Ms. Erwiana recalled. “I tried to avoid it, so it would usually hit me on the shoulder.” During the trial, Ms. Erwiana testified that in the winter months Ms. Law made her stand for hours at a time in the bathroom, naked and wet, with a fan blowing on her.

Once, she said, Ms. Law put a vacuum cleaner tube in her mouth, then twisted it, cutting her lips. “I was afraid to report it to the police.”

She was afraid because at one point she took food beyond the rice and six slices of bread that were her normal daily ration, and Ms. Law threatened to report her to the police. Once a week, Ms. Law would also buy her a small package of precooked meat and vegetables. “I was just so hungry,” Ms. Erwiana said. Another time, she knocked on a neighbor’s door at 2:30 a.m., begging for food. He turned her away, testifying at her employer’s trial that he thought she was playing a prank on him.

In the eight months in Hong Kong, Ms. Erwiana only spoke to her family in Indonesia once. The agency contacted Ms. Law and told Ms. Erwiana to contact her father. Ms. Law was next to her when she called. “I didn’t want my father to be worried, and I was afraid of threats, so I told my father that I was fine.”

In court, Ms. Erwiana testified that Ms. Law threatened her and her family with harm if she ever talked about her treatment.

The beatings, the stress, the very poor diet and the lack of food were taking its toll, and Ms. Erwiana’s body began to break down. She stopped menstruating. A skin condition was exacerbated by the daily, constant use of cleaning solvents, including bleach. Ms. Erwiana was forbidden to use gloves when she was cleaning: “She said if I used gloves I couldn’t clean properly.”

The apartment had two small bathrooms, but Ms. Erwiana was only allowed to relieve herself twice a day. To minimize her need to urinate, Ms. Law only permitted her to drink one 450-milliliter, or 15-ounce, bottle of boiled water a day. She was told to urinate into a plastic bag or bucket. “If I used the toilet, I was told I was wasting my time, because I would then have to clean it, and I was here for work.”

“She didn’t want anything to be dirty,” Ms. Erwiana said of Ms. Law.

She would work 20 hours a day and, she said, she was never paid for her labor.

Near the end, Ms. Erwiana’s body completely broke down. “I was not able to work at all.”

One day in January last year, Ms. Law took her to the airport.

“She put Pampers on me, and six layers of clothes,” Ms. Erwiana said. Then Ms. Law put makeup on Ms. Erwiana’s face and combed her hair, tying it up. “She asked the daughter, ‘Is it O.K. like this?’ and the daughter said, ‘Yes, that’s O.K.’”

The taxi driver who drove them testified in court that Ms. Erwiana reeked of urine and feces. She was heading back to Indonesia, and Ms. Law warned her that her family would be harmed if she told them about her experience. She was given her passport back and received what amounted to less than $10 for expenses, the only pay Ms. Law ever gave her in eight months.

After passing through immigration, Ms. Erwiana somehow found her gate. It was midnight. The airport, normally bustling, was nearly empty.

Some other Indonesians at the gate noticed her, and they asked her where she was from and what had happened to her. She told them she had been assaulted. They asked to see her passport. One told Ms. Erwiana that she lived near her home in Indonesia.

Then a gate change was announced. Ms. Erwiana couldn’t walk.

“They wheeled me on a baggage trolley to the new gate.”

When she arrived home in Indonesia, shocked friends and family, seeing her bruised and emaciated body, told her she must go to the hospital.

“But I refused. Because I didn’t want to burden my parents, because they could not afford the hospital fee,” she said. “My father said, ‘It’s O.K., we’ll try to find a way of paying the fee.’”

Pictures of her at the hospital quickly caused an uproar in Indonesia and Hong Kong. Days later, Ms. Law was arrested at the airport as she was about to leave for Thailand.

“I can forgive her, but she must be punished, because that will teach other employers in Hong Kong and elsewhere not to abuse their employees. Domestic workers are really treated like slaves,” Ms. Erwiana said.

Since then, Ms. Erwiana’s life has been transformed. She’s now studying on a full scholarship at a Catholic college in Indonesia. She wants to set up a foundation to help other migrant workers.

“That is my dream,” she said, in English.