The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir
Karen Cheung
Random House: 2022
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Karen Cheung’s much-anticipated debut is one of the most exciting books to come out of Hong Kong in recent years, and for good reason. The journalist and writer’s gripping, lucid prose is at times lyrical, yet makes no attempt to romanticise the narrative or the city, which in this memoir is both backdrop and character.

It is unsurprising, then, that I resonated more with Cheung’s personal experiences, set within a wider narrative of Hong Kong’s transfigurations. Without providing an exhaustive list of parallels, it is Cheung’s introspections at the crossroads of depression, privilege and home that had me reaching into various parts of my own heart and finding reflection, both poetic and figurative.

So while Cheung says, ‘Maybe this isn’t the book you expected to read’, I found myself echoing what many Hong Kong readers of The Impossible City seem to share: I felt seen. Perceived. As Cheung traces her own moments and movements across and beyond the city—from the neighbourhood of her childhood to the psychiatric ward of her depression—I found my own moments and movements mirroring hers in more ways than one.

• Tags: Hong Kong, Issue 27, Karen Cheung, Laura Jane Lee