Since the 1970s, a significant number of migrant domestic workers from the Asian region (primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka) have worked to sustain households in cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong. Amidst public debate about the ever-increasing need for migrant domestic workers to assist with eldercare in Asia, we hear little about their own futures. Based on ethnographic research, this talk traces the journeys of an older generation of migrant domestic workers who have spent much of their working lives abroad on temporary contracts. Given the restrictive long-term residence policies in the places in which they work, migrant domestic workers must return to their countries of origin upon retirement. The talk focuses on the ‘ends’ of transnational care, considering both the individual, collective and familial life projects and aspirations that long-term domestic workers have sought to cultivate in their years of work abroad; as well as the new aspirations that ageing domestic workers develop as they imagine their futures towards the end of their transnational working lives. I argue that the aspirations of migrant women, while initially stated in linear terms, rarely settle; rather, they take on novel and ambivalent forms that are often temporally at odds with the restrictive migration regimes which shape their transnational care trajectories.
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