Cheung’s mother was from Wuhan and had moved to Shenzhen where she was working at a restaurant when she met Cheung’s Hong Kong father. It took Cheung a long time to feel like she belonged in Hong Kong. Although she writes about various protest movements going back to 2003, also a year that was plagued by the deaths of Hong Kong icons Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui, she also, by merging memoir and observation, goes far beyond the issues that make international headlines. Her story is a welcome counterpart to narratives that portray Hong Kong as either as exotic or, more recently, as dystopian. Cheung herself had a troubled childhood and adolescence, later salved by music and ultimately her writing-a story that is in many ways a unique consequence of Hong Kong’s particular situation, but nevertheless entirely relatable to young adults of other places and epochs that face such challenges as fitting in, dealing with mental health issues, political disappointment, and navigating dysfunctional families. The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir, Karen Cheung (Random House, February 2021)Ĭheung covers the next twenty years or so as “that space when so much felt possible” and when, at least as she portrays it, young people were forging a new (post-colonial) identity. It is too neat a metaphor, but still we’re pointing to the sky, mumbling to ourselves: It’s crying. The observatory hoists the black rainstorm signal, to warn us of tumbling landslides. The water is charging down the steps, drenching our concrete pavements, dripping from the banyan trees. Summers in Hong Kong always heave with rain, but on this first of July, the downpour feels deliberate, overdone. It’s hard to avoid being swept up by her story from the beginning as she describes the day of the Handover in 1997 when she was four years old.

Karen Cheung’s new book, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir, about growing up and coming of age in a city she feels is like no other, is characterized by a narrative style both intimate and candid.

The impossible city book