At several points on Sunday afternoon in Hong Kong, I found myself passing through some sort of covered walkway: either one of the many overpasses connecting buildings in the Central district, or a sheltered area along the street leading to the Star Ferry pier. Every time I encountered one of these spaces, I’d see a large mass of people -- literally hundreds in some cases -- huddled on the ground together, sitting on newspapers they’d spread over the concrete. The first time I saw this crowd, while walking towards the mid-levels escalators, I thought: wow, they’ve got a big homeless population here. And then I did a double take. These didn’t look like homeless people. For one, they were relatively well-dressed, and they seemed to be assembled in groups of five or six, cheerily picnicking on their newspaper blankets. Even more puzzling: every single one of them was a woman.
It was one of those stranger-in-a-strange-land sights where you know there’s some organizing principle at work, but you can’t for the life of you figure out what it is. Finally, at dinner with some Hong Kong residents, the mystery was explained to me: these women are the city’s vast population of live-in (largely Filipino) maids. Sunday is their day off, and since they don’t have houses of their own to relax in, they have collectively decided to take over the public walkways of the city to unwind with their friends. And sure enough, on Monday when I explored the same passages, not a single person was sitting on the ground. The picnic was over.
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