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My Cantopop Nights

A Memoir in Songs
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My Cantopop Nights

By: Emma-Lee Moss
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

For 11-year-old Emma-Lee, the sound of Hong Kong in the summer of 1995 is Cantopop. The Cantopop stars she idolises, at the height of their stratospheric fame, are seen on every billboard and heard on every street corner. Later that year, she and her family will leave the city to live in England, pushing Emma-Lee’s love of Cantopop underground – the sound and symbol of her secret childhood identity.

My Cantopop Nights is the story of how Emma 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 how she suffers an identity crisis just as the city’s post-colonial tensions erupt into the 2019 protests. It’s a story of uncanny coincidences, magical thinking and a quest to reconcile the different sides of her inheritance: Hong Konger and British, Cantopop and indie.

It’s about falling in love with a city, a country, its people and its music, while she seeks to find her own place within it.

© Emma-Lee Moss 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

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Critic reviews

One of my favourite musicians on some of her favourite musicians. A beautiful meditation on how belonging is something we create day by day, year by year. (Rowan Hisayo Buchanan)
Tracing her own life and career alongside the Hong Kong music scene, Moss emerges here as an author of exceptional vision. In My Cantopop Nights, the personal is entwined with the political, and understanding the self means holding close the places and people that make us. This is a book not simply for those who love Moss’s music, but for anyone seeking to understand how complicated, tender histories unfurl in our present—and how art emerges to help us through. (Jessica J. Lee)
An incredibly honest and personal memoir that talks about something universal - finding friendship, understanding family, creating an identity in a world that's messy, layered, and complex (Dan Thompson)
A captivating memoir-meets-cultural history that blends a modern history of Cantopop with Emma’s own personal journey to reconcile with her identity and Chinese heritage. It manages to blend the understated intimacy of personal memory with a compelling and insightful overview of Hong Kong as a site of cultural clash. I was captivated from start to finish and left feeling both moved and more knowledgeable. (Catherine Anne Davies)
My Cantopop Nights is a wondrous thing: fresh, evocative, self-aware, fantastically light of touch, and wholly original. Moss’s writing rings out like a sung note, layered with memory and suggestion. In this diasporic quest unlike any other, an artist gradually realises she’s put half of herself away in a drawer in order to survive: it’s the half-remembered soundtrack of her Hong Kong childhood, refusing to stay locked away, that leads her back. I read it in one headlong, heartsore sweep (Sarah Howe)
My Cantopop Nights brilliantly captures the sweet sorrow of lost places and lost time. It's a chance to time-travel in vivid sound and colour through Emma-Lee Moss's memories to '80s Hong Kong and back. I loved it. (Becky Barnicoat)
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