September 1, 2021
Journalist Cheung relates growing up in Hong Kong-- The Impossible City--after its 1917 reunification with China, traversing its rich identities while exploring her education at various English-speaking international schools, the city's literary and indie music scenes, and the protests against restricted freedoms. One of America's top pianists, MacArthur fellow Denk recounts his upbringing and training, clarifying the complexities of the artistic life and the student-teacher relationship in Every Good Boy Does Fine. As Drayton relates in Black American Refugee, she left Trinidad and Tobago as a youngster to join her mother in the United States but was angered by the contrast in how white and Black people were treated and by age 20 returned to Tobago, where she could enjoy being Black without fear. What My Bones Know reveals Emmy Award-winning radio producer Foo's relentless panic attacks until she was finally diagnosed with Complex PTSD, a condition resulting from ongoing trauma--in her case the years she spent abused by her parents before they abandoned her. Growing up fourth-generation Japanese American in Los Angeles directly after World War II, Pulitzer finalist poet Hongo recounts spending his life hunting for The Perfect Sound, from his father's inspired record-player setup and the music his Black friends enjoyed to Bach, Coltrane, ukulele, and the best possible vacuum tubes. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Negroland, Jefferson offers what she calls a temperamental autobiography with Constructing a Nervous System, woven of fragments like the sound of a 1950s jazz LP and a ballerina's movements spliced with those of an Olympic runner to explore the possibilities of the female body. In Home/Land, New Yorker staffer Mead captures the excitement, dread, and questions of identity that surfaced after she relocated from New York to her birth city, London, with her family in 2018. Vasquez-Lavado now lives In the Shadow of the Mountain, but once she was a Silicon Valley star wrestling with deep-seated personal problems (e.g., childhood abuse, having to deny her sexuality to her family) when she decided to turn around her life through mountain climbing; eventually, she took a team of young women survivors up Mount Everest (150,000-copy first printing).
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December 6, 2021
Reflecting on the multivalenced reality of life in Hong Kong, journalist Cheung’s debut leaps from one charged historical moment to the next to capture “the many ways a city can disappear, but also the many ways we, its people, survive.” Beginning in 1997—with the hand over of the city to China—Cheung interweaves personal essay with reportage as she examines the interstices of culture and commerce from the vantage of both insider and outsider. Born in 1993 in Shenzhen to a mother from Wuhan and a father from Hong Kong, Cheung bounced between Singapore and Hong Kong after her parents separated when she was young; attending an international school that gave her an American accent, she still felt a desire to prove to her peers that she was a real Hong Konger. Cheung is best at delivering personal missives about city life: attending indie music shows in east Kowloon; surviving exorbitant rents by cycling through 22 roommates in six years; and struggling with a depression that drove her to attempt suicide while in college in Hong Kong. She also hauntingly captures the tumult of the city’s political protests, “moments of awakening... when... we no longer wanted Hong Kong to be only a background for our personal dramas.” The result is a riveting portrait of a place that’s as captivating as it is confounding.
Starred review from February 1, 2022
Spanning over 20 years, Cheung's debut memoir examines her tumultuous childhood and young adulthood in Hong Kong. It tragically juxtaposes the author's severe depression with the disintegration of democracy in Hong Kong, depicting a heartrending destruction of Hongkongese cultural identity. Cheung posits and describes a step-by-step dismantling of democracy, beginning with the handover of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China on July 1, 1997; followed by the Umbrella Movement of 2014, in which Hongkongers fought for universal suffrage; the 2019-20 protests over the proposed Hong Kong Extradition Bill; and finally the passage of a national security law with severe sentences for anyone posing a threat to the nation. Cheung argues that economic development and urban renewal are changing Hong Kong's landscape while housing remains unaffordable. Her memoir also includes an extensive history of Hong Kong's underground music scene, which she says offered a psychological escape from political unrest. VERDICT This is an outstanding contribution for any library about one personal experience of political upheaval in Hong Kong.--Michele Gottlieb
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Starred review from December 15, 2021
An intimate look at Hong Kong by an "ambivalent" native who never appreciated it until the incremental seizure of freedoms by mainland China. Cheung is one of the few in her cohort trying to stay in Hong Kong and make a living despite the crackdown, and she has dedicated herself to getting to know her city as its character, she fears, is slipping away. The colonial handover from Britain occurred on July 1, 1997, when the author was just 4 years old. "At Tiananmen Square, where less than a decade ago students were killed asking for democracy," she writes, "Beijingers are waving little handheld flags with the Hong Kong bauhinia flower stamped onto it, celebrating our return." Cheung's parents separated, and her mother went to Singapore with her younger brother; the author lived in Hong Kong with her critical, authoritative father but was largely raised by her paternal grandmother, who she felt was the only one who loved her. She could not wait to leave home at age 18. Her generation felt they had a grace period of decades until China actually took over--"one country, two systems model to guarantee the city's way of life"--but by 2014, China was cracking down on Hong Kong's election autonomy, actions that led to the emergence of the Umbrella Movement. At this point, Cheung, now a journalist, grew politicized, and she also suffered debilitating depression, which her family did not understand and that further alienated her from them. In June 2020, a national security law was passed, which "marked the turning point for a total crackdown that soon infiltrated all aspects of life." In a book that should appeal to young protesters everywhere, the author eloquently demonstrates how "it takes work not to simply pass through a place but instead to become part of it." Hong Kong is in dire straits, and Cheung brings us to the front lines to offer a clearer understanding of the circumstances. A powerful memoir of love and anguish in a cold financial capital with an underbelly of vibrant, freedom-loving youth.
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Starred review from February 1, 2022
Hong Kong journalist Cheung pushes back mightily on those who think her hometown could be summed up in one tome: ""Never trust anyone who holds themselves out as such," she warns. Yet English-language readers might not find a book that captures Hong Kong in such visceral detail and humanity as Cheung's, from its tragic political history to its hierarchical educational system, its woeful mental-health-care system, its failure to provide affordable housing to its people, its stultifying Confucian family ethos, and its heroic but embattled arts scene. Hong Kong's agonizing struggles over the past 25 years are Cheung's, too, as she tries to find a safe space between the city's wretched colonial history and the Chinese Communist Party's ruthless suppression of human rights there today, and [she] navigates her own debilitating depression even as some two million Hong Kong people have themselves suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder over the last two years. It's a grim status report, to be sure, but Cheung doesn't quite let go of hope for that extraordinary city: ". . . and yet. Across the harbor, the lights are on."
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