Consuming Home: Memory, Community Building, and Hong Kong Canadian Futures

Saturday, 07 March 2025 | 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. | Nat Taylor Cinema, Room 102, North Ross Building, Keele Campus, York University 

This event brings together archival media, scholarly insight, and lived experience to explore the making of the Hong Kong Canadian consumption cultures and community in Toronto across generations. It is structured in three parts:

• Screening: A curated presentation of iconic 1970s and 1980s Hong Kong television commercials, offering an entry point into consumer culture, everyday life, and collective memory.
• Keynote Talk: Professor Emerita Lucia Lo (Geography, YorkU) will trace how earlier waves of Hong Kong migration shaped patterns of consumption, spatial belonging, and community formation in Canada. Her talk will draw on her pioneering research on ethnicity and the geography of consumption, particularly concerning shopping malls and urban spaces, and connect these histories to the recent transformations associated with the Hong Kong Pathway.
• Panel Discussion: Features guest discussants from newer waves of Hong Kong Canadian economic and cultural life, specifically Stanley Fu of 852community.ca, Andrew Choi of Haven Brews, and Sandra Kuan of Bowl Cut Paper Goods.

Collectively, the components are designed to invite a "transgenerational conversation" about memory, continuity, change, and the reimagining of home across time and place.

About the keynote talk

Title: The Role of Ethnicity in the Geography of Consumption

Speaker: Lucia Lo, Professor Emerita and Senior Scholar of Geography, York University 

Professor Emerita Lucia Lo of Geography at York University has held leadership roles in research centers, including the Geomatics for Informed Decision Making and the Ontario Centre of Excellence on Research on Immigration and Settlement, and served as former Chair of the Department of Geography. Trained as an economic geographer, her early research focused on mathematical modeling of transportation demand and consumer spatial behavior.

Since the late 1990s, she shifted her focus to immigration scholarship, examining immigrant integration, their role in economic development, and urban transformation. She has conducted extensive work on the Chinese diaspora, covering their settlement, use of services, labor market performance, entrepreneurship, and consumer behavior. Since retirement, her work has included a comparative project on higher education migration between China, Canada, and the United States.

Professor Lo is also the co-author of two books, Social Infrastructure and Vulnerability in the Suburbs and Intellectual Migration: The Movement of Students and Professionals, in addition to numerous book chapters, journal articles, and technical reports.

Host: Wendy Wong, School of the Arts, Media, Performance, & Design, York University 

Professor Wendy S Wong is an active scholar of Chinese graphic design and comics. She authored Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua (2002) and The Disappearance of Hong Kong in Comics, Advertising and Graphic Design (2018), and co-edited Transnationalism in East and Southeast Asian Comics Art (2022), contributing to global design and comics studies.

All are welcome! Please register using this link.

This event is part of Diaspora, Decolonization, and Dialogue, the Hong Kong Studies Group's 2025–26 event series.

For more information: hongkong[at]yorku.ca