The concept and structure of this book were partially inspired by Leo Ou-fan Lee's City between Worlds: My Hong Kong, in which the author walked in the city, trying to ‘find out what indeed is (or was) there, in Hong Kong's past, that may still shed light on its culture today’. According to Lee, a long-time Hong Kong resident, the city means quite different things to different groups of people: the natives who grew up there and experienced it as the context for everyday life, the expatriates who came to work in its robust finance centre, the British who created the colonial face of the city, and the urban and global residents whose emerging consciousness encompassed and transcended that of the previous groups. Lee had chosen to look at his Hong Kong from this perspective: ‘voicing opinions, wherever possible, on behalf of a Chinese community whose members have not chosen to write about their city in English’. ‘Each chapter presents a slice of the city's history and culture,’ in addition, ‘called up by the streets, sites, and artifacts themselves, and by association with literature and film.’ Taking this as the critical backdrop, the chapters in this book – structured around walking tours – were conceived to touch on different ‘slices’ of Hong Kong pop culture in the 1980s: