Wedding Consumption in Hong Kong: Dynamics in Marital and Family Relations

This research studies how marrying couples do marital and family relationships through wedding consumption. By analyzing data obtained from an ethnographic study based on in-depth interviews and participant observations from a sample of 33 brides and 21 grooms, I analyze how marrying couples do marital and family relations, i.e. how they create, maintain and transform both familial and marital memberships and boundaries through the narration and reasoning of their wedding choice and relevant monetary practices. Even though public perception dictates that a wedding is owned by the couple to publicly display their independent coupledom in a romantic, stylistic and lavish ways, it is also an important family occasion that incorporates the bride into the groom's family. These two contradictory conceptions of independent marriage and harmonious family relations put the couple and their parents into a dilemma in whether to define the wedding as jointly or solely owned by the couple.;I probed into the negotiation of lavish and stylistic weddings and the relevant money management and division of wedding labor to examine relationship making processes. The data shows that, on the family level: 1) the couple incorporates itself into the larger family network based on perceived moral obligations, the desire to maintain parent-child relationship and also to establish in-laws relationships, (e.g. through buying a lavish wedding banquet); 2) the couple also purchase various wedding consumption goods and services to differentiate the coupledom from the family network, (e.g. through wedding photography); 3) negotiation of new and existing family roles are also reflected through the couple's negotiation of bride price and dowry with their parents. On the couple's level, they work towards the creation of an independent coupledom -- a joint decision-making and consumption unit - through variously embracing and resisting stylistic consumption goods and services in the wedding market. Last but not least, the couple also negotiates the pattern of financial responsibility and division of labor based on gender ideology and "marriage ideal". In general, couples mostly manage to create and maintain harmonious marital and family relationships despite undercurrents of tension.