DRAFT PROGRAM

5th TORONTO HAKKA CONFERENCE July 1-3, 2016 - York University PATRON - The Honourable Dr. Vivienne Poy CO-CHAIRS: Prof. Bernard Luk, Dr. Keith Lowe

Friday, July 1, 6:30 pm - 9:00 pm

RECEPTION & REGISTRATION (Music, Refreshments) Chinese Cultural Centre of Greater Toronto 5183 Sheppard Avenue East

Saturday, July 2 & Sunday, July 3

LECTURES, PANELS, FILMS (Free lunch each day) 9 am to 4 pm York University, Keele Campus

BANQUET - Sunday, July 3, 7-10 pm (Venue to be announced) Hakka Achievement Award Hakka Scholarship Award KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

SHIU LOON KONG, Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Education, University of Toronto Order of Canada medal; author of Chinese Culture & Lore and essays on Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. TOPIC: From Hakka to Humanity

PAULA WILLIAMS MADISON, President of Madison Media Management, former Vice President of National Broadcasting Corporation and General Electric, author of Finding Samuel Lowe: Harlem, Jamaica, China. TOPIC: My Journey So Far

JOSEPH TSANG MANG KIN, former Minister of Culture of the Republic of Mauritius, awarded Brilliance of China medal in 2013, author of The Hakka Epic and Stopovers in a Poet’s Mind. TOPIC: 21st Century Challenges to Hakka and Huaren

SPEAKERS (to date)

RUIFENG LIANG, University of West Virginia, describes the Hakka Genealogy Museum of Shanghang, Fujian province, which holds the largest collection in China of Hakka family tree books, clan literature, worship charts, Taoist manuscripts, folk artifacts and cultural relics. Prof. Liang will mount an exhibition based on the Museum’s collection, and invite the curators to come and advise on setting up a branch in North America.

CHARLES N. LI, former chair of the Linguistics Department, University of California in Santa Barbara, traces the changes in Hakka and Mandarin that have occurred since the Tang dynasty and subsequent Hakka migrations. He outlines the major dialects of Hakka and the challenges to their survival in the context of state language policies. His autobiographical novel, The Bitter Sea, has been widely acclaimed.

ABRAHAM ANTHONY CHEN, retired professor of physics and atmospherics, applies the teachings of Lao Tze (Taoism) to comprehending, enduring and curing contemporary climate change. He was awarded the Hakka Achievement Award at the Toronto Hakka Conference of 2004. Subsequently, he shared the Nobel Prize as a member of the UN Intergovernmental Committee on Climate Change; he was the leader of the subcommittee dealing with the effects of climate change on small islands.

SAMUEL LOWE, historian and hospital chaplain, reflects on the scriptural motifs that inspired Hung Tze Kuan, leader of the Taiping rebellion. The moral forces which guided the Taiping bear a striking resemblance to the forces behind the European peasants’ war, and continue to permeate movements to change society in China.

DEOLI survivors in Canada and the USA appraise their trip to New Delhi in November 2015 to seek an apology from the government of India for interning them for up to five years in the Deoli concentration camp. Their internment resulted from the short border war between India and China in 1962. Speakers include Yin Marsh, author of the book Doing Time with Nehru; Ming Tung Hsieh, author of A Lost Tribe; Michael Cheng current president of the DEOLI association; Shen Ling, coordinator of the association.

ROBERT HEW is a Rhodes Scholar and financial analyst. Following the physical restoration of the cemetery, which was abandoned since the seventies and rebuilt over the last two decades, Hew verified the location of graves using GPS data developed by Dr. Parris Lyew-Ayee. He edited the cemetery records, merged them with information from the tombstones, and matched the Hakka pronunciation of village names with present pronunciation. The database is available on-line.

RANDY CHIN, President of VP Records of New York, and his wife KECIA, trace the growth of popular music in Jamaica, and the remarkable contribution of the Chinese to the spread of Jamaican music around the world. Focus of their presentation will be the music of the late Byron Lee, who was awarded a Hakka Achievement Award in 2008. VP Records is the world’s largest distributor of contemporary Jamaican music.

JEANETTE KONG, documentary filmmaker of The Chiney Shop and Half as well as director of Finding Samuel Lowe, presents a lecture on the influence of pioneering reggae producer Leslie Kong who produced and distributed the earliest records made by world-famous Jamaican singers such as Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley. Leslie Kong and Jeanette Kong are from the same Hakka clan originating from You Gan Bu in Guangdong.

NAM LOW is a retired Malaysian engineer who travels most of the year in search of Hakka cultural sites and modern music festivals. He traces the means by which young pop musicians in the East can compose songs with their counterparts in the West via electronic media. He foresees a bright future for Hakka pop music.

KEITH LOWE is a 23rd generation Lowe/Luo whose family in the 16th generation built Crane Lake, the largest five-phoenix villa in the Dungguan region. However, the dragon-backed villa Little Hill built by the 7th generation in the Meixien region and still occupied today, provides better samples of Hakka folkways. Dr. Lowe will screen videos of Little Hill welcome ceremonies, harvest activities, worship of natural elements and human ancestors, New Year and Lantern festivals, couplets on doorways. He is the author of Heaven and Earth - Sustaining Elements in Hakka Tulou, www.mdpi.com/ 2071-1050/4/11/2795.

ANNE-MARIE LEE-LOY is an English professor at Ryerson University. Since the first Toronto Hakka Conference in 2000, she has been studying the peculiar biculturalism resulting from young boys being sent to live for a number of years in the ancestral village by parents who had emigrated as young adults from the same village. She will review recent biographies on this topic. Her research interests focus on literary representations of Caribbean "Chineseness" and experiences of the Chinese in the Anglo-Caribbean. Her articles have been published in a number of scholarly journals. She is also the author award-winning monograph Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in the West Indies.

ELINOR TY, professor of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, analyzes Eddie ’s as a refreshing, irreverent account of a Chinese diasporic subject’s growing up in the suburban wilderness of white America. The book hit bestseller list in 2013, and more than a million people have viewed his Fresh Off the Boat show on Vice.com (Choi). Professor Ty will explore what literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin calls “heteroglossia,” the existence of distinct varieties within language and its use and effect in Eddie Huang’s life writing.

TENG TENG KLEINER is a broadcaster and advocate of sustainable housing. Drawing from her memories of life in Borneo, she will provide a hands-on demonstration of making lei-cha, a dried food used for travelling. She highlights the health aspects of preparing this food from fresh herbs.

LINDA LAU ANUSANASANAM capped her career as a California life-style journalist by writing the most beautiful, most comprehensive and most authoritative book on Hakka cuisine. The Hakka Cookbook: Chinese Soul Food From Around the World was published in 2012 by the University of California Press. She acknowledges Toronto as the most fruitful site for her research, and aims to engage Toronto chefs in her presentation.

OTHER SPEAKERS have expressed interest in such topics as mixed-race identity, global Hakka, Chinese migrants to the Caribbean, Lee Kuan Yew, Han Suyin, youth leadership and career development, mindfulness and wellness, etc.