Instead, the city slowly became my family.

I moved out of home at the age of eighteen, the first step in a gradual and inevitable process of estrangement from my family. That there are people here who can talk about jazz and no-wave cinema but also about the history of blues music in Hong Kong communities I would want to be part of and give back to. I did not know enough about the place I grew up in, did not know these scenes exist here in their own form. Instead, I ached over descriptions of young writers showing up at one another's indie bookstore readings in New York, guitarists and photographers who shared pints together in Camden in London. I did not try to understand why the people hit the streets every year on July 1, the anniversary of the handover, because I never thought I would stay here. It takes work not to simply pass through a place but instead to become part of it. Through them, I understood why I had been ambivalent about this place as a child.

It isn't that the Hong Kong they lived in wasn't real it's that they inhabited one universe in many that existed here, and they only ever wanted to get to know that one. The good expats ate chicken feet, tried to learn Cantonese, and followed the news enough to make political jokes. Our public railway stops are clean and the trains are mostly on time. They loved our dumplings and roast meat and noodles, and the fact that it takes only a short train or ferry ride to get out of the city and be surrounded by trees and reservoirs. Locals here still nursed colonial hangovers and were nice to them. They spent weekends hiking up the Dragon's Back or cannonballing into water from junk boats, and thought the city was so beautiful. Their paradise is Lan Kwai Fong, a bar-infested slope of drunk men and Jell-O shots. I learned to see my hometown through their eyes, to become a tourist in my own city. In university, before I found the universe I eventually wanted to belong to, I lived for a while in the 'cosmopolitan city' version of Hong Kong, populated mostly by exchange students, international school graduates, and expats who moved to Asia to teach English or find themselves.

The impossible city a hong kong memoir