The Impossible City Quotes

“Documenting disappearances is a defeatist line of work: I can never write fast enough to keep up with the changes of my hometown. Nothing survives in this city. But in a place that had never allowed you to write your own history, even remembrance can be a radical act.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“Look closer at this street corner: The sun is setting. The vendor at the newspaper stand packs up the dailies and puts away the cartons of eggs. Students with laptops in their arms shuffle out of the cha chaan teng. Elderly couples and their poodles take a stroll by the pier. You can still hear the uproar of the crowds that once gathered on the steep slopes for film screenings, festivals, protests. The florists at the wet market put away the last lilies. The last tram slots itself into the station. And then the scene dissolves again. Maybe you can’t save this place; maybe it isn’t even worth saving. But for a moment, there was a sliver of what this city could have become. And that is why we’re still here.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“The original sin of the English language in Hong Kong is colonialism, and so, deliberately or not, people who write it must find an ongoing justification to exist; this is the tariff we pay for a seat at the table, to enter relevance,”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“If we want to write shit poems about Hong Kong, then let us write shit poems about Hong Kong. If I want to exploit my pain, then let me exploit it until my heart can no longer take it.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“Hong Kong pulses with a sort of frenzied energy, and speaks the language of alienation and impatience.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“When my friends and I text we have our own language, a mixture of Cantonese and English and internet lingo and typos and everything else. I am homed, a friend tells me after a night out, to let me know they’ve gotten back safe. Homed. As if home is standing at the door begging you to come back indoors as rain runs down the bridge of your nose. And just like that you’re back again, letting the four walls cage you in, like you’ve returned against your will but you couldn’t quite help yourself.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“Hong Kong's literature was written not for readers in the city, but for "an unseen diaspora, or some international connoisseur, peering at Hong Kong with anthropological detachment.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“When diasporic Asian writers move to their ancestors' countries, they become Asian correspondents for the American media companies they work for, and the stories of contemporary Asia are told through their lens rather than that of journalists who grew up in that place. Sometimes I get the feeling that we aren't real people to them, merely inhabitants of a place where the real story is one about how they reconnected with their ancestors' culture.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“Tolstoy says every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way; the Chinese say every family has their own litanies they find difficult to utter.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“I don't worry about being unfilial: that I could be struck by lightning because I have not been grateful enough to my family. But 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.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“The existence of third places didn't seem possible here in this city designed to be an amusement park for real estate overlords.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“In the years leading up to 2019, I had been so singularly focused on trying to rebuild my relationship with the city that I had forgotten it never belonged to us in the first place. [...] Hong Kong is a city that is always dying. Mainstream media had pronounced Hong Kong dead as early as 1995, and every few months or years some political commentator who suddenly remembered we existed would pen a new obituary.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“At the time of the historic event, known as the handover, literature and media depicted Hong Kong as at the intersection of clashing identities, but the truth was worse: We had no identity. The only thing that could be called a Hong Kong identity was the fact that we had some neat colonial buildings but also bamboo scaffolding and great Chinese food in our day pay dongs. We defined ourselves in negatives—not Communist, no longer colonial subjects. The fact that we had rule of law, which exists in a great many other countries, became the basis for an entire collective identity. It would take a few decades of experimentation before each of us would come to define this identity for ourselves.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“Despite my attempts to translate some of their lyrics here from Cantonese, the essence of these intimate and exquisite, yet 鳩, lyrics is impossible to capture. They feel like soft inside jokes whispered into your ear just before bed, jokes only Cantonese speakers understand.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“A home is the only space that aspires to be a constant. But a home is also a space that always represents everything we can be, and because of this, the perfect home is an insatiable thirst. Buoyed by a façade of stability, you start accumulating things. The strategically placed bookshelf in your study behind you during online meetings as a nod to your intellect. The scented candles and artwork on the wall that guests compliment you on at dinner parties. A portrait of a smiling family casually sitting on top of the piano, to flaunt domestic bliss. The instruments and amps scattered across a carpeted floor, a cabinet full of jazz records. You want to leave your past behind, a decade of putting roses in a beer can in lieu of a vase. You want an ever-expanding place that deserves these things. But what if you live in a city where there was never any space for this to begin with, where permanence can never be promised?”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“The New Territories — it's the forgotten narrative of Hong Kong, because it doesn't have the architecture or cityscape with traces of colonial characteristics.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“A government's housing policy is a good indicator of how it treats its people," Hsiuwen later tells me.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“Later, as an adult, it occurs to me that my misplaced self-pity means I truly am the ungrateful little shit my father accuses me of being.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“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.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“People often characterize depression as a lack of hope or vitality, but I associate it more with a restlessness, an inability to feel at peace. You’re on the couch watching Netflix in furry pajamas, clutching a mug of hot tea, and you think, maybe the problem is that you aren’t getting out of the flat enough. You throw on jeans and head down to the bar, but after half a drink you want to run home. You repeat this routine a couple of times before you realize the problem isn’t where you are.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“Police often ask me whether the music scene in Hong Kong is "political": What they mean if, if the lyrics allude to a spirit of resistance, or if the musicians are active protesters. They do not understand that rebellion comes in the form of organizing shows without obtaining permits, playing where you were told you couldn't play, living how they don't want you to live. In other words, we aren't supposed to exist at all. And yet, here we are.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“The result is that the Anglophone literature here gives him the sensation that he is overhearing. "It was the author speaking to somebody next to me about me, and I just happen to overhear this conversation, and of course the actual recipient of that conversation was a white guy. I was having myself explained back to me, but not directly to my face. The way to rectify that was to create a kind of writing voice that was speaking directly to me.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“If you look at it strictly, they're not even part of Hong Kong's literary space, just an extension of the British literary space. The question then becomes, after colonialism, why the fuck do we still need you?”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“Sarah says that the idea of global citizenship among international school graduates denotes "a certain kind of people; people who have no roots because they're rooted everywhere have the privilege of not having to root themselves in the place they're at." That identity is a class marker of a global elite made up of the rich.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“We're supposed to stick a thermometer in our ear every day before school, and get our guardians to sign it, to prove that we aren't going into school while we're sick, as if this is something any kid would do. Most of us fake a number between thirty-six and thirty-seven degrees Celsius on the school bus in the morning, and sign it in a sloppy imitation of our parents' handwriting, often with their blessing.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“But kids who are meant to one day go to expensive American universities don't need to learn about Hong Kong. The physical cityscape of Hong Kong exists but for your amusement. You need to know only enough so that when you are an adult, you can make clever memes about which section of the minibus to sit in so that the driver can hear you when you need to alight, or what spice level of broth to get at our most beloved noodle joint.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“Hong Kong's capitalism perpetuates an endless reproduction of wannabe oppressors, and with the help of government policies and Chinese money, we—consumers and residents and small-business owners and future landlords—devour ourselves until there is nothing left.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“The good expats ate chicken feet, tried to learn Cantonese, and followed the news enough to make political jokes. 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.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“My classmates and I were brought up on the belief that nothing was more important than securing a job that would eventually buy us a flat, a basic human right that had become nearly impossible for my generation, and these jobs were usually soul sucking. Hong Kong's brand of capitalism makes it easy to live in a place and never engage with it.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir

“People often ask me whether the music scene in Hong Kong is “political”: What they mean is, if the lyrics allude to a spirit of resistance, or if the musicians are active protesters. They do not understand that rebellion comes in the form of organizing shows without obtaining permits, playing where you were told you couldn’t play, living how they don’t want you to live. In other words, we aren’t supposed to exist at all. And yet, here we are.”
― Karen Cheung, The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir