An 83-Square-Meter Flat and a 6,000-Yuan Nanny: What Hong Kong Celebrity Domestic Life Looks Like
Ada Choi's family of five lives in an 83-square-meter apartment worth 30 million HK dollars, and Kenny Chan's nanny earns 6,000 yuan a month. Mainland readers are doing the math.
Ada Choi, the Hong Kong actress mainland audiences know from "The Empress in the Palace," said in an interview this week that she and her husband, the actor Max Zhang, are raising their three children in an 83-square-meter Hong Kong apartment. She is not complaining: seventy-something square meters is already a good-sized flat in Hong Kong, she said, and she is very content.
The numbers travel badly across the border. The apartment is worth about 30 million Hong Kong dollars, and the family has built a loft over the children's rooms to fit bunk beds. The family moved back to Hong Kong from a far more spacious flat in Shanghai, reversing the direction most people in her position travel.
One post summarizing the interview drew more than 6,000 likes, and the most common response was a confession: "first time I had a real sense of Hong Kong's "寸土寸金" -- every inch of land is gold." A celebrity who has been famous for decades lives in an apartment a middle-class family in mainland China would find modest.
The same week, another Hong Kong celebrity household was under discussion: the actor Kenny Chan's wife, Jiang Lisha, revealed in a livestream that her family's nanny earns 6,000-plus yuan a month, plus a 1,500-yuan food allowance, social insurance, and a reimbursed air ticket home each year. The debate that followed was partly about the number -- and partly about something structural: the same nanny in mainland China would cost more than double, and the gap is the reason Hong Kong's domestic-worker market runs on imported labor.
Two households, one lesson: Hong Kong's domestic ceiling -- the space a family of five can afford, the salary a full-time nanny commands -- is a product of the city's housing market, not of the celebrities' wealth. The site has covered this story from the mainland side before: the hotel rooms some city dwellers swap apartments for, and the housing fund that now pays for repairs and property fees. What Hong Kong's stars show, and why mainland readers keep coming back to the topic, is the other side of the argument: what Hong Kong's housing market does to people who can afford it.
"The house size is never the only measure of happiness," one post concluded, echoing the interview. But the sentiment is doing a lot of work: a family of five can afford what is a 30-million-HK-dollar flat, and the only reason it is an 83-square-meter one is that the alternative is a smaller flat in a worse neighborhood. On mainland Chinese social media, where the apartment is a reference point for a family living well, that is the part that is hard to read.