num_pages: 352
description: An insider's account of Hong Kong--from its tenacious counterculture and robust underground music scene to its unique history of youth-led protest--that explores what it means to survive in a city of broken promises.Nothing survives in this city. But in a place that never allowed you to write your own history even remembrance can be a radical act. Hong Kong has long been known as a city of extremes: a former colony of the United Kingdom that today exists at the margins of an authoritarian ascendant China; a city rocked by mass protests where residents once rallied against threats to their democracy and freedoms. But it is also misunderstood and often romanticized its history and politics simplified for Western headlines. Drawing richly from her own experience as well as interviews with musicians protesters and writers who have made Hong Kong their home journalist Karen Cheung gives us an insiders view of this remarkable city at a critical moment in historyboth for Hong Kong and democracies around the world. Coming of age in the wake of Hong Kongs reunification with China in 1997 Cheung traverses the multifold identities available to her in childhood and beyond whether that was her experience at an English-speaking international school where her classmates would grow up to be global citizens struggling to fit in with the rest of Hong Kong or within her deeply traditional multilingual family. Along the way Cheung gives a personal account of what its like to seek out affordable housing and mental healthcare in one of the worlds most expensive cities. She also takes us deep into Hong Kongs vibrant indie music and literary scenesyouth-driven spaces of creative resistance. Inevitably Cheung brings us with her to the protests where her understanding of what it means to belong to Hong Kong finally crystallized. Weaving together memoir cultural criticism and reportage The Impossible City transcends borders to chart the parallel journeys of both a young woman and a city as they navigate the various sometimes contradictory paths of coming into ones own.
language: English
title: The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir
publisher: Random House