By Eunice Lim

Review of A Dream Wants Waking by Lydia Kwa (Hamilton, Ontario: Buckrider Books, 2023)

Just as Lewis Carroll’s Alice reckons with a distorted reality through a looking-glass, Canadian writer Lydia Kwa’s fantastical speculative-fiction novel features the protagonist Yinhe, a half-fox, half-human chimeric spirit navigating a realm of existence that is quite unlike our own, yet possesses an uncanny resemblance to it. Yinhe is on a multi-generational quest to find Ao, a divine turtle that she believes can reunite her with her friend Ling. However, a vengeful demon known as Gui is intent on thwarting Yinhe by escaping the Underworld and wielding power and control over all beings. If the elusive Ao represents a sacred philosophy and praxis of care for all beings that the novel centers as wisdom and truth worth inheriting and passing down, then Gui, the power-drunk central villain, represents civilizational callousness driven by a cruel impulse to destroy and dominate others, an approach that the novel cautions against. Dream is the third and last novel in Kwa’s chuánqí (“transmitting the strange”) trilogy. The previous two novels are titled The Walking Boy (2005) and Oracle Bone (2017), and while there are references in Dream to these other two novels and while the title of Dream references a couplet associated with the oracle bone in the first novel, this third novel works well as a standalone.

The narrative glides effortlessly between Tang China of the 7th to 8th centuries and Luoyang of the 23rd century, blending mythology and folktales with the futuristic technology of neural implants and subdermal microchips to build a compelling fictional world. A Dream Wants Waking draws inspiration from Chinese classical texts like Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West (16th century), Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber (18th century), and The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing), as well as Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (1740) and Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zhou’s “The Butterfly Dream” (4th century BCE). Xuanzang, a 7th-century Chinese Buddhist monk known for his pilgrimage to India to retrieve Mahayana scriptures and popularized by Journey to the West, makes an appearance in Kwa’s novel, but it is his role as a translator of scriptures that is emphasized, alongside other references to Taoist rituals and practices. Dunhuang, the renowned site of the Mogao Caves—a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an important stop on the Silk Road—meets H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) on the literal page and in the same narrative breath in Kwa’s novel. Reminiscent of the science fiction by Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, No. 1, the crowning scientific achievement of the narrative’s authoritarian Central Government, is a disembodied mega-brain that dreams of a shenti, a Chinese term that the novel clarifies does not merely refer to the body, but “a combination of body with personhood”.

It would also be generative to read Kwa’s trilogy in relation to contemporary works of speculative fiction and sci-fi by Asian American and Asian authors, such as Korean American writer Chang-Rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) and Chinese sci-fi writer Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide (2013), translated by Ken Liu and published in English in 2019. The anti-authoritarian and counter-hegemonic verve of the novel also results in a fascinating juxtaposition of historical figures like Empress Wu alongside dystopian depictions of a surveilling Central Government and a cultish religious organization known as the Spirit Supreme Assembly. The abbreviation of Central Government as CG in the novel also calls to mind “computer-generated”, raising questions about the future of governance and the possibility of an electric one. Kwa presents us with a futuristic narrative world in which “Autumn Night”, a song by Bai Guang, a popular Chinese singer in the 1940s and ’50s, serves as a potential soundtrack, demonstrating that nostalgia operates by inserting the distant past of today into the distant future of tomorrow. This layered literary melding of genres effectively bridges imaginaries of the past to that of the future, producing a remarkably complex narrative world in under 200 pages.

Dream is a celebration of words and their gentle power, delivering a sustained and self-reflexive commentary on the meticulous craft of storytellers. Storytelling Night, which Yinhe presides over, is not merely a highly anticipated event but also a generous communal space that embraces both skeptical newcomers and patient regulars. The novel reminds us that the physical body is the original medium of expression and that the gender identities of our chimeric characters are signalled through gestures rather than words, such as when the character Rakan “covers his heart with his right hand, signalling that he is male”, and when the character Raiju gestures “with right hand over heart and left hand touching the top of their right shoulder [to] signal that they are non-binary”.

Born in Singapore, Kwa also innovatively adapts the country’s complex sociolinguistic and multiracial context for the novel’s speculative future, advocating for a rich dynamism and creative hybridity of language use and racio-cultural influences. Writing against a purist, generalist, and monolithic understanding of Han Chinese identity, proper putonghua, and mainstream Asian culture, the novel invites us into the narrative world’s Dream Zone, a spatiotemporal antithesis to the illuminated and established Bright Order of the Central Government. Characterized by “unsettling aspects that would be judged hideous, inadequate, or wrong by many humans”, Dream Zone represents a making of space for those who tend to be neglected, marginalized, and pathologized. Phrases like “huat ah!” and “kau peh kau bu” serve as embedded linguistic markers of Sinophone-Hokkien vernacularism and identities and are a welcome departure from the conventional oral evocations of Standard Mandarin, written Standard Chinese, and the formal use of Classical Chinese in both Anglophone and Sinophone Chinese literature. A sagely chimeric salamander known as the End Decoder greets our protagonist in Bahasa Melayu, a language that Yinhe states she “hasn’t heard for many lifetimes”. Kwa also references the jogappas, a transgender community in India, presenting a vivid tapestry of interwoven cross-cultural influences. Those unfamiliar with Asia’s complex linguistic repertoire and politics might, however, stumble over these interventions and potentially find them alienating or peculiar juxtapositions.

The novel’s prefatory dedication to “our non-human kin” informs its key interventions, and Kwa is ardently committed to this mission from the beginning to the end of the novel with each line and word curated to convey this gift of consideration and kinship to the non-human in its myriad forms. Alluding to a Great Catastrophe that has robbed the narrative world of clear skies and pristine ocean waters, and rendered countless animals extinct, Dream may thus also be interpreted through an ecocritical lens. For instance, the playful wind mentioned in the prologue “livens up”, “sneaks through gaps to get inside houses”, and “teases and cajoles”. Kwa is a meticulous architect of this animist narrative world, taking us through the familiar alleys and streets of a place called Bent Back, an implicit recognition of the spatial body for its identifying but not defining features. The novel focuses on intergenerationally powerful female characters, although the power that the shape-shifting Yinhe employs and experiences is distinct from the power employed and experienced by her Earth mother Phoebe. Memorable lines like “menopause is such a gong show” humorously highlight the underrepresented but hardly insignificant parts of the human experience and condition. Through these many subtle interventions, Dream rouses the reader’s dormant heart-mind and privileges intuitive and affective senses and sensibilities over the logical deductions of the mind’s eye.

Kwa’s novel describes a post-apocalyptic future in which humankind has turned away from art and literature to focus instead on recovery and survival through science and technology, and it is worth considering why art and literature are rarely perceived as being well-suited for recovery and survival. Readers with an interest in these inquiries will likely appreciate Kwa’s novel as a literary summons to the kind of learning that is beyond the reach of “documents and cold data” but endures in warm bodies and tender hearts. The ambitiously capacious A Dream Wants Waking will likely be an exciting read for those interested in disability studies, gender and sexuality studies, sound studies, the move from the Anthropocene to the Symbiocene, Asian speculative fiction, archipelagic studies, and Sinophone studies.

The active purpose of a dream, according to the novel, is “to assist the dreamer toward a realization of reality, toward awakening”, putting a different spin on the common saying “but we can dream”. The novel contends that we do not dream as a means of escaping from our reality, but we awaken to our reality with the assistance of our dreams. A Dream Wants Waking might not be everyone’s gaiwan of tea, but for this reviewer, the novel is like its own description of freshly brewed pu’er — it “neither begs you to like it nor is showy; yet, it insinuates itself with such intense presence”.

Eunice Lim is a lecturer of writing and composition at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She was formerly a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Pennsylvania State University and has published journal articles in ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Global Storytelling, and Antipodes. Born and raised in Singapore, Eunice speaks Teochew, is learning Bahasa Melayu, and fondly recalls a time when children would pluck ixora flowers to suck nectar from the stems.