Would you take a low-paid job and turn yourself into a second-class citizen just to make a few dollars and see the world?Swedish au pairs and French maids are legendary for it but it's more difficult to see why two German girls from good families would come over to London, specifically to find such work.

Hannah and Elsa were two ladies at a loose end some summers ago, having negotiated work at a pizza place on Shad Thames and with the weekend to put in before they began their first shift on the Monday morning. I met them in Blackheath, trying to negotiate accommodation for the night. What else was a man to do on a Sunday afternoon other than take them through Greenwich Park and give them a boat trip to the city?

So, once again – would you work for a pittance as a second class citizen in a foreign country? What if that country was, say, China? You’d get to see the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square and the like, you’d get to travel in your two days off and you’d improve your Chinese. And be looked down on. Would that trouble you?

It’s also interesting how some nationalities appear to make better domestic assistants than others, when in foreign countries. There’s an important distinction here – in foreign countries. In Britain itself, as you’d know, going into service in Edwardian times was often seen as a career move for girls of the working classes. Ditto in the Anglo colonies such as Australia and New Zealand.

So what to make of the Filipino girls who flock to Hong Kong and China? Economic necessity, yes – and yet surely something more? Why would they consent to becoming a ‘bun bun’ or amah in a Chinese household and look at how they got there in the first place.

These girls are tertiary educated, usually speaking a high level of English and other languages and could carve themselves a niche in Western society with great aplomb – if they could get there, that is. They’re often Christian, as distinct from Muslim and maybe there’s something in that.

Arabs in Israel, blacks in many countries, including America and China, Spaniards and Pakistanis in Britain, whites in Zimbabwe, Indians in British India, burakumin in Japan, women in certain countries I’m not going to mention, Kurds everywhere.

Leaving aside, for one moment, the enforced oppression of many of these, the Ukrainian and Belarussian slave trade and the position of Muslims in France, what makes a person voluntarily submit to the indignity of being regarded as a second class citizen, beyond dire economic necessity?

Well – money of course. Asia Times mentions a couple, in Shanghai, who offered 6,000 yuan per month for a Filipino maid with a college degree to teach their child English and do the housework. An average Filipino maid in mainland China now makes between 3,000 and 4,000 yuan a month.

They nominally come in as teachers of English and get round the regulations that way. They do as they’re told, give good service and are in high demand with the new mandarins of the economic boom. Some young Chinese themselves cast an eye over the type of money being earned by these girls and want in themselves. Tutoring children and housemaiding, they can earn upwards of 2000 yuan.

But the crux is that demand outstrips supply in this industry where the wage is still far below that of the average office clerk and in an unofficially free market such as this, market forces draw Filipino girls of high quality to the mainland. Shanghai alone needs 600 000 quality maids with the supply currently running at around 300 or 400.

The Asian Times also gave these figures: In Beijing, the annual income of 60% of maids ranged from 6,000 to 8,400 yuan, compared with the average disposable annual income of 15,637 yuan of the urban residents.

It’s the top end, of course, that’s attractive to these girls and consequently the bar is being raised in both what the employers are demanding and in the class of girl applying. Traditionally low class Filipino workers of the itinerant kind, the majority, in other words, find themselves quite out of this burgeoning market and the scramble for qualifications and English is on.

So to come back to the original question – why would someone do such a thing? The answer is - good money, secure work with a benign employer [they know on what side their bread’s buttered in the law of supply and demand], accommodation in one of the new trendy households and security of tenure.