“She Would Carry This into the Sea”: Bodies of Water and Aqueous Imaginaries in Ysabelle Cheung’s Patchwork Dolls

Abstract

This essay reads three stories from Hong Kong-based writer Ysabelle Cheung’s debut speculative fiction collection Patchwork Dolls (2026) — “Please, Get Out and Dance,” “Mycomorphosis,” and “To My Great-Granddaughter, Who Will Find This Letter When I Am Dead” — through Astrida Neimanis’s hydrofeminist framework. The essay argues that Cheung’s collection stages water as a relational substance that dissolves the fantasy of the bounded, autonomous body, enables collaborative worlding across species and time, and sustains an ethics of care attentive to human and more-than-human life alike. In “Please, Get Out and Dance,” a group of political resisters found a seafloor community, enacting a hydrocommons that connects bodies across species and deep time. In “Mycomorphosis,” the pervasive dampness of a sealed apartment enables a fungal-aquatic becoming that dissolves the perceived boundary between the human and the nonhuman. In “To My Great-Granddaughter,” water in cooking and ritual circulates as the vital conduit of watery inheritances and responsivity. Together, the three stories cultivate what Neimanis calls “aqueous imaginaries” — ways of imagining embodied life as intimately and inseparably tethered to water and to the more-than-human world.