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Long-distance call

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In July, singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss (Mok Ai-ming) felt like she had come home.

'It was just amazing,' she says of her gig at Grappa's Cellar, in Central. 'They billed it as a homecoming and it really felt like that. It was like showing my family, 'I told you I made music and here it is'.'

Moss, 26, who performs as Emmy The Great, has achieved a strong following performing at festivals and touring with troubadours Martha Wainwright and Jamie T. She grew up in Sha Tin with her Chinese mother and English father. She attended Creative Primary School in Kowloon Tong but has mixed memories of her time there.

'I remember there was always a lot of homework,' she says. '[I remember] typhoon eights. I remember when all the taxi drivers had black flags on their aerials. I didn't understand - I asked my mother and she said something terrible had happened in China. That was the Tiananmen Square [crackdown].'

Moss says she felt like an outsider in Hong Kong.

'I felt really awkward; I didn't really speak slang or anything; I didn't watch the same TV shows [as school colleagues], so I didn't have the same cultural references.'

In 1995, when she was 12, her family left for England, something she had dreamed about.

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