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- [00:01]
Tropicana Narrator
Ever wonder where Tropicana got its name? The Tropics. And every time you enjoy a glass, you're not just drinking juice. You're taking a trip, stepping into sunshine and embarking on a flavorful journey into the tropics, where ripe fruit is crafted into wildly delicious juice. And the best part? No passport required. Tropicana. Give life some juice.
- [00:28]
Perfect Bistro Cat Food Host
This episode is brought to you by Perfect Bistro Cat Food. Hey guys, today I'm interviewing my cat about his Perfect Bistro food. Percy, you seem to be a big Perfect Bistro fan. Care to comment? Totally. What do you like about it? You love the high quality ingredients and the delicious flavors, of course. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Listen to Percy, guys. Visit perfectbistro.com to try it for your cat.
- [00:57]
Isabel Chung
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:01]
Chris Holmes
I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Rahman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous episodes@burnedbybooks.com and on Instagram and Twitter burnedbybooks. Let's start the show. Isabel Chung wants to make you uncomfortable. In her tremendous debut short story collection, Patchwork Dolls, she asks the reader to look closely at the global phenomena of toxic beauty culture, rampant misogyny, authoritarian surveillance, technophilia, just to name a few. And in that looking, we find ourselves uncomfortably close to the subjects of her stories. A sister mourns the death of her twin. A young woman sells the features of her face for a chance at economic liberation. An unnamed character is forced to make a series of impossible decisions in a political moment of increasingly bleak outcomes. While nearly every story lives at the edge of a speculative world with science fictional elements, Patchwork Dolls is grounded in lived life and never feels far from the ethical and political questions that form the basis of life on earth in the 21st century. When, for example, an artificially intelligent companion doll is rescued from a life of dull subservience, it is her rescuer who must contend with her own originality and uniqueness, finding herself ultimately not so different from a clone. And each story engages with a new form and voice. For example, the reader takes the form of a choose your own adventure story, but with the consequences that feel viscerally current. As with the best short fiction, a reader's sense of the universality versus the particularity of each story will depend on the lived and historical traditions that they are drawing on and while Patchwork Dolls lives in the shared urban and technological spaces of contemporary life, Isabel's fiction is always making room for Hong Kongers to see the realities of their lives reflected in the work. This is a tremendous debut, full of the best kinds of experiments in form and feeling and certainly not to be missed.
- [03:39]
Interviewer
Isabel Chung is a writer and art critic based in Hong Kong. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Slate, and the Rumpus. She was awarded the 2023 Aspen Words Fellowship and was in residence at the Jan Mikowsky foundation in 2024. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Atlantic Art Forum and Lit Hub. She is the co founder of a contemporary art gallery in Hong Kong called the PhD group. Welcome to Burned by Books. It's Isabelle Chung.
- [04:11]
Isabel Chung
Hello. Happy to be here.
- [04:14]
Interviewer
So, since we are live for this recording, which is very unusual for me, normally I have a remote guest and I'm not in the same place. Oh, I think yeah, you're one of maybe two, possibly three where I've been in the same place. But we are in your gallery. And I wanted to talk about the first, first story in the, in the collection, which has a lot to do with kind of fungus and fungal growth that happens in this semi fantastical way in, in the characters in the, in the story. But I wonder if you'd take us through a little bit about the gallery, how it came about, and then maybe talk about the exhibit that's here right now and how it relates to that story.
- [05:03]
Isabel Chung
Sure. So the room that we're actually sitting in right now is a great place to start. It is the former kitchen of the private clubhouse that the gallery is now in. And the clubhouse used to belong to my grandfather and his two business partners in the 1970s. So it has a sort of domestic feel to it, which we really tried to explore crest to this architecture that we like to call non extractive architecture. So it's really just taking what already exists and stripping away, you know, the crust of history and then revealing the layers underneath of. What would that recall? So as you walk through the gallery, you'll notice that we've just moved the plaster and the carpet that used to cover the old clubhouse. And it just like you just see this wall concrete with the patterns of the carpets, the walls. And it's very much in keeping with the philosophy of how myself and my husband like to consider our lives and the way that we observe and move through the world. We work with maybe eight to 10 artists in our program. It's actually quite small for a gallery and we only do about four to five shows a year, so we're very much leaning into a sl thinking observing of looking. And the show we have on right now is very special for me. Not just because we're now into five years of the gallery. So it's. It's sort of the fifth year for a gallery, is usually the year where you feel like you've really made it. It feels like you. You are on the path to something. And so all the shows this year will be very special, but this one in particular, because it really changed my outlook. My on nature and mushrooms. And the story that you're referencing in the collection was actually written quite a few years before we even started thinking about this exhibition with the artist. I think I had been interested with the story in alternate ways of survival and resisting the very human centric ways in which we interact with the world. And funnily enough, the artists that we're working with, with this exhibition have been exploring the same concepts over the past 10 years. And I've known them for a while as well, and I didn't know that they were always in the background interested in mushrooms. So it just felt like we were both interested in looking at the world from a different perspective. Both the outfits were fungi, and so for them, they really wanted to explore the brain of the mushroom, how it can have agency, how it can communicate with the world. And for me, it was much more of a personal story how something that people fear and something that could even kill somebody or make them hallucinate could provide beauty for another person and that kind of perspective on the world.
- [08:14]
Interviewer
Yeah, because there's. There's some. A sense of kind of body horror in that story and this being overcome by this other creature that's sort of growing on you and in you and. And thinking about how at first it's really kind of alien and yet the story is interested in a kind of. Whether there can be a synergy or harmonious interconnection between those entities. Would you talk a little bit about that?
- [08:46]
Isabel Chung
Yeah. When you were talking about the. The growing within and around you, I mean, that. That immediately makes me think of the example of the Cordyceps mushroom, which, I don't know if you know this, but it invades just another species. It invades like an ant or a plant. And then I know it from the
- [09:06]
Interviewer
last of us
- [09:09]
Isabel Chung
I've been eating from after that, mushrooms in these atomic goods. But forget that. Those are very popular.
- [09:14]
Interviewer
Cordyceps is now like as a global competition. Yeah.
- [09:19]
Isabel Chung
So, right. It. It's Mushrooms are a species that have lived alongside us for as long as the planet has had life. And we eat it, we use it, we. It's everywhere. And so what I think I wanted to explore with that story was how. How much we ignore the systems around us and how much we ignore the natural world in supporting us in what we need. And it can be. We can become so distracted by our human desires and our human egos that that. That becomes like, the primary driving force of how we live our lives. And so I'm. I'm thinking not just about, you know, binary interspecies development of, like, one species or other species, but I'm trying to think about, like, entire world entanglement, how much we're entangled with all these different beings and lives that live in Mother.
- [10:17]
Interviewer
I love that word entanglement. And I think it's. It works so well for the story. But also, I mean, I think one of the things that's been interesting about, like, what we're learning about biological life and flora in particular is that, you know, there's so much more kind of communication and a kind of natural intelligence that's happening there. And I sort of. Every year we seem to, like, have something new, newly unlocked. And so your. Your story, I. I felt like, was, in a way, future looking in terms of how we might understand our entanglements.
- [10:55]
Isabel Chung
Yeah. But there's still so much discomfort and fear and horror around that. So I did want to bring that into it a little bit as well, and to sit with that discomfort, which is something I'm very interested in, in all of my writing. So whatever makes you uncomfortable. I want to explore that and I want to, you know, kind of dig deeper into that a little bit more. Something I'm interested in.
- [11:20]
Interviewer
Maybe we can get a little bit of the sound of your. Your work and. And some of that discomfort, which in the. In the title story, Patchwork Dolls, is pretty intense for me anyway. I was pretty uncomfortable and. And felt like you wanted me to sit in it. And I. I thought that was really, really well done. Would you be willing to read from the opening for us? And then we'll get a little bit of a sense of your voice and then we can talk a little bit about that story in particular.
- [11:50]
Isabel Chung
So. So this is the opening from Pathwork Doll. In the last few weeks, with my face, I studied it closely. Every morning, I ran my cold fingertips over my skin, pressing into the hollows of my skull. Closing my eyes, I tried to bind the sensation to memory. Then I performed my usual morning ablutions, washing my face, painting careful clean decorations on my eyelids and cheeks. The day of the surgery, Mejica came to pick me up early. In her car's cup holder was a paper bag of tiny sugared doughnuts with raspberry jam and some coffee, hot and dark. Good morning, sunshine, she said. She was smiling, and when the morning light moved through the car it slipped over the almost invisible scenes on her face. Did you take your pills? She asked. They're super important. One time I forgot to take them and I woke up too early for surgery. Had an outer body experience. It took me a while to recover. You never told me about that. I didn't want to scare you, mijica said as she crawled into a narrow driveway. There were fresh blood red lilies at the clinic counter. We signed in and waited on lounge chairs. Mijica picked up a few magazines. You're lucky, she said. Your eyes are in season. I looked. The last few years everybody wanted the same eyes, domed like lemons, with precise, symmetrical lashes. But now in the magazines I only saw those creaseless eyes for flushed clean, tilted to the temples. The same eyes I had. A nurse called the name my mother had given me and led me into a room entirely sheathed in blue pvc. There was a mirror on the ceiling and I saw my face for the last time. The surgeon entered the room, pressed her hand on my shoulder, laid down an extra blanket on my body. I went to sleep. When I woke up, I was chained. Mahika had sold her deep set eyes, her nose, her dimples, her lips, Jumana her sharp symmetrical cheekbones, and Roy, her high auspicious forehead and small ears. I was swapping out my entire face. We were known as Patroc Dolls, and in our contracts, each worth thousands of dollars, we agreed to exchange our features with moneyed people seeking an upgrade to newer, trendier faces. The name had been coined in the 1970s and referred to a method of transdermal patchworking devised by plastic surgeon Jill Anderson, which meant plotting out facial features wholesale. It was the height of Second Wave feminism, and Anderson led the scientific guard, claiming that her process preserved the agency of women. She experimented and performed the surgeries on herself and others in a Spring street lock. Her needling techniques were crude and unrefined, and she worked in thick, fleshy squares, not the tissue paper thin circular patterns commonly today. You could see the delineation very clearly, visible scars around her eyes and lips, like the tiny perforations and stamps which led to her being called Dr. Patchwork in the media. The 20 year experiment was documented in a series of photographs by her partner, the performance artist Mara Weiss. Moment acquired them in the early 2000s. When I looked at those photos, I noticed that Jill never changed her hair. Blonde, long, straight, just past her breast. In later images, it became clear that she started dyeing her locks to cover the gray, but otherwise the style remained unchanged. I thought of us, the newest generation of Patchwork Dolls, the stitches glossier and finer than ever. Were there features of ourselves that we were more willing to swap out? Were there some that we would never let go?
- [15:25]
Interviewer
Thank you so much, Isabelle. Many of your stories use a light speculative fiction overlay to develop competing cultural and social anxieties. In the case of Patchwork Dolls, Sophia is selling specific qualities of her face. Well, her entire face, really, and to afford a life of some luxuries, which feeds into a sort of deeper inequality in the society she lives in. But you also write that this is quoting you directly. As children of immigrants, we were doomed to sell ourselves and how colonialism presented itself in the purchasing of such flesh. How do the. The science fictional aspects of the face transplant help you to explore these other issues of the ways in which we. In which certain people are forced to give up the very qualities and nature of themselves to a system that abhors them?
- [16:28]
Isabel Chung
That's a very good question. I think I use speculative fiction as a vehicle to express the expansive histories of the culture that I'm, you know, that I live in, I live in Hong Kong. And also that I grew up with being from London, but within an immigrant family. My. My family are Chinese. And the mythologies and narratives around identity and who we are, we're not always so clear and we're always very complicated by, you know, the shifting social standard, larger narrative that we can control, like whether political or cultural or otherwise. And I really think that with Patrick Dolls, I would. And with a lot of my stories, actually, the very visceral body horror aspect of it, you know, this very literal cut and paste story that I've written is, I suppose, an expression of relief because I, perhaps not even personally, in my personal life, I've always felt that the diaspora world that I lived in, and then now with the ways that Asian Americans are viewed in the US that there's a lot of strange assimilation happening and there's a lot of. How do I express it? I think what really troubled me was that the world changes much faster, at a pace, at a rate, much faster than I feel like we can keep up with. And that Might not be true for everybody, but it's true, I feel, for myself and for a lot of people of color. And some of the changes are obviously beneficial and positive. But then there was this essay I read a few years back before I wrote Patrick Doll, written by J. Colentino in the New Yorker. It's called Instagram Faith. I didn't come across it.
- [18:26]
Interviewer
No, I was, I. I was. Couldn't get that out of my head. When, you know, you thinking about the ways in which, really globally, there's these sets of maybe like 10 different Instagram faces that exist, and everyone is patchwork, dolling themselves into some form of them.
- [18:48]
Isabel Chung
Yeah. So that was hugely kind of troubling to me. And what, what I tried to really glean from that story and put into Patchwork Doll was the idea that, you know, people were now borrowing features that, you know, I might have been bullied for in school or that were considered ugly or crude or did it lower class just because of the, like, racial tension between the people that were criticizing me and.
- [19:16]
Interviewer
Oh, wow.
- [19:17]
Isabel Chung
Yeah, yeah. So like the, the narrow set eyes, the kind of palest skin, all of that was. Was a point of attack when I was a child in London. And now these are the features that in Jaw's story seemed to be desired by other people. And so it became a story of not just cut and taste, of the body features, but of what people considered to be beauty.
- [19:43]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [19:43]
Isabel Chung
And how that's so interchangeable with how that can change, but not by the choices of the people that shock the fungi changes, but by the people that. The people that dictate their changes are those with power and wealth. Right. And so there's not only the body horror, there's like the class bubble within the. That I'm trying to point out.
- [20:06]
Priceline App Advertiser
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- [20:09]
Isabel Chung
It's the Priceline negotiator.
- [20:11]
Priceline App Advertiser
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- [20:39]
Tropicana Narrator
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- [21:04]
Interviewer
No, it wasn't at all. And Sophia, I mean, she, she takes a lot of at least temporary joy from her ability to, to engage with capital and to buy things and to feel like for, for a moment she has a, you know, bridge into a class that wasn't hers. And she's, you know, doesn't want to give that up.
- [21:27]
Isabel Chung
Right, right. And it's a trap of the capitalist circle. I really wanted to write a character that was sort of morally complicit in this industry. You know, she, she has a choice to stop engaging in this process of systemic oppression, and she did not achieve more personal gain. And you can't fault her for that because that's the way that the world has been set up. You know, and so I was very interested in this complication of complicity and, and like personal upward mobility versus the collected growth. You know, that of that story.
- [22:06]
Interviewer
I want to talk about maybe my favorite story in the collection. It's the most formally playful, the Reader. I, I, you know, I grew up reading choose your own adventure stories. I don't. Yeah, we can talk about whether you have that experience as well, but it does take up a form similar to those in which second person narration pulls the reader into really a turbulent moment. And you have to make choices as the reader, and those choices have political and intellectual and material consequences for the, for the character. Did you grow up reading choose your own adventure books at all? And how does giving the reader the choice or the illusion of choice act as a kind of accelerant to the plot and the, and the meaning that you're, you know, rushing towards in a story?
- [23:04]
Isabel Chung
The questions are good, but they're very, they're challenging me and really making me rethink.
- [23:10]
Interviewer
I'm gonna choose to think that that's not bad.
- [23:12]
Isabel Chung
No, no, it's great. It's great. It's. Just to be read so closely is sort of terrifying and wonderful at the same time, obviously. But I did grow up reading shoes and adventure books. They were much more popular back then than they are now. Like, I feel like, although they're having
- [23:32]
Interviewer
a, they're having a retro return moment.
- [23:35]
Isabel Chung
Okay.
- [23:35]
Interviewer
And in fact, they're. The original press that put them out doesn't exist anymore. But one of the big US presses is doing like, you know, reprints of a lot of the Major ones. So look for your favorites.
- [23:49]
Isabel Chung
Okay. That's really exciting to hear. I think the ones that really stuck in my memory when I was reading, when I was writing the Reader, though, were the r l Stein 1, which were more of, like, a horror genre.
- [24:01]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [24:02]
Isabel Chung
And thinking about, like, how one wrong twist would lead to your death or, like, all of your friends dying all at once or near, like, you know, now you're an alien or now you're, like, buried in a coffin.
- [24:14]
Interviewer
Oh, yeah, true. They were. They were so scary. Or else.
- [24:18]
Isabel Chung
But I was, like, addicted to that. And you know what was fun was that you could just go back and be like, okay, but what if I made this choice? And with the reader, I think I was really trying to use the form of chooser and adventure to capture this feeling of being stuck in a place in which choice has no meaning. And whether that is true politically or socially or culturally, you know, a lot of people feel stuck for a variety of reasons. For the Reader, I tried to ambiguate what that reason could be, but as you progressed, it's become clear. It's about, like, the ghost, the past. So fauna, and I think fauna is such a tricky theme to write about because it's never just static. It's never just one thing. It's always changing, and it always changes depending on context and time. And so I think with achievement and dental, I wanted to make sure that there were shifting narratives and there were shifting perspectives and timelines. And that's what trauma is for me, and I think it is for a lot of people as well.
- [25:32]
Interviewer
There's one of the. The aspects of trauma in the story is the sudden disappearance of books and bookstores.
- [25:39]
Isabel Chung
Right.
- [25:40]
Interviewer
And so there's this. You know, one of the. The many avenues that you can take is searching for your missing books and searching loosely for disappeared bookstores. And I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about how the idea of a loss of books, a loss of reading culture, you know, it's. It's echoing in lots of different ways in the story. And I wonder how it. How it resonates for you.
- [26:08]
Isabel Chung
Yeah. So there are two things that I could speak to that might seem a little bit ambiguous, but that directly led to this idea of the disappearing books. And the first was that I myself worked in a bookstore in Hong Kong for about a year part time. And it was a wonderful bookstore, formerly Kafka, and now it's been relocated to upstate New York.
- [26:34]
Interviewer
It's upstate New York.
- [26:36]
Isabel Chung
Yes. It exists in.
- [26:38]
Interviewer
Where is it?
- [26:38]
Isabel Chung
Tony O Hall, I don't care. Do you know that location?
- [26:42]
Interviewer
No, but I'll look it up. I'll go and find it.
- [26:45]
Isabel Chung
So it exists now in another time. And it feels like another world to me because every time I go to New York, I met at the Ernan. He said it's a six hour drive and you know, it's very far away.
- [26:57]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah.
- [26:59]
Isabel Chung
But when the bookstore closed here, there was such a loss in our community because it was one of the very few independent English language bookstores in Hong Kong. I mean, you have like S Light booker name. Those still exist here, but they're very much. They very much feel like corporate facing shops that sell books as opposed to
- [27:24]
Interviewer
a bookstore rather than independent book stake.
- [27:28]
Isabel Chung
Right. With an identity and its own quirks. And maybe the owner's a little grumpy at times, but that, you know, love desk might be me. I was all grumpy sometimes. But it, it was part of the charm of what it would. And it was so solid and that's what I loved about it. And actually the group shelf from here upon there, after the book owner left, he distributed the shelf all around Hong Kong. But obviously they're now filled with my objects and my books. And so my feeling of having something that was once so solid and so secure suddenly disappear and remove itself so suddenly from my life was sort of the impetus for starting to write this story. And then the second incident that really made me think about something disappearing and then almost being replaced by something else as well, which is a theme I also explore in other stories, is that there was a restaurant downstairs from where we live. And it was, it's been around for many years. And it was around, you know, right before the pandemic and then in the first couple years of the pandemic. And it was a very friendly place. We knew the owners, we knew the people that frequented there. And then one day we went in and it was very clear something had changed, but it was not obvious what was different. So the decor was exactly the same, the menu was exactly the same, but all of the things people that worked here had been replaced by other people. So like a whole new staff. And we walked around and we realized that the restaurant had changed ownership, but very quietly. And then they've kept everyone the same. And so this feeling of you only being the only one that notices when something has changed and everything around you just going on as if nothing has happened was also this like, eeriness that I wanted to kind of put into the story.
- [29:33]
Interviewer
I love that backstory Galatea is a story that really shows your love of layering intertexts into your. Into your work. Some of them are likely figments of my own imagination, but the story of an artificial intelligence companion brought to life and, in a way, rescued from an existence of subservience reads, of course, with echoes of the Greek Galatea, but also Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, Ishkuro's Clara and the son, Spike Jonze movie her and so many others. And I'm sure there's a million layers that I'm not uncovering. But what intertexts were particularly meaningful to you in crafting this story? And how do you think about a reader encountering or missing or being feeling as though they're. They're, you know, encountering an intertext? And even if they don't know what it is, there's some kind of affect there to that.
- [30:38]
Isabel Chung
Well, obviously, the Galatea myth, hugely influential to this story, but I wanted. I wanted to just take the base interpretation of Galatea and sort of play with it a little bit, because so much of the Galatea story is about the male genius or the inventor, the artist that makes her. And so I wanted to.
- [31:02]
Interviewer
Yeah, it really flipped the gender power dynamic.
- [31:06]
Isabel Chung
Yeah. And also make that a metaphor for how gendered AI is.
- [31:11]
Interviewer
You know, say more about that.
- [31:13]
Isabel Chung
Yeah. A lot of AI voices are feminine, female, because so much of the role of women in society is to assist, ought to be assistants. And so there was this wonderful essay that another writer, Dorothy R. Santos, wrote as a response piece to Galatea when it was published in Slate a few years ago about the cultural baggage of the feminized AI voyage and how it dates back to, like, the 1800s. The very first robot, or what we consider a robot machine that a man makes, has a female doll head attached to it, because that's something that people are supposed to be more comforted by it. Just like a version of a woman that.
- [31:59]
Interviewer
And they see it and they assume, oh, this will assist.
- [32:02]
Isabel Chung
This will assist me. This is something that's supposed to support me as opposed to something, I guess, like a man, which someone might consider to be, like, a threat or domineering or controlling. Right. But it says so much about the way that we view women, especially in the labor force. And so that's what I wanted to do with the Gala cabinet, she being not just an object of beauty that comes to life, but of the labor that's involved in becoming a woman, you know, and coming to life and entertaining. And the other interted Bringing you right. There's so much of all of those books in there and films like Spike Jones her. I really love Kara and her son a little bit. Big Band of Ishugur. Not just Clara Leston, though. I think a lot of his books really influenced the emotional core of Galatea as well. Never Let Me go also about, you know, clones and the emotions of clones and the.
- [33:01]
Interviewer
And the protagonist of the. The story, the woman who encounters this Galatea like figure who's in, you know, a man's house, who she's having a very mediocre date with. And she recognizes in what is mostly an inert, to begin with, artificial companion, the. The. An internal desire to live a broader life and in particular to live one that would be in communion with a society of people who might understand and not wish to make her an assistant. And it's absurd. And I really loved. I felt like you were. You were doing one step further than, you know, what something like her thinks about with. With an AI assisted voice.
- [33:53]
Isabel Chung
Right.
- [33:54]
Interviewer
Yeah. And I wonder if you talk a little bit about that relationship between what is a. A human woman and this quote unquote, artificial woman who. And them being able to perceive in each other a certain kind of need.
- [34:09]
Isabel Chung
So that was really the relationship that was most important to me in that story. The. The man really is just a conduit for the two women.
- [34:19]
Interviewer
Yeah. And I like how he's so mediocre. He's such a. Like, tall. Yeah, he does, but I enjoy his mediocrity.
- [34:31]
Isabel Chung
He's very replaceable, unfortunately, but he's necessary. In this story, the. The woman who's on the date that encountered the robot is described as. I tried to describe her as a very ordinary sort of office worker that you might find in mainland China. The story is actually set in Shenzhen. I don't know if I've said it explicitly, but it's always been that place in my mind.
- [34:58]
Interviewer
I don't think you did. But it's interesting to now think of it as Shenzhen.
- [35:03]
Isabel Chung
Right. Which is of course very close to Hong Kong. It's just across the bor. And yet it is a place where technology and AI is so hugely advanced in ways that you can't even imagine. Like, even here AI is used a little bit, but over there they're like, producing a robot and everything is being automated at. And so it's a world in which robots are very common and yet there are a lot of people in the workforce still also because of this need to create deep parts and to keep the economy Running. And so you encounter these huge corporations with. It feels like thousands of people working. And each person has a very defined role and there's not much leverage or room for expression or creativity. And I feel like this is the position this woman is in. She is just a tiny cog in this huge machine. And I wanted to really express this sentiment that she herself feels like a robot or what she imagined a robot to feel, you know, like going through the motion, queuing up for her lunch, going to her desk, turning off a computer, going home. And even as the season changed, she just repeats the same motion over and over again. And so the feeling of desire, of wanting something else that she recognizes in the robot is really within herself. The robot is acting as a mirror to herself and vice versa. The robot is sensing that the woman feels like she's a robot because the robot is a robot. And so there's just this reflect, this reflection happening. And one of the moments I was thinking about a lot when I was writing that first encounter was this scene from the TV show Wakwolf, which I don't know if you.
- [36:55]
Interviewer
Yeah, I was a big fan when it was if one of us out.
- [36:59]
Isabel Chung
I mean, the later seasons, I'm not such a fan of. But there was a. I think Athena.
- [37:03]
Interviewer
The first two are. They're really good. Yeah.
- [37:07]
Isabel Chung
I think this is the second season, or maybe the very. The end of the very first season where the main protagonist, Dolores, is realizing that she had not been speaking with her mentor in this small room where she'd been like, really reflecting on herself, but she'd been speaking to herself all along to like, become sentient. And so this reflection of like the robot woman and the real woman and vice versa is something that I was. Was like in my head, I have that imagery of Dolores like, finally recognizing that she was talking to herself. All sentience because of that.
- [37:42]
Interviewer
Yeah, I'm. I'm. You know, this is not a surprise, but I'm. I'm thinking now of Ishiguro's line in an interview when he's talking about never let me go. And he said, you know, it didn't have to be about clones, you know, because we are all clones anyway. We are all think of ourselves in these kind of like, artificial terms, in this kind of super habitual robotic lives that we find ourselves in. Which connects to me to one of the major currents that runs through a lot of these stories, which is. And you've just sort of explained, expressed it really well with thinking about AI's progression. But there's a. There's a sense of an anxiety about the way in which technology is alienating us from ourselves, from others, from communities, really kind of altering, in a fundamental way our humanity. But technology in your stories is also a revealing agent, and it shows us it can be a mirror to give us a better sense of things going on in our. In our human society. And so I wonder if you'd talk a little bit of both about, like, a technology anxiety that's really in these stories, but also your desire to use technology to show us something about ourselves that maybe we wouldn't see without that technology.
- [39:07]
Isabel Chung
So technology has somehow crept into the majority of my story without my intention. So it's. It. I think it must have been something that I myself was really struggling with at the time of writing stories, and it's still something I continue to struggle with. But, you know, the stories which are written all between 2019, 2022, this was before the rise of AI swap and like, really the. The imagery, sort of confusion that we're seeing today of what is truthful and what is not. And it was just the very beginning of what virtual reality to do for us. And so there was a lot of hope around that. And people were talking about, like, using VR and AI and medical testing or to help with ptsd. I'm sure that's still being done. But right now the predominant conversation is how much we burn an intellectual copyright and take away our jobs. Right.
- [40:05]
Interviewer
Assuredly, AI has already extracted Patchwork Dolls
- [40:10]
Isabel Chung
and written a whole lot.
- [40:11]
Interviewer
Is using it to, you know, for somebody else's writing.
- [40:16]
Isabel Chung
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, technology moves. Moves so fast that you are almost unable to express the whole of it in one single motion. So I think what I was trying to explore in these stories is just alternate universes through the use of technology. I've always been very interested in fact, magical realism. It's what I read when I was growing up.
- [40:44]
Interviewer
Ah, fantastic.
- [40:45]
Isabel Chung
And it's what I feel like my stories are still about. It's just that the magical realist element of some of the stories are now technology, as opposed to, like a tree that you can climb into that takes you to another universe. There's one story in Patrick McDolle called Herbs, which is really interesting.
- [41:03]
Interviewer
The one I was going to talk about next. So I'm glad you're going to.
- [41:06]
Isabel Chung
Yeah, but it's. It's so interesting to me because when I wrote it, I didn't really think much of the technology that I was introducing, which is a world in which you can create clones of yourself at different ages and then after you die, the clones then come into this world and accompany whoever you want the clone to accompany, whether it's like partner or your children or whatever you want it to replaced. And it is at its core also a story about relationships and long term commitment to one another. And for me, what was revealing was not the writing of the story itself or even my opinion of it, but I've had so many people come up to me and say they thought the story was about a couple that in a toxic, abusive relationship. Or on the other very extreme side, a story about an extremely romantic story about commitment and longevity and what it takes to be in a partnership. Oh, that's so those were two. Yeah, those were two flip sides of the same coin. I felt. And I felt like the technology in that really made it happen. Because you know when if you're given the choice to do this and the man in the story who does this does this without the woman knowing. So there's also this secrecy around it or there's that this choice that he makes that doesn't involve her Heat up
- [42:35]
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- [44:03]
Interviewer
And she has to encounter, you know, stages of their life together in which her husband was very cruel and very unpleasant and.
- [44:13]
Isabel Chung
Right.
- [44:14]
Interviewer
And has to balance that with maybe the more sort of romantic, optimistic, youthful. Youthful version of herb.
- [44:22]
Isabel Chung
Yeah.
- [44:22]
Interviewer
And then, you know, having to think about the end of their lives together, whether she wants to or not.
- [44:28]
Isabel Chung
Right.
- [44:29]
Interviewer
The. It's the. Her not wanting any of them, which I found super, super inventive and interesting.
- [44:36]
Isabel Chung
She'd already gone through all of that. I mean, she loved. I think she loved every version of him and that's why she remained with him until the end. But you don't want to go through the pain again like you've done it once and that's why you've grown.
- [44:49]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [44:49]
Isabel Chung
And so that was. It was interesting to me the way people interpreted it. And I had one woman that said she loved the story because she is in a May December relationship herself. She's an older woman and just. She found it really joyful that there was an older woman with a younger man and that presented that alternative for her as well. So that then all these readings of this story made possible with the technology that I introduced that have opened up the way that people might approach this technology made available.
- [45:24]
Interviewer
That's. That's fascinating and a really great answer to my question. And I'll just note that there's a really great Australian sitcom called Fisk and it's about a lawyer. And one of the episodes, this woman comes in and she. Her husband has set up a kind of series of texts that will come to her at all these various times. He's dead. And so that she'll constantly receive texts from him sort of as though he were alive, like reminding her to buy milk and things like that. And she hates it. She didn't want it. It really upsets her. Brings up that trauma again and again, which I think you deal with in. In her.
- [46:07]
Isabel Chung
Yeah.
- [46:08]
Interviewer
So it's clearly something on people's mind that the technology of the future may really interfere with the way we understand a long term relationship. The way we understand mourning. Are we going to constantly be in a melancholic re. Experience of mourning? Which is actually my. My next question has to do with. There is a lot of mourning in these stories. There's a lot of loss and mourning. There's lots of individual people and Find your spirit, which is a very dear story to me. I found it so emotionally touching and, and has a deep well of. Of mourning. And loss in it. But the protagonist is using an app to track the wanderings of her. Of her dead twin sister's ghost and is trying to decide really whether to kind of let mourning go or to be in a constant repetition of melancholic loss. And then in To My great granddaughter, a woman leaves recipes behind and a. A lesson on the impermanence of the ways of living. And those two feel like very different ways of encountering someone again and. And warning them. So I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about how your stories and characters live with and resist certain states of mourning. And maybe it's worth starting with find your spirit, which is really the one where we have that kind of tension between both being so interested in following her. Her sister's ghost with this app and then finding it to be, you know, doesn't bring her back to life.
- [47:44]
Isabel Chung
Right? Right. Well, it begins with her actually seeing or perhaps hallucinating her sister's ghost. So it begins with a moment in which her sister does come back, whether it's real or imagined. And then the sister tells her to download this app, and then the app is there, it's in her inbox, and she's asked to download it. And I think that so many companies and the ways in which the world is run these days, it's. It's exploiting those vulnerabilities that we have around mourning and around our desires. And so this connection between the very, you know, magical, realist element of a seeing that goes. Coming out of the scheme and then suddenly there's an app was something I wanted to explore as well, like this kind of absurdist, corporate capitalist kind of exploitation of somebody's grief. But as I continue to write the story, I think I really wanted to think about how much grief is physical. And it's. Obviously, it takes up a lot of space in our mind. You know, it's very pleasant, but it also is a very physical process. You know, we cry with our bodies, not just with our eyes. There's something happening in our shoulders and our backs as we're crying. Those. The places we go to with the people that we go to with that are no longer around. There's.
- [49:11]
Interviewer
I will note that she watches her go to a bookstore that maybe doesn't exist anymore. Maybe another disappearing bookstore. She's searching. She realizes her. Her sister's ghost is searching for. So we're. We're back to the disappearing book.
- [49:28]
Isabel Chung
Disappearing books bowl, the place that no longer exist. And that was once so physical. And I think there's always just something still shocking and magical that happened when somebody died in which, you know, the body possesses the person and then suddenly only left with the body. And it's something that over and over again, as. As humans, we still can't really accept sometimes. There's a book I really love called the Year of Magical Thinking.
- [50:00]
Interviewer
Oh, yeah, I love that book.
- [50:03]
Isabel Chung
It just. It's just the most incredible book about grief. And obviously it's so sad, but it also really explores grief in a. In a really nuanced way. So it talks about the. The kind of. What's it called, the suspension of belief that you have when somebody passes and you really believe they're going to walk back through the door. Their physical preference can't be gone. Like, how can it be? And so the physicality of what the app provides, whether or not it's real or not, it's something that helps the protagonist temporarily bridge that disbelief you have about someone really being gone. She says, oh, as long as I can see this little dot on the app, on the phone, she's there physically, the physical presence of this person is still around. But of course, the. That doesn't really help with the grief. It just sort of ameliorates it temporarily. And that's what I find sad about the story. Is it? It's just a temporary self.
- [51:02]
Interviewer
Yeah. Yeah. In. In sort of contrast to that, I loved the fact that to my great granddaughter has these actual recipes and. And that feels like a different kind. A different kind of gift to someone who will eventually mourn you. And a way of encountering them that's very. As opposed to the dot on the technological screen, we have a. A physical and material way of doing something that isn't bringing the person back to life, but is encountering them in such a. Your. Your body is encountering them by making a recipe. And I wonder if you talk about that as. As a really distinct from that kind of technological version.
- [51:47]
Isabel Chung
Yeah. So I'm also very interested in archives. I love thinking about them. And when we were opening this gallery after we found a lot of my grandfather's objects and his books in boxes here, and he had already passed away by that point, so I was encountering his life through these objects, through these, like, materials, but with him no longer present to explain what they had meant to him or what they had. How they had kind of fit into his life. And there's this wonderful organization here in Hong Kong called the Asia Art Archive, which is trying to fill in the gaps of Asian art histories because it's been so fractured by trauma by, like war or in mainland China, the Cultural Revolution, that it's very necessary to fill in those gaps. And so I was thinking a lot about archive and how somebody might want to make an archive of their own life, but not for history books and not for organizations or institutions, but just for one single person in the future. And she doesn't even know if this person will exist. She just hopes that she will and then she'll be able to pass on these latter piece for survival. So in this way, I. I really love this story. And I felt like it was. It. It's a little bit different to the others, in which it feels a bit more hopeful, although. Yeah. Because the others end on sometimes quite a somber police note. But this ends on a note in which you can always reinvent yourself or you can always survive again.
- [53:29]
Interviewer
And if it's a way of life is impermanent and is. Is lost, there is options for re. Reinvention.
- [53:37]
Isabel Chung
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this through line of surviving in a very hostile world. It is something I was thinking about a lot when I was writing this collection. And food is something that's so important in a lot of cultures, in particular Asian cultures.
- [53:56]
Interviewer
Having spent a little bit bit more than a week here now, I would say that maybe Hong Kong, it is more important than. Than a lot of places.
- [54:05]
Isabel Chung
It is. It's fresher. It's like the gathering place. It makes us happy. We're always talking about it and.
- [54:12]
Interviewer
And it's so. It's. It feels very electric here. Everything you pass, there's like an energy to the food culture and places. And even if that place is sitting on an overturned bucket and having some cold tofu pudding, it feels very alive.
- [54:31]
Isabel Chung
Right, right. And so I was thinking a lot about that and how to. How to recreate those moments when there's nothing. So there's one part of the story in which people have to live underground because overground is now dangerous. And so what if you were living in complete darkness and not experiencing any of the joy that comes with eating the food, which is, you know, open air, sunlight, other people, and how to bottle that and jar it. And so that's what I was really trying to explore in the recipe. Tap food can bring you back from the brink of hopelessness and just kind of. Yeah. Just help you survive in these very, very dire.
- [55:10]
Interviewer
Well, Isabelle, before I let you go, I was wondering if you might recommend some things that you've been reading and loving recently. Because I know my. My listeners, they're really their favorite part of every episode is finding out new books to love and get excited about.
- [55:27]
Isabel Chung
Oh, that's so great. Yes. I would love to share two books that I've been sort of slowly reading. Summertime is always when I try to read in a slower way. And the two books are really wonderful for that.
- [55:43]
Interviewer
So the first I want to pause just a second because I feel like that's. That is the opposite of what a lot of people think of as summer reading. And they think of it as like, very long, frothy, and you just read it. The most that you're reading during the year yet is happening during that period of time. Get through a lot of books, but tell me about why it's a time for slow reading.
- [56:07]
Isabel Chung
I think a lot of it has to do with the heat. It becomes so insufferably hot here that my. My brain is not as sharp and I'm not able to, you know, spend a few hours finishing a book or even a few days. It really. I really have to take my time, and so I can't just. I can't read a page turner in three weeks. I read something that lets me meditate and that lets me sit with it and then go back to it and think more. So that's why I really enjoy reading much more slowly in the summertime. And I also like just doing the opposite of reading what other people are doing, I think. So the two books that I have that are very encouraging of my slower reading pace is the first is Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. And it's a book about fungi and how it makes our world, changes our minds, and shapes our futures. That's really the tagline. But the reason why I was introduced to this book is because I'm actually organizing a reading group for it later this week at the gallery. It is a book that had been.
- [57:13]
Interviewer
Is that something you do regularly, having reading groups at the gallery?
- [57:17]
Isabel Chung
No, we haven't done it more than three or four times, but each time it's been really wonderful. And it's a very. Usually a very small group of people who I feel like would really enjoy the book. So it's not regular, but whenever there is a book that I feel like is worth discussing and this is one of them, then I will try and organize something because it's still very important to me to talk about the books feel, you know, and so this one was so highly formative for the artists that created the exhibition about Markland in the space. And when we first opened the show they had a selection of books in this little library space that we have, and this was one of the books. And they said, if there's one book you must read about mushrooms, it has to be this one.
- [58:04]
Interviewer
Oh, wow.
- [58:05]
Isabel Chung
Yes. And now, having read it, I understand, because not only does it really express the sort of scientific mysteries and observations around mushrooms, it really talks about the magical solutions that it can provide. And it's written in a way that is extremely narrative. It's creative. There were all these wonderful illustrations of mushrooms that are drawn with mushroom ink.
- [58:34]
Interviewer
Oh, my goodness. That's amazing.
- [58:35]
Isabel Chung
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So all of it feels very intertwined and very whole. And the more I'm reading about it, the more I understand why some people spend their entire lives obsessed with mushrooms. It's just an infinite. It's a place of infinite wonder, and it's a place of infinite possibility. And it really has changed my perception of how to look at, like, the ground around me and the little mushrooms that pop up off the brain. Like, what can they mean? What are they trying to tell us? And so I.
- [59:07]
Interviewer
Or that might grow out of our ear.
- [59:10]
Isabel Chung
What is it trying to say? So, yeah, I really, really recommend this.
- [59:14]
Interviewer
I can't wait for that one. I'm going to get it as soon as I can.
- [59:18]
Isabel Chung
And then the second one I recommend is a poetry book by Japanese author Sayumi Kamakura, and it's translated by James Shear, who was a poet based here in Hong Kong. These are all haikus, and on the left are the Japanese and on the right is the English. So you can sort of look at the shape of the Japanese characters as you're reading the English translation, which I really love. I can't read Japanese myself, but I love how so much of Asian language and Asian character shaping is pictorial. Like in Chinese, the word literally is made out of the components of what it's supposed to represent or look like. Right. And so I just love that the book includes both languages.
- [60:08]
Interviewer
It gives it much more. Well, it reminds you how magical language is to begin with, and it. And it signals that magic and how much is contained and layered within a single. A single word.
- [60:21]
Isabel Chung
Yes. And just a physical, like, opening to the page of each poem, and just the. You imagine the act of translation from left to right, and then it being just separated by this, like, page binding is really incredible. And the high keys themselves are obviously poetic and beautiful, but sometimes really funny and really ridiculous. I think it's written by an older Japanese poet, and so there's this really funny One maybe I can read a bit.
- [60:53]
Interviewer
Yeah, read us. Read us.
- [60:55]
Isabel Chung
If I can find the one that's
- [60:56]
Interviewer
really hilarious when I do. When I think of, like, ancient haiku, I feel like there's a lot of humor there, but then maybe more modern stuff loses that a little bit. And so I'm glad that these are returning to that kind of early sense of playfulness.
- [61:13]
Isabel Chung
Yeah, I think maybe the, you know, the cultural phenomenon of, like, Japan being a place of beauty has, like, made the haiku a little bit of a pastiche of itself. Snappy. But haikus, like, they're just meant to be short and snappy. So, like, the humor obviously would play into that. It just seems like an actual fit. Okay, so the one I will read is in a section called Light, and it's very short. Cherry blossomed in full bloom. Just leave me alone. It's getting warmer. A nail provokes a needle in the spring afternoon I count three white hairs. I won't count anymore.
- [61:54]
Interviewer
Yeah, I love that.
- [61:55]
Isabel Chung
Yeah, dude, that's so great. It's like, from the perspective from an older woman. I was like, cherry Bach and grim on groom again. Just leave me alone. Like, the cherry rips out here and then keep, like, counting the whiteheads. Like, I'm going to stop counting with, like, her perception of, like, queen time with people like that are young and then live. Are wandering around the cherry blossom like, oh, my God.
- [62:14]
Interviewer
And another. Another year is passing because the cherry blossoms have come again. But for someone older, that. That means something different.
- [62:22]
Isabel Chung
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [62:23]
Interviewer
Younger.
- [62:23]
Isabel Chung
Leave me alone, you know?
- [62:25]
Interviewer
Well, these are both really wonderful recommendations. I'm excited to read them both. I'm most excited to recommend to my listeners Patchwork Dolls by Isabel Chong. It's really one of my favorite short story collections that I've read in the last few years. And I think each one is. They're. They're connected by a lot of threads to things they're interested in, anxious about, wondering about. But they each have a playfulness in the form and a really unique nature to each story that I found really compelling. And I'm. I know I'm going to return to them again. So thank you so much for being on the show, Isabelle.
- [63:05]
Isabel Chung
Thank you so much. Thank you.
- [63:18]
Chris Holmes
Well, that's all for me for now. My thanks to Isabel Chung for coming on to talk about her debut short story collection, Patchwork Dolls. You can find links to purchase Patchwork Dolls and all of Isabelle's recommended books at the website burned by books dot com. There you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast, T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on iTunes, Spotify, and now YouTube, or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books.
- [64:21]
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