A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On
Dung Kai-Cheung (translated by Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson)
Columbia University Press: 2022
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How should we read a twenty-two-year-old book? Dung Kai-cheung wrote these flash fictions or ‘sketches’ (the author’s preferred term) at the start of what he calls the ‘political experiment’ of Hong Kong’s post-handover one country, two systems reality. Between 1998 and 1999, he wrote short weekly pieces documenting the lives of Hong Kong people, in particular those who inhabit universities and housing estates. The ninety-nine stories collected in A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On have a distinctively Hong Kong character, which is on the cusp of disappearing, like a dream. In Hong Kong, twenty-two years is a long time.

• Tags: Dung Kai-Cheung, Hong Kong, Issue 27, Xu Xi