The Cutthroat Teachers of Lau Yee‑Wa's "Tongueless"

Leah Rachel von Essen

June 20

Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa, translated from the Cantonese by Jennifer Feeley, is a powerful work about the perils of an individualistic culture framed by a false meritocracy—set within the dramas of a school system shifting under societal pressure.

Hong Kong has been a place of debate and struggle for decades. In 1997, the UK released it as a colony to China on the condition it would retain its economic and political autonomy for 50 years. But that autonomy has been debated. Mainland China has eroded Hong Kong's unique culture, enforced new legislation, and caused significant worry and protest among Hong Kong's residents. In Tongueless, language becomes a symbol for this changing climate, as Cantonese, the primary language of Hong Kong, and Mandarin, the primary language of the mainland, clash.

Ling is a Chinese teacher who is trying to rise through the ranks. She doesn't push her students too hard or take any chances. She relies instead on her cleverness and her skill at flattering her coworkers and bosses. She makes sure her students know how to get good scores on the big tests, because it's their grades, not their learning, that matters.

But when new teacher Wai shows up on the scene, Ling is confronted and disturbed by her "weirdness." Wai is set on working very, very hard. Thrown into teaching four courses (two more than any of the others) and volunteered by her peers to take on extra responsibilities, she works late into every night. She dedicates every moment of her time that she can to learning Mandarin, the language of their immigrant students from the mainland, even though most of their students speak the Cantonese of Hong Kong. In all ways, she tries too hard. Her coworkers, led by Ling, mock her for her efforts. "Wai's diligence was extremely over the top," Ling thinks to herself.

But Wai's viral death by suicide—a gory, painful affair mentioned in the first chapter—shakes Ling. Why does she feel some tremor of guilt at Wai's death? Why does she suddenly feel an aura of dread in the air?

In the days before her brutal death, Wai becomes obsessed with staring into countless mirrors, studying her face and body. "Why is this me?" she asked the mirrors repeatedly. At one point, she looks between herself and Ling in the mirror. "In fact, what's the difference between me and you? You," she says, and breaks off, focusing the mirror on Ling. That "you" haunts Ling throughout the book. Perhaps from guilt—or perhaps because Ling is next.

From the beginning of the novel, Wai knows what she is doing. She is trying to take on as much work as possible—including her coworkers' work—in order to make her mother proud and get a permanent position as a teacher in a competitive job market. Perhaps Wai looks odd and endures teasing for her poor attempts at Mandarin and her hope of pushing the language on her fellow teachers and students, but she knows what Ling doesn't.

Mandarin-language education is trending—in the year after Wai's suicide, the principal announces an official transition from teaching Chinese in the Hong Kong–specific dialect of Cantonese to teaching in the mainland's most common dialect, Mandarin. The biggest increase in student enrollment is from the Mainland, economic forces behind the principal want to see Chinese taught in Mandarin, and quietly, the job market across Hong Kong has begun to demand Mandarin fluency as a requirement. Ling was the odd man out, unaware that big changes were happening around her. "I was too stupid to realize the change last year," Ling thinks at one point in a panic. "Wai was one step ahead of me…."

The reader can see what Ling can't: Wai was ahead of her in many ways. She realized long before Ling does that there was simply nothing she could do to gain ground. Despite all her efforts, her contract was not renewed for a second year. If she can't learn Mandarin, she can't be a teacher. In fact, she can't be anything. She did everything she was told to do, but the finish line is ever-moving, ever-shifting, the bar is ever-rising, and now Wai's excellent Cantonese is useless.

Wai is infected with a hopelessness that's rooted too deeply to shake off. She turns the issue inward. If it's really about who's a better worker, if everyone else can adapt to this new world and she can't, then is there something inherently wrong with Wai? With her very body, being? If she is trapped into her circumstances, and truly unable to earn her way up from them, then the reason for her inability to succeed is contained in her very birth, her very body. And how can she change that?

"Next time if you work hard enough, certainly you'll succeed," Ling tells Wai at one point, but Wai just throws back her head and laughs. "No matter how hard I try, I can't change."

There's a bitterness to this argument, a nihilism that will haunt the reader. Ling has the illusion of change, but the reader can see that Ling is utterly delusional, thinking that she's invulnerable, that her good clothes or even plastic surgery could be what changes the truth of the systems of power working around her. It's a false choice, the semblance of having the ability to change your circumstances, your body, your luck. That truth builds like a horrid suspense with every page: the reader knows long before Ling does that she, too, will fail. That the system is built against her, that she's working her way into a mire of self-destructive tendencies.

When a face-reader tells Ling that she should quit and change her profession rather than try to get plastic surgery (believing it will change her destiny by changing how others see her), she dismisses the notion. They don't live in the kind of society where that's possible. She needs to pay her credit card bills, somehow buy her mother a new flat, buy the luxuries to dress herself up, put food on the table. With all of those needs, there is only a false semblance of freedom of choice. If she left her job, her life would fall to pieces. What kind of a choice is that? A bleak world becomes clear between the lines: that the only way to survive is to adapt and somehow mold yourself to the system you're in.

Early on, Ling criticized Wai. "Wai was more like the new immigrants in the school, dumb and isolated from the world, not caring about the jokes that Hong Kong students told or the pop culture they liked, thinking that doing their best was enough," she says. The weirdness of Wai, the joke of her, is that she believes that doing her best will be enough to succeed. "That's just how society is—the powerful are correct, and the powerless must accept it," Ling thinks. Wai seems to think she can subvert it, and she's wrong.

But the joke is truly on Ling. Because Ling, too, always believed she would be able to do enough. She believed that if she dressed herself carefully enough, presented herself well enough, gave enough gifts and compliments, that she would eventually get promoted. She didn't need to take her LPAT qualification, because she flattered the principal enough. She didn't need to do extra work if she was clever enough. The sadness of this truth suffuses the pages of the novel, and lends it an acidic taste, hard to swallow.

One scene captures the book perhaps better than any other. As Ling struggles with her conscience and her anxiety at her desk, an ant shows up on her papers. She puts a tupperware lid over it. It continues to fight. Whenever she lifts the lid, it tries to escape, and she just lowers the lid again. "After several rounds, the ant was so worn out that, even if she lifted the lid, it just stopped in its tracks and looked at her," the text reads. She mocks the ant, thinking that it serves it right because "Why climb up here to die?" The ant continues to get up, unkillable. Why, after all, did Wai continue to try so hard every time she was pushed down? Why not simply accept the system for what it is?

The ant believes it has choice, has options, but it is just trapped in an impossible system. So was Wai, and so is Ling, despite her belief otherwise. The reader is forced to follow along as Ling is overwhelmed with work, as the principal threatens to terminate her job, as her gifts, her appearance, and her attempts to improve her own Mandarin fail to make a difference. Their once luxurious house now looks dingy, and Ling's mother wants a new one, no matter the cost. The finish line will never stop moving away, and the reaching, longing suspense is haunting. It paints a bleak mood that will be relatable to too many readers—the mood of burnout, of always striving but never doing enough to stay afloat, let alone escape the current.

When you're an ant, maybe the only way to feel superior is to be better than other ants. Ling hoped that crushing Wai would preserve her own place. She disdained Wai for believing she could rise, could belong. And yet in the end, Ling too is just an ant, exhausted in her attempts to make it to the ever-shifting boundaries of survival, to not be the one eliminated. This rich psychological thriller is a haunting story of how society places the onus on individuals to find a way to survive, and how changing political climates in Hong Kong could have dire cultural and emotional consequences on an already strained populace.