Emma-Lee Moss, a singer-songwriter who released four albums as Emmy the Great, was born in Hong Kong to an English father and Hongkonger mother. She lived there until she was 11, when her family moved to England, one of many who left Hong Kong before its transfer of sovereignty from the UK to China in 1997.

Even as a child, Moss understood the significance of the handover, which returned Hong Kong to Chinese control after 156 years as a British colony. “Thanks to our British passports, we would avoid the greatest schism our city had ever known – and its consequences, which were unwritten,” Moss writes in her memoir, My Cantopop Nights. Later, as a touring musician, Moss played gigs in Hong Kong, where she reconnected with her childhood love of Cantopop – predominantly Hong Kong music that blended Chinese and western pop sensibilities. In 2017, she moved back there to write her fourth album. Then, in 2019, she watched as thousands of pro-democracy protesters took to the streets after activists, including Joshua Wong, Nathan Law and Alex Chow, were imprisoned.

In My Cantopop Nights, Moss tells Hong Kong’s history through Cantopop alongside her own origin story in becoming Emmy the Great. Here are some of the genre’s highlights, with Moss writing about how they touched her life and captured the mood of Hong Kong throughout its turbulent history. Katie Goh

Aaron Kwok – Love You Endlessly 對你愛不完

Aaron Kwok was one of the “four heavenly kings” of Cantopop in the 1990s, alongside Jacky Cheung, Andy Lau and Leon Lai. Love You Endlessly is the song that launched his career. But it is also an important song for me because of a significant haircut I got in 1995, age 11. I went to the salon and I remember thinking: should I get the Rachel from Friends cut? And instead I walked out with the Aaron cut. I arrived in England from Hong Kong with that haircut, where no one knew who Kwok was. I passed from a world where he was a god to a world where he did not exist.

It felt appropriate to start my book with this song and Kwok because he feels linked to me, because I had his hair. We shared a silhouette.

There’s something about the age of 11 that is magical. You’ve got a bit of autonomy. You can choose a CD to buy, or your own haircut. It’s a transitional age where strange things are happening to you. I crossed a threshold at that age, and the thing that held me as I was crossing it was this haircut.

Faye Wong – Dream Person 夢中人

The year after we left Hong Kong, my parents came back on a business trip and I came back, too. I associate this song – Faye Wong’s Cantonese version of the Cranberries’ Dreams – with a sleepover I had there with my friend Nat. She had just seen the Cranberries and been to a three-band bill of the Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys; she played me DIY punk bands whose members went to international school. For a weekend I dived into 90s Hong Kong and came back to England transformed into a vessel of subculture.

At that time, Wong was getting into western rock and rebelling against Cantopop. She had done a cover of Tori Amos, was really into Björk and the Cranberries, and did a collaboration with Cocteau Twins. The mixtape Nat made me that weekend became my entire personality for the rest of my teen years, and we wrote a song together – which was the first song I ever wrote.

The Wynners – You’re Free

During the Covid pandemic, I found a 1970s album by a Hong Kong band called the Wynners. On the back of the record cover, I saw my dad’s name! I remembered an old family story about my dad writing songs for a Hong Kong band, who needed English lyrics. He was in Hong Kong as an art specialist, but had agreed to it because it sounded fun.

It turned out they were massive, and included Alan Tam and Kenny Bee, who were big Cantopop stars. I couldn’t believe it. I thought my Cantopop investigation was just for me and I was trying to figure out who I was, but I realised that if I looked at the history of Cantopop, not only could it help me understand the history of Hong Kong, but it also gave me greater insight into my parents’ lives when they were young.

The Wynners had a TV show where they dressed in ruffles and did these pitch-perfect covers of western songs. I was looking at these incredible videos and discovering a history of Cantopop that began with the Beatles playing Hong Kong in 1964. There was such a burst of Beatlemania that local bands started singing in English. The Wynners were part of this first wave of Cantopop. So, my dad wrote songs for one of the first Cantopop bands.

Beyond – Boundless Ocean, Vast Skies 海闊天空

This was the song Beyond released just before their singer Wong Ka Kui died in 1993. I was nine at the time and I remember watching TV and asking my mum why all the pop stars and famous people were crying. Beyond were Hong Kong’s biggest rock band, but no one in England knew them when we came here, so it was like I was holding on to this name in secret.

During the pandemic, when I was missing my parents, who were in Hong Kong, I was really longing for Hong Kong. I would play Beyond songs on the piano and listen to them all the time. They came from an underground movement of independent bands, before they signed with a major label. As a musician myself, I had always thought that I wasn’t very Hong Kong because I was also independent with my band. But I realise now that I’m as Hong Kong as it’s possible to be!

Sam Hui – Half a Catty, Eight Taels 半斤八两

Sam Hui was one of the first people from the post-Beatles 60s wave to experiment with writing in Cantonese. I love his music. He’s a songwriter’s songwriter. He can do beautiful ballads and he can bring in classical Chinese, but he can also do funny Canto opera when he’s being a bit jokey. I really love this jokey song. It has the same message as Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5, but the 70s Hong Kong version: we’re working too hard, the boss thinks we’re dogs!

I discovered Hui when I moved back to Hong Kong as an adult. I was really seeking Hong Kong. The stability I took for granted as a child was gone and I spent the end of 2017 writing my album April/月音 about Hong Kong.

I could see other people doing the same. It was a time when people felt that Hong Kong was a fragile thing, being halfway through what was called “one country, two systems”. Young people who had been born after the handover were coming of age, and there was political insecurity as well as an urgency to preserve and to discover what Hong Kong actually was – which I noticed most in music and art.

The story of Hong Kong is the sound of it and the feel of it. It didn’t begin with colonisation. It’s not what you read on the street signs or in an English history book. Listening to Hui was the moment I realised, for me, I would find that history if I listened to Cantopop.

Tat Ming Pair – The Stars Are So Bright Tonight 今夜星光燦爛

This song is on the first Cantopop concept album, I Wait for Your Return 我等著你回來, by Tat Ming Pair. They were a pop act who emerged from the band scene: activists who never wasted a lyric.

Their 1988 song Forbidden Colours was one of the first LGBTQ+ anthems, and Anthony Wong Yiu-ming was the first Cantopop star to come out, in 2012. Tat Ming Pair were probably the biggest cult act in Hong Kong and they always will be. They’re a testament to being yourself as an artist.

This song is incredibly prophetic. It was written in 1988, before the handover, and it asks: is the glitter and glamour going to disappear? Is this all going to go away? I remember these questions being part of the atmosphere during my childhood.

Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung – Yuanfen 緣分

This song is from a movie called Behind the Yellow Line, which is basically the 2001 movie Serendipity, starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale, but made in 1980s Hong Kong. It stars Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung and it’s about people trying to bump into each other on the MTR railway system: if they bump into each other, it means fate has decided they’ll be together.

I went to China for a music residency in 2017 at a time when I was quite lost. Halfway through the residency, I discovered this concept of yuanfen, which is karmic serendipity. They say yuanfen dictates how two people meet, when they meet and is the result of all the interactions in your past lives. When I discovered yuanfen, it truly changed my life. I ended up with a completely different life as a result of it. I still use yuanfen as the basis for all of my decisions.

Mui and Cheung had some serious yuanfen together. They both became pop megastars at the same time. They rubbed up against Hong Kong conservatism and refused to back down. They shared this energy of extreme productivity and talent mixed with sadness. They died in the same year. They were icons and must have had some serious karma together.

Faye Wong – One Person Playing Two Roles 一人分飾兩角

This song came out in 1995, the year after Wong starred in Wong Kar-Wai’s film Chungking Express. She couldn’t have been more famous – then she put out this weird song that couldn’t have sounded less like a hit.

I discovered the song in my 20s, when I was on my first tour of Asia and in Hong Kong. Everyone I encountered in Hong Kong told me it’s an AMK song: Hong Kong’s first indie band. AMK couldn’t have been more indie – the biggest capacity they played for was 500 – and Wong was singing over their music.

It’s not a song for radio and I love it. It introduced me to another strand of Hong Kong’s music history, and I learned about the indie scene that AMK pioneered along with bands such as the Box. The beloved indie band My Little Airport were first signed by AMK’s Ah Chung.

I discovered this song when I was making my first record and I was furiously anti-commercial. It was like I had found my perfect song. The lyrics are about living in an internal world that other people can’t know about. She’s living in a dream and playing two roles: it was like she had written this song for me.

My Cantopop Nights: A Memoir in Songs by Emma-Lee Moss is published 11 June by Jonathan Cape (£22). To support the Guardian, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.