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My Cantopop nights: a memoir in songs

2026· 337 pages

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For 11-year-old Emma-Lee, the sound of Hong Kong in the summer of 1995 is Cantopop. The Cantopop stars she idolises, at the height of their stratospheric fame, are seen on every billboard and heard on every street corner. Later that year, she and her family will leave the city to live in England, pushing Emma-Lee's love of Cantopop underground - the sound and symbol of her secret childhood identity. 'My Cantopop Nights' is the story of how Emma found herself in a Hong Kong bar twenty years later, listening to a Cantopop song and realising that this music was her inheritance. It's about how she suffers an identity crisis just as the city's post-colonial tensions erupt into the 2019 protests. It's a story of uncanny coincidences, magical thinking and a quest to reconcile the different sides of her inheritance: Hong Konger and British, Cantopop and indie.

Genres: History Music Travel
Language: English
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
ISBN: 9781787334540