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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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Summary

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.

'Captures that era of Hong Kong music with such warmth and clarity... Transcendent and transportive' Angela Hui

‘A wondrous thing: fresh, evocative, self-aware, fantastically light of touch and wholly original’ Sarah Howe

‘An author of exceptional vision... for anyone seeking to understand how complicated, tender histories unfurl in our present – and how art emerges to help us through’ Jessica J. Lee

'Prepare to meet your new favourite playlist' Dan Schreiber

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

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Critic Reviews

Captures that era of Hong Kong music with such warmth and clarity. It’s a scene that shaped generations, and here it feels vivid, alive, and essential... Transcendent and transportive, with prose that kept me hooked to the very last line (Angela Hui, author of Takeaway)
Tracing her own life and career alongside the Hong Kong music scene, Moss emerges here as an author of exceptional vision... 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, author of Dispersals)
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... I was captivated from start to finish and left feeling both moved and more knowledgeable. (Catherine Anne Davies (a.k.a The Anchoress))
Prepare to meet your new favourite playlist (Dan Schreiber)
My Cantopop Nights is a wondrous thing: fresh, evocative, self-aware, fantastically light of touch, and wholly original... I read it in one headlong, heartsore sweep (Sarah Howe, author of Foretokens)
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, author of The Sleep Watcher)
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, author of Cry When the Baby Cries)
Emma-Lee Moss brings her lyrical brilliance as a songwriter to this dreamy memoir that interweaves personal history with iconic Hong Kong songs. A must-read for anyone who has ever loved music. (Doretta Lau, author of How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?)
Fascinating... a beautiful memoir that celebrates the hidden forces that make our lives into something special
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)
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