An Intimate History of Hong Kong

For about a year, international news headlines were dominated by mentions of Hong Kong and the massive protests that unfolded all across the city against a now-shelved extradition bill and for universal suffrage. Then the pandemic hit, and the Hong Kong government introduced a new set of national security laws that criminalized most forms of dissent, and the city all but disappeared from public consciousness. Karen Cheung, who is a veteran Hong Kong-based journalist, found herself not reporting on the movement, as such, but writing moving personal op-eds and essays for major international papers about what it was like to come out, consistently, day after day, to scream at a government you did not vote for, against policies you never wanted.

Parts of those essays surface in Cheung’s new book, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir. In it she relates the story of her childhood in post-handover Hong Kong, her fraught adolescence and coming of age (narrated in a series of apartment moves), and how she came to care for a city that has decidedly not been hospitable to her or most other people. There are detours here and there, about the indie music scene, the mental health system, before moving toward the protests in 2019 and its devastating aftermath. Cheung writes with a brisk tenderness, narrating major historical shifts within the city with the same level of care and attention as she details interactions with old roommates.

In Hong Kong, whether or not your secondary school offers English literature as an elective for public exams is a surefire indicator of the class stratum you and your school occupy. Cheung and I have one thing in common—we both taught ourselves the subject outside of regular class time with the help of teachers who kindly didn’t charge us, because neither of our religious public schools was equipped to teach middle- or working-class high schoolers bits and pieces of Shakespeare, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and other such remnants of the British curriculum as would be likely to pop up on exams. That exceedingly rare opportunity afforded us the opportunity to cultivate our development as writers within a language that wasn’t technically our first. In that spirit, we discussed her book, the positionality of Anglophone writers within Hong Kong’s literary traditions, and her thoughts on covering the indie music scene.

—Rosemarie Ho

Rosemarie Ho: The Impossible City begins with a series of vignettes about the different versions of Hong Kong people inhabit that form a kind of map, before moving on to your childhood and the Hong Kong that you arrived at and learned to appreciate in your adulthood. Could you talk a little bit about how you structured the book?

Karen Cheung: I didn’t really go into it with a plan. I started writing essays for international publications in 2019, and at the time, I started freaking out because things were changing so quickly. Between the time I started as a reporter to the time when the…