Alonso: "Those are the Philipina "helpers". They get Sundays off so they prepare food and get together with their friends. They live for Sundays, as you might imagine -- hence the positive energy. They congregate in public places because they are live-in help and have no where else to go. Walking among them feels like stepping into a bird cage. There is something about the sing-song nature of Tagalog that gives their conversations a distinct quality."
and Gary: "The women of Causeway Bay you mention in your blog are actually "domestic helpers" (Amahs), who all have Sunday off. Because they are cheap labor, even middle class Hong Kong residents hire them and they live with their respective employers' families. Originally, most of them came from the Philippines but now more and more are from Indonesia, thus the Muslim attire."
Local contacts also explained how Chinese law prohibits hiring Mainland Chinese to serve in these roles (even though Chinese from the Hinterland would leap at the opportunity to move to HK and live with a local family, likely increasing their annual income by a hundred times or more) due to the potential "damage" such lowly labor would cause the Chinese culture.
It's a complicated world.
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