A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made on

Kai-Cheung Dung

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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.

Book Details

Publisher: Columbia University Press
Publish Date: Jun 21st, 2022
Pages: 344
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.43in - 5.51in - 1.10in - 1.05lb
EAN: 9780231205436
Categories: • Asian - Chinese• Asian - General

About the Author

Dung Kai-cheung was born in Hong Kong in 1967 and teaches writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has published more than twenty books in Chinese, mainly novels and short stories. His works in English translation include Atlas: The Archeology of an Imaginary City (Columbia, 2012), translated by Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson with the author, and The History of the Adventures of Vivi and Vera (2018).

Bonnie S. McDougall is honorary professor of Chinese at the University of Sydney and has translated works by writers including Bei Dao and Ah Cheng.

Anders Hansson is the author of Chinese Outcasts: Discrimination and Emancipation in Late Imperial China (1996).

Praise for this book

Named a New York Times Notable Book.-- "New York Times Book Review"

Playful and quirky, the sketches reveal Dung's eye for this particular moment in history, and his vast imagination . . . Documenting a particular place and time, this vibrant and distinctive collection offers a kaleidoscopic vision of that era.--Weike Wang "New York Times Book Review"

Highly addictive, the equivalent of literary dim sum.-- "South China Morning Post Magazine"

[These tales] are as relevant today as they were when they were first published in 1999 . . . Feed your inner nostalgia monster some of these surrealist pop-culture bites.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

Fascinating and refreshing.-- "Publishers Weekly"

Surreal, comical, and haunting, this short story collection sees magic in everyday items.-- "Foreword Reviews"

Dung Kai-Cheung is Hong Kong's greatest novelist.-- "Three Percent"

Reading Dung Kai-cheung's A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is like descending into a beautiful fever dream of Hong Kong in the late '90s. The story collection is both a time capsule, capturing Hong Kong through pop culture references like Hello Kitty and Air Jordans, and an incantation, breathing life into a surreal cast of characters who transform themselves, literally and metaphorically, through their pop culture choices.

-- "Necessary Fiction"

Longtime urban chronicler Dung has achieved rare distinction as one of very few figures writing about Hong Kong to win recognition in world literature. He has done so by turning mundane, unexamined items in all our lives into haunting, near-Shakespearian spiritual forces.-- "Nikkei Asia"

Dung Kai-cheung's catalog is a cultural 'thick description' of popular culture filled with dry wit and humor. His sketches are not short stories. He offers flights of fancy.-- "Asian Review of Books"

These half-allegorical sketches by a uniquely gifted Hong Kong writer bring to us a nostalgic mosaic of the sights and sounds of 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 translation is a cause for celebration, giving global readers another path into his 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

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

I read these ninety-nine sketches with a mixture of dreamy fondness and rueful melancholy. Dung Kai-cheung deftly captures the city at a time of fundamental change in this series of offbeat stories, and 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

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

This publication represents a milestone in broadening the readership of Dung's work and in fostering the teaching and research of Hong Kong and Sinophone literature.-- "Asian Studies Review"