In Hon Lai Chu’s newly translated novel Mending Our bodies (Two Strains, 2025), intimacy turns into a matter of state coverage. The Conjoinment Act, a fictional authorities mandate that requires or encourages {couples} to bear surgical fusion, is not only a grotesque medical process—it’s a literalized metaphor for the lack of autonomy underneath systemic management. First revealed in Chinese language in 2010 and tailored for the stage in 2014, the novel has gained new urgency in its 2025 English translation by Jacqueline Leung. As Hong Kong continues to reckon with the aftermath of its political unmaking, Mending Our bodies arrives like a ghost from the long run, eerily prescient and painfully current.

Set in a vaguely outlined metropolis that mirrors Hong Kong, the novel presents a collage of reclaimed land, vanishing hills, and colonial structure repurposed into medical amenities. The residents converse within the sanitized language of therapeutic and concord. However beneath that language lies a deep and visual wound. The novel follows a college pupil researching the historical past and psychology of conjoinment, a journey that finally leads her to bear the process herself. Her physique turns into each topic and object—a website of analysis, resistance, and smash. 

Within the spirit of Orwell and Atwood, however with a distinctly Hong Kong sensibility, the narrative explores how conformity will be achieved not by way of pressure however by way of fastidiously cultivated need.

Hon’s dystopia is just not constructed from metal and surveillance cameras however from social stress and internalized ideology. Within the spirit of Orwell and Atwood, however with a distinctly Hong Kong sensibility, the narrative explores how conformity will be achieved not by way of pressure however by way of fastidiously cultivated need. Individuals consider they wish to be joined. They converse of togetherness as advantage, solitude as illness. One psychologist on a chat present cheerily asserts, “No particular person is full on their very own.” It’s such logic that authorizes the knife.

If this sounds eerily acquainted to observers of Hong Kong’s political descent, it ought to. The novel’s Conjoinment Act echoes the area’s post-handover integration into mainland China—a course of promoted as reunification however skilled by many as recolonization. The so-called return to China left many Hongkongers in a state of existential limbo, trapped between nationalist expectations and an area identification they had been informed to transcend. Hon offers this psychic dismemberment a bodily kind. To stay underneath the Conjoinment Act is to stay in ache. And but, as one character cynically notes, it retains folks “too drained to protest.”

Via the embedded voice of the protagonist’s thesis, Mending Our bodies analyzes itself. Her writing incorporates references to Michel Foucault’s principle of biopower—the concept that fashionable states exert management, not by killing, however by managing life itself. The act doesn’t annihilate its topics; it makes them manageable. It rearranges their limbs, shortens their stride, slows their will. Erich Fromm’s psychoanalytic principle additionally haunts the textual content: the protagonist notes that many conjoined residents undergo from what Fromm known as the “masochistic character,” the tendency to give up freedom in trade for consolation, approval, or the phantasm of security. The tragedy, the novel suggests, is just not that folks favor their shackles however that they’re trapped by hope—hope that love or responsibility will transcend ache.

The tragedy, the novel suggests, is just not that folks favor their shackles however that they’re trapped by hope—hope that love or responsibility will transcend ache.

Take Aunt Myrtle, as an example—a once-hopeful girl who embraces conjoinment with romantic optimism. She chooses the surgical procedure not as a result of she is coerced however as a result of she believes in a way forward for mutual assist. Her actuality, nonetheless, turns into a bureaucratic and anatomical nightmare: fixed ache, stifled intimacy, blurry imaginative and prescient, and a husband who slips into silence. When she lastly voices doubts and reaches for painkillers, the state doesn’t intervene, however her neighbors do: with concern, not violence. They confiscate her capsules. They urge her to regulate her angle. Her struggling turns into a matter of public wellness. The cruelty is communal, the policing performed by friends who, like her, are solely making an attempt to outlive the mandates of their time.

Then there are Evelyn and Josephine, fictional conjoined twins mentioned within the protagonist’s thesis. Evelyn is scared of separation however agrees to it nonetheless, not as a result of she believes it should set her free, however as a result of she quietly hopes that each of them would possibly die within the course of. That, for her, is the closest factor to peace. Josephine, in contrast, longs to be unbound. She yearns for independence, not out of resentment however from an aching need for solitude, for the opportunity of an identification not formed by fixed proximity. But it’s Josephine—the bodily stronger of the 2—who dies on the working desk. Evelyn wakes alone and instantly is aware of what has occurred. She is just not shocked they didn’t each survive, however the truth that she, and never Josephine, lived seems like a cosmic mistake. In dropping her sister, Evelyn additionally loses the one framework of that means she’s ever identified. She is informed she is going to by no means stroll once more. She continues on, haunted and hollowed. The metaphor is devastating. For some, the ordeal of disconnection—of reclaiming one’s particular person physique and self—will be extra insufferable than the situation that preceded it. On this world, and maybe in ours, the ache of separation can outlast the ache of attachment.

Hon Lai Chu writes with surgical precision. Her prose, rendered fantastically by Leung, strikes between scientific detachment and visceral anguish. The metafictional construction—a narrative nested in a thesis nested in a narrative—echoes the recursive traps her characters inhabit. Even the protagonist’s physique turns into a analysis website. When she describes the festering wound postsurgery, her professor responds: “Your analysis has simply begun.”

Mending Our bodies joins a rising canon of sinophone dystopias that use allegory to navigate the unspeakable.

Mending Our bodies joins a rising canon of sinophone dystopias that use allegory to navigate the unspeakable. Alongside Dorothy Tse’s Owlish and Lau Yee-Wa’s Tongueless, it displays a pattern amongst Hong Kong writers to reimagine resistance not by way of slogans however by way of nightmares. These works don’t inform us what to do; they present us what would possibly occur if we do nothing.

By the point the narrator begins to dream of reclaiming her physique, it’s unclear whether or not she nonetheless can. That ambiguity is the novel’s closing minimize. Mending Our bodies doesn’t provide liberation. It provides a mirror: bloody, fractured, and uncomfortably near the pores and skin.

College of Toronto