About the Symposium
The Backreading Hong Kong symposium brings together scholars, writers, translators, and artists to share their cross-disciplinary humanities research and findings on the city that we call home: Hong Kong, and to ignite stimulating and rigorous discussion. Building on the momentum of previous editions, the 2025 symposium explores the entangled, and at times antagonistic, relationship between the Anglophone and the Sinophone in the study of Hong Kong’s cultural and literary fields.
The Anglophone and the Sinophone are often understood as linguistic domains, geopolitical categories, or literary traditions. But in the context of Hong Kong, these labels are never stable or self-evident. They emerge from colonial legacies and Cold War formations, shape diasporic imaginaries and media ecologies, and constitute sites of aesthetic contestation, translation, and reinvention. This symposium aims to revisit these categories not as fixed binaries, but as historically situated and conceptually porous frameworks for rethinking identity, creativity, and resistance in and through Hong Kong.
Agenda
NOVEMBER 17, 2025 (MONDAY)
Welcoming Address (10:30 a.m.–10:45 a.m.)
Maria Lau (Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library, University of Toronto)
Chris Song (University of Toronto)
Panel A (10:45 a.m.–12:15 p.m.) | Chair: Bernice Hoi Ching Cheung (University of Toronto)
Culinary Translation in Hong Kong
Gilbert Fong and Shelby Chan (Hang Seng University of Hong Kong)
Marked Timbres, Evolving Meanings: Anglophone and Sinophone Soundscapes in Cantopop
Jason Lee (McGill University)
Intersectioning the Anglophone/Sinophone in Fungal Hong Kong
Christopher Payne (University of Toronto)
Panel B (2:15 p.m.–3:15 p.m.) | Chair: Christopher Payne (University of Toronto)
On the Transcultural Practice of Hsu Ti-shan in Hong Kong: Focusing on the English Short Story “Wuu Shiunn”
Carole H.F. Hoyan (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
When Victor Hugo Met Jyu Yu Jai 朱愚齋: Translating Love and Literature in 1950s Hong Kong Romance Fiction
Cleo Sau-ming (Independent scholar)
Graduate Student Colloquium A (3:45 p.m.–5:15 p.m.)
Chair and Discussant: Chair: Christopher Payne (University of Toronto)
Diaspora and the Female Body: Female Displacement and Queer Resistance in Wong Bik-wan’s Fiction
Jessica Song (University of Toronto)
Incarnated History: Translation of Won Bik-wan’s “Veronica the Twice Reincarnated Woman”
Yuxi Tong (University of Toronto)
Tasting Diaspora: Food, Memory, and the Imagination of Hong Kong in Leung Ping-kwan’s Postcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart
Ellie Liu (University of Toronto)
Singing in the Diaspora: The Affects of Traditional Cantonese Song in Dung Kai-cheung and Yeng Pway Ngon’s Fiction
Alexis Lai (University of Toronto)
Body, Language, Voice: Possible Area between Diaspora and Sinophone Theory
Tingying Li (University of Toronto)
NOVEMBER 18, 2025 (TUESDAY)
Panel C (11:00 a.m.–12:30 p.m.) | Bernice Hoi Ching Cheung (University of Toronto)
What is Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Literature?: A Comparative Reading of Ye Si’s Papercuts and Larissa Lai’s The Lost Century
Yiwen Liu (University of Toronto)
Translation as Multiplication: Dung Kai-cheung and the Translation of Hong Kong Sinophone Literature
Gavin Tse (Hong Kong Metropolitan University)
Unsayable Grief: The Limits of Anglophone and Sinophone Words in Derek Chung’s A Cha Chaan Teng That Does Not Exist
Justin K.H. Tse (Singapore Management University) and Xenia L.Y. Chan (Augustana University)
Panel D (2:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m.) | Mitchell Ma (University of Toronto)
Home-Making and Home-Escaping: Interrogating the Politics of Mother Tongue and the Representation of Translingual Childhood in Chinglish and Uprooted
Lanlan Cheng (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Tongueless in Hong Kong and Singapore: The Cruel Optimisation of Language in Satjyu and Jen Mu Chih
Alexis Lai (University of Toronto)
Graduate Student Colloquium B (4:00 p.m.–5:30 p.m.)
Chair and Discussant: Yiwen Liu (University of Toronto)
Legends of the Diasporic Heroes: History, Diaspora, and Nationalism in Jin Yong’s The Legend of the Condor Heroes
Sam Minden (University of Toronto)
Yi Shu and Her Transpacific Practice in Popular Literature: A Case Study of “Huangshigu”
Leslie Shi (University of Toronto)
Ghostly Identities, Ethereal Belonging: Exploring the Role of the Spectre in Leung Ping-kwan’s Poetry
Brigid Macaoud (University of Toronto)
Staging The Third Space: Intergenerational Diaspora and Wai-Sum Poon’s Family Plays in Post-1997 Hong Kong
Shiu Hei Larry Ng (University of Toronto)
Organizers
Department of Language Studies,University of Toronto Scarborough
Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library, University of Toronto
Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
Support provided by the Jackman Humanities Institute Working Group on Hong Kong-Canada Connections
RSVP
Please RSVP by emailing chk.library@utoronto.ca