Consuming Home in Hong Kong: A Qualitative Study of Middle Class Aspirations and Practice

This dissertation, "Consuming Home in Hong Kong: a Qualitative Study of Middle Class Aspirations and Practice" by Ka-ki, Catherine, Fong, 方嘉琪, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled Consuming Home in Hong Kong: A qualitative study of middle class aspirations and practice submitted by Fong Ka Ki Catherine for the degree of M.Phil at The University of Hong Kong in March 2007 Home in Hong Kong is the most central and symbolic of all consumption for two reasons. First, it involves big money and is commonly viewed as a life-time matter. Second, it houses family togetherness and warmth, and is commonly thought of as a safe hearth. Reviewing the emergence of a modern domestic ideal in the West and in the mid-70s Hong Kong, we can expect that the middle class remain active in consuming home in Hong Kong. However, the middle class may be internally divided, which complicates our understanding of a Hong Kong modern ideal home. From these lines, I started a study to look at middle class home aspirations and practices in 2005, in the hope to pin down on such diversified and complex picture relating to middle class home consumption. By doing content analysis of property advertisements on newspapers, I found that a dominant presentation of the home centers on the presentations of high class, couple enjoying leisure and consumption, and consumption of exterior space. In response to such, my middle class informants are quick to get at the high class aspects of the presentations; they exhibited varying feelings of acceptance, non-acceptance and compromise. By interviewing 10 middle class men and women in Hong Kong, I found that my informants share a more elaborated home ideal which contains the anti-work features of leisure, comfort, privacy, security and stability, while presuming certain gender and generational relations, and class and non-class consumption. These features are organized according to certain degree of order of priority, and they are found to be loose, varying, and negotiable with the middle class' immediate life conditions. Very importantly, home aspirations are practicable to them. For this, my informants have i unequal access to the aspirations, as they have differing abilities to practice. In actual home practice, resources are determining at all three levels of purchase, home infrastructure and decoration, while gender is an outstanding dimension for home decoration level decisions. The importance of social class and gender as two governing principles of home practice brings some larger implications. Consuming home becomes an act of class consumption, and middle class women play a central role in social reproduction through home distinction. All this analysis adds up to a complex picture of the Hong Kong adaptation of a Western experience of consuming the modern ideal home. ii DOI: 10.5353/th_b3784454 Subjects: Home ownership - Social aspects - China - Hong Kong Consumption (Economics) - Social aspects - China - Hong Kong Middle class - Housing - China - Hong Kong