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.Blurb from The Feminist Press
There's a fascinating review from May Huang in Words Without Borders:
“Tongueless” is an apt title for a novel about the politics of language, and the visceral ways in which power dynamics manifest through speech. There are many “tongues” in this book, reflective of Hong Kong as a multilingual city that speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, English, and more; and Feeley has found inventive ways to convey these lexical variations in her English translation. Whereas in the source text, the contrast between Cantonese and Mandarin comes across in the different ways Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese speakers refer to “potato” (“薯仔” and “土豆,” respectively), for instance, in English this becomes a comparison between UK and US English: “he referred to aubergine as ‘eggplant’ and courgette as ‘zucchini.’” Feeley writes in her translator’s note that she often portrays Wai’s dialogue through faltering English, to convey her clumsy command of Mandarin, although the dialogue between Ling and other staff members appears in fluent English.