Cultural capital and consumption practices for embodied acculturation: The case of educated and affluent Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong

While acculturation research on migration tends to adopt a psychological orientation and focuses on migrants’ adaptation challenges in distinct host cultures, our study draws on the practice theories (e.g. works of P. Bourdieu, E. Shove and A. Warde) to explore with a processual view how educated and affluent immigrants from the Mainland China and Taiwan adapt to their new life in the city of Hong Kong. We explore how this particular group of migrants mobilize cultural resources and embodied consumption practices to negotiate for existence and new identity over time in the new social setting. Do migrants with similar ethnic background as the destination and relatively good economic capital find the need of acculturation and integration at all? How are they enabled and empowered by their embodied habitus to mobilize cultural competence and practices to achieve acculturation? From where do migrants acquire those cultural skills and knowing that help (re)produce migrants’ habitus? Are they pre-exist before migration or acquired and accrued over time (Skeggs, 2004)? While acculturation studies for Asia are comparatively scarce, the three places of Hong Kong, Mainland China and Taiwan present a unique bordering case study to understand the malleable structure-agency relationship. Though sharing historical roots and Chinese background, the three places have undergoing dissimilar political regimes and value socialization, yet ethnic increasingly converging in terms of economic mutuality. The educated and affluent group is chosen due to targeted government policies in attracting talents. Their higher economic capital also allows a focus on the role of cultural capital in acculturation. The biographic narratives with 15 migrants reveal how nuanced embodied competence and performative knowing constitutes their proficiency in accommodating migration hysteresis. Cultural barriers are better traversed through prior familiarity with the host culture, readiness for integration, language similarity, appreciation of host virtues and prudent fusion of consumption practices. The relative salience of these cultural resources and practices evolves over time, inducing a process of using, not using and adjusting, as well as prudent optimization of consumption across impalpable borders. Sources of socialization are also found changing over stages of migration. The study shows the mutability of habitus in cross-border cultural assimilation, and the evolution of nuanced competence found would provide practical implications to policy makers and migration authorities