In this alternate tale of Hong Kong, free from the straitjacket of state-sponsored history, Lim places recent protests in the area’s centuries-long history of rebellion, dating back to when it was a thriving salt production center in the 12th century BC. describes recent efforts among Hong Kongers to forge a sense of shared history, from the Lo Ting myths to “archive marathons” in which volunteer researchers come together to comb as many as 8,000 pages of source material at a time, ‘merging the past’. And, writes Lim, Hong Kongers “were also political animals, who would show their displeasure when their core values were threatened” by taking to the streets. Over time, Lim writes, a Hong Kong identity was born based on respect for hard work and perseverance (aka the “Lion Rock Spirit”) and held together by a shared Cantonese language and a growing wariness of the mainland. .
But perhaps the most unlikely hero in Lim’s account—in fact, her inspiration for the book in the first place—is Tsang Tsou-choi, better known as the King of Kowloon. A toothless garbage collector who accused British colonialists of stealing from his ancestral homeland, “the King”, spent nearly six decades, from the 1950s until he died in 2007, doing a daring graffiti campaign around the island to publicize his claims. . In pursuit of his story, Lim discovered “a large number of Hong Kongs” and her own competing identities. Was she a neutral journalist or a contestant? As a Eurasian speaking only “embarrassingly basic” Cantonese, is she a real Hong Konger? Towards the end, Lim concludes that she is, and that’s why she couldn’t remain neutral. “Distance is a privilege that Hong Kongers – wherever – cannot enjoy,” she writes. “There is no escaping the horror of seeing your home destroyed.”
In “The Impossible City”, Cheung also distinguishes between the multiple universes that make up modern Hong Kong. There’s the ‘cosmopolitan city’, home to international students and expats whose idea of paradise is Lan Kwai Fong, ‘a bar-ridden slope of drunken men and Jell-O shots’, who proudly tell people they’re from Hong Kong. Kong, but are “barely able to describe the city without talking about Mong Kok or char siu rice.”
Then there’s the universe of wet markets and the waterfront, of “underground musicians in industrial buildings, anarchists running a vegetarian restaurant, and zine makers and poets writing in both Chinese and corrupted English.” In these ‘quiet corners’ Cheung learned what it means to be Hong Konger.
Her memoir covers the period between the 1997 handover and 2021, the year after new national security legislation became “a weapon for Beijing to silence dissent in Hong Kong”, as well as a “turning point for a total crackdown that soon all aspects of life.” Cheung was hesitant to write about Hong Kong until “the walls began to close,” and she feared that if she waited too long there would be no more Hong Kong to write about. This book, she says, is her way of reminding us “the way we lived.”
Cheung was born in Shenzhen and moved to Hong Kong before the age of 1. “When I was 4,” she writes, “my small town changed from a British colony to Chinese ownership.” By this time her parents were divorced, her mother absent, her father temperamental. Her relations with both are strained. The “only reliable presence” in Cheung’s life was her grandmother, who was picky about her Taoist rituals and expressed her love through food, from abalone and lettuce to steamed fish to cake rolls. At that time, Cheung didn’t know what it meant to be Hong Konger. The SARS crisis and the 2003 protests against Article 23, a national security law, are just background noise to the well-known children’s drama.
