Content warning: This piece mentions suicide.
Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa, translated by Jennifer Feeley, is a tale of two teachers in a city beset by political change. It takes place in a Hong Kong that feels dystopian, yet not far removed from reality: as Hong Kong legislation evolves to align more closely with that of the mainland Chinese government, secondary schools face growing pressure to teach in Mandarin as opposed to Cantonese, the dominant language in Hong Kong. The novel revolves around Wai and Ling, teachers at Sing Din Secondary School who grapple, in their own ways, with adapting to this new mode of instruction. But the first page offers an unsettling revelation: Wai died by suicide on the first day of summer break, in a way that was “spine-chilling, bloodier than a family massacre.” Though told from Ling’s perspective, in a way the novel is about Wai’s very present—even haunting—absence.
On the surface, Wai and Ling could not have been more different. Wai kept her desk tidy while Ling’s workspace is always messy. Wai did not care much for appearances, whereas Ling compulsively buys designer clothes and considers getting plastic surgery. Wai was a stubbornly hard worker who frustrated the entire department by persistently speaking garbled Mandarin; Ling scoffs at her and believes getting ahead is about staying likable and currying favors. Ling, who was contemptuous of and duplicitous toward Wai, has it easier to begin with, but as the story progresses, she is increasingly subjected to the same struggles: excruciatingly relentless hours; a cutthroat work environment; the precarity of being a contract worker; and the pressures of passing the LPAT (Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers) to prove proficiency in Mandarin and stay in the principal’s good books. The two characters mirror each other, an irony captured by the literal mirrors that appear in the novel. Wai’s cubicle has a “boundless sea of mirrors” that remain on her desk even after her death. In a chilling scene, Wai moves the mirror in her hand to reflect Ling, then swings it back to herself, repeatedly. She asks Ling: “In fact, what’s the difference between me and you?” The mirrors reflect how the characters are under constant self-scrutiny, obsessing over how they look, behave, and, of course, speak.
“Tongueless” is an apt title for a novel about the politics of language, and the visceral ways in which power dynamics manifest through speech. There are many “tongues” in this book, reflective of Hong Kong as a multilingual city that speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and more; and Feeley has found inventive ways to convey these lexical variations in her English translation. Whereas in the source text, the contrast between Cantonese and Mandarin comes across in the different ways Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese speakers refer to “potato” (“薯仔” and “土豆,” respectively), for instance, in English this becomes a comparison between UK and US English: “he referred to aubergine as ‘eggplant’ and courgette as ‘zucchini.’” Feeley writes in her translator’s note that she often portrays Wai’s dialogue through faltering English, to convey her clumsy command of Mandarin, although the dialogue between Ling and other staff members appears in fluent English.
Wai’s stuttering speech molds the text, giving it a texture that outlives her character. One of the most memorable instances of this is her repeated refrain that teaching is “horde lurk”—hard work—a phrase that, when pronounced, almost forces one’s tongue to the back of the mouth (a result of the controlled vowel sound created by “or” and “ur”), rendering the speaker, in a sense, “tongueless.” It is no coincidence that throughout the book, struggles with language are described in similarly corporeal ways: Wai says “not being able to speak Mandarin or English in Hong Kong is a duh-deficiency, another kind of dis-dis-disability.” When Ling takes Mandarin lessons, she is reminded of “the discomfort she had felt when she had braces back in secondary school . . . as though her whole body were covered in braces, and she couldn’t move.” And their desperation at acquiring proficiency in Mandarin drives both Ling and Wai to taking drastic actions on their own bodies.
Surviving in Hong Kong is, indeed, horde lurk, and though Lau frames this conflict in the setting of a secondary school, it becomes a site of ideological tension that amplifies the hardships of surviving in a city where the weight of societal expectations and regulations can feel unbearable. Tongueless portrays a society in which those without affluence or beauty are stuck in a cycle where they can never get ahead. One stark example of the wealth gap is Ling and her mother’s power over the new immigrants who rent their subdivided units in Mong Kok. These tenants face discrimination by their landlords and the system; within the school walls and the cramped rooms of tenement buildings, we see greed rear its ugly head, as concern for profit trumps mutual aid, and personal gain comes before collective benefit. There is a sad, yet not entirely surprising instance of this toward the end of the book, when we find out that Ivy (the principal’s assistant, who Ling believes has her best interests at heart) likely encouraged Ling to get plastic surgery in order to collect a referral bonus.
Ling is a difficult protagonist to root for. As much as she is a victim of the system and is trampled on by an overbearing mother, she also comes across as materialistic, manipulative, and politically apathetic. She does not participate in the Hong Kong Professional Teachers’ Union, finds protestors “uninteresting,” and looks down on students who voice their political beliefs on social media. It is clear that Ling is indifferent to political struggle in general. There’s a chilling passage that lays bare Ling’s views on the class divide inherent in Hong Kong society:
Dundas Street was teeming with neon signs for nightclubs and saunas, the street a mixed bag of characters: shirtless laborers, men smoking on the roadside and middle-aged women who always wore low-cut clothes . . . But once she turned onto Ferry Street [ . . . ] with luxury residences and modern estates [ . . .] people in the street were much more respectable, and the sky above was extraordinarily vast. It was as if there were two worlds, new and old, an immense chasm between them. When she stepped onto the Ferry Street footbridge, her disgust from just then turned into a sense of inexplicable superiority, and her steps became lighter and quicker.
One wonders: does Ling yearn for a more just Hong Kong? Is that a question she even knows to ask?
It is a question that instead dogs a bright student named Tsui Sui-Hin, “the biggest troublemaker” in class D, who constantly challenges figures of authority. It is significant that, in a book about characters rendered effectively tongueless by the institutions they are part of, Tsui Sui-Hin is the only character unafraid to run his mouth. Toward the end of the novel, he calls out Ling for teaching the canonical writer Lu Xun without internalizing and practicing his work’s ethos: “Lu Xun reflected on himself, but do any of you reflect on yourselves?” It is a biting comment that feels timely; at the time of writing this review, students around the United States are asking similar questions of their faculties amid protests against genocide in Gaza.
What would a better Hong Kong look like? How do education systems adapt in a society subject to state power? Tongueless engages with these questions and more. There is no simple answer to these dilemmas, which the novel lays bare for readers in ways that feel mundane, jarring, and radical all at once. But perhaps Tsui Sui-Hin puts it best: “It doesn’t matter. I just want to have a choice.”
Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa, translated from Chinese by Jennifer Feeley (The Feminist Press, 2024)
© 2024 by May Huang. All rights reserved.