Nostalgia in the Making of Urban Forms: Hong Kong & Shanghai

About the program

This is a 400-level History course offered by UBC’s Department of History Professor Henry Yu (Principal of St. John’s College), in partnership with Hong Kong University (HKU) Department of Urban Planning and Design Instructor Christina Lo, Assistant Professor Cecilia Chu, and the Shanghai Study Centre. Students will explore different perspectives on the urban forms, geographies, cultures and histories of Vancouver, Hong Kong and Shanghai through rich, city-specific coursework that will include field trips, workshops, lectures, and guest speakers. The program intends to encourage students to develop and refine their respective writing, research, project management, film and team work skills. In addition, UBC students will have the opportunity to meet, learn from, and work with HKU students. This is ideal for anyone looking for a short yet rewarding academic, social, and travel exchange experience.

Coursework will include a combination of lectures by Professor Henry Yu (Vancouver), Professor Cecilia Chu (Hong Kong), and relevant guests; course readings that feature Vancouver, Hong Kong and Shanghai as focal points of study; group discussions; individual weekly journal assignments; field visits around each respective city; workshops; and a final project (paper + film).

General timeline

The program will run May 11 – Jun 19, 2015. Below is a rough itinerary; the details of our travel plans in June are subject to change.

May 11-29: Lectures by Professor Henry Yu at UBC

May 29- May 31: Class travels to Hong Kong

June 1-11: Lectures, Workshops and Field studies at Hong Kong University (HKU). Students will go on a day trip to Macau.

June 12-19: Lectures, Workshops, Field Studies at the Shanghai Studies Centre

Eligibility and prerequisites

This program is suitable for students second year and up from a variety of majors, not limited to the Faculty of Arts. Students should have a genuine interest in the course material prior to taking part in this program. Graduating students may also apply.

Program fees

The program fee is $2,100-$2,300 (approximately). The final fee depends on the number of students in the program.

INCLUDED in program fee	NOT included in program fee
Accommodations in Hong Kong and Shanghai One-way flight from Hong Kong to Shanghai Roundtrip ferry transportation from Hong Kong to Macau Field trips entrance fees Guest lectures Workshops Three group meal Go Global Fee	Roundtrip flight between Vancouver and Hong Kong UBC tuition (3 credits) Meals Bus and taxi fare within Hong Kong, Macau, and Shanghai Health or travel insurance Immunizations (if necessary) Chinese visas (if necessary) Personal spending money for communications, snacks, souvenirs, etc.

All qualifying students will receive a $1000 Go Global Award.

Click to visit Go Global website for full information

Eligible Courses (2015S)

Nostalgia in the Making of Urban Form in Vancouver, Hong Kong, and Shanghai

If you are interested in traveling, food, heritage, culture, history, urban planning, and/or geography, this GoGlobal Group Study program is for you!

Nostalgia in the Making of Urban Form is a 3 credit, 400-level History course (HIST) that will feature Vancouver, Hong Kong and Shanghai as focal points of study.

This is ideal for anyone looking for a short yet rewarding academic, social, and travel experience.

May 11-29: Lectures by Professor Henry Yu begin at UBC
May 29- May 31: Class travels to Hong Kong
June 1-11: Hong Kong University (HKU)
June 12-19: Shanghai Studies Centre
*This is a rough itinerary; the details of our travel plans in June could change.

The program fee ($1800-$2000) will cover travel within Asia, workshops, field trips, and accommodation in Hong Kong and Shanghai.

Graduating students are also encouraged to apply. Students with a ~70% average should be eligible for the $1000 GoGlobal scholarship.

Please email both Alyssa Leung (alyssaleung101@gmail.com) and Joanna Yang (joanna.yangg@gmail.com) for more course information.

Application deadline: March 2015

Jan 10 – Asian Diaspora Party

In celebration of the 130th Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Vancouver, 8–11 January 2015

Join us for the Asian Diaspora Party!

When: Saturday, January 10, 2015, 7:30-9:30pm

Where: Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 W Hastings Street.

RSVP to: asiandiasporaparty@gmail.com

Click to view expanded map of the MLA convention site and our party event venue

Featured speakers:

Rawi Hage

Rawi Hage is an internationally celebrated fiction writer whose work has been translated into 30 languages, and nominated repeatedly for all major Canadian fiction prizes. Mr. Hage’s first novel, entitled De Niro’s Game (House of Anansi Press, 2006), and set largely in wartime Lebanon, won the International IMPAC Dublin Award. His second novel, entitled Cockroach (House of Anansi Press, 2008), won the Paragraphe/Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and was a Canada Reads finalist. His most recent novel is Carnival (House of Anansi Press, 2013), which won the Paragraphe/Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, and is a riveting account of a taxi driver who reveals the frequently disavowed underside of our global cities.

Lydia Kwa

Lydia Kwa was born in Singapore, but has lived in Canada since 1980, and currently works in Vancouver as a psychologist and writer. She has published written three novels to date: This Place Called Absence (2000), The Walking Boy (2005), and Pulse (2010). Kwa has also published two collections of poetry: The Colours of Heroines (1994) and sinuous (2013).

Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien is the author of three books of fiction, including her most recent novel, Dogs at the Perimeter, which was a finalist of the 2014 International Literature Prize awarded in Berlin. She is a recipient of the City of Vancouver Book Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and the Ovid Festival Prize, and her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Granta, PEN America, Asia Literary Review, Brick and elsewhere. Her books have been translated into 22 languages. Since 2010, she has been part of the international faculty in the MFA program at City University of Hong Kong.

Nov 27 – An Afternoon Discussion with Terry Watada, Jim Wong-Chu, and Glenn Deer

On Thursday November 27, 3.00pm to 4.00pm, ACAM and IKBLC co-hosted an afternoon discussion with Terry Watada and Jim Wong-Chu, two of the pioneers of Asian Canadian writing. Moderated by Dr. Glenn Deer, Professor, English Department UBC, this fireside chat will encompass a wide range of topics, including the speakers’ memories of the early days of the Asian Canadian cultural studies movement.

View event webcast: http://www.ikebarberlearningcentre.ubc.ca/terrywatada/

Photo credit: Denise Fong

Speaker Bio’s

Terry Watada is a Toronto writer with many titles to his credit. His publications include The Sword, the Medal and the Rosary (a manga, HpF Press and the NAJC), The TBC: the Toronto Buddhist Church, 1995 – 2010, (non-fiction, HpF Press & the Toronto Buddhist Church 2010), Kuroshio: The Blood of Foxes, (novel, Arsenal Pulp Press 2007), Obon: the Festival of the Dead (poetry, Thistledown Press 2006), Ten Thousand Views of Rain (poetry, Thistledown Press 2001),Seeing the Invisible (a children’s biography, Umbrella Press 1998), Daruma Days (short fiction, Ronsdale Press 1997), Bukkyo Tozen: a History of Buddhism in Canada (non-fiction, HpF Press & the Toronto Buddhist Church 1996) and A Thousand Homes (poetry, Mercury Press 1995).

As a playwright, Watada has seen seven of his plays achieve mainstage production; his best known is perhaps Vincent, a play about a Toronto family dealing with a schizophrenic son. Workman Arts of Toronto has remounted it several times since its premiere in 1993. Most notably, it was produced at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and the first and second Madness and Arts World Festival in Toronto and Muenster, Germany, respectively. His essays have been published in such varied journals and books as Maclean’s Magazine (March 2011), Canadian Literature (UBC), Ritsumeikan Hogaku “Kotoba to sonohirogari” (Ritsumeikan University Press, Kyoto Jpn), Crossing the Ocean: Japanese American Culture from Past to Present, Jimbun-shoin Press (Kyoto Jpn), and Anti-Asian Violence in North America (AltaMira Press, California). He wrote a monthly column in the Japanese-Canadian national journal the Nikkei Voice for 25 years. He now contributes a monthly column for the Vancouver JCCA Bulletin which expanded its scope to a national level in 2012.

Among his numerous citations and awards, he was presented with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal and the NAJC National Merit Award recognizing his writing, his music and his community volunteerism in 2013. His archives which include records, tapes, and significant artifacts of the Asian North American experience have been collected as the Terry Watada Special Collection and housed in the East Asian Library and his manuscripts (drafts and final), personal papers and books have been housed in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Robarts Library, University of Toronto. He is awaiting the publication of his fourth collection of poetry – The Game of 100 Ghosts (TSAR Publications, Fall 2014) – and his second manga, Light at a Window (Toronto NAJC and HpF Press, Fall 2014).

Jim Wong Chu was born in Hong Kong in 1949, and came to Canada in 1953 settling in Vancouver in 1961. Witness to and participant in much of the Chinese Canadian activism in the 1970s and early 80s, Jim became one of its documenters. After completing a degree in Creative Writing at UBC in the 1980s Jim published Chinatown Ghosts (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1986), the first book of poetry published by an Asian Canadian. As a persistent activist and cultural producer Jim co-founded the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop, Ricepaper Magazine, Pender Guy Radio, the Asian Canadian Performing Arts Resource (ACPAR), literASIAN: A Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing and the Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Festival. With the sheer girth of his activity Jim has been instrumental in creating a cultural scene inclusive of Asian Canadian talent.

Wong-Chu is among the first authors of Asian descent with the likes of SKY Lee and Paul Yee who challenged the Canadian literary establishment and questioned why it was devoid of any Asian writers. His book Chinatown Ghosts (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1986) was one of the first books of poetry by an Asian Canadian writer. Wong-Chu later co-edited and co-editor Inalienable Rice and Many Mouthed Birds, two of the earliest anthologies of Asian Canadian writing.

Dr. Glenn Deer completed his B.A. (Honours) at the University of Alberta and his M.A. and Ph.D. at York University, Toronto. His early interests were in contemporary poetry and phenomenological poetics and he wrote his M.A. thesis on Robert Creeley. Longspoon Press published a collection of his poetry in 1982. During his Ph.D. research, after completing comprehensive exams in Renaissance Literature, Rhetoric and Critical Theory, and Canadian Literature, he began to focus on discourse studies, the rhetoric of power in narrative fiction, and postmodernism and Canadian Literature. After completing his Ph.D. at York in 1987, he joined the English Department at the University of British Columbia to teach in the areas of rhetoric and Canadian Literature. McGill-Queen’s University Press published his study of ideology and discourse in Canadian fiction in 1994, Postmodern Canadian Fiction and the Rhetoric of Authority.

In 1993 Deer’s interests in ideology critique and the rhetoric of racialization developed into research on rhetorical representations of Asian Canadian culture in the local media and a series of directed readings with graduate students, graduate seminars, and undergraduate courses in the areas of comparative Asian Canadian and Asian American studies. He received a Vice-President’s grant in 1997 to organize the conference “Diversity, Writing, and Social Critique.” In 1999 he was the guest editor for a special issue of Canadian Literature on Asian Canadian writing (Number 163, December 1999), and he has been an associate editor with the journal since the summer of 2000. From 1999 to 2002, he served as the Chair of the First-Year Program in English.

Deer’s recent teaching and research interests include the politics of historiography in Michael Ondaatje, comparative studies of Asian American and Asian Canadian writing, mixed-race writing and trans-ethnic desire, the representations of food in trans-cultural writing, and the discourses of the nuclear. He has written an editorial for the Fall 2002 issue (number 172) of Canadian Literature on the aftermath of September 11: “Writing in the Shadow of the Bomb”. His current graduate seminar is an attempt to work through some of the features of modern thought and literature that arise in the context of such global crises.

November 27, 3.00-4.00PM at the Dodson Room (Rm 302), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

This talk is sponsored by the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program and the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre

IKBLC_Blue_w_text_2014

Nov 18 – Panel Discussion on the Umbrella Revolution

Umbrella Revolution Panel Discussion. Photo credit: Denise Fong

On Tuesday, November 18, the Belkin Art Gallery hosted a conversation with UBC professors Hedy Law (School of Music), Michelle LeBaron (Faculty of Law) and Henry Yu (Department of History) to better understand recent protests in the streets of Hong Kong. What contexts inform this pro-democracy activism? How might we make sense of our relationship to the demonstrations and its resonance here on campus and in Vancouver?

Hedy Law, a musicologist who has been paying close attention to uses of music in the Umbrella Movement, will discuss music and the politicization of space in the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement.

Michelle LeBaron researches and teaches on cross-cultural conflict, and will speak on the historical and worldview dynamics of the protests in Hong Kong. She will also pose questions about creative ways to address the conflicts.

Henry Yu, Vancouver Project Leader for the Hong Kong Canada Crosscurrents Project, will speak about the historical contexts for the protests in Hong Kong and the connections between Hong Kong and Vancouver.

—

Photo by Stephen Fung, @TheFallingStar.
#UBC Goddess of Democracy has an umbrella today. Retrieved from twitter.com/TheFallingStar
Posted October 1, 2014; accessed November 4, 2014.

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
1825 Main Mall, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z2
http://www.belkin.ubc.ca | belkin.gallery@ubc.ca
t: (604) 822-2759 f: (604) 822-6689
Open 10-5 Tue-Fri, 12-5 Sat-Sun

World Sinophone Drama Competition for Young Playwrights

The World Sinophone Drama Competition for Young Playwrights project invites young playwrights (aged 18-35) to submit new scripts composed in either English or Chinese for the inaugural round of this international drama competition. The Competition seeks to encourage production of new dramatic works that reflect upon global Chinese culture from a variety of perspectives and enrich our understanding of Sinophone cultures, circulations, histories, and communities.

For English-language submissions, we welcome works of self-reflection from members of Sinophone communities, as well as those that explore encounters among the Sinophone and other cultural contexts; for Chinese-language submissions, there are no specific requirements for content.

Online Submission: www.2015wsdc.com

Participant Qualifications: Participants must be between 18 and 35 years of age at the time of submission to qualify (Date of Birth between 01/01/1980 and 12/31/1997). Competition entry is limited to single authors; works written collectively will not be accepted.

Submission Guidelines:

Both Chinese and English-language scripts accepted.
Participants must fill out the online registration form at http://www.2015wsdc.com, and submit their work in Word and PDF files following the instructions and format specified online.
Deadline: February 25, 24:00 (GMT+8), 2015.

Award Packages: Publishing bilingual E-scripts and World premiere readings of winners in October 2015; Global workshop + reading tour 2016-2017.

WSDC_official Terms and Conditions_20141027

Nov 12 – The Missing Bachelor Man

On November 12 (12-1pm), ACAM program director Prof. Chris Lee presented a talk for the Social Justice @ UBC Noted Scholars Lecture Series, ” The Intimate Public Sphere: Thinking Through the Skin” at the Institute of GRSJ at Jack Bell Building.

Photo credit: Denise Fong

Before 1947, the vast majority of Chinese in Canada were men, most of whom were separated from extended families in China. While the “bachelor man” is a well known figure in Chinese Canadian history and politics, he is curiously neglected in contemporary Anglophone Chinese Canadian literature. Rather than a clear-cut case of historical mis-representation, this absence reveals the complex intersections of nationalism, race, and sexuality. This talk traces the representation of bachelor men in works by SKY Lee and Winston Christopher Kam in order to theorize the “worldliness” of Chinese Canadian writing vis-à-vis transnational histories of Chinese migration.

Dr. Chris Lee is Associate Professor of English and Director of UBC’s new program in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies. He is the author of The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Mediation and Asian American Literature (Stanford University Press, 2012, winner of the Literary Criticism book award from the Association for Asian American Studies) and a co-editor of Tracing the Lines: Reflections on Contemporary Poetics and Cultural Politics in Honour of Roy Miki (Talonbooks, 2013). He is the Canada Area Editor of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures in the Americas. His current research focuses on trans-Pacific literary thought in the Cold War Chinese diaspora and the politics of realism in contemporary Chinese Canadian literature.

Date: Wednesday Nov 12, 12pm
Location: 2080 West Mall, Jack Bell Bldg. Room 028
University of British Columbia

Co-sponsored by Department of English, St. John’s College and Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice

http://grsj.arts.ubc.ca/events/event/the-missing-bachelor-man/

Nov 13 – ACAM Open House

On November 13, Asian Canadian and Asian Migration (ACAM) Studies hosted its first Open House event at Buchanan Tower 104A (Click for map) from 12pm-1:30pm. Undergraduate/ Graduate students and ACAM faculty members who are interested/ involved in the program were invited to attend the event. The Open House included a short presentation by ACAM program director Prof. Chris Lee, screening of student community films, student/faculty meet and greet, and refreshments.

Prof. Chris Lee giving a presentation about ACAM. Photo credit: Denise Fong

Meet ACAM faculty and students in the program

Learn about community-based student projects

Find out how to be part of ACAM

UBC Launches ACAM on September 23, 2014

Excerpt from UBC Public Affairs article: An Acceptance Letter 69 Years Later

September 18, 2014 – by Heather Amos

The new Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies program

“Canada has changed a great deal over the last 100 years,” says Prof. Henry Yu, who teaches history at UBC. “Until 1949, anti-Asian legislation deprived Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians, and Indo-Canadians of the vote, and prevented them from working in many jobs and living in some neighbourhoods. Until 1967, Canada’s immigration policy excluded Asians.”

“One of the important lessons students grapple with in the new program is the question of how a racist society was both built and then remade, and who struggled to make Canada a more just society.”

The minor, created with the involvement of different Asian Canadian communities, gives students a chance to explore the rich history of Asians in Canada. It includes courses from a variety of fields such as geography, history, sociology, literature, and fine arts, as well as a course where students create short documentaries that put Asian Canadian issues in the spotlight.

Carolyn Nakagawa is an English Honours student in the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies program and she’ll be meeting Henry Sugiyama in person on September 23 when he, at the invitation of President Arvind Gupta, travels to UBC from his home in Toronto to attend a symbolic first day of class.

“Readings and texts become tools to engage with the community and with lived experiences,” says Nakagawa. “People like Dr. Sugiyama are at the centre of the learning we’re doing.”

Read related articles about Dr. Henry Sugiyama and Carolyn Nakagawa.

New program and a new way of learning

The new Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies is not just a history program. With courses drawn across the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences, it empowers students to become storytellers and teachers. Last year, a new course in film production asked students to use video to highlight under-reported stories – from the past or present – of Asian Canadians

Joanna Yang, a recent graduate who took the course, and master’s student Stephanie Fung created a short documentary on queer Asian Canadian youth that will be shown at film festivals in Montreal and Torino this coming year. Yang says that “learning by doing” has been life-changing.

“We are harnessing the power of new media to preserve, create, and spread knowledge and to tell stories that have often been ignored,” she says.

Students also created short films on topics such as Canada’s first tofu company, playing hockey in Asia and how Filipino international students stay connected to home. Students worked with community members across cultures, and used media to communicate important topics. As part of UBC’s more flexible approach to learning, the program aims to create a better experience for student learning and engagement.

“The Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies Program aims to give students skills that will enable them to impact their communities long after they graduate from UBC,” says Chris Lee. “We hope it’s a fitting way to honour older generations who suffered from racial discrimination.”

UBC welcomes first student of ACAM program

Photo credit: Denise Fong

On September 23, 2014, Dr. Henry Sugiyama was officially admitted to the University of British Columbia as the first student in the Asian Canadian and Asian Migration (ACAM) studies program. Sugiyama received an official admission letter to UBC and the ACAM program, as well as a UBC tie and alumni pin during the official ceremony.

The ceremony featured speeches by Dr. Chris Lee (UBC Associate Professor of English and ACAM Program Director), Mr. Alden Habacon (UBC Director of Intercultural Understanding Strategy Development), Ms. Carolyn Nakagawa (UBC ACAM student), Dr. Henry Sugiyama, and Ms. Mary Kitagawa (community activist).

On his first day of class as a UBC student, Dr. Henry Sugiyama attended a special lecture on Asian Migration History taught by ACAM faculty member Dr. Henry Yu. Watch video recording here.

Remarks by UBC Student Carolyn Nakagawa

If you’re wondering what my qualifications are for speaking here today (because I had to think about it myself), last year I co-coordinated a student-directed seminar on the Nisei poet and artist Roy Kiyooka, and I’m currently conducting a research project on the life and legacy of Nisei musician Harry Aoki. In 2012, my father, who is here today, was the alumni representative for the honorary degree ceremony for the students of ’42. So there’s been a number of coincidences that have brought me in contact with internment as an experience and a legacy in the two years since my grandmother passed away, that are indirectly connected to her own experience and my grandfather’s of forced relocation during the war.

The history I’ve been learning these past few years is the history of a generation – the wartime Nisei generation, whose experiences form a crisis point for Japanese Canadian history. My grandparents were among them, as were Roy Kiyooka, Harry Aoki, and Dr. Sugiyama. What this generation endured at the hands of the government has become what defines the entire history of the Japanese Canadian community, including how we experience it today. Learning about what happened, I feel like I’m uncovering things that have always been around me, in my own family, that I never properly noticed or understood. My grandparents never spoke about the war, or seemed to want to, to me or to their children. They didn’t seem to think it was important. But the more I read and learn, the more my understanding of my family and myself changes. I’ve realized that the fact that I am here – that I go to UBC and was born in Vancouver and grew up here, natural as it may seem – cannot be taken for granted.

For example, I keep coming across this explanation about Japanese Canadians not having the franchise before 1949, which meant not only that they couldn’t vote, but that they couldn’t be doctors, lawyers, politicians or pharmacists – and that always makes me pause, because my dad is a licensed pharmacist, and the registrar of the College of Pharmacists, which means he actually signs the licenses for all pharmacists in BC, and not only was that not possible for his father because he didn’t economically have access to that kind of education, but even if he had, it wouldn’t have been legal. I think it’s incredible that my grandparents came back to Vancouver after being chased into the interior. I think it’s amazing that, even while they put it behind them and acted like it wasn’t worth talking about, there were others in the community who fought for years until the government gave them compensation. And I’m very proud to belong to a tradition of people as hardworking as my grandparents and as committed to social justice as those who disagreed with them. I’m glad to be a part of welcoming Dr. Sugiyama today because I get to engage with that tradition and not just passively inherit it.

I say I inherit it because I am a fourth-generation Japanese Canadian, and learning about this history I do get the sense that it belongs to me, something I’m able to recognize even if I never knew it before. But I don’t think it’s only my inheritance. It’s the inheritance of everyone who chooses to live or work or study here because “here” is such a fraught and complex term. When I say “here” I mean Vancouver or the Lower Mainland or Canada or UBC in varying contexts; the more I learn about all the places I am in the more I realize that it took a series of atrocities and a series of incredible achievements to bring each and every one of us here. For me I think about the fact that this is Musqueam land, first of all, and my grandparents were forced to leave here in 1942 but they came back and my father was born here and went to UBC. And I am at UBC now, and it was never questioned that I would go here or that I have every right to be here. But that’s not to be taken for granted. Even with that, people look at my face and still don’t believe me when I say I am from here. As much as things seem to change, and do, the past doesn’t disappear. Dr. Sugiyama’s history with UBC may not have stopped him, but it hasn’t disappeared. We here today all inherit that legacy, and what we do with it is the question we’ll be asking in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies.

— Remarks by Carolyn Nakagawa, ACAM student, made on September 23, 2014 at St. John’s College UBC.

News stories featuring Dr. Henry Sugiyama and the new ACAM program: