This book came onto my radar during the brilliant event about writing female experience I attended at Hong Kong International Literary Festival earlier this month. The panel featured three local authors, who spoke arrestingly about how they capture the pressures facing young women in Hong Kong today.
As soon as I heard the premise of the title story of Ysabelle Cheung’s debut collection, Patchwork Dolls, I was hooked. The story centres around young, marginalised women in a scarily believable version of New York, who sell their features to be grafted onto the faces of wealthy, white consumers keen to keep up with the latest Instagram trends. Indeed, as Cheung explained during the event, the story was inspired by Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker essay ‘The Age of Instagram Face’. I snapped up a copy of Cheung’s book and devoured much of it on my flight home.
One of the many things to admire in this collection is the sense of a hallmark running through it. Although this is Cheung’s debut, its voice and identity are deeply assured. Cheung’s specialism is near-realist dystopias – skewed portraits that show us our world in a slightly distorted mirror by walking now a few nightmarish steps down the road. There is the recluse who becomes infested with ‘head fungus’, and a letter from a woman forced into a life of continuous displacement sharing recipes with the great-granddaughter she will never meet. There is the matchmaking agency that parachutes strangers into identikit apartments and the app that allows bereaved people to track the ghosts of loved ones. The stories roam around the planet, taking in versions of Hong Kong, London and New York, as well as unidentified landscapes ravaged by consumerism and climate change.
It sounds bleak – and it’s certainly true that a ‘latent type of horror’ pervades many of these stories, as well as a righteous anger at the mess humans have made – but the collection is playful, ingenious and surprising too. In the great-grandmother’s letter, for example, Cheung raises several smiles by crashing together notions of survivalism and tradition with futuristic technology. ‘If you do not have these tools in the future, a laser crusher will survive’, the narrator instructs her descendant-to-be.
There’s also a choose-your-own-adventure story. I have to admit my heart sank when I saw this. I’ve never enjoyed this sort of book (although, admittedly, my experience of them isn’t vast – if you can recommend a good one, please do, especially if it’s translated) and as the mother of young children, I have been held hostage on more than one occasion by rambling stories about unicorns, cake and glitter, where my main concern has been to game the system so as to get to an ending as quickly as possible.
Perhaps mindful that selecting what happens next isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, Cheung appears to give the reader the option of skipping this story, also called ‘The Reader’. ‘Dear reader,’ she writes. ‘If you prefer to continue this story collection in the traditional way, please feel free to turn to the next story after this one. If you’re up for a little adventure, however, please proceed to the next page.’ And of course, in so doing, she ensures that all of us – even those who, like me, aren’t fans of this sort of fiction – give ‘The Reader’ a try, because who wants to think of themselves as the sort of person who isn’t up for a little adventure? (Indeed, as the title suggests, the whole story is really about us and our responses, encouraging us to notice what goes into our decision-making and what we look for as we work our way through texts.)
This sort of psychological astuteness is part of what makes Patchwork Dolls special. The author is attentive not only to her characters and the worlds they inhabit but to the responses of her reader. There is a wonderful humanity and pathos to the stories, as well as an uplifting hopefulness. This may be a world where nature is compromised and where boundaries are continually breached – where phones ‘grunt’ like living things and people use one another like objects. These may be visions of a reality in which, like the prospective great-grandmother, we grieve ‘being so much less of ourselves – so reduced in our want for the future’. But there is still beauty, even if it comes from surprising, even repulsive, quarters – in the lustre of discarded bits of parasitic fungus, for example. And there is still possibility: the fact that the great-grandmother writes her letter shows her conviction that there will be a future, no matter how tough and precarious, and there will still be pleasure to be had from taking care over the preparation of food.
The fact of Cheung writing is similarly encouraging. She and her fellow panellists, Kaitlin Chan and Karen Cheung, were forthright and open about the challenges facing their generation, particularly young women. Yet they saw these as a spur, rather than a barrier – something their writing could tackle and expose.
At the end of the acknowledgements to Patchwork Dolls, Cheung lays bare the motivations for her work: ‘And finally, to the teacher who said I would never learn to read; the magazine publisher who made me doubt my own words; the men who followed me home from school; and the authoritarian figures who dictate what we can, and cannot, write and say. You gave me a reason to write these stories.’
I look forward to seeing what Ysabelle Cheung does next.
Patchwork Dolls by Ysabelle Cheung (Blair/Carolina Wren Press, 2026)
