About this event
LearningTuesday, 17 November 2026 | 12:30 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. | Room 857, Eighth Floor, Kaneff Tower, Keele Campus, York University & virtually via Zoom
Join us for the Hong Kong Studies Group Fall 2026 Meet & Greet, which will begin at 12:30 p.m! Connect with fellow researchers, faculty, and students interested in Hong Kong Studies before our main circle launch session.
Building on this community connection, we are launching York-HKSG-Grad-Circle (the Circle) with its inaugural talk. The Circle is a graduate student initiative of the (HKSG). It gives graduate students working on Hong Kong-related topics a peer space to share research, test ideas, and build networks. It follows HKSG’s view of Hong Kong Studies as interdisciplinary, transnational and diasporic.
Saam Kap Dai 三及第: The Politics of Sound, Script, and Belonging in Cold War Hong Kong with Bauhinia Hill-tone Ho (National University of Singapore)
Why can a text with relatively few distinctly Cantonese expressions still sound unmistakably Cantonese? This talk starts from that discrepancy to revisit saam kap dai 三及第, a distinctive mode of writing that brings together classical Chinese, standard written Chinese and colloquial Cantonese, each with its own historical trajectory. Its genealogy predates the twentieth century, but it gained particular prominence amid the shifting cultural conditions of Cold War Hong Kong, where it created a textual space in which the three languages could converge and be renegotiated.