A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

by Kai-cheung Dung

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Pub Date Jun 21 2022 | Archive Date Sep 28 2022

Columbia University Press

General Fiction (Adult) | Literary Fiction

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Description

Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is a playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. First published in 1999, it comprises ninety-nine sketches of life just after the handover of the former British colony to China. Each of these stories in miniature begins from a piece of ephemera, usually consumer products or pop culture phenomena, and develops alternately comic and poignant snapshots of urban life.

Dung’s sketches center on once-trendy items that evoke the world at the turn of the millennium, such as Hello Kitty, Final Fantasy VIII, a Windows 98 disk, a clamshell mobile phone, Air Jordans, and cargo shorts. The protagonist of each piece, typically a young woman, is struck by an odd, even overriding obsession with an object or fad. Characters embark on brief dalliances or relationships lasting no longer than the fashions that sparked them. Dung blends vivid everyday details—Portuguese egg tarts, Japanese TV shows, the Hong Kong subway—with situations that are often fantastical or preposterous. This catalog of vanished products illuminates how people use objects to define and even invent their own selves. A major work from one of Hong Kong’s most gifted and original writers, Dung’s archaeology of the end of the twentieth century speaks to perennial questions about consumerism, nostalgia, and identity.

Advance Praise

"Dung Kai-cheung is Hong Kong’s greatest novelist."

—Three Percent

"Dung Kai-cheung is the most prolific and imaginative Hong Kong writer of the past three decades. His A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On is a fascinating and singular literary meditation on how 'objects' and 'stuff' affect people’s everyday lives, create meaning, and contribute to cultural identity."

—Michael Berry, editor of The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan

"These half-allegorical sketches by a uniquely gifted Hong Kong writer bring to us a nostalgic mosaic of sights and sounds of material culture about a city whose cosmopolitan splendor is fast fading. It is even more heart-rending to read them in English today than some twenty years ago when these astonishing literary tidbits first appeared in the Chinese original."

—Leo Ou-fan Lee, author of City Between Worlds: My Hong Kong

"Dung Kai-cheung is Hong Kong's greatest living writer, and this new translation is a cause for celebration, giving global readers another path into Dung's unique, uncanny Hong Kong. May it help bring him the wider international readership that is long overdue."

—Antony Dapiran, author of City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong

"Modeled on a remembrance of the Song dynasty capital city after it fell to northern invaders in the twelfth century, these vignettes record dreams of a bygone (yet never quite gone) Hong Kong with wistfulness and humor, translated by McDougall and Hansson with accuracy and elegance."

—Lucas Klein, editor and translator of Words as Grain: New and Selected Poems of Duo Duo

"I read the 99 sketches with a mixture of dreamy fondness and rueful melancholy. Dung Kai-Cheung deftly captures the city at a time of fundamental change in a series of offbeat stories of consumer products, objects and people. One couldn’t ask for better translators than Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson."

—Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, editor in chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

"Dung Kai-cheung is Hong Kong’s greatest novelist."

—Three Percent

"Dung Kai-cheung is the most prolific and imaginative Hong Kong writer of the past three decades. His A Catalog of Such Stuff as...