Cheung also captures moments of miraculous triumph, documenting Hong Kong’s vibrant counterculture and taking us deep into its indie music and creative scenes. With heartbreaking candor, she recounts her yearslong struggle to find reliable mental health care in a city reeling from the traumatic aftermath of recent protests. Through vivid and character-rich stories, Cheung braids a dual narrative of her own coming of age alongside that of her generation.

Not quite at ease within the middle-class, cosmopolitan identity available to her at her English-speaking international school, she also resisted the conservative values of her deeply traditional, often dysfunctional family. Drawing from her own experience reporting on the politics and culture of her hometown, as well as interviews with musicians, protesters, and writers who have watched their home transform, Karen Cheung gives us a rare insider’s view of this remarkable city at a pivotal moment-for Hong Kong and, ultimately, for herself.īorn just before the handover to China in 1997, Cheung grew up questioning what version of Hong Kong she belonged to. But it is also misunderstood, and often romanticized. Hong Kong is known as a place of extremes: a former colony of the United Kingdom that now exists at the margins of an ascendant China a city rocked by mass protests, where residents rally-often in vain-against threats to their fundamental freedoms. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post about what it means to find your place in a city as it vanishes before your eyes.”- The New York Times Book Review A boldly rendered-and deeply intimate-account of Hong Kong today, from a resilient young woman whose stories explore what it means to survive in a city teeming with broken promises.

The impossible city book