In this Cha Reading Series event "Nostalgia in the Chinese City", Cha contributors Antony Dapiran and Paul French will discuss nostalgia in their work and in the Chinese cities where they have lived and worked for many years. Moderated by Cha co-editor Tammy Ho Lai-Ming. Nostalgia—from the Greek words nostos ('homecoming') and algia ('pain' or 'ache)—a yearning for lost time and place, for a past where one perhaps felt more 'at home'. We may feel nostalgia for our own past, or for earlier times we could not have personally known. And it seems that nowhere is this more sharply felt than in the rapidly developing metropolises of China. Our cities are sites of collective memory, and collective amnesia. Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing: all suffer forms of the "culture of disappearance"; all have ambiguous—sometimes wistful, sometimes problematic—relationships with the past. Whether in a tourist packed hutong, an old Shanghai-themed café, a G.O.D. store, or gazing at a lone junk sailing on Victoria Harbour—we encounter nostalgia triggers daily. It can be comforting or confusing, positive or negative. It is political and it is personal. Nostalgia is a community, even if those communities are long gone now.