City Magazine's Chan Guan-chung
Chan Guan-chung is the founder of City Magazine—Hong Kong’s first ever avant-garde publication dedicated to the local cultural scene. The writer has since left Hong Kong and has been residing in Beijing for more than 10 years. He talks to June Ng about how the lure of the mainland capital was strong enough to make him leave his wife.
I came to Hong Kong from Shanghai aged 4, after the Communist Party confiscated my family’s fortunes. My parents, my sister and I lived together in a tiny room.
I was always a mediocre student, but because I went to a decent, church-run primary school, I managed to go to a decent secondary school, and then to university.
I studied politics, but for the first two years at school I mostly messed around. It wasn’t until my final year that I started working.
After graduation, my options were either to work for the government or teach. I wasn’t interested in either, so I went to Boston to study journalism—why Boston?
It was the only school that would take me.
My first job was for a Hong Kong newspaper called The Star. Later, my friends and I discovered the Village Voice from the States. It talked about interesting stuff that was happening around the city, and we were inspired to create our own magazine for Hong Kong. That’s how City Magazine was born.
We had almost no revenue at all. We struggled from 1976 to 1981, and we were constantly on the verge of shutting down. But somehow, we kept on, and we eventually got a big investor to breathe new life into the magazine.