Review of Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa

*Tongueless* by Lau Yee-wa, translated by Jennifer Feeley (2024). Published by The Feminist Press.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently fell into a spell of unemployment probably during the worst time to be unemployed, as it was very hard to find a job. I was applying to hundreds of jobs, getting interviews, but no offer was manifesting for me in the near future. So during this time, I had a lot of free time, and spent a good chunk of it chipping away at the blog.

I’ve always and forever been a library girl from the bottom of my heart. When I was a child my mother would always take us to the library and I’d pick out a ridiculous amount of books, and I’ve continued that tradition when I moved home from New York City, after college, in order to keep picking my brain for new stories out there in the world.

I love stories, hence why I even became a writer. When I was unemployed during this period I found solace in books (and movies/television, too) because it fed into my own creativity and reminded me the options and world out there were limitless. The library is somewhere that is sacred to me, and I’ve been loving how my local system has been leaning hard into acquiring diverse titles.

Lately I’ve been able to go into my library branch and find books from all over the world, LBGTQ+ authors, and so much more, and I’ve been living it up. I find all of these new, wonderful books I had no idea existed before the day began, and it makes me so much more curious about the rest of the world out there.

It was there I found a copy of Tongueless during one Friday stop to get some new books for the upcoming week. The erasure of local languages in China for putonghua, or Mandarin, has been a research interest of mine for the past year, so when I read the synopsis on the dust jacket, I knew I wanted to read this immediately.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much, as you’ll be here longer than it took me to read this book.

Two teachers at an elite Hong Kong primary school find themselves at linguistic odds with a changing Hong Kong.

This novel is set during the present day, where, if you don’t follow what’s happening in places like Hong Kong, the local language (Cantonese) is slowly being replaced by Mandarin. This is a broader policy by the Chinese government to try and unify the nation with one language, but it means that local dialects, such as Shanghainese and Cantonese, are being replaced with putonghua.

The school this book takes place in is a Cantonese language school, and people take pride in how this school still teaches in Cantonese instead of Mandarin. That’s going to change throughout the course of the novel, as the principal, who has links to mainland China, is beginning to push for the curriculum to change towards Mandarin language, even if the teachers can’t fully speak Mandarin.

We see this tale unfold from the perspective of Ling, who spends her salary competing with the others to buy luxury outfits. She wants to desperately fit in with the cliques of other teachers, which puts her at odds with the awkward Wai. Wai, another teacher, has become obsessed with learning Mandarin in order to keep her job.

She tries constantly to speak and study Mandarin, but isn’t doing so well with it, and that doesn’t help her already unpopular reputation with the other teachers. There’s an undertone to this, as Ling sees how the poor woman grew up poor and lives with her mother, but because we see this from Ling’s perspective, it’s all brushed off.

Ling doesn’t really try as hard to learn Mandarin, which might be shooting herself in the foot, as the teachers are all now going to be required to know Mandarin in the near future.

Instead, Ling thinks she can dodge the requirement by becoming friendly with the principal. As all of this goes on, Wai eventually commits suicide, and then Ling is left alone to face the consequences of the changing dynamics in the school and how she now has to adapt or lose her job.

Overall Thoughts

This is a tragic novel in so many ways. Ling is unlikable as a character because she refuses to see the writing on the wall, but also because of how she treats Wai throughout her time alive in the book. You really feel bad for Wai, and because we see her from Ling’s perspective, she really comes across as pitiful at times.

Wai’s situation is obviously a tragedy, but the broader strokes are about how Hong Kong might lose its own linguistic and cultural identity in order to conform with the Chinese government’s agenda. The principal’s connection to money and the fact she has real estate connections back in the mainland are also suspicious, as the reasons she want to switch the school’s language, which had made it famous, probably is financially motivated.

Anyways, this is such a compelling novel to read, especially if you know nothing about the subject. It reminds me of a conversation I had with someone else where she defended teaching everyone the English language, and my argument was about how we lost so much when people forget their culture.

Read this one for sure if you’re interested in what it has to say; I think this is a critical novel in today’s world.

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