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Coco Lee reviews Ysabelle Cheung’s debut story collection on the experiences of Asian migrant women, set in a surreal and eerie technological future.

Ysabelle Cheung, Patchwork Dolls (Blair, 2026), 212pp.

Patchwork Dolls (2026) is a short story collection that depicts immigration and alienation in a mechanised world. Ranging across identity, trauma, memory, politics, technology, and heritage, Cheung opens a mythic distance from our material reality in order to picture a future we might inhabit as technology advances. Read as surreal, science fiction, magical realism, fantasy, or dystopian fiction, the collection moves nimbly between genres, resisting any single designation. In the same spirit, Cheung embraces plurality, experimenting with female roles across different times, cultures, and environments.

The ten stories — which range from growing fungus inside a body to living on an imagined planet — all illustrate, in one way or another, the struggles faced by the Asian diasporic community. Without naming a specific place or time, Cheung’s stories speak to anyone who shares such experiences.

In “To My Great-Granddaughter, Who Will Find This Letter When I am Dead,” Cheung shows how cultural barriers in food and lifestyle, compounded by an unsettled sense of home, alienate the family of a Chinese migrant woman. Written as a letter to her future offspring, the story has its narrator pass on her Chinese heritage through recipes and stories. Cheung captures the process of “constant uprooting” (40) and prepares the descendants to “regenerate” and “reinvent” themselves should they lose their home (43). The maternal tone offers a measure of comfort even as it conveys the bleak reality of an intergenerational migrant family.

In “Mycomorphosis,” “Patchwork Dolls,” and “Galatea,” Cheung critiques stereotypes about Chinese and Asian women, white-led aesthetics, and women’s roles in patriarchal society. She examines what constitutes a woman by linking the physical bodies of Asian migrant women to identity and social labels. In “Mycomorphosis,” Noel, a Chinese girl, develops a fungus in her head that brings on persistent migraines. Rather than give in to her employer, her mother, or the attacker who scarred her face, she embraces the fungus and lives as a renewed Asian woman who defies expectations in a New York where anti-Asian hate crimes are rife. As Noel strengthens her independence and embraces a new life, she grows less troubled by her mother’s grumbling:

Her mother kept calling – come home, stop wasting your life, it’s too dangerous for you there, you never pay attention, why haven’t you figured anything out yet? – but she found herself caring less and less. It felt as if her mother was describing someone who no longer existed. She noticed in herself not the familiar sensation of panicked heat, but a cool closing off, of the external world not being able to reach her. (Cheung 12)

Cheung casts the fungus as a physical form of expectation — a weight that burdens and pains a person while blind to the possibility that one might transcend cultural stereotypes through adaptation and internalisation. Beyond this internalising of cultural difference, Cheung also considers how technology helps immigrants assimilate by erasing external markers such as appearance.

In the titular story, “Patchwork Dolls,” Sophia and other “primarily disadvantaged women of colour” exchange their facial features with “affluent white women” through surgery for handsome profit, living for a time the life of an “ordinary” white person (105). Despite the lucrative rewards, Sophia realises that a new identity is taking root beneath her new face, replacing her former self in the world and erasing the existence and memories attached to her old one. In a world that is always changing, she comes to realise: “I wasn’t an activist or a feminist or an icon – I was just myself, with slightly more money than before and a history of bad choices” (121). Rather than alter one’s essence to assimilate, Cheung reminds us to embrace our own appearance and identity.

Assimilating into a new culture is never easy. Beyond the question of changing one’s essence, Cheung also looks at how people cling to memory to cope with unfamiliar surroundings. As a record of the past, memory can serve as a reference point from which migrants envision their future in a new place. In “Please, Get Out and Dance,” for instance, Cheung portrays a vanishing world in which things sharing particular traits — a colour, or signifiers of indigeneity — gradually disappear as a new authority takes over:

More and more buildings were disappearing, but nobody knew why or where they went. […] soon the roads would vanish too, and the parks and ponds, and, finally, the mountains. […] But then things began to disappear. Small, unnoticeable things at first: a handlebar on the bus, a strip of yellow on the road. […] but how could one explain the disappearance of a single mah-jong tile from thousands of sets across city? Or the words on one specific page of a book? […] Mailboxes. Apples. Adding them up, they concluded that the disappearances were not random. (19-20)

When a remembered place changes through such disappearances, it estranges our lived experience. Cheung shows how memory shapes one’s connection to places and people. As a character’s perception of a place shifts, and home no longer feels like home, they move elsewhere to rebuild that sense of home.

“Find Your Spirit” and “Herbs” further reveal the emptiness of clinging to memories of beloved people who have died. “Find Your Spirit” follows a disoriented protagonist tracking her dead twin sister’s spirit through Hong Kong via a mobile app, while “Herbs” presents a wife who lives with replicas of her deceased husband at various ages until her own death. Through characters who live alongside this “absent presence,” these stories show how migrants reconstruct memory in foreign spaces for a sense of security, even when doing so becomes self-deluding. Across these disappearances and recoveries, Cheung invites readers to reflect on the significance and legacy of memory in shaping a life.

On the work of memory, a special mention goes to the fourth story, “The Reader,” which offers an immersive, disorienting reading experience. The reader steers the story’s direction by flipping to designated pages, arriving at different endings. Set in post-2019 Hong Kong, “you” wake with no memory of your surroundings; trying to recover what happened, “you” encounter different people and places. Cheung skilfully extends the character’s disorientation beyond the page, trapping the reader in a swirl of memories, a haze, and an endless loop of fragmentation. Allowed to decide the plot’s development, readers drift through disordered memories and a broken timeline, flipping the pages back and forth. Like the protagonist — traumatised and broken — they finish the story bewildered.

Anyone interested in migrant communities, women’s rights, cultural difference, and the struggle to build new lives should not miss Cheung’s collection. The ten stories capture the insecurities and concerns that migrants face far from home. From the interpersonal to the political, Cheung renders these experiences in literary form and leaves readers caught in the dilemma of whether to stay or go. For women, for anyone struggling to negotiate their identity, and for those who have become part of the Hong Kong diaspora, this book speaks your story.

Coco Lee is a researcher in postcolonial literature and Anglophone African literature. She obtained her MA in English literary studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is currently exploring indigenous animist practices in postcolonial literature through a posthuman framework. Her recent article on Africanfuturism is published in African Literature Today.