Listening to the silence

Lau Yee-Wa’s gripping debut novel, Tongueless, translated from Chinese by Jennifer Feeley, opens in the aftermath of a tragic suicide. But it’s a suicide that almost everyone seems to want to get past. Rather than think of their colleague whose cubicle lies untouched, the Chinese language teachers of the Sing Din Secondary School in Hong Kong would rather just get back to the way things were before. They want to teach classes, grade student assignments, indulge in workplace gossip, and exchange information about the latest cosmetic procedures and where to score deals on Valentino bags and Céline blouses.

Outside the school, on the streets of Hong Kong, protests are erupting and a disaffected populace is raising its voice against the territory’s closer relations with China. Within the school, however, and among the teachers of the Chinese department, overt political debates are avoided. But how long can the political reach of the mainland be kept at bay?

The politics of language in Tongueless find their physical form in the figure of Ling, the quick-witted and silver-tongued protagonist of the novel and one of the teachers at Sing Din school. Ling is a first-generation Hong Konger — her mother fled the mainland during the Cultural Revolution and reached Hong Kong where she hawked fake designer handbags and worked her way up to becoming a slumlord.

As someone who was raised in Hong Kong, Ling is most fluent in Cantonese. Mandarin, however, is increasingly becoming a requirement for Chinese language teachers as school administrations are aligning themselves with the mainland to curry political favour. Ling’s Mandarin is not flawless but she has, in the 10 years she’s been teaching at Sing Din, managed to avoid any repercussions professionally by a simple workaround: “She didn’t teach in Mandarin at school — mainland students would ask her questions in Mandarin, and she’d answer in Cantonese.” Besides, her students always score well in their exams so the lack of official grades in proficiency exams hadn’t affected Ling’s career thus far.

This peaceable status quo starts coming apart with the arrival of a new teacher in the department. Wai Yu is everything Ling isn’t. She wears thick-rimmed glasses, black suits and schoolgirlish leather shoes. She wouldn’t be able to tell a regular handbag from a Valentino. She lacks the basic social graces and would rather spend the time she’s not teaching to swot for her Mandarin proficiency tests. Her cubicle is soon papered with inscriptions of Mandarin pinyin romanisation.

Given their widely differing characters, Ling should not be remotely threatened by Wai. However, the newcomer’s desperate attempts to improve her Mandarin and progress in her career start to affect Ling. They are both on fixed-term annual contracts and if Wai were to gain a good grade in her proficiency assessment, Ling would lose favour with her superiors. Before Wai’s arrival, Ling had “…deeply understood that, as long as she was irreplaceable to others, she could keep her position.” It’s not long before the two are in a toxic, passive-aggressive workplace relationship that can clearly only go downhill and end in tragedy for the naïve Wai.

Pressures outside of work are also mounting on Ling — her mother, a monstrous bully, uses her to extract rent from her tenants, who are all new immigrants to Hong Kong. When she visits these minuscule units and negotiates with the tenants, Ling finds herself confronting realities far removed from the safe spaces of the school where she teaches and the high-end shopping malls where she buys her designer clothes. Seeing the wretchedness of the lives that her mother is exploiting, Ling tries to help out in whatever way she can but fails each time. These are failures her mother doesn’t let Ling forget, unleashing torrents of verbal abuse through text messages, phone calls and in person in the apartment where they both live together.

When things come to a head, as they inevitably do, it’s Ling who has to face the consequences — Wai’s actions make headlines around Hong Kong and a journalist is soon on the trail to figure out why she did what she did. The journalist who pesters Ling on the phone eventually publishes a story that further serves to alienate Ling from the rest of her colleagues. In desperation, the ever-resourceful Ling takes action to change her fortunes, one that doesn’t require her to gain a language or lose one.

Translating a novel that examines the socio-political dimensions of language and which was written originally in multiple forms (Standard Chinese, Cantonese and Mandarin) could never be an easy task. But Feeley has accomplished something extraordinary here — she’s made it possible for English language readers to understand the struggles of those who’ve long spoken in one tongue to try and adopt another. The missteps in pronunciation on the part of Wai and Ling as they try to speak fluent Mandarin don’t lose their impact when read in English. Yee-Wa’s compelling story and Feeley’s virtuosic translation take the reader on a journey into the Darwinist nature of life in contemporary Hong Kong, one that they won’t forget anytime soon.