Nothing was impossible in the 1980s, but at the same time many other future possibilities were buried.

The Golden Decade: Gone for Good?

At the beginning of this book, I argued that it was necessary to articulate one's personal belonging. Personally, I do not have anything fascinating to write about, but the city where I was born and grew up does. What I watched, listened to, and read, and where I (window) shopped and saw people dancing are very well worth recording. As previously mentioned, my recordings in this book were partially inspired by Leo Ou-fan Lee's City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong. I cannot agree more with Didi Kirsten Tatlow on what she said in her review of this book: ‘Anecdotes and vignettes pepper Lee's book. Yet this is no elegiac history of a colony-that-was; rather, his gentle, personal musings read more like a declaration of love for a city full of contradictions.’ Unlike Leo Lee's stance of ‘the fl.neur chronicling the life of a beloved city’, though, I looked back at the 1980s as a time when the economy as well as the pop culture of my Hong Kong flourished on an unprecedented scale. In a special feature on the 1980s published by Ming Pao Weekly in November 2016, the editor made the remark quoted in the epigraph, which perfectly summed up the gains and losses of the decade in which Hong Kong cultural industries had ‘the magical Midas Touch’.