TONGUELESS, unnerving psychological novel of losing your home without leaving it

TONGUELESS
LAU YEE-WA (tr. Jennifer Feeley)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: 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.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: China has been on a multigenerational project to Han-ize all the Sinosphere. Hong Kong's significant Anglophone population has been able to attract some out-of-China interest in the Han's Borg imitation, and from everything I've seen coming out about it in English, resistance is risky if not futile.

As little pale imitators, US fascists are doing their best to marginalize and poison the information space. No one in their dream world will know what to trust, therefore will accept their stupidification without the fuss and bother of rebellion and resistance to them. I think what's happened is that's scare a lot of people. Ones who weren't necessarily thinking about it before. Books like Tongueless can send painful shocks into the ideamakers that encounter it. Set in a very basic institution of Hong Kong culture, a language school, we are prepared in the set-up for those very reactions by those of the characters.

Teacher Wai is a very passive person, unable to put herself forward agreeably, or frame and present an idea persuasively. Her affect is so rigid that she's become faceless, just a messily-dressed part of the crowd. This works well enough while she's left alone to keep doing what she has learned to do. She is blindsided by the mandate to switch from her native Cantonese to the Han people now in charge's Mandarin. It's not like having to use Aussie or Indian slang and adapt to an accent. It's like having to learn, then teach in, Dutch. The alphabet and some words would look familiar but pronunciation let alone grammar? Not a hope. Wai, in her oddly passive way, sets about learning Mandarin but founders agonizingly slowly as the hopelessness of the task sinks in.

Ling's a Mean Girl. She's made it on marginal ability plus ruthless indifference to others' feelings or needs. She hides this behind a surface smarm...sorry, charm...that slips her in under peoples' radar. That route to her success is now closing off because it just won't teach her Mandarin. Poor Wai, with no interpersonal radar, is a prime victim for Ling to hate on. Ling's own focus on surface perfection and flawless presentation of self finds no echo in Wai. She doesn't understand the point of these things and lacks the flexibility to adapt to learning them (or Mandarin) to Ling's contempt...well-masked from others. Wai's failing attempts to survive in this horrible, cruelly indifferent new system lead to a true tragedy.

What's funny is that Ling is, on the surface, so good at masking that she presents herself as super-agreeable, and accepts that their language, Cantonese, is no longer going to be the one they're allowed to use...these're good Chinese girls, after all, and Authority Has Spoken. The manner of the adjustment is the difference between Wai's tragedy and Ling's desperate attempts to avoid failure, not the fact of its external imposition leading to resistance. It doesn't.

It's a brutal story. It's told directly...I picture Ling, our PoV character, sitting before an inquisitional interview recounting this story directly to us, the "camera" so to speak, with many soft little smirks and touchings-up of her hair and make-up. Ling is the one who, in Author Lau's subtle hands, shows herself as a slacker caught in a new system that pitilessly highlights her basic failures and failings in relation to that system. The narrative shifts in time though not always seamlessly. The very first pages give away a giant spoiler, but it is needed to set up our time-hopping. Ling is undergoing before our eyes the fate her students, to whom she always showed a smooth face hiding her contempt, worked hard to escape...and she can not do what they tried to do.

Ling escapes Wai's fate. She does not escape the fate of social collaborators everywhere: She loses her camouflage and has no skin underneath it to protect herself. Hiding is not possible; no protection or help is forthcoming.

I sometimes felt the story was in fragments of time or shards of context that did not always scan with my idea of what I had read. There was a reason for that; I'm going to urge you to read the Translator's Note before you start the story. I don't want to spoil certain things but spoilers are part of the book from page one! However, if someone chooses not to follow my advice, they should be able to proceed as they prefer. I myownself think "spoilerphobes" are spoiled, but no need to rehash THAT conversation.

Politically this story of a bullying overbearing linguistic minority imposing its words, values, and culture on hapless victims caught in an economic and social trap, suffering the loss of long-unexamined and too-little valued traditions and freedoms, could not possibly be more timely to read for the entire Anglophone world.

TODAY HONG KONG, TOMORROW THE WORLD: What China's Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere

TODAY HONG KONG, TOMORROW THE WORLD: What China's Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere
MARK L. CLIFFORD
St. Martin's Press
$29.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A gripping history of China's deteriorating relationship with Hong Kong, and its implications for the rest of the world.

For 150 years as a British colony, Hong Kong was a beacon of prosperity where people, money, and technology flowed freely, and residents enjoyed many civil liberties. In preparation for handing the territory over to China in 1997, Deng Xiaoping promised that it would remain highly autonomous for fifty years. An international treaty established a Special Administrative Region (SAR) with a far freer political system than that of Communist China—one with its own currency and government administration, a common-law legal system, and freedoms of press, speech, and religion.

But as the halfway mark of the SAR’s lifespan approaches in 2022, it is clear that China has not kept its word. Universal suffrage and free elections have not been instituted, harassment and brutality have become normalized, and activists are being jailed en masse. To make matters worse, a national security law that further crimps Hong Kong’s freedoms has recently been decreed in Beijing. This tragic backslide has dire worldwide implications—as China continues to expand its global influence, Hong Kong serves as a chilling preview of how dissenters could be treated in regions that fall under the emerging superpower’s control.

Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World tells the complete story of how a city once famed for protests so peaceful that toddlers joined grandparents in millions-strong rallies became a place where police have fired more than 10,000 rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets and even live ammunition at their neighbors, while pro-government hooligans attack demonstrators in the streets. A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, author Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation firsthand. As a celebrated publisher and journalist, he has unrivaled access to the full range of the city’s society, from student protestors and political prisoners to aristocrats and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, this book is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is, in light of China's Xi and Russia's Putin inking a deal for "world domination", beyond urgent that we listen to Author Clifford's personal experience on China's until-now slow, patient, and carefully deniable march towards world domination.

After almost thirty years as a foreign resident in Hong Kong, Author Clifford...able, at any time, to leave this city he loves for a solid and certain welcome "home"...was a more than modestly invested resident of what was to be a Special Autonomous Region of China with rights and freedoms guaranteed by treaty in 1984, to take effect in 1997's handover of Hong Kong and be in place until 2047. (I can't help but wonder if the symmetry of that date with the centennial of India and Pakistan's partition and independence was deliberate.) I am sure that his pain, as he's watched the world shrug its shoulders when viewing (at a profitable distance) China's steady, concerted, implacable abrogation of the treaty, is intense. It comes from a genuine love for this unique and vibrant world that is the port on the Pearl River into the South China Sea.

If this year's Beijing Winter Olympics had not focused some attention on the Uyghur Genocide (alleged, in case some troll farm decides I'm good as a target, alleged genocide) and the de-Uyghurization of children in boarding schools, a policy shamelessly, shamefully modeled on US and Canadian Native populations' systematic abuse of the too-recent past, and darn near compelled the regime to require a Uyghur skier to act as torchbearer at the opening ceremonies, no doubt we would all be listening to Author Clifford in a near-comatose indifference.

It is the besetting sin of the capitalist, "democratic" society to look on apathetically when things occur that do not earn or cost them money.

But that said, are we just helpless as the autocratic 2.4 billion-strong Asian/Russian Neues Herrenvolk flex their economic and resource-controlling might? What, then, would be the point of picking up the book? Author Clifford's not Cassandra, nor even Tiresias. He is, though, a keen observer, a skilled craftsman of ideas, and an effective communicator of what he has observed as well as what he has seen work or not work in countering the actions taken by the Chinese authorities. He makes a very plain, inescapable fact crystal clear: China is on a tight time schedule to achieve its goals.

Like the US now, like the Soviet Union in 1989, the population-shrinking bomb's going off in China within the next two decades. The growth, economic and technological, that China has experienced, came at the price of fewer births among Han Chinese (the infamous one-child policy is already scrapped), the real people in China's HIGHLY racist culture. So they need to get their control of Tibet (source of water for over 2 billion people!), of Taiwan (control of the South China Sea, busiest shipping lanes on Earth!), and Xinjiang (mineral wealth beyond belief!) fully consolidated yesterday at the latest.

So it needs maximum Red Army head count. And that's set to decline. Hence the sudden-seeming, multi-pronged, and many-faceted repressions, aggressions, and pacifications we're seeing. Author Clifford, in his wordsmithing, does a more deft and delectable job than I have, but he is not one whit less urgent in his bid for your attention. The world faces a large number of concurrent crises...nothing new there...but one does rather need to step away from the genuine anguish of watching the labor of decades, a century, being dismantled on so many fronts at once. Author Clifford, while his love for Hong Kong doesn't inspire me with similar love, does inspire me to look at the events in Hong Kong and think..."uh oh."

But on an entirely different plane. One of, "wait a minute, that's what the CCP did in Hong Kong!" One of seeing past the mendacious excuses offered for authoritarian groundwork-laying. One of "it can happen here if we let it." There is a level on which reading this book will, and should, cause anyone born in times that called themselves democratic to look long and hard at the political landscape in the US and think "it's not a single second too soon to take decisive action against the home-grown authoritarian movement."

Please.