Fifteen years have passed between the publication of Hon Lai Chu’s 《缝身》 (“Seam”) and Mending Bodies, its English translation by Jacqueline Leung. Readers who feel those years mark a drift toward dystopia may detect the eerie touch of prophecy in Hon’s writing. Yet she also digs into human problems with neither expiration date nor borders.

In a novel where neither the name of the protagonist nor her home city is given, the central proper noun is “The Conjoinment Act”,  legislation dating back a generation or so, passed to encourage young people to undergo surgery that stitches them into pairs. There’s an economic rationale: new bodies stimulate productive new demands. There’s a social rationale: marriage is obsolete. There’s an existential rationale: adult humans are too flawed to thrive as individuals. And there’s an unwritten political rationale: conjoined people are too bogged down to resist, or otherwise involve themselves in politics. The surgery itself is, needless to say, gruesome, burdensome, prone to error, and impossible to undo without severe damage and risk of death.

The nameless narrator is a student writing a dissertation on conjoinment, who initially considers and finally commits to the procedure. Her decision is shaped by a progressive degradation of her mental state and increasing uncertainty, exacerbated by her caring but cold dorm-mate, and a series of bizarre (a)sexual encounters with older men. These frisson-free flings feature touching, tying up, but all are directed, nominally at any rate, to shaping her passage into “healthy” society. Her subsequent conjoined life proves oppressive and even more mundane, and so buyer’s remorse prompts a newfound decisiveness: perhaps far too late.

Excerpts from the dissertation—which largely discuss fictional and real-world cases of conjoined twins, and the psychology driving their conflicting desires to separate, or to remain as one—become touchstones for the narrative.

Hon’s nameless city is surreal: she deploys sci-fi-infused dystopia and abject body horror for her premise, but her more consistent mode is unreality. People in Mending Bodies behave strangely, and the flow of cause and effect feels distorted. This shifting ground leaves the reader with little to grasp onto unless they turn to cerebral interpretation; a pattern of reading already prompted by the namedropping of figures like Erich Fromm in the “dissertation” interludes.

National politics offers the most obvious analogy. Though detail on the setting is scant, Hon tells us that it is “failing”. Readers familiar with Hong Kong will recognise particular geographic clues, and even those unfamiliar will note signs of malaise. The medical and academic authorities the protagonist meets are dubious “experts”, cramming themselves into love hotels and dingy offices above wet markets. Anxiety over pending bodily conjoinment suggests Hong Kong’s relationship to mainland China. Society in Mending Bodies is an impassive force, sidelining the noncompliant and eager to ponder the merits of sensible surrender.

Philosophy aside, there is also reward in considering Mending Bodies from the perspective of a young person, especially (but not exclusively) a young woman. The conjoined pairs of our narrator’s dissertation are all same-sex siblings, while every surgically conjoined pair in the novel is a heterosexual (but sexless) couple. Every character who is conjoined or heading for conjoinment accepts that the surgery ends a period of levity and adventure, and commences a hoped-for passage into maturity and respectability. So it feels natural to consider the novel as a dark bildungsroman concerned with the fear and fascination with which a floundering twentysomething might consider the institution of marriage – particularly if that twentysomething is a woman living in a society where to be among “serious adults” is to managed by weird, handsy men peddling impenetrable dogmas. This is another form of surrender: across the novel we see our hero lose interest in her studies, and then, post-surgery, begin to cede choice of career to her conjoined male half.

So, Mending Bodies is “out there”: a unique, beguiling depiction of a displeasurable existence in an apathetic society. But it’s not incomparable with other works. Among other recent Hong Kong literature available in English translation, the parallels with Dorothy Tse’s Owlish are hard to miss: another surreal story of surrender and introversion in academia, amid dystopian surroundings. Fans of Neon Genesis Evangelion (or Schopenhauer) may find a kindred exploration of “the hedgehog’s dilemma”, where the desire for human connection is cancelled out by the reality of pain and cruelty, producing a perpetual pull between the desire for solitude and the desire to dissolve oneself into a greater whole. If there is a broadly applicable lesson in Mending Bodies, it is that surrendering one’s individual existence is never easy, and not necessarily a lasting answer to one’s problems.

Angus Stewart founded the Translated Chinese Fiction Podcast and has written for publications including Cha, Typebar and STAT.