Mending Bodies Author Tour: Hon Lai Chu and Jacqueline Leung

Co-presented by Two Lines Press, The Ruby, and On Waverly.

About Mending Bodies

For readers of Ling Ma and Sayaka Murata, Hon Lai Chu’s dystopian exploration of body autonomy, relationships, and late capitalism defies and then reassembles dark realities.

In a failing city, a government program incentivizes couples to “conjoin”—surgically attach themselves to one another—promising a flourishing economy, ecological revitalization, and personal fulfillment. A student writing her dissertation on the program’s history begins to suffer from insomnia. As her world unravels and under the weight of expectations by both society and her close friends, she worries that maybe they are all right when they tell her it would be better—for the good of another person and for the good of the country—to sacrifice everything that she is and get conjoined. Mending Bodies blends body horror and political allegory to explore a world where even the motives of those you love most are shaped by larger forces.

Hon Lai Chu is one of Hong Kong's most prominent writers and the author of several novels, including Mending Bodies, Degravitation Zone, and A Dictionary of Two Cities, co-authored with Dorothy Tse, which won the Hong Kong Book Prize. Her most recent works are Half-Eclipse and Darkness under the Sun, two diaristic essay collections about Hong Kong. She has also received accolades from Taiwan's Unitas Literary Association, the Liang Shiu-chiu Literature Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature, among many others.

Jacqueline Leung is a writer and translator from Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in Wasafiri, Transtext(e)s Transcultures, Gulf Coast, Asymptote, Nashville Review, SAND Journal, the Asian Review of Books, Books From Taiwan, and elsewhere. She is a translator editor at The Offing. Her excerpt of Mending Bodies is a winner of PEN Presents by the English PEN. This is her first full-length translation.

Claire Light is a Bay Area writer, cultural worker, and activist. She has worked since 1997 in nonprofit administration, particularly in arts and social justice, and was the founding director of APAture, an annual APIA artists festival, and a co-founder of Hyphen magazine. Her activism has turned most recently to disability justice, and she is co-founder of the Disability Justice League-Bay Area. You can read her fiction in McSweeney's, Hyphen, and The Encyclopedia Project, among others. A short collection of her stories, Slightly Behind and to the Left, was published by Aqueduct Press in 2009. Her fantasy novel Monkey Around, written under the pen name Jadie Jang, was published by Solaris in 2021.

More information: https://www.catranslation.org/event/mending-bodies-author-tour-hon-lai-chu-and-jacqueline-leung/

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