Top Quotes: “The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir” — Karen Cheung
“We’ve never been as dead as when the national security law was enacted on the last day of June in 2020, a few months after the pandemic put an end to the protests. The law itself was a weapon for Beijing to silence dissent in Hong Kong, but it also marked the turning point for a total crackdown that soon infiltrated all aspects of life. We had known all along that this would be the Communist Party’s script, but the speed with which developments came was so startling that it sometimes felt like payback for our petulance during the protests. Within a year, the government would find ways to rid itself of all opposition lawmakers and district councillors, shut down the city’s biggest pro-democracy newspaper, and promote former cops to top political positions.”
“This book documents the years between 1997 and 2021, that space when so much felt possible. In each of these chapters, I take a personal narrative as an entry point into a different side of Hong Kong, and detail how we tried to build a sense of belonging amid all the challenges of survival. There are stories about sleeping on couches and living with twenty-two roommates; wrestling with depression at a time of collective political trauma; evading tear gas — and the allies and comrades we found in the process. Each chapter deals with a different but related subculture, historical moment, or facet of life in Hong Kong; the first half of the book leans more toward memoir, and the second half reportage and cultural criticism. While the book is generally chronological, the chapters themselves often end in 2019, when a protest movement imbued these topics with a new urgency.”
“There are two types of villagers residing in the New Territories, indigenous and non-indigenous. This legal designation is not a reflection of different ethnic or cultural identities; it was determined by a 1970s British policy meant to appease powerful rural leaders. Unlike in other places in the world, indigenous villagers in Hong Kong are not oppressed, but enjoy special privileges: The male descendant of a family from a village that is recognized to have existed in 1898 is guaranteed the “right” to build a three-story house on New Territories land.
Non-indigenous villagers, on the other hand, face eviction when the government retakes land for building high-rises. Between 2009 and 2011, Choi Yuen Tsuen in Yuen Long became the subject of protests when the government ordered the non-indigenous villagers to move out. Artists, activists, and villagers held an art festival amid semi-derelict houses and fields, and later clashed with land officers and the police. Choi Yuen village was nonetheless eventually demolished in the name of “development,” and the villagers relocated.
But the major orbits of activity in the New Territories are not villages, but semi-urban “new towns.” In the second half of the twentieth century, the Hong Kong government built large-scale housing projects known as new towns in the New Territories. While the New Territories encompass village houses, farmland, country parks, bicycle trails, and light rail, the region is also home to mega malls for the middle class, with major chain boutiques and cosmetic shops popular with tourists from China, who can take a train into Hong Kong and get off at one of the new towns.”
“My mother is from Wuhan, China, born at a time when the place was still a backwater, when girls were worthless; she was thrown into the river as a child by her father, but saved by her grandmother. She barely finished primary school. My father met my mother when she was a waitress in Shenzhen, on one of his regular business trips to the neighboring Chinese city.”
“They both had explosive temperaments, and fought all the time. My mother moves to Singapore. There are vague plans for my father to follow her over, but he never does.
My mother has to fend for herself in a strange new land where she has no friends, no employable skill. She could take one child — that seems fair. She picks the son, the male heir, more bargaining power. Sometimes, I think about my mother when I watch the period dramas that are on television every evening, about women in ancient China that would be banished into the “cold palace” after they fell out of favor with the emperor. My mother’s cold palace is the eternal-summer island of Singapore. And I am the abandoned child.”
“Every summer, my parents make me spend weeks in Singapore with my mother and brother. The trips are hell for everyone involved. I feel no attachment to the person I am supposed to call my mother; the only mother figure in my life is my grandmother. I cry and beg to be taken home to Hong Kong. I count down the seconds in an hour, the number of hours in the days, the days I have left until I can get on a plane. I cry again when they put me on the phone with my grandmother, until I throw up. To shut me up, my parents buy me new phones, the latest iPod, shoes and cosmetics, everything they did not have as a kid.”
“Nobody knows exactly how old my grandmother is, not even she herself. Her date of birth on her Hong Kong lentity card is fake: many Chinese immigrants of that era did the same so that they could be of optimal working age, whether that was younger or older. She no longer emembers what her real birthday is. She believes she was born in the year of the dog, meaning she must have been born somewhere in the vicinity of 1922.”
“At night, my father terrorizes us. He opens the door to our bedroom at two in the morning and barks out instructions for my grandmother to run an errand for him at the pharmacy the next day. He plays loud music with no regard for anyone’s sleep schedule but his own. The windows tremble from the noise. If I tell him to turn it down, he says, in a booming baritone: Liar, you can’t hear it. I’ve been monitoring the frequency levels, and the music can’t reach you through two doors. Two years later, I move out.”
“Sometimes, I worry that I’m mean, that it has something to do with genetics or upbringing or it doesn’t matter, I’m just mean. How else could you explain it, the way I am so terrible to the only person who loves me, except that I am incapable of kindness? Every day I tell myself that I’ll make an effort to change, that I’ll remember to be nice to Gran tomorrow. I try, really try, until maybe six P.M., and then I forget all about it. And then I’ll say, Ugh, Grandma, stop nagging.”
“Having abandonment issues is a part of my borderline personality, which includes symptoms like suicidal ideation. But I don’t need therapy to tell me where this came from. All the women in my family were abandoned: my mother, my aunt, me. Neither of my parents wanted me. My mother chose the boy, and my father had no idea what to do with me: When my brother is around, my father is suddenly animated, talking about football and action movies. To me he would say, You’re lucky that corporal punishment is outlawed in Hong Kong.
During holiday breaks in Singapore, my parents often took my brother and me to a bookstore and told us to stay there while they went off to shop on their own. They didn’t leave us with a cellphone. My brother and I would make a game of it at first, browsing through the different sections, flipping through the comics and the books, playing hide-and-seek ourselves. But by the second hour we would look at each other nervously, unsure if our parents were ever going to return. We never knew when they would come back, so we could only ever use the bathroom in turns, in case we missed them and they decided they didn’t really need to have kids after all. They’ll be back when I count to a hundred, we’d say. I’d count to five hundred, then a thousand.
Another time, when I was around eight, my parents left me in the car alone because they had a craving for spicy food. My brother loved chilies from a young age, but I could not handle spice at all. So the three of them went off to get spicy food at a mall while I sat in the air-conditioned vehicle for half an hour, staring at the shoppers and passersby. For a year afterward, I slowly trained up my spice levels so when they asked me to join them, I could triumphantly announce that I was now the spice queen, but they never went out for spicy food together again.”
“My grandmother wanted me when neither of my parents did. She fed me, bathed me, loved me. But anyone raised by a grandparent knows of that watershed moment, when you become old enough to realize that the shrunken skin and eggshell hair on the person you love is an indicator that they are old, and old people tend to die. You start counting down the days, and everything in life aches with the loss that is to come. My grandmother never intended to abandon me, but when the day came, she had no choice.
“When we pay our last respects, Gran’s sons and grandsons get to stand in the first row, out of tradition, and I’m relegated to the second.”
“After my grandmother passed away, the last thread between my family and me breaks. I never return to the dinner table again.”
“My father and I don’t talk anymore. My mother and I are distant: We have never spent more than a few months in the same city for over two decades. But in recent years she will ask me for updates about work and my partner, and say, I know that we failed as parents. Sometimes I respond to her text and she won’t reply for another two months, as though she’s forgotten that she initiated the conversation. During festivities, she will send me a text: Happy holidays?”
“Leslie was bisexual and flirted with gender conventions at a time when attitudes in Hong Kong toward queer folks were even more conservative; along with fellow megastars Roman Tam and Anita Mui, Leslie opened up a realm of possibilities for gender-fluid performances.”
“The issue isn’t exactly that Hong Kong doesn’t have enough land; it’s that the city is controlled by tycoons. The government is the city’s largest landowner as well as the sole supplier of land. It profits off selling land to property developers — a practice that began during the colonial era — which inflates the price of flats so that they remain out of reach to even middle-class families, turning the market into a speculation game for the rich elite. Now government revenue is so dependent on land-related income that the property market is too big to fail. In Land and the Ruling Class in Hong Kong, first published in 2005, the writer Alice Poon explains that Hong Kong’s “free” and laissez-faire economy produced an anti-competition environment in which collusion between the government and the property cartel resulted in an oligarchy of developers. Hong Kong’s richest and most powerful families — the “economic lords” —are property developers who have built business empires.”
“The entangled relationship between the government, property owners, and public services haunts every aspect of Hong Kong life; our gas and electricity are supplied and controlled by corporate giants that were initially property developers. The government is also the largest shareholder of the public railway company, which makes half of its money from property development. When the government sells the rights to manage the neighborhood malls and wet markets near public housing estates to real estate fund Link REIT, rent prices immediately skyrocket and family-run shops disappear, replaced instead by chain stores that erase the local character. Under the legal framework established in 1997, while ordinary residents are deprived of the right to vote for the leader of our city, “property tycoons and their close associates” in banking and legal fields, as Poon notes, occupy seats on the small election committee that chooses the leader. (The inability of Hong Kong people to vote democratically for the leader of the city is what triggered the 2014 protests.) The government has long been known to be cozy with developers, sometimes even unethically and illegally so.”
“Public awareness is also continually raised through nonprofit research organizations like the Liberal Research Community, which often present data to debunk the government’s narrative that it is left with no choice but to build artificial islands in our Lantau waters to increase land supply (as was laid out in the chief executive’s policy plans in 2018), destroy parks with high ecological value, or take land from rural villages and farms. Even though the government has launched one massive development plan after another over the past two decades, the living conditions in Hong Kong have not improved. Through its work and research, the group hopes to “smash the myth that Hong Kong has a huge population on very scarce land’” and prove that “the land problem in Hong Kong is caused by uneven distribution instead of inadequate supply.”
When I was in secondary school, my classmates spoke about how they would apply for public housing the minute they turn eighteen. Under the Home Ownership Scheme lEE, the government sells housing units to the general public at a 30 to 40 percent discount rate; such flats are so scarce that when applications for these flats open, some Hong Kongers start lining up at three in the morning for a form, and just before the deadline there will always be some poor sap sprinting to the office like their life depended on it. It’s widely referred to as 抽居屋」一抽 roughly translated as “draw” as though its a lottery or lucky draw. Including public rental housing, which is rented to low-income families at a subsidized rate, a total of 45 percent of Hong Kong residents currently live in public housing.
For the many waiting for the government to allocate them public housing, the only option may be subdivided flats — apartments that have been illegally divided into multiple residences, against land regulations. When fires break out in these densely populated rooms, they often result in fatalities. Places that are away from the city center offer bigger spaces for lower rents, but the commute costs time and money. Even young professionals and university graduates are unable to find places they can afford; I was twenty-five years old when I finally had my own room for the first time in my life. Everywhere we look in Hong Kong, we’re confronted with the impossibilities of trying to make a home in a city where the game is rigged.”
“The average waiting time for public rental housing is over five years, and the monthly income for a single-person household — meaning applicants without spouses or other elderly family members — is set at HK$12,940.
Many working-class jobs, from bus driving to selling bubble milk tea, pay over this amount. To qualify for public housing, applicants are forced to lie, consider unemployment, or take day jobs. Once you’re allocated housing, the government will not check your income levels for ten years, and following that, every two years.
Jimmy’s family pays around HK$3,400 a month, and is subjected to income checks via a self-declaration form. “You can ask your boss to not pay you these few months, or pay you by cash. Or you can quit your job and study, so you won’t have an income. So many people do this, because there’s no other way,” Jimmy says. “It’s about how ‘clean’ you are on paper when you see the government officer.””
“Hong Kongers who have taken part in protests sometimes pick from lists of trusted “yellow” psychiatrists, which imposes even more limitations to seeking help. If the mental health system was overloaded prior to the protests, the political crisis has stretched it to a breaking point.”
“By December, it is impossible to leave our flats without first checking which areas are being tear-gassed at that moment. In the malls, protesters opt for the most PG-13 protest tactic: singing “Glory to Hong Kong,” the unofficial anthem of the resistance. You can get pepper-sprayed for singing. You can’t even do your Christmas shopping without possibly being pinned down onto the polished marble floor. Paramedics wear reindeer headbands and riot police circle pink Christmas trees.”
“In May 2020, China announces that it is drafting a national security law for Hong Kong. Within two months, the law is implemented, even though no one in Hong Kong, not even the government or legislature, has seen what the provisions contain. Before the law is enacted, political parties disband, social media personalities lock or delete their accounts, and some activists quietly leave the city.
With the national security law in effect, I become too terrified to go to a proper protest. I might never get to go to a protest in Hong Kong again.”
“The police have set up hotlines for Hong Kongers to report on one another, and you no longer know which strangers in your neighborhood you can trust. There are eyes everywhere. Posts in support of the movement, on private social media accounts, have been screencapped and circulated on the internet; it could cost you your job. It isn’t safe to talk about politics just anywhere now.
In anticipation of the national security law, some yellow shops removed their protest posters and stickers from their window displays and walls, though sometimes you can still see discreet protest pigs on the corner of a table. Earlier that day, my partner and I went to the history museum, and caught its Hong Kong Story permanent exhibition just before the museum announced that it would be closed for a “temporary revamp,” presumably to update its materials to fit into the Communist narrative.”
“When you flee, your retirement fund is the last thing on your mind. All you want is out. When the ex-lawmaker Ted Hui left Hong Kong in December 2020 in self-exile, he and his family’s bank accounts were frozen in retaliation, for “money laundering.””
““We might be moving, an ex-colleague tells me, laying down coasters and sauces on the table for hot pot. “Probably in the next couple of months or so.”
“Wait, what?” I say. This is the first I am hearing of it.
They had just been married for a few months and had recently moved into a new apartment in Hong Kong Island East.
“She doesn’t feel safe here anymore,” he says, gesturing to his wife. Even if it might be years before it truly becomes dangerous for them, living in a place where you cannot sleep every night out of anxiety is too overwhelming. “They’re getting closer and closer.” The couple have close friends in human rights and political circles, and work in relevant fields. It’s the randomness of the national security law arrests that scares them: You never know who will be next. If it’s your turn, they can arrest you over any minor statement you’ve made in the past, then confiscate your travel documents, even without a formal charge. And then it’s over: It’s too late to leave at that stage.
During the 2019 protests, I had written “記住緊守崗位，同中共鬥長命”as a reminder to myself. “We should all keep doing what we’re doing, and outlive the Communist Party.” But now, carrying on means that if you want to continue to speak or teach or write or protest, you have to brace yourself for jail or exile. You have to hedge your bets as to how far you can go without becoming a target, how long you can stay before leaving becomes impossible. You have to prepare yourself for the inevitable scenario that everyone you love will either be behind bars or thousands of miles away.
It’s the final few hours of 2020. My partner and I are at the couple’s flat, with Holmes and his girlfriend, and the friend who was arrested the day I got married. His passport has been confiscated, and he is now reporting to the police station every couple of weeks.”
