What is an "ideal" home? a multimodal discourse analysis of the housing names and TV advertisements in Hong Kong

Abstract

“Bik Hoi Laam Tin” (碧海藍天)—which literally means “blue sea and clear sky”—is not a line in a poem but the name of a private housing complex in Hong Kong. Odd though it may seem, all housings in Hong Kong are named. As acquiring private housing in Hong Kong is infamously difficult, those who succeed have long been deemed the “successful”, the “elites”. Developers have even invented different housing names to manifest this different and prestigious identity of residents/potential buyers. Seeing these names and their TV advertisements as semiotic resources, investigating the settings and patterns, with the help of the computer program Python, this article unveils the trends of these materials from the 1980s to the 2020s in Hong Kong: Increasingly, there is a continuous need to construct and manifest, more explicitly, the elite identity through home commercialization. Implied in these housing names are not only an “ideal” home created by the estate developers but a continuous demonstration of elite identity, an uninterrupted indulgence of superiority, an encouragement of alienation, and unceasing naturalization of the worsening wealth disparity in Hong Kong.