Marvel’s Simu Liu Accepts Hometown Honour

Simu Liu has had a busy weekend. The Marvel actor most prominently spent Saturday at Fan Expo Canada in Toronto, the biggest pop culture convention in the country. He spent this morning at Legoland Toronto, as a guest of KultureCity, a charity he serves on the board of which is dedicated to sensory-inclusive efforts.

But he wrapped the afternoon in his hometown of Mississauga, just west of the city of Toronto, accepting an induction into Legends Row: Mississauga’s Walk of Fame.

Held in front of a massive audience in the Living Arts Centre, the induction was also livestreamed. Here’s a transcript of his speech:

What can I say about Mississauga? … For me, Mississauga was Goldilocks. And by that I mean it was just right.

You were never too far from a great party, but traffic was never too bad that it made you want to tear your hair out. It had parks your kids could actually play at, but you also had mega malls that you could hang out at. You had Tim Hortons at every corner, but you had great pho at every other corner. And not one, but two Mandarin buffets in the city…

My parents would drive through Mississauga Road in Port Credit all the time, marveling at all the mansions with the three garage doors, and wondering just how much money you had to make to afford a place like that.

It’s been a pretty wild road for me since that, and I’ve gotten to see a lot of the world and do many incredible things, but, you know the more I think about it, the more I think the magic was here all along.

It was here at Thorn Lodge Elementary where I went to school. It was literally here at the Living Arts Centre where I had my piano recitals. Never did well. I was at Honeywell where my parents worked for over two decades, before they both retired. And it was in Erin Mills where we were able to bring my grandparents over from China to spend the last fourteen years of their lives.

So for our immigrant family, our Mississauga was our happily ever after.

I still remember the day my parents showed me the blueprints of the house that they were going to buy. It was a new residential development off of Winston Churchill Boulevard, which at the time was of just miles and miles of dirt and farm. Our house was the smallest and cheapest model, it was less than 2500 square feet, but in our eyes, it was practically a castle.

I mean we could barely fathom what to do with all that space, a tiny family of three with very, very little in the way of material possessions. My parents had been living off of scholarship money, secondhand furniture, and the discount aisle of the supermarket, before they made this terrifying decision to buy this house. And the night they signed the closing papers, neither of them slept for a single second. But still they were so excited, because we finally owned a tiny piece of Canada. And that meant that we were finally home.

You know, twenty-five years later, you’d think our neighbourhood had been around for hundreds of years. The nearby parks are lush with greenery, and filled with the sounds of children playing. And the trees that were once little saplings on front lawns have become so big, that they hang over our streets.

And somewhere nestled in the middle of thousands of homes just like ours is our little brick house that was once nothing more than a hole in the dirt.

And I guess the charm of Mississauga, for me, is just that. It’s that it embodies the immigrant journey and embodies our family story. It too came from nothing, but brick-by-brick and day-by-day became what it is today. And I am so incredibly proud to call this place my home, and I’ve grown into a grownup among this collection of kind, generous, and culturally diverse families.

You’re each and every one of you proof that happily ever afters are not only possible here, they’re inevitable, and you all have a piece of my heart always. Or as the kids say, 905 ’til I die.

Thank you again for this tremendous honour.

Title image via Marvel Studios.