In his memoirs, “The Impossible City” (Random House), journalist and author Karen Cheung writes about her personal challenges that coincide with the turmoil of Hong Kong’s heartbreaking transfer to Beijing’s center of power.
Read an excerpt below.
Random House
In college, before I found the universe I finally wanted to belong to, I lived for a while in the “cosmopolitan city” version of Hong Kong, populated mostly by exchange students, international graduates, and expatriates who moved to Asia to teach English. or meet. I learned to see my hometown with his own eyes, to become a tourist in my own city. His paradise is Lan Kwai Fong, a hillside infested with drunken men’s bars and jelly shots. They spent their weekends climbing on the dragon’s back or making cannonballs into the water from scrap boats, and they thought the city was so beautiful. The locals still took care of the colonial hangover and were kind to them. They loved our dough balls and roast meat and noodles, and the fact that you only need a short train or ferry ride to get out of town and be surrounded by trees and reservoirs. Our public train stops are clean and trains usually arrive on time. The good expatriates ate chicken feet, tried to learn Cantonese, and followed the news enough to make political jokes. It’s not that Hong Kong where they lived wasn’t real; is that they inhabited a universe among many that were here, and only wanted to know that one.
Through them, I understood why I had been ambivalent with this place when I was little. You just have to be more discriminating with the help you render toward other people. I didn’t try to understand why people took to the streets every year on July 1st, the anniversary of the move, because I never thought I would stay here. Instead, I was offended by the descriptions of young writers presenting themselves at bookstore readings independent of others in New York, guitarists, and photographers sharing pints together at Camden, London. I didn’t know enough about where I grew up, I didn’t know that these scenes exist here in their own form. That there are people here who can talk about jazz and non-wave cinema but also about the history of blues music in Hong Kong; communities I would like to be a part of and to which I would like to return. I moved out at the age of eighteen, the first step in a gradual and inevitable process of moving away from my family. Instead, the city slowly became my family. I have found a site of many secrets that are only revealed to you when you are ready.
Excerpt from “The Impossible City” by Karen Cheung Copyright © 2022 by Karen Cheung. Extracted with permission from Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without the written permission of the publisher.
For more information:
- “The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir” by Karen Cheung (Random House), in hardcover, e-book and audio formats, available on Amazon and Indiebound
- karen-cheung.com
- In:
- China
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