In an unnamed, imaginary city, the government comes up with an idea to salvage its failing economy and latent social crisis: literally sewing living human beings together. Through the “Conjoinment Act,” the authorities match individuals by “height, weight, skin color, age, and metabolic rate” and surgically join them at the shoulder or chest, purporting to free them for life from fear and futility. “Only by being with another person,” explains a psychologist, “can we experience the cycles of joy, heartbreak, harmony, and conflict necessary to arrive at true fulfillment.”

Mending transcends metaphor in Hon Lai Chu’s Mending Bodies: to mend is the 縫 of the novel’s original Chinese title《縫身》. 縫 invokes the reparation of sewing, a needle and thread binding disparate bodies— 身—together.

Yet consider the affects of conjoinment: the collapse of your individuality, the complete annihilation of your personal spacetime, and the physical toll of the wound crawling down your torso, leaving you “too tired to care about matters of society.” In Hon’s city, conjoined people take a new name after their operation: “It’s both of us or neither of us,” says the first-person narrator’s partner, formerly named Nok. Another character voices the suspicion that conjoinment facets “an elaborate political ploy to make citizens forget about their long campaign for the city’s independence.”

All this appears in Hon’s Mending Bodies, published for the first time in English in 2025 in a supple, measured translation by Jacqueline Leung. Both Hon and Leung are from Hong Kong: born in 1978, Hon is one of the territory’s most prolific and admired contemporary authors, and Leung is one of its most talented translators. How could Hon’s “long campaign,” then, not jolt your memory of headlines from Hong Kong in 2014 and 2019?

And yet《縫身》was first published in 2010, before Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy made international news or even boiled to fever pitch in the city. Is it possible not to read Mending Bodies as an allegory for Hong Kong, prescient of the city’s present political precarity? Can we separate the literature from the context, the conjoined from each other?

If we were to detach it from its accompanying sociopolitical structures, “conjoinment” is a union between two individuals, like marriage or cohabitation. “Apparently, everyone knows the story of the two halves,” writes Roland Barthes, in a fragment titled “Union” in A Lover’s Discourse, “trying to join themselves back together.” He means Aristophanes’s fourth-century BC account of the origins of love, first related in Plato’s Symposium. In this story, the earliest humans—who possess two-headed, eight-limbed bodies as a sign of their wholeness—are bisected by the gods, as punishment for trying to topple the divinities. The two halves now spend the rest of their lives attempting to reunite; hence, “love.”

This original human, praises Barthes, is a “figure of that ‘ancient unity.’” Yet in trying to draw that remarkable figure, all Barthes’s speaker can muster is a “monstrous, grotesque, improbable body. Out of dreams,” he concludes, “emerges a farce figure.”

This “farce figure” appears in the very first line of Mending Bodies, when it rings the doorbell. Hon spares no time plunging us into her dreams, whose pathetic fallacy Leung renders in a haunting, minorly surreal key: “It was an afternoon in plum rain season, lush mold blooming all around.” Even though the protagonist herself has been conjoined, she—like Barthes—fixates on the grotesque. On seeing her university friend, May, materialize conjoined from behind the front door, “I couldn’t help but feel shocked [by] the way their bodies clung together … chests drilled and sewn together until their skin, muscles, cartilages, and tissues were connected as if by a small, short bridge.”

Thus, Mending Bodies inverts the arc of Aristophanes’s mythos of desire. Here, the one-headed, four-limbed humans—symbols of our lost freedom—are now transformed into two-headed, six-limbed creatures by the government. Or could we say that Mending Bodies perpetuates the myth: a transposed, contemporary sequel to Aristophanes’s tale? What Mending Bodies charts could be the reunion of these once-bisected humans: morally redeemed by their successful return to “ancient unity” and yet “monstrous, grotesque, improbable,” even in Hon’s fictional city where conjoinment is the norm.

Yet conjoinment is a union story that, in Westernized imaginations of democratic freedom, monstrously forsakes the citizen’s freedom to choose. In Hon’s city-building—standout for its cogent, poised materialization of social structures in a mode akin to social science fiction—“[conjoinment] was not [the narrator’s] decision, nor was it any individual’s decision.” Instead, conjoinment figures as a “collective responsibility” to be borne without protest or complaint; it is the duty of an individual active in the national framework, just like “being born and becoming a person, a woman, a man.” Under the auspices of mending—the ethical weight of its value judgment—conjoinment espouses the public ideal of the one-stop happy ending: the static beatification of those who physically unite.

But as Anne Carson asks in her hermeneutics of desire, Eros the Bittersweet: “Was it the case that the round beings of [Aristophanes’s] fantasy remained perfectly content rolling about the world in prelapsarian oneness? No. They got big ideas and started rolling toward Olympus to make an attempt on the gods.

“They began reaching for something else. So much for oneness.”

Is it the case that the conjoined beings of Hon’s fantasy remain perfectly content in postlapsarian oneness, their bodies “mended”? No.

In fact, we know this Carson-esque rejection from the outset. Our speaker is nostalgic for the days when she was just a nonconjoined “wisp of soul,” to the extent that she asks her conjoined other, Nok, to take sleeping pills so they can “dream different dreams.” In her pivot from Hon’s passive, first-person singular in the original Chinese, Leung translates the dissent from this lack of choice into the collective plural of the narrator’s fellow citizens: “Only a long time later, when I stepped into adulthood, did I learn that a certain ambivalence toward policies we had no power over was the last effective resort for protecting our remaining freedoms. If we obeyed as if it didn’t really matter, or carefully looked for the loopholes, we could secretly map the limits of their control.”

Not only are the citizens of Hon’s world compelled to conjoin their bodies, they also cannot choose the body to whom that invasive surgery will irrevocably fasten them. Beyond the strictures of the law, this compulsion is enacted more persuasively through social normification and peer pressure. Mother, doctor, “the staff at the matching center … over the phone,” friends: all applaud the narrator’s conjoinment; and she “recognize[s] that they weren’t cheering for us but for themselves: us becoming part of the conjoinment population was an encouragement that strengthened their beliefs and validated their own choices.”

These minor epiphanies and moments of recognition are a recurring motif in Mending Bodies, their echoes amplified by the somatic stakes of Hon’s ‘social science’ structure-building and her narrator’s acute observations. In their first year at university—before conjoinment—the narrator and May strip naked in their dorm room to conduct their regular activities, “read[ing] a book, [drinking] tea”: “That was the moment when we realized that people weren’t bound by the gaze and criticism of others, but the habits we had normalized ourselves.” Later, as our narrator leans into her fearful fascination with conjoinment, their friendship faces unmendable schisms. “It felt like [May] wasn’t taking me seriously, but a long time later, I understood that maybe she just lacked the courage to face things as they were.”

By things, we understand the protagonist to mean conjoinment’s choicelessness, its faceless impositions, orchestrated by the matching center’s deceptive “chance occurrence. … Yet change”—concrete, irreversible—“always starts from small, unidentified moments—by the time I realized just how critical this was, I was already a poor swimmer flailing in a maelstrom.”

Carson’s genius in Eros the Bittersweet is to visualize desire as a tripointed constellation: lover, beloved, and intransigent third party. These three are simultaneously magnified to and repelled from each other by lack, the active vector that necessarily enables desire.

From Carson’s poetic exegesis, we learn how to read the triangular dynamics of an erotic or psychic union: “Conjoined they are held apart. … The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates.” Here, in Mending Bodies, that is embodied not only in the conjoinment between our speaker and Nok, but in the fusional, bitter friendship between her and May. Between Nok, May, and the narrator, who is the third party? The answer is that no matter which side of the triangle you ponder, one point will always stand out.

It is May who first veers toward conjoinment, lured by its promise of financial stability, even as she denounced it, early in the novel’s chronology, as “groom[ing] to become part of a dominant population that pushes others to the periphery of our society.” Meanwhile, our narrator, now in her final year of university, begins to research her dissertation under the supervision of a slippery, legless professor nicknamed Foot, who counsels her: “Make the fear that paralyzes you in your sleep real. Stand before it—don’t turn away—and look. Record it if you can.”

And so the friction between her minor metanoias, the pressure to conform, and her paralyzing fear usher our narrator toward the heart of her obsession, her dissertation topic: “Third Identities and Hidden Selves—the Faces of Conjoinment.” In it, she takes an anthropological slant to the “origins of conjoinment,” to explore “the shadow that still exists between two bodies when they are connected, how it flourishes and expands, and whether it is capable of birthing new selves.”

Hon’s speaker recounts the psychological experiments of fear and self-actualization conducted by fictional researchers (one is called David Lynch), detailed in fictional monographs: “Therefore, the only thing that can grow between two bodies where distance is impossible is hatred.” She analyzes the cases of fictional Siamese twins: “According to Erich Fromm’s psychoanalyst theory, Evelyn had a masochistic character, meaning she would rather surrender her freedom than face the fear of taking control over her solitude. … But the question is, how is freedom defined?” (She does not mention Aristophanes’s myth but references fictional legends from non-European cultures.)

Hon’s formal boldness sutures the supposed extracts of her narrator’s dissertation to her first-person, past-tense narrative, alternating from chapter to chapter. This metatextual conjoinment performs an extraordinary feat of mapping: that of the limits of narrative freedom. Hon’s metatextual narrative technique emphasizes the dissonant voices of distinct forms, impossible to seamlessly conjoin yet conditioned here by her choice of structure.

Enmeshed in the psychic social architecture of repression and lack, the protagonist nevertheless decides to retell the story of conjoinment, and to do so in a way that contradicts the top-down, essentialist narrative pitched by the authorities. This discordancy juts out, particularly where active ambivalence is the norm of dissent. Teasing out the narrator’s sliver of putative freedoms, pitting her logic of epiphany against the politics of her city, Hon’s consummate world-building commends the speaker’s voltas of recognition to our lived reality. Aren’t we all the “poor swimmer flailing in a maelstrom”?

Dreams circulate through the nervous system of the novel, as stories, memories, immediate experience, and as they fuse with the novel’s textual fabric, so its interpenetrating structures of dream and reality crumble.

Another meta-layer in Hon’s exploration of unmelding bodies is the novel’s take on insomnia, its evocation of the paradox between sleeplessness and dreams. In《縫身》’s afterword—untranslated into English—Hon briefly describes the chronic insomnia she experienced as she wrote the novel: how this sleeplessness quite literally, absurdly, seeped into her surface dreams; how she “transformed [her] dreams into the material of [her] novel,” bending her disorder into lucid prose, permeating the language and mood of another, unreal city.

Similarly, dreams circulate through the nervous system of the novel, as stories, memories, immediate experience, and as they fuse with the novel’s textual fabric, so its interpenetrating structures of dream and reality crumble. This can be seen in Bak, one of the characters of our narrator’s dreams. Bak mutates into something closer to a signifier of pervasion and transgression; indeed, his name in Hon’s Chinese original means “white,” as though he were a void of light.

As our narrator’s insomnia consumes her nights, May schedules her an appointment with a sleep therapist. Their first meeting is one of those “small, unidentified moments” that spiral into—by Hon’s deft design of growing ambiguity—a gripping, gloomy alarm, a total sense of abjection. “I grew to understand,” translates Leung in the deceptively sedate pitch of another minor epiphany, “that in certain states of existence, to live was really just another form of death.”

In Leung’s brilliant, punning transliteration of her and Hon’s Cantonese, the sleep therapist is named Lok—「樂」. Polysemous, pronounced Lok⁶ or Nok⁶ depending on context, “Lok” tends to be translated as “happiness”: “not … ‘Nok’ as in music, the sounds people use to numb their emotions.” Double-edged, contradictory, the contranym of 樂 conjoins corrosive meanings; or, personified in the sleep therapist’s ungraspable identity, the contrast between Lok and Nok conjures a slip into dreams, even nightmares.

“The round beings” of Barthes’s farcical improbability also “began reaching for something else” in Carson’s retelling of Aristophanes’s “fantasy.” After her conjoinment with Nok, the societal aspiration of wholeness realized, what does our narrator begin to reach for? Reading Leung’s version of Mending Bodies in 2025—15 years after《縫身》’s publication—what do we begin to dream of?

Our narrator, for her part, remains mired in the idea that “every sleep is, in fact, a temporary death.” But, in these 15 years, the limits of freedom on Hong Kong’s map have significantly contracted, and “sleep” and “dreaming” have come to mean something else since the pro-democracy movement of 2019. They are metaphors for distinct states of resistance against imposed origin narratives, against the real, encroaching superstructures of censorship and control. Thus, there is something terribly resonant in Leung’s post-2019 translation of Mending Bodies—especially considering Leung’s Americentric Anglophone audience, who might be most familiar with Hong Kong for its recent political predicaments.

Yet the city of Leung’s translation has no name at all—not in Hon’s original, either. As such, it could, ostensibly, be any city on Earth, fictional or not. (Certainly, Hong Kong is not the only body politic to encounter imposed silences and revisions of its history.) Ultimately, Mending Bodies’s only links with Hong Kong are that both Hon and Leung are from there, and that some of its characters carry Cantonese names. That said, Hong Kong has become an apt prism through which to probe the skin tissue between state violence and victimization, and the widening wounds to personal freedom.

In another book, 《黑日》 (Darkness under the Sun), published in Taipei in 2020 and as yet untranslated, Hon writes: “Solitude isn’t what saddens you. A lot of the time, solitude is a kind of freedom. What really sets you at a loss is that you have no way to be truly alone. There’s a part of you that’s always connected to a collective flesh-and-blood.”

Published 10 years after Mending Bodies, Darkness under the Sun is a staggeringly sensitive nonfiction account of Hon’s experiences during the 2014 Umbrella Revolution and the 2019 pro-democracy movement. And, indeed, the book appears to treat a lot of the same material that Mending Bodies engages with: questions of social belonging, the right to choose, and human relationships in times of collective loss, mediated by the capitalistic, cutthroat conditions of working and writing in Hong Kong. As Mending Bodies’s narrator observes (on the website of an underground charity she encounters during her research): “SEPARATION IS A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT.” Yet there is a part of her that will always remain connected, that cannot be excised.

The exceptional clarity of this lived paradox is what we begin reaching for. So much for conjoinment.