Throughout her debut collection, Patchwork Dolls, Hong Kong writer and gallerist Ysabelle Cheung writes with a beguiling matter-of-factness as she impressively explores seemingly fantastical impossibilities over 10 stories. In the disturbing titular story, these so-called "Patchwork Dolls" sell their facial features for thousands of dollars to "moneyed people seeking an upgrade to newer, trendier faces." This "method of transdermal patchworking" eventually comes under fire for "murky racial inequities": most buyers are "affluent white women dabbling in ethnically ambiguous faces," and sellers are "primarily disadvantaged women of color." The narrator, recalling the anti-Asian racism she endured, remains conflicted: "On a white woman, my face was desired, ambiguous, a symbol of power and wealth. But for me it had been a curse, something I desperately needed to scrub out."
In "Mycomorphosis," Noel's debilitating migraines prove to be "extra fungus in your head." Once she's been diagnosed, she begins to see "brain fungus everywhere." In "Find Your Spirit," a woman's dead twin sister returns to convince the living sibling to download an app that tracks the unliving "as long as she remains close to the earthly plane." In "Herbs," a septuagenarian widow can't escape her dead husband's clones of various ages--youthful 21, emotionally abusive 45, familiar 75--who appear by her side wherever she goes. In "Please, Get Out and Dance," Frankie, her mother, and grandmother attempt to outrun the disappearances of anything and everything by jumping cliffside into the deep sea. In "Galatea," a woman goes home with her date, and leaves with his CompanionDoll--"not a sex toy.... More for companionship"--who "looks... like a generic female office worker," rather like the woman herself. In "Not in This Neighborhood," an extraterrestrial refugee has difficulty adjusting to life on Earth--"she had chosen America simply because she had been to no other place on Earth"--where her name is truncated to just "T" for the difficulty of its "sloping vowels," where, once she migrated, "the narrative changed from a language of community to one of singularity, of hostility."
What elevates many of Cheung's stories into standouts is her uncanny ability effortlessly to spin today's all-too-familiar challenges into tomorrow's speculative extremes: the jarring disappearance of books; escaping colonialism's destruction; matched cohabitation instead of dating; interplanetary immigration. With inventive aplomb, Cheung skillfully strikes a memorable balance between the utterly disconcerting and thoroughly engaging. --Terry Hong
Shelf Talker: Ysabelle Cheung's remarkable debut collection, Patchwork Dolls, presents 10 stories of women facing challenges, simultaneously somehow both familiar and fantastical.