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A review by bakaburg
Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa
4.0
Another The Feminist Press at CUNY banger. Tongueless focuses on the tragic reality of culture and language being slowly diluted. I actually have so much I want to say about this book but no one else has read it so I won't LMAO but there's a lot I'd want to talk about...anyway.
Hong Kong has a very unique culture due to its history and this novel goes into that without turning it into a history lesson. The protagonist Ling is so painfully realistic that I personally went through a number of emotions while reading this. Sometimes I was so angry with Ling and other times I felt downright awful for her. The novel doesn't excuse her actions but gives enough that you can understand them.
Mostly I walked away from this feeling so much towards Wai. Mostly how easily I could see someone like Wai existing in the real world. A victim of society, who despite how much she tries to exist within it, remains ostracized and criticized by everyone around her. I just wanted to hug her and tell her her efforts wouldn't be in vain. If I think about Wai too much I feel like I'm going to tear up...
I'm interested in seeing how others like this and I think Feeley did an excellent job translating what I imagine was a very difficult work to adapt to an English audience! The explanation for those translations are given at the end but even if I skipped that I would have understood why certain things were written as they were.
Thank you to Edelweiss and the publisher for the ARC.
Hong Kong has a very unique culture due to its history and this novel goes into that without turning it into a history lesson. The protagonist Ling is so painfully realistic that I personally went through a number of emotions while reading this. Sometimes I was so angry with Ling and other times I felt downright awful for her. The novel doesn't excuse her actions but gives enough that you can understand them.
Mostly I walked away from this feeling so much towards Wai. Mostly how easily I could see someone like Wai existing in the real world. A victim of society, who despite how much she tries to exist within it, remains ostracized and criticized by everyone around her. I just wanted to hug her and tell her her efforts wouldn't be in vain. If I think about Wai too much I feel like I'm going to tear up...
I'm interested in seeing how others like this and I think Feeley did an excellent job translating what I imagine was a very difficult work to adapt to an English audience! The explanation for those translations are given at the end but even if I skipped that I would have understood why certain things were written as they were.
Thank you to Edelweiss and the publisher for the ARC.