SPECIAL EDITION: WORLD on the MOVE : SNAPSHOT : The Maids of Hong Kong: A Journey of Loneliness, Humiliation

It’s Sunday in Hong Kong--maids’ day off--and in Statue Square in the heart of downtown, the ritual weekly gathering of Filipino domestic helpers is in full swing.

Sheltered from the seasonal sun by the stone archways of a colonial-style courthouse at the edge of the square, Fely Gallenero and half a dozen friends have settled down on a straw mat to feast on roasted chicken, macaroni salad, fried rice, a vermicelli rice-noodle dish called pansit bihon , guavas and bananas.

Gallenero, 28, and her friends are among several thousand Filipino domestic helpers who jam the square every week to share their day off with friends. From early morning until well past dark, the joking, chattering crowd, mostly young women, overflows into a park and an open concourse under the high-rise headquarters of Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp.

“I come every Sunday, just to meet relatives and friends,” said Gallenero, a veteran maid who worked for a Somali family in Abu Dhabi, Brazil and Ivory Coast. She left that family, returned briefly to the Philippines, then came to Hong Kong two years ago.

Most of the 68,000 Filipino domestic helpers in Hong Kong do not have enough space of their own at their employers’ homes to invite guests over, nor enough money to spend their day off shopping or eating in restaurants. So, many find that the best way to spend the day is to head to the square, which is full of benches and greenery plus out-of-the-way patches of pavement and concrete-lined fountains that provide additional sitting space.

While unlicensed hawking is officially banned, the crowd manages to reproduce a bit of the atmosphere of a Filipino bazaar. Movie and fashion magazines in Tagalog and English, horoscope comics and Manila newspapers are sold from shopping bags. Hong Kong dollars can be changed for pesos to be hand-carried by friends or relatives to loved ones back home. Chinese vendors shaded by umbrellas sell ice cream, candy and soft drinks, but almost everyone else in the square is Filipino.

Ruth Jimenez, a mother of 14, works six days a week as a maid, then spends Sundays working at the square, passing out leaflets advertising a door-to-door shipping service. Her entire family stayed behind in the Philippines.

“Marriage contract!” Jimenez shouted at a young woman walking by, who took her moving company leaflet with some surprise. The woman glanced curiously at the handout, then handed it back with a laugh. “If it’s a marriage contract, I’ll sign it at once,” she said.

“That’s what we do here,” Jimenez explained with a wry smile as the woman walked away. “We make jokes to get away from our loneliness. I say, ‘marriage contract,’ and they like it. I think they want to have a boyfriend. . . . They’re all single here, even if they have husbands left behind in the Philippines. Everyone is lonely. Some are happy, if their employers are good. . . . Some cry a lot, because their employers are mean. But mostly they are happy, because they earn a lot.”

It is difficult for ordinary Filipinos to get visas to work in Hong Kong in any position other than as a domestic helper. The status of maids is low, but the wages are good enough by Philippine standards to attract highly qualified applicants. As a result, nearly all Filipino maids speak English, and most held jobs in the Philippines in respected fields such as teaching or nursing. And they resent that they are looked down on by most Hong Kong Chinese.

Chrispina Malangen, 38, is typical. Married to a day laborer carpenter and the mother of five children, she came to Hong Kong early last year, leaving her family behind. In the Philippines, she worked in a medical clinic.

“I took the blood pressure of patients, gave injections and weighed the babies,” she said. “I told my boss at the clinic, ‘I want to go abroad now.’ He said, ‘But there are so many patients who need you here.’ I said, ‘My salary is not enough. I want to earn more money.’ He said, ‘OK, when you come back, you can work again here.’ ”

Now, Malangen earns $360 a month, plus room and board--more than 10 times her salary in the Philippines. She spends her days cooking, cleaning the house and taking care of the children for a Chinese family. Her employers have no idea what she did before coming to Hong Kong.

“I cannot tell the story, because they have not asked me what my work was,” Malangen explained. “They never ask me like that. They just tell me, ‘You clean the bathroom, clean the sitting room’--like that. I say, ‘OK, Mum.’ In the Philippines, my patients used to call me ‘Mum.’ ”

On Sundays in the square, laughing with friends beneath the palms and ornamental rubber trees, one can try to forget the loneliness and humiliation.

Gallenero, who is paying the rent for the Manila home where her husband, a driver, lives with their children, says with a giggle: “I have a maid in the Philippines. I am working as a maid, and I have a maid. It’s funny, you know.”