By Hon Lai Chu
Translated by Jacqueline Leung
Reviewed by Tammy Lai-ming Ho
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright July, 2025)
Hon Lai Chu, Mending Bodies Tr. Jacqueline Leung. San Francisco: Two Lines Press, 2025. 240 pp. ISBN: 978-1949641769.
In Hon Lai Chu’s 韓麗珠 Mending Bodies, originally published in Chinese as Fengshen 縫身 (which translates literally to “Sewn Body”) fifteen years ago and newly translated into English by Jacqueline Leung, the Hong Kong author envisions a society where connection and loyalty are measured by literal bodily attachment. Under a new law known as the Conjoinment Act, young adults are incentivized—indeed pressured—to surgically “conjoin” with a partner for life. These partnerships may be arranged through state-run matching programs that assess bodily compatibility, but they can also arise from personal choice, including romantic inclination. Yet love is no guarantee of harmony. Whether selected voluntarily or bureaucratically, conjoinment is depicted as a fraught compromise with an increasingly coercive society.
Hon transforms this surreal premise into an unsettling fable of personal freedom under siege, one that resonates far beyond its vaguely defined setting. Through spare, haunting prose and disquieting imagery, Mending Bodies interrogates what it means to relinquish autonomy “for the good of another person and for the good of the country.”[1] It’s a dystopian tale deeply rooted in Hong Kong’s contemporary anxieties, yet its questions about bodily sovereignty and identity feel unnervingly universal.
The novel’s unnamed narrator is a university student writing her dissertation on the history of conjoined humans. She is critical of the Conjoinment Act, even as friends and family urge her to “settle down” and join the program. In Hon’s alternate Hong Kong—a thinly veiled version of the real city—public opinion has been swayed to see conjoinment as the only path to a better life. The narrator observes with unease as newly conjoined couples are celebrated like heroes, showered with champagne by friends and touted as symbols of hope. Meanwhile, unjoined individuals face growing stigma as incomplete or selfish. This Orwellian social pressure is epitomized by the narrator’s close college friend, May. Once a free-spirited roommate, May now boasts about her own conjoinment and pointedly wonders when the narrator will “sacrifice” herself too (134). Through such interactions, Hon paints a chilling portrait of conformity, where even those close to us become agents of state ideology.
At first, our narrator resists fiercely. She fixates on completing her thesis, which she hopes will expose the Conjoinment Act’s absurdity. Hon structures the novel in an innovative way, interweaving the narrator’s first-person account with passages from her academic research. These inserted excerpts—purportedly drafts of the narrator’s thesis—lend a quasi-scholarly tone, even as they echo the narrator’s inner turmoil. For instance, she writes in her notes: “Once we connect our bodies with another person, we inevitably become a bystander to their lives” (159). This observation crystallizes her fear that conjoinment means annihilating the self, becoming an accessory to someone else’s existence. Such lines blur the boundary between the narrator’s scholarship and her emotional reality, adding a metafictional layer to the book’s structure. As readers, we are privy not only to what she lives and witnesses, but also to how she intellectualizes those experiences in writing. It’s a fascinating narrative technique that deepens our understanding of the protagonist’s psyche—her desperate rationalizations, her dread of losing herself in another.
Hon’s prose, elegantly translated from Chinese by Jacqueline Leung, oscillates between cool, reportorial description and poetic flashes of pain. Early in the story, when May visits while conjoined to another person, the narrator is transfixed by the grotesque sight of their bodies “clung together beneath a curious seam” connecting their chests. Later, after undergoing the surgery herself, she confesses, “I won’t say it hurts . . . I just feel each part of myself more acutely than before . . . like an overweight backpack” (6). This quietly devastating image, tinged with unease and regret, shows Hon’s talent for conveying psychological complexity through the body. In that single metaphor—a human form rendered burdensome like a heavy pack—we sense the weight of a choice that cannot be undone. Hon’s turns of phrase are consistently arresting. Even in translation, lines like “The self proliferates as incessantly as mold” shine with eerie precision (149). Jacqueline Leung deserves credit for rendering Hon’s spare, lyrical style into English with such haunting clarity. (It’s no surprise the translation received an English PEN Translates award prior to publication.)
As the plot progresses, Mending Bodies tightens its focus on the narrator’s conflicted journey. Under mounting societal and peer pressure, she edges closer to the fate she dreads. Her academic advisor, the eccentric Professor Foot, delivers the final push: he suggests that to truly understand conjoined subjects, she ought to “simulate being one of them” (44). In a discomfiting scene, he ropes himself to the narrator in a hotel room, forcing her to stumble in tandem with him, literally experiencing the clumsiness of two people fused into “three legs” (45). This pseudo-scientific experiment, bizarre in premise, is described with deadpan intensity, but its subtext is powerful. It dramatizes the imbalance of power and consent at the heart of the narrative—a foreshadowing of how the narrator will be coaxed into giving up her autonomy. It’s also one of several moments where Hon invokes the grotesque and the intimate in the same breath, a hallmark of her style.
Inevitably, the narrator does agree to conjoin. The surgery scene is rendered in vivid detail: the hospital’s festive ward for new couples, a lawyer reading out legal disclaimers before the anesthetic hits. The narrator notes that the crowds cheering her decision are really “cheering” for themselves (131), taking her compliance as validation of their own choices. After the operation, she awakens to a frightening new normal. Conjoined at the chest to a man named Lok, she experiences every movement as a joint effort, each private moment now shared. Hon conveys the body horror of this scenario with subtle brilliance—the narrator and Lok literally cannot look each other in the eye due to the angle of their attachment, rendering emotional connection even more elusive. As she recovers, the narrator feels her sense of self ebbing: “My inner world [was] richer and fuller than it had ever been before I got conjoined” (160), she reflects ironically, noting how her thesis ideas finally seem to crystallize after she’s lost her physical independence. This is Hon’s dark irony at play—only by losing freedom does the protagonist understand its value fully, her scholarly analysis sharpened by personal tragedy.
Through the narrator’s post-surgery experiences, Mending Bodies explores the emotional fallout of imposed togetherness. She and Lok attempt to adjust to life as a single unit, but their partnership is strained and surreal. Earlier in the novel—before their conjoinment—the narrator had sought treatment for insomnia, not realizing at first that her therapist was the same man she had met at a matchmaking dinner: Lok. During one of those sessions, he tells her, “Insomniacs are just people who are too sealed within themselves” (113). The line, clinical at the time, gains ironic weight in hindsight. Now physically sealed to Lok, the narrator experiences a new form of isolation—not solitude, but dissolution. Hon carefully charts this quiet unraveling: though she outwardly performs the role of a supportive partner, she continues polishing her dissertation in secret, revisits memories of her friend May, and mourns the parts of herself she feels slipping away. At one point, she chooses “harmony” over “sincerity” (160) deciding not to reveal her true feelings in order to keep the peace. This small act of self-erasure captures how repression operates most insidiously—not through direct coercion, but through the daily compromises of closeness.
While the narrator’s story remains central, Hon broadens the novel’s scope through rich subplots and allegorical vignettes. Among the most affecting is the tale of Aunt Myrtle, a relative who once embraced conjoinment with hope. She and her husband willingly amputated an arm each to be sewn together at the shoulder, persuaded by the promise of a more meaningful, unified life. But their domestic reality soon deteriorated: they stumbled constantly, conversation dried up. Myrtle began to fantasize about escape and once raised a butcher knife to the seam that bound them. Her crisis, however, was met with community surveillance and repression. Neighbors and a social worker staged an intervention, scolding her for her “suspicion” and stripping her home of anything that might aid her rebellion. Shamed and disempowered, she spent years in quiet suffering, vacillating between compliance and silent anguish. Yet Hon does not leave her there. Myrtle ultimately undergoes separation, reclaiming both physical autonomy and psychological clarity. Her left sleeve—now empty—becomes a marker of her choice to excise what no longer belonged to her. In a modest office located in a slanting building, she establishes a support center for those seeking or recovering from separation. There, she counsels others navigating the same trauma she once endured. Myrtle’s journey becomes not only a cautionary tale about the internalization of oppressive norms, but also one of late-stage resistance and renewal. For the narrator, her aunt’s transformation offers a radical model of how survival can become advocacy, and how selfhood, once fragmented, can still be reassembled.
Mending Bodies is, without doubt, a political allegory aimed at post-handover Hong Kong. The metaphor of conjoinment as forced union carries unmistakable resonance. Hon never names the city, but she embeds clear clues—from the “campaign for the city’s independence” mentioned by an opposition leader to the repurposed colonial-era church that now serves as a hospital. The sense of a hybrid, haunted city caught between past and present permeates the novel. It is no stretch to read the Conjoinment Act as Hon’s fantastical stand-in for the tightening control of Beijing over Hong Kong since the 1997 handover. The conjoinment policy parallels a society where ideological conformity is expected and deeply internalized, particularly by those already marginalized. It functions less as a mandate than as a mechanism through which unquestioned norms shape citizens’ choices and restrict dissent. Indeed, one talk-show psychologist in the novel argues that conjoinment is the cure for societal ills like “the obsolete institution of marriage, racial conflict, wealth discrepancy,” since “no person is complete on their own” (11). This absurd justification rings satirical and chilling—an eerie echo of real-world rhetoric that promises unity and stability at the cost of diversity and freedom. At the same time, an opposition politician in the story desperately warns that the policy is a “political ploy to make citizens forget . . . the city’s independence,” leaving people “too much in physical pain to go to protests” (11). This disturbingly specific line bridges Hon’s fictional world with real-world parallels: it brings to mind the very real crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in recent years, where citizens have been distracted, deterred, or outright prevented from protest—not by literal surgery, but by laws and force. Hon’s brilliance is to take the psychological truth of those experiences and magnify them into visceral, bodily horror. The pain her characters feel in their flesh becomes a concrete manifestation of the abstract pains of political suppression.
Despite its dark themes, Mending Bodies is not a despairing novel. Hon suffuses the narrative with a sense of the uncanny and occasional deadpan humor, imbuing her dystopia with an almost dreamlike quality. At times, reading the novel feels like walking through a hall of mirrors—reality warps and doubles back on itself. Hon’s approach to dystopia is refreshingly indirect and literary. Rather than bombastic rebellion or heavy-handed moralizing, she offers quiet introspection and surreal tableaux. Images such as white haze swallowing the city’s view, rain thick enough to drown rooftops, and clouds so polluted they obscure the sun lend the setting a ghostly atmosphere. The narrator’s insomnia and emotional detachment blur the line between personal reflection and political critique. In one especially haunting moment from her thesis research, she recounts the case of conjoined twins, Elisa and Melina, who agree to undergo separation for very different reasons—one driven by fear, the other by a yearning for freedom (137-150). Though not a hallucination or fantasy of the narrator’s own, the episode becomes a psychological double for her internal conflict. Such moments invite the reader to ponder whether the story’s extremities are literal or symbolic, myth or reality.
Crucially, Mending Bodies also explores how bodily autonomy intersects with gendered expectations, particularly in relationships. While the Conjoinment Act affects all citizens regardless of gender, Hon subtly critiques how roles within conjoined life become uneven. After surgery, the protagonist is expected to become her partner Lok’s assistant—a practical consequence of sharing one body and the impossibility of pursuing separate jobs. Though she is a university student working on an independent thesis, her own career aspirations seem quietly abandoned; their shared body is directed toward his medical practice. This lopsided dynamic, never overtly questioned by the characters around her, reflects a deeper structural assumption about whose goals take precedence in a domestic pairing. Aunt Myrtle’s storyline also illuminates the psychological toll of such arrangements. Initially swept up in the state’s rhetoric of unity and sacrifice, she comes to internalize the shame of wanting independence. For years, she oscillates between painful compliance and fleeting dreams of escape. Only later—through self-realization and literal separation—does she reclaim a sense of personal agency. Her empty left sleeve becomes a powerful symbol: “a reminder that she must amputate parts that didn’t belong to her in order to live as a fuller person.” Rather than portraying her as forced into docility, Hon reveals how compliance with systemic expectations often stems from self-surveillance and guilt, especially in intimate contexts.
The translation by Jacqueline Leung deserves special praise for capturing the novel’s shifting tones. Hon’s language is minimalist and nuanced, and Leung renders it in clear, supple English that retains a faintly uncanny atmosphere. Certain Hong Kong cultural specifics (such as the city’s unique bilingualism or local slang) are downplayed in the novel’s allegorical setting—a choice that makes the story feel universal. Hints of the city peek through, and Leung handles these gracefully, maintaining the novel’s subtlety. Throughout the text, the translation strikes a fine balance between eerie formality and intimate emotion, much as Hon’s writing does. Passages from the narrator’s thesis sound appropriately academic, whereas the first-person narration remains personal and piercing. This contrast could easily have felt jarring, but under Leung’s pen it becomes part of the novel’s rhythm. Notably, early readers and PEN judges have praised the translation as “haunting” and seamless. It certainly succeeds in making Mending Bodies accessible to an international audience without diluting the distinctly Hong Kong soul that underpins the story.
Hon’s voice is very much her own: quiet, incisive, and eerily mesmerizing. She has a knack for revealing the psychological cracks in her characters as the oppressive system works upon them. Despite the dark subject matter, there are moments of levity and warmth amid the darkness (for instance, a few lingering memories of the narrator and May sharing cigarettes and gossip in their dorm, before the world changed). These human touches ensure the story never becomes a mere clinical thought experiment; we care about the narrator’s fate.
Without spoiling the ending, it can be noted that Hon does not leave her heroine without agency or hope. Mending Bodies ultimately asks: How far will one go to reclaim oneself? The climax brings the themes of autonomy and resistance to a head in a way that is both surprising and thematically resonant. By the final pages, the Conjoinment Act stands fully exposed as a dystopian metaphor—one that has illuminated the value of individual liberty and the quiet forms of rebellion that can persist even under totalizing regimes. In the era of Hong Kong’s ongoing struggles, Mending Bodies reads like a prescient allegory of a city’s fate, but it also transcends that context. Anyone who has ever felt pressured to compromise their identity for the sake of belonging will find this story poignant. Hon has crafted a novel that is politically charged yet deeply personal, bleak in its vision yet not devoid of hope. Mending Bodies lingers in the imagination, a reminder that even when people are bound together against their will, the human spirit—the yearning to be free—remains stubbornly alive. In the end, Hon’s novel affirms that while the body may be altered or constrained, the spirit endures. It’s a powerful, thought-provoking addition to world literature, and thanks to this excellent new translation, international readers can now explore its many layered meanings.
NOTES:
[1] Publisher’s description for Mending Bodies, https://www.catranslation.org/shop/book/mending-bodies/
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Honorary Researcher, Richard Charles Lee Canada-Hong Kong Library, University of Toronto.