It’s Sunday — the day of the “maids” in Hong Kong. It is an extraordinary thing to walk into, most intensely in Central and across the public spaces of Kowloon. Hong Kong has in the order of 340,000 to 380,000 “domestic helpers” — a great many for a territory of about 7.5 million — overwhelmingly women, and mostly from the Philippines and Indonesia.
Their one day off is usually Sunday, and they take it together. They shop, they meet friends, they share food, some dance, some simply lie down and sleep. Because Hong Kong offers so few places to sit for free, the women make their own: they gather on pavements, elevated walkways and parking areas, on rugs or flattened cardboard boxes, and for a day the city’s hard edges become a kind of front room.
It is hard to describe the force of seeing it for the first time, and it leaves mixed feelings — real joy and fun, and also visible exhaustion. Most of these women are required to live in their employers’ homes, often carrying the care of children or elderly relatives; the arrangement works well for some, and advocacy groups and first-hand accounts have exposed exploitation and abuse in others. A Sunday on the walkways opens onto larger questions — about how a wealthy city organises its domestic life, and about the poverty and lack of opportunity that lead these women to leave their own families to send money home.
We met the crowds in Mong Kok, among the markets and the elevated walkways, and found ourselves, as everyone does, quietly moved.
More of the districts where this plays out → Mong Kok