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catalog of such stuff as dreams are made on
A playful and imaginative glimpse into the consumerist dreamscape of late-nineties Hong Kong. It consists of ninety-nine sketches of life in Hong Kong just after the handover of the former British colony to China. Each of these stories in miniature develops from a piece of ephemera, usually consumer products or pop culture phenomena, and unfurls alternately comic and poignant snapshots of urban life. Dung blends vivid everyday details, Portuguese egg tarts, Japanese reality television, the Hong Kong subway, with situations that are often fantastical or preposterous. The central character of each sketch, usually a young woman, flits past without reappearing. They fall into brief dalliances or relationships that last no longer than the fads that sparked them. Dung's sketches feature once trendy objects that evoke the world at the turn of the millennium, when he was writing, Hello Kitty, Final Fantasy VIII, a Windows 98 disk, a clamshell mobile phone, Air Jordans and cargo shorts. Recognizing the imminent obsolescence of the objects it depicts, this catalog of vanished products is no mere exercise in nostalgia. Its archaeology of life at the end of the last century speaks to ongoing concerns about consumerism and identity. A major work from one of Hong Kong's most gifted and original writers, this book illuminates a world where people use objects to define and even invent their own lives.
Dung Kai-cheung ; translated by Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson.