My Cantopop Nights

Captures that era of Hong Kong music with such warmth and clarity... Transcendent and transportiveAngela Hui

‘A wondrous thing: fresh, evocative, self-aware, fantastically light of touch and wholly original’ Sarah Howe

A story of music, fandom and identity, from the acclaimed singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss (a.k.a. Emmy the Great)

For 11-year-old Emma-Lee, the sound of Hong Kong in the summer of 1995 is Cantopop. The Cantopop stars she idolises are everywhere - their images are on every billboard and their music spills from shop speakers onto the streets. When she and her family move to England later that year, Emma-Lee’s love of Cantopop will be pushed underground – the sound and symbol of her secret childhood identity.

My Cantopop Nights is the story of how Emma-Lee 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 suffering an identity crisis just as the city’s post-colonial tensions erupt into protests. It’s a story of uncanny coincidences, magical thinking and a quest to reconcile the different sides of her heritage: Hong Konger and British, Cantopop and indie.

It’s a story of falling in love with a city, its people and its music, while trying to find your own place to belong.

‘An author of exceptional vision... for anyone seeking to understand how complicated, tender histories unfurl in our present – and how art emerges to help us through’ Jessica J. Lee

Prepare to meet your new favourite playlistDan Schreiber