Sense of place among young transmigrant professionals in Hong Kong

Abstract

Envisioned as ‘Asia’s World City’, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China serves as the lived landscape for this study, which investigates the sense of place of young transmigrant professionals, particularly U.S. American and British nationals. By exploring the everyday lived experiences of young transmigrant professionals through the domains of residence, workplace, and leisure place(s), this study aims to capture experiences lending to young transmigrant professionals’ sense of place in Hong Kong. A qualitative research design guided by a phenomenological perspective has been employed in this study to examine the significance of the tripartite of residence, workplace, and leisure places in Hong Kong as they relate to sense of place. The first person perspective expressed through lived experience is the conduit to this phenomenological enquiry. This thesis provides the final outcome of the main study, which includes twenty-five young transmigrant professional informants between the ages of 21 and 40 recruited via a combination of convenience and snowball sampling. Semi-structured interviews conjointly with visual methods of photography and mapping were employed to elicit responses from the informants. A self-reflective journal consisting of post-interview entries and field site observations in written and visual form, serves as the bracketing tool for reflexivity. The insights from this study provide a window into young transmigrant professionals’ lived experiences for better understanding their sense of place in the lived landscape of the global city of Hong Kong. In this thesis, my findings reveal three key themes on how young transmigrant professionals experience sense of place in Hong Kong: 1) via mobilities-stillness practices; 2) via English linguistic capital; and 3) via diasporic tendencies. Mobility practices can be understood as movement and stillness practices can take many forms, such as staying within an area or limiting/avoiding particular places. Informants’ abilities to engage in mobility-stillness practices of selective place engagement, (un) familiarity management, and local-global sojourn contribute to their sense of place. Choices of mobility, limiting/avoiding mobility, or staying within particular areas are often influenced by opportunities for English language use—young transmigrant professionals’ means of understanding and communicating with their environment. As such, young transmigrant professionals engage in English socio-spatial practices that manifest as linguistic segmentation in Hong Kong’s social and physical landscape. As a third theme, young transmigrant professionals display diasporic tendencies similar to features of traditional diasporas. In a territory which claims itself as ‘Asia’s World City’, the lived experiences of informants within this study articulated through these themes presents a segmented Hong Kong where the ‘global’ or ‘world’ aspect of the city is practiced within particular (elite) milieus, and often juxtaposed with the broader local Hong Kong Chinese context.