Hua Hsu, a 77-year-old retired biochemist, is a mall rat.
Early every weekday morning the senior citizen hangs out for a couple of hours at the Southgate mall in Edmonton. He’s usually surrounded by 60 of his friends, also seniors, in a large open area nestled between the Hudson’s Bay and Sears.
No, they are not there to loiter or make general mischief for the mall cops. Hsu, who came to Edmonton from Taiwan in 1968, to study at the University of Alberta, is there to lead the group through the discipline of a Chinese martial art called tai chi.
The movements, with names like “part the wild horse’s mane” and “hand strums the lute,” are done in a slow and fluid way, which is often described as “meditation in motion.” Tai chi has been known to help with balance, muscle strength and flexibility. There is also strong evidence to suggest it can improve quality of life as people age.
Southgate mall has provided a free space to the group since its beginning.
Hua Hsu leads a tai chi class in the Southgate mall in Edmonton, Alta. (Larry Wong/Edmonton Journal)
The building, which opens at 7:30 a.m., bustles with activity in the morning. Hsu says it’s getting so busy his group has been told to stay off the walking paths and stick to a large, open space away from the thoroughfare. Mall walkers, of which there are many, as well as transit users who pass through the building to access the LRT system, whip by as Hsu’s posse slowly mimic the movements of a white crane spreading its wings.
Hsu says the relationship between his group and the mall is mutually beneficial.
“After tai chi, the shops are open and lots of members go do their shopping. One of our members mentioned to me [that] every year he spends about $300 in there. So it’s good for the mall as well as good for our members.”
A few years ago Hsu, who learned tai chi after he retired in 2003 and has been teaching it ever since, said he was recruited by the mall’s general manager to teach classes to his employees, but that ended when the manager left to take a job somewhere else.
No shirt, no shoes, no service
Southgate mall has stepped up to help these community groups, but as Shauna Brail, a professor and the director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Toronto, told Checkup host Duncan McCue during the show on Sunday, malls are ultimately private spaces.
Listen to their full conversation.
“[Malls are] privately owned and managed, and the security is run by a private organization. They don’t need to allow you to stay,” said Brail.
This point was illustrated perfectly when Jim Kent, a listener from Calgary, emailed during the show to say he’d been kicked out of a mall because he took his bike inside after not being able to find a place to lock it up.
“I was stopped by security, told very rudely that bikes are not permitted,” Kent wrote. “I never plan to go back, and I hope it does shut down. I made the purchase on Amazon.”
An aging population
Brail agrees it’s one of the drawbacks of thinking of malls as public spaces.
“What we do need, as a growing and changing society, is a truly high-quality public spaces,” she insists. “Both indoor and outdoor, that accommodates the unique population needs.”
Brail points out that the latest census data shows, for the first time in census history, there are more people over the age of 65 in Canada than there are under the age of 15.
“So we do need to think about how we provide public spaces that serve the needs of an aging population,” Brail said.
Hsu says the mall provides a comfortable space for his group, most of whom are seniors, regardless of the weather outside. With the average temperature of an Edmonton January sitting around – 15 C, the class is never cancelled due to weather. Even during a gorgeous Edmonton summer day the group forgoes baking in the sun to take it easy in Southgate’s air conditioning.
The seniors practice near the entrance to Sears, and Hsu says they’ve watched as the department store goes slowly out of business. He says he’s worried about the future of the mall.
“The Sears is closing, it’s on sale now. In the mall you can see they have lots of shops closing now … I think from my area, in the past four months, they have three shops close already.”
But until the mall closes down completely, if it ever does, you can find Hsu and his friends hanging out there every weekday, rain or shine.