Tongueless - Paperback

by Lau Yee-Wa (Author), Jennifer Feeley (Translator)

Winner of the Chommanard International Women's Literary Award

A gripping psychological thriller that sheds light on the current political situation in Hong Kong.

Tongueless follows two rival teachers at a secondary school in Hong Kong who are instructed to switch from teaching in Cantonese to Mandarin--or lose their jobs. Apolitical and focusing on surviving and thriving in their professional environment, Wai and Ling each approach the challenge differently. Wai, awkward and unpopular, becomes obsessed with Mandarin learning; Ling, knowing how to please her superiors and colleagues, thinks she can tactfully dodge the Mandarin challenge by deploying her social savviness. Wai eventually crumples under the pressure and dies by suicide, leaving her colleague Ling to face seismic political and cultural change alone as she considers how far she will go to survive such a ruthlessly competitive work environment.

Sharp, darkly humorous, and politically pointed, Tongueless presciently engages with important issues facing Hong Kong today during which so much of the city's uniqueness--especially its language--is at risk of being erased.

Author Biography

Lau Yee-Wa is one of Hong Kong's most exciting up-and-coming fiction authors. Lau began her literary career writing poetry at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she obtained her BA in Chinese language and literature, and her Master's degree in philosophy. Lau's short story "The Shark"' won the prestigious Hong Kong Champion of the Awards for Creative Writing in Chinese in 2016. Tongueless has been highly praised by acclaimed Hong Kong authors including Chan Ho-Kei and Dorothy Tse.

Jennifer Feeley is the translator of Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, Carnival of Animals: Xi Xi's Animal Poems, the White Fox series by Chen Jiatong, Wong Yi's chamber opera Women Like Us, and Mourning a Breast by Xi Xi. She holds a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures from Yale University and is the recipient of the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.