At age 12 I finally watched the film and it felt like it was made for me. I recognised and appreciated, unlike its critics, the hodgepodge. It is not so much a chick flick with magic as a genre chimera: romance, gothic melodrama, small-town satire, ghost story and feminist parable. I grew up in Hong Kong during the 1990s, a city defined by its complex history with traditions shaped by diverse communities and displaced refugees like my Beijing-born father.