Hi there, links,
First, hope your move to HK goes smoothly. Honestly, there aren't really any "daycare" places in HK. Your best option is to hire a live-in domestic helper. It seems weird for an American to do this but it's quite normal here. I'm also from the States and we employ a domestic helper to care for our two children while we're away at work.
Second, if you don't know which area in Hong Kong you're going to live it's really hard to provide any useful suggestions for school. Most people send their children to school in a nearby neighborhood if they live in HK. Children can start full-day nursery school here at 2-years-old and they generally start kindergarten when they're 3-years-old. Neither are compulsory. We sent our son (now almost 5-years-old) to nursery school at 2 and kindergarten when he wasn't quite 3-years-old.
As far as "diversity." Hong Kong is a really diverse place but as carang pointed out, it still is 95% Chinese. Some schools are more diverse than others but in most local schools your child is still going to be a minority--as are all non-Chinese children in the local system.
I teach at a really rural, small primary school and we still are pretty diverse. Most of the students are Chinese, however "Chinese" can mean a lot of things--we have students who are local Hong Kong Chinese and have grown up with the local culture here and speaking Cantonese as their first language. We also have students who have immigrated or are bussed in from Mainland China who have a very different culture from that of Hong Kong and speak Putonghua (Mandarin) as their first language and they are actually learning Cantonese and English as their second languages! Then we have overseas Chinese students. These students were born in the UK, Australia or North American and may have spent a big portion o their lives living there. They may or may not speak Cantonese or Mandarin as a second language at home but usually their first language is English and they usually do not write Chinese very well--they feel more "Western" compared with their local or Mainland classmates. Then we have a high percentage of South East Asian students from countries such as Pakistan, India and Nepal. We also have students from Indonesia and the Philippines and then we have a few students who are from Africa (often Nigeria) but have immigrated to Hong Kong via various routes--sometimes having lived all over the world. One family of children from Africa had already lived in America, France and Mainland China before they came to our school last year. They moved around a lot due to their parents' international businesses. Then there are children like mine and carang's who are mixed. Their are many children living in my neighborhood who have African fathers and Indonesian, Chinese or Philippina mothers. There are quite a few children with British, American, Australian, German or Canadian mothers/fathers and Chinese mothers/fathers. It's really a melting pot here.
If your worry is that your child won't be accepted due to his skin color and culture, I'd say HK tends to be a fairly accepting place. Not saying that there aren't mean kids out there or racist or discriminatory practices but I'd say that as far as I can see the various different children who attend my school are accepted and loved--it just depends on the culture of the school--the culture at my school is very pro-diversity.
