Today’s classrooms are battlegrounds for political and cultural conflicts. Are teachers prepared to serve on the front lines? Despite being set at a school, Lau Yee-Wa’s debut novel Tongueless provides few glimpses of Hong Kong’s classrooms. When it does, the reader wades through a space thick with politics, such as when a junior secondary student asks Ling, the protagonist, “what is a colony?” Ling instinctively knows that her student is not asking for the technical definition of the term. Instead, the student is challenging Ling to provide commentary on the historical and modern implications of the colonization of Hong Kong. Ling’s response, a sanitized history of the transfer of Hong Kong from China to Britain and then back to China, leaves the student and the reader unsatisfied. But in a time of political and cultural upheaval, is it fair to expect anything more than this deflection from Ling?
Tongueless follows the paths of two teachers, Ling and Wai, navigating what could appear to be quotidian trials of teaching secondary school, such as dealing with a disruptive student, avoiding laborious service assignments at faculty meetings, and ingratiating themselves with administrators. But, as Tongueless informs the reader on its first page, this is a story of Wai’s death by suicide and its impact on Ling. Lau, in this dual timeline novel, methodically reveals Wai’s state of mind leading up to her death by showcasing her interactions with Ling.
Ling and Wai, both raised in Hong Kong by single mothers, speak Cantonese as their native language and teach at Sing Din Secondary School. Ling, a seasoned teacher, boasts ten years’ experience and a designer wardrobe. She is savvy with office politics. In contrast, Wai is a second-year teacher, decidedly frumpy, and clumsy in her interactions with teachers and students alike. At her previous school, Wai had confessed to Ling, the principal did not renew her contract because Wai failed the Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers (LPAT), a test used by the Hong Kong Education Bureau to determine competence in Mandarin. Fearing that her current position will also be at risk if she doesn’t pass the LPAT, Wai obsessively studies Mandarin in addition to her demanding workload. She refuses to speak Cantonese unless she is teaching, further isolating herself from her colleagues.
Wai has reason to be afraid, because the principal has announced that within two years, Sing Din Secondary School will switch from teaching in Cantonese, the native language in Hong Kong, to Mandarin, the national language of China. This move was a reversal from the principal’s previous policy to continue teaching in Cantonese. It also decidedly puts the principal and the school directly within the pro-China camp during a time where many Hong Kongers are fighting for distance from China rather than deference. Neither Ling nor Wai has the requisite skills to pass the test. And, as Ling discovers, the principal intends to let go of one teacher at the end of the year. Ling relies on political acumen and sabotage to secure her contract, but at the expense of Wai’s position. Wai, triggered by the nonrenewal, violently ends her life on the first day of summer recess.
Ling’s job security is only temporary. Following Wai’s death, Ling is subject to new scrutiny from her principal. Her classes are being observed without notice and her grading reviewed, and she’s been saddled with teaching two of the courses Wai had taught the previous year. She’s told, more than once, that passing the LPAT would offer her the job security she was previously able to secure with high student test scores and bespoke presents for her principal. The stress affects her mood, sleep, and health. She begins to better understand Wai.
Tongueless raises a variety of themes, including commercialism, discrimination, and ableism. But, as an Indiana-based university professor, Lau’s exploration of the politicalization of academic spaces stood out to me. The historical and legal foundations of this politicalization would be well known to readers of the novel in its original Chinese. After more than 150 years as a British colony, Hong Kong was transferred back to China in 1997. The Sino-British Joint Declaration and China’s Hong Kong Basic Law established Hong Kong as a “Special Administrative Region” for a period of fifty years. During this time, the law outlined, Hong Kong would maintain separate economic, political, and legal systems from China. Hong Kong Basic Law also enshrined the independence of Hong Kong’s legislative system and guaranteed universal suffrage. Neither mandate has been realized, however, and Hong Kongers have only experienced further disruption in their political and civil rights.
Hong Kongers have not been silent in their disappointment. The 2014 Umbrella Movement, which was covered extensively by the international media, is just one example. This movement was sparked by reform proposed by China’s legislative body regarding the election of Hong Kong’s chief executive. There would be universal suffrage, yes, but voters could choose only from a slate of candidates pre-selected by a nominating committee. And the chief executive selected by Hong Kongers via election would still have to be subsequently appointed by China. This proposal prompted months-long protests across Hong Kong. Although the Umbrella Movement did lead to renegotiations of electoral processes at the time, China has since only further cemented its authority over Hong Kong. China’s legislature introduced a law in 2019 facilitating extradition between Hong Kong, China, and even Taiwan, leading to widespread protests. It also enacted a National Security Law in 2020 that restricts speech, press, and protest in the Special Administrative Region.
Tongueless was originally published in 2019 but written prior to the anti-extradition protests of that year and the passage of the National Security Law in the following. But it still captures the ongoing tensions facing Hong Kongers in the current political climate. Ling situates herself as apolitical. She thinks to herself, “I’m not a yellow ribbon, or a blue ribbon, or any ribbon” (yellow representing support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and blue opposition to the protests and support for the current government). Despite this, Ling exists in a workplace that is political, and her failing to adapt risks her position and livelihood. She accepts this, although it is unclear to the reader whether it is too late to save her job. At a meeting where Cantonese is described as “vulgar,” Ling introduces herself using her Mandarin name and declares that “it’s imperative that our school switch to teaching in Mandarin . . . if we don’t, we’ll be marginalized.”
Academics, journalists, lawyers, and others have been marginalized for speaking out against anti-democratic policies in Hong Kong. Some have been imprisoned, some have fled. In early 2024, Hong Kong adopted a new set of national security laws with steep penalties for dissent and other political crimes. For example, reposting a critique of the law from an overseas commentator on social media can be a violation. Hong Kongers in possession of copies of a pro-democracy newspaper, as another example, can be subject to jail time. Many Hong Kongers are experiencing what has been described as “death by a thousand cuts.”
Tongueless was a rewarding read for me but not a comfortable one. Ling and her colleagues are cruel to Wai, someone who was suffering. My visceral reaction to their severity and unkindness is a credit to Lau’s writing. She crafted a realistic setting; so many workplaces are this cruel. And Lau created a protagonist in Ling that was shallow and without integrity. I didn’t like her. But I empathized with her, because Tongueless established a conflict that transcended the ones that Ling was experiencing. What was at stake was more than Ling’s position and livelihood, but the political independence and integrity of academic institutions in Hong Kong. It is within this conflict that I most engaged, a reflection of my own insecurities and fears as an educator in the United States.
It’s not readily comparable to the dire climate in Hong Kong, to be sure, but, in Indiana, my work as an academic is subject to more scrutiny today than when I began teaching in 2017. The state now boasts a school library book-banning process; a public system for the reporting of teachers, school districts, and universities providing “socialist indoctrination”; and legislation to make universities more welcoming to conservative students via a vague “intellectual diversity” teaching requirement. Ling’s classroom has fallen victim to external political tensions. Is my classroom next?
In truth, classrooms have always been political spaces. So have our neighborhoods and health care facilities and workplaces. Deborah Stone, in her seminal text Policy Paradox, explains that “[p]olicy decisions aren’t made by abstract people but by people in social roles and organizations, addressing audiences of other people in their social roles and organizations.” In all of our roles, we bring our beliefs, biases, prejudices; we can never be truly neutral. Policymaking is thus, according to Stone, inherently political. And, yet, Indiana’s recent educational policies are not merely inherently political, they are openly so. The same can be said of the educational policies unfolding at the fictional Sing Din Secondary School and the real institutions across Hong Kong on which Sing Din is based.
I was deeply invested in Ling’s response to her workplace travails following Wai’s death. I waited for Ling to be galvanized to action or radicalized in some way. Would she stand up to her principal or attend a protest? No. Ling copes through shopping and complacency. For me, this response is emotionally unsatisfying but profoundly realistic. In the face of political oppression, many, regardless of their privilege, comply rather than resist.
“Damn the education system! Damn the Secretary of Education!” Wai says shortly after her arrival at Sing Din Secondary School. Ling responds, “It is what it is.” Both sentiments resonate and trouble me deeply.
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Tongueless. By Lau Yee-Wa. Translated by Jennifer Feeley. New York: The Feminist Press, 2024. 279 pp. $17.95, paper.
