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[REVIEW] “Yuanfen of Emmy the Great: On Emma-Lee Moss’s My Cantopop Nights” by Mario Rustan

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on My Cantopop Nights.

Emma-Lee Moss. My Cantopop Nights: A Memoir in Songs. Jonathan Cape, 2026. 352 pgs.

My Cantopop Nights, the memoir of the British singer Emma-Lee Moss, also known as Emmy the Great, seems a natural companion to my previous reviews of books on Hong Kong. It is also a trade book on Hong Kong, a subject usually left to academic or niche publishers.

_{^{Emma-Lee Moss as one person playing two roles}}

I had only just begun reading this book when my online friend Susan Blumberg-Kason submitted her review of it, but it is Cha’s policy to accept multiple reviews of a single title in order to present alternative perspectives and interpretations.

I first came across Emmy the Great in the 2010s while searching for Western singers and bands of Asian heritage, and listened to some of her tracks. She released her first album in 2009, and the book opens with her final concert in London on 22 April 2023.

^{Emmy the Great performed at Shoreditch Town Hall}

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My Cantopop Nights is a fairly straightforward memoir that weaves Moss’s life around Cantopop, placing less emphasis on her professional career as an indie artist in Britain. Although we read about her early tours of the United States and the United Kingdom, most of the episodes from her adult life are set in Hong Kong and China.

As Blumberg-Kason notes in her review, the title pays homage to Wong Kar-wai’s American film My Blueberry Nights, and Moss appears to draw on Wong’s themes of memory, of Western sounds and images within Hong Kong’s landscape, and of the identities of Hong Kongers and their home.

Moss opens her story with a 1995 haircut that warranted a trip downtown from her home in Sha Tin to Admiralty. It was not the Rachel from the TV seeries Friends, which every other girl wanted, but the boyish cut of Aaron Kwok. In 1995, Hong Kong entertainment was at its zenith: the city’s top singers and film stars, led by the “Four Heavenly Kings” (Jacky Cheung, Andy Lau, Leon Lai, and Aaron Kwok) ), were famous throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Tim Wheeler, an Irishman who once dated Moss but makes no visible appearance in this memoir, was so taken with Jackie Chan that he wrote a song titled “Kung Fu” for his band Ash, which featured in the end credits of the American release of Rumble in the Bronx in 1996.

^{Aaron Kwok and his hairstyle}

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Moss’s parents had resolved to emigrate at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. That year, Hong Kong, along with Taiwan, appeared to be a bastion of liberty in the Chinese-speaking world, but its incorporation into the People’s Republic of China in 1997 was inevitable, and the Mosses concluded that leaving for England was their best option.

The Aaron haircut was perhaps her keepsake from Hong Kong as the family settled outside London and found a world calmer, colder, and emptier than the one they had left, where the other mothers at school looked so plain and the only Asians her peers could think of were Japanese. Moss was at the age when puberty, rebellion, and the search for identity go hand in hand, and in the end it was her mother who feared being left alone by a husband equally at ease in Chinese and English settings and by a daughter who had learned to be British.

She also sought role models among rebellious Hong Kong singers such as Anita Mui and Faye Wong. Mui defied China, where her single “Bad Girl” was banned, and supported the Chinese students in 1989, whereas Wong defied Hong Kong by giving birth in Beijing to Leah Dou, her daughter with the Chinese rock star Dou Wei, and by siding with a Chinese celebrity who had mocked the Four Heavenly Kings.

One intriguing point that Moss leaves unexplored is the moment she felt out of her depth, unfamiliar with British alternative music, when someone mentioned Lush. The band’s lead singer, Miki Berenyi, daughter of the Japanese actress Yasuko Nagazumi, is likewise biracial.

^{Miki Berenyi with Lush in 1994}

The Rise of
Emmy the Great

Moss returned to Hong Kong on holiday and immersed herself in the punk side of the city’s entertainment scene. Faye Wong’s cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams”, titled “Dream Person”, became the city’s anthem, just as her film Chungking Express became an arthouse favourite around the world. As part of growing up, Moss began to drift away from Cantopop, listening instead to Hong Kong punk bands formed by international school students.

The United Kingdom handed Hong Kong over to China on 1 July 1997. The Four Heavenly Kings performed alongside Faye Wong, while Boy George and Grace Jones squabbled over the DJ booth. As the new People’s Liberation Army garrison marched in and the new Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, delivered a speech in Mandarin, London was swinging once again under Tony Blair. Coincidence or not, the Asian Financial Crisis began the following day.

Moss grew up aware of being a half-European, half-Asian girl: desired (she took Weezer’s album Pinkerton as a paean to girls like her), yet belonging nowhere. After experimenting with alcohol and drugs, she resolved to become a singer and adopted the stage name Emmy the Great. Hong Kong, meanwhile, endured its annus horribilis in 2003, when SARS brought the city to its knees, Anita Mui died of cancer, and Leslie Cheung took his own life.

Emmy the Great released her first single in 2007, at the age of 23, returned to Cantopop after the death of her uncle Sam, and found a professional role model in Faye Wong. She was aided by the digitalisation of media and the rise of social networks in the 2000s, which made it easier to find and play Hong Kong content on her laptop in the UK or the US, and by Lily Allen, who recommended her MySpace page. Faye Wong’s “One Person Playing Two Roles” (itself a cover of a song by the indie band AMK) became Moss’s song too, speaking to her both as a biracial migrant and as an indie singer with a stage name. She recorded her own cover for the Asian edition of her 2011 album Virtue.

^{Emmy the Great performing “One Person Playing Two Roles”}

Destined for
Hong Kong

It is never easy for an Asian singer to succeed in the Western music market, and the two most notable examples of our time, Bruno Mars and Olivia Rodrigo, may have succeeded because their Asian heritage is often overlooked. Like her Hong Kong heroes, Emmy sought opportunities in China, taking up a residency in Xiamen, Fujian Province, where she learned to embrace the concept of yuanfen, or destiny.

The late 2010s brought a great deal of yuanfen. This was a period of global progressive activism, from #MeToo in the US, which was also widely discussed in local contexts across Asia, to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Moss’s mother introduced her to an Englishman she calls the Woodsman. In 2018, Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries died, and Moss discovered that she was expecting a baby. By the time she became a mother, Hong Kong was engulfed in mass protests, and she found herself raising a child in a city under siege. All her parents’ fears of 1989 had come true, yet even in 2019 they remained in Hong Kong.

Moss released her final album, April/月音, in 2020, as the pandemic brought the world to a standstill. The narrative then comes full circle, returning to the opening scene in which she performs Emmy the Great’s final concert and prepares this memoir. As its title suggests, the memoir concerns the influence of Cantopop on her life and the way Hong Kong has stayed with her long after her migration to England. I wish more had been said about her professional career in the West during the 2010s, including some of her successes.

Meanwhile, the history of Cantopop that this memoir documents so well is being erased. When Moss visited the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, she found nothing on the 1989 Concert for Democracy in China, on Anita Mui’s activism, or on Denise Ho, who came out as a lesbian and became a figure of the Umbrella Movement.

The book opens with a description of Cantopop by the poet Sarah Howe, a fellow biracial Briton, who characterises it as humid, much like Hong Kong itself. Moss expands on this, describing its muggy notes and close harmonies, the watery music of sweat, tears, and drinking in the city. Cantopop was spurred by Beatlemania, and Moss notes that her father played a part in its growth as a lyricist for the 1970s band The Wynners, fronted by Alan Tam and Kenny Bee.

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I missed the golden age of Cantopop for a couple of reasons. Indonesia had a policy of restricting Chinese-language media, and although Cantopop songs were not banned, their cassettes were not stocked in record shops the way Western and Southeast Asian albums were, a result not only of political restriction but also of low demand. My Chinese classmates talked about the Four Heavenly Kings, but I knew them only as actors (their films were dubbed into English in cinemas and into Indonesian on television), since only the girls listened to Cantopop.

Cantopop was more ubiquitous in Australia in the 2000s, owing to the significant presence of the Hong Kong diaspora and other Chinese communities, including those from the People’s Republic. The golden age ended in 2003 with SARS and the deaths of Mui and Cheung. A period of democratisation in the mid-2000s, led by more approachable singers such as Eason Chan and Nicholas Tse, ended in the debacle of the late 2000s.

It began with Edison Chen’s photo scandal, which involved Gillian Chung of the pop duo Twins (Moss jokes that whenever she is with another Chinese woman, they instantly become Twins), continued with a street brawl between Gary Chaw and Justin Lo, and culminated in Jill Vidal and Kelvin Kwan being caught in possession of drugs. All of this might seem unremarkable in the entertainment scenes of Los Angeles or London, but it was unacceptable in face-conscious East Asia, where celebrities are expected to inspire and encourage the public.

Cantopop lives on in Hong Kong, but since the 2010s it has been permanently eclipsed by Mandopop, to say nothing of the global dominance of Korean pop. The Heavenly Kings remain active, as do Eason Chan and boy bands such as Mirror. Emma-Lee Moss, meanwhile, holds on to the memory of Faye and others of her era as she lives through history and sings about it.

^{My Cantopop Nights playlist via}

^{How to cite: Rustan, Mario. “Yuanfen of Emmy the Great: On Emma-Lee Moss’s My Cantopop Nights.“ Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Oct. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/10/29/yuanfen.}

Mario Rustan is a writer and reviewer living in Bandung, Indonesia. [All contributions by Mario Rustan.]