My Cantopop Nights: A Memoir in Songs

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.