Tongueless

By Lau Yee-Wa

Translated by Jennifer Feeley

(2019, trans. 2024)

The Feminist Press at CUNY

Language is at the center of conflict in Lau Yee-wa’s Tongueless, a withering satire of global politics, education, and Hong Kong’s attempt to preserve its autonomy and cultural identity. At an elemental level, that identity is tied to preserving Hong Kong’s “mother tongue,” Cantonese. But given the impact of British colonialism, Hong Kong’s tongue has rarely been its own. For generations, the medium of instruction in Hong Kong schools was the English of the British Empire, so much so that although Hong Kongers continued to speak Cantonese, few could read or write their language. Following the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, schools had the opportunity to teach in English, Cantonese, or both. In 1998-1999, three-quarters of the schools chose to teach in Cantonese. However, in 2008, following a grant of HK$200 million from the Standing Commission on Language Education Research, there has been steady pressure to switch the medium of instruction from Cantonese to Mandarin. In 2020, China’s Ministry of Education called for “vigorously promoting the common national language.” Hong Kong celebrities responded with a call to defend Cantonese, yet China continues to apply pressure. Lau brings this conflict to life at the Sing Din Secondary School, where Cantonese is still the medium of instruction. But the head of the department graduated from Peking University, and her authority clearly rests on her status as the best Mandarin speaker in the faculty. The most powerful person in the school, the principal, yearns to be more Chinese, attracting envy with her life-long goal of acquiring  property and influence on the mainland; she equates emigration to Shanghai or Hangzhou as the pinnacle of success. Under Lau’s critical eye, the administrators and faculty think little of their work or the larger questions of Hong Kong’s language and their role as culture bearers. The narrator, Miss Ng Tsz-ling, embodies a no-nothing outlook. She is a Chinese Language instructor whose Mandarin has always been merely passable. When mainland students ask her a question in Mandarin, she replies in Cantonese. She recognizes the creeping influence of Mandarin, but does nothing to stave off or prepare for the inevitable. Instead, she embraces the status quo, phones in her instruction,  and teaches students to pass the exams. Her students do not complain, as they regularly earn the highest scores. She channels her true passion into hyperconsumerism. Instead of saving, she spends her salary on beauty products, dermatological procedures, and fashion. She leverages her privilege as a fair-skinned, eurocentric tastemaster to position herself at the principal’s right hand. This all changes with the arrival of Yu Wai, an awkward and mousy instructor who puts everyone on edge by announcing her intention to attain fluency in Mandarin. She is clearly struggling to master the language, and the faculty openly mock her for filling her cubicle with sticky notes of common Mandarin words and advocating for forming a Mandarin-only club. Simultaneously, her commitment to learn the language of power frightens them. What if this poor person from a questionable family background should  succeed? Does she know something that the professional educators do not know? And who among them values the Cantonese language or “cantoculture” enough to resist in what may be the final days their “mother tongue?

“In her ten years of work, Ling had never encountered a new colleague who asked her to speak Mandarin on the first day of employment. Wai rubbed her hands and kept on talking. ‘Whether studying English or Mandarin, Hong Kong people are always in a female … no, I mean an in—yes, an infer-ior po-position. We have no opportunities to listen or speak, so we always study … It’s not good. If possible, I’d like to create a Mandarin-speaking en-fry—no, en-vi-ron-ment. This is the only way to speak as well as those whose mother tongue is Mandarin.’ Wai spoke extremely slowly, repeating the words she had difficulty pronouncing multiple times, as though she were coughing up each syllable from her throat.”