Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
cultural identities between the two shores of the Pacific. Vancouver seems to
be emerging as something of a hub in this broader reach of overseas Chinese
mediascapes. Following the television series, Farewell Vancouver, shown on
Mainland television,
2
the popular musical variety show,
Our Chinese Heart
,
was taped in Vancouver by Chinese state television in November 2008 to be
broadcast throughout the global diaspora. Exuberantly billed as the 'biggest
Sino-event ever' in North America (Shore 2008), the show's name, with its
call to a shared national sentiment, reveals the ongoing political attempt to
consolidate the imagined community of the overseas Chinese and sustain
loyal emotional ties with the Mainland. The show also disclosed Vancouver's
role in staging that diasporic project.
An institutional infrastructure as well as a media network has flourished
binding the two sides of the Canada-East Asia social field. Aside from large
Canadian university alumni associations, the Chinese Canadian Association
in Hong Kong had a membership of 3,000 by 1997, while the Hong Kong-
Canada Business Association had 4,000 members dispersed on each side of
the Pacific (Metcalfe 1997). The branch of the Canadian Chamber of
Commerce in Hong Kong, with 800 members, was the largest outside
Canada. The ties that bind were also underscored by the declaration of
'Canada's Year of Asia-Pacific' in 1997. Far from a hollow declaration,
events that year included the fifth Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation con-
ference held in Vancouver, and the fourth World Chinese Entrepreneurs'
Forum, also located in Vancouver, the first time it had left an Asian venue.
All of these networks and connections facilitated the circulation of informa-
tion and permitted the switching of both capital and labour between Canada
and Hong Kong to become routinized.
While the winners of the Miss Hong Kong Pageant are highly visible
examples of the movement of postgraduate labour within a transnational
social field, the migration of Canadian-educated university students to Hong
Kong is a much larger phenomenon. Already by the late 1980s, 50,000-
60,000 Canadian university graduates worked in Hong Kong with another
16,000-18,000 still studying in Canada (
Chinatown News
1988a). Young,
well-educated adults, often the children of millionaire migrants, are an
important segment of the population to return, as they cash in the cultural
capital of a western degree for economic capital in East Asia. But they are far
from alone. Families have also made the trip back across the Pacific in large
numbers to the point that estimates identify over 200,000 Hong Kong resi-
dents holding Canadian passports.
3
This should not be a surprise for surveys
in the early 1990s showed that significant numbers of potential emigrants
expected to be back in the colony by 1997 after a brief sojourn overseas,
fortified by an overseas passport as 'insurance policy'. The temporary intent
of the move was clear: 'Most were clearly planning to move in order to stay'
(Lam et al. 1995). In this chapter I examine the phenomenon of return, but
