As the other have mentioned, the load event does not bubble. Instead you can manually trigger a load-like event with a custom event:
$('#item').on('namespace/onload', handleOnload).trigger('namespace/onload')
If your element is already listening to a change
event:
$('#item').on('change', handleChange).trigger('change')
I find this works well. Though, I stick to custom events to be more explicit and avoid side effects.