The Impossible City
A Hong Kong Memoir
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
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.
“[A] pulsing debut . . . about what it means to find your place in a city as it vanishes before your eyes.”—The New York Times Book Review
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post
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. But it is also misunderstood, and often romanticized. 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.
Born just before the handover to China in 1997, Cheung grew up questioning what version of Hong Kong she belonged to. 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.
Through vivid and character-rich stories, Cheung braids a dual narrative of her own coming of age alongside that of her generation. 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. Cheung also captures moments of miraculous triumph, documenting Hong Kong’s vibrant counterculture and taking us deep into its indie music and creative scenes. Inevitably, she brings us to the protests, where her understanding of what it means to belong to Hong Kong finally crystallized.
An exhilarating blend of memoir and reportage, The Impossible City charts the parallel journeys of both a young woman and a city as they navigate the various, sometimes contradictory paths of coming into one’s own.
LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In her intimate memoir, journalist Karen Cheung offers a candid look at life in Hong Kong over the past two decades. Cheung, who shuttled between Singapore and Hong Kong as a child when her parents separated, is both an insider and an outsider in the epic Asian city. She discusses her struggles with severe mental illness and finding housing (she lived with over 20 different roommates in a six-year period just to afford rent!) alongside her experiences of Hong Kong’s thriving underground arts-and-music scene. We found it really fascinating how Cheung’s stories—and those of her friends—offer a window into Hong Kong’s history of political and social unrest. This haunting, riveting read made us even more curious about Hong Kong than we already were.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reflecting on the multivalenced reality of life in Hong Kong, journalist Cheung's debut leaps from one charged historical moment to the next to capture "the many ways a city can disappear, but also the many ways we, its people, survive." Beginning in 1997—with the hand over of the city to China—Cheung interweaves personal essay with reportage as she examines the interstices of culture and commerce from the vantage of both insider and outsider. Born in 1993 in Shenzhen to a mother from Wuhan and a father from Hong Kong, Cheung bounced between Singapore and Hong Kong after her parents separated when she was young; attending an international school that gave her an American accent, she still felt a desire to prove to her peers that she was a real Hong Konger. Cheung is best at delivering personal missives about city life: attending indie music shows in east Kowloon; surviving exorbitant rents by cycling through 22 roommates in six years; and struggling with a depression that drove her to attempt suicide while in college in Hong Kong. She also hauntingly captures the tumult of the city's political protests, "moments of awakening... when... we no longer wanted Hong Kong to be only a background for our personal dramas." The result is a riveting portrait of a place that's as captivating as it is confounding.
