Tongueless: Lau Yee-Wa and Jennifer Feeley, in conversation. | Libreria Bookshop
Arts
Literary Arts
‘Insightful and investigative, Lau Yee-Wa explores the searing politics of a threatened tongue in Hong Kong with tact, terror and empathy. She evokes a dangerously competitive world fuelled by success, shopping, inflation of house prices, educational hierarchy and social status. It's a timely portrayal of a city that has experienced a seismic shock and is grappling with the consequences of irreversible change.’ – Kit Fan, author of Diamond Hill Wai and Ling are secondary school Chinese language teachers in Hong Kong, both crumbling under the pressure of a forced transition from using Cantonese to Mandarin as a medium of Chinese-language instruction. Apolitical and focused only on surviving their professional environment, Wai and Ling approach the challenge differently: Wai, awkward and unpopular, becomes obsessed with Mandarin learning, only to fail the qualification exam, lose her job, become mentally ill, and kill herself by inserting a drill into her head. Ling is polished and cunning, she knows how to please her superiors and believes she can tactfully dodge the Mandarin challenge through her social savviness. Ling sees herself haunted and mirrored by Wai's tragedy: things around her slowly spiral out of control and her colleagues begin to shun her too. What will she do to survive in a ruthless environment where the rules of survival are constantly being re-written? Tongueless is a taut, compelling novel of betrayal, power imbalance and rapid social change. About our guests: Lau Yee-Wa's short story 'The Shark' won the prestigious HK Champion of the Awards for Creative Writing in Chinese in 2016. After working as an editor in a publishing house for five years, she transitioned into writing fiction and pursuing a career in education. Her debut novel Tongueless has been highly praised by acclaimed HK authors including Chan Ho-Kei and Dorothy Tse. Jennifer Feeley is the translator of Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast, Not Written Words, and Carnival of Animals, as well as the novel Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa, Chen Jiatong’s White Fox series, and Wong Yi’s Cantonese chamber opera libretto Women Like Us. Her forthcoming translations include Xi Xi's My City. She is the recipient of the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.
Information Source: La Despensa | eventbrite