#39 Guest Episode: Jennifer Feeley, Part 1 (English)
In this episode we interview the award-winning literary translator Jennifer Feeley. Jennifer has helped introduce English-language readers around the world to a variety of works of Hong Kong poetry and fiction. She has been particularly prolific this year—her translation of Lau Yee-Wa’s novel Tongueless came out in June, and her translation of Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast just came out this month. Our conversation with Jennifer is split into three parts, with this portion focusing on how she came to learn Cantonese and the language politics of translating Xi Xi. The next episode focuses on her work on Tongueless, while the final episode digs into what it takes to become a literary translator.
Cameron: We are incredibly excited—this is the first time that we are welcoming a literary translator to join us on chatty Cantonese, so thank you so much, Jennifer Feeley, for coming and talking to us today!
Jennifer: Oh, I'm really excited and I hope you can have more literary translators in the future as well!
Cameron: Yeah, I think one of the joys of having literary translators on is it also helps us draw attention to Hong Kong literature, which is probably an art form that people don't talk about enough when they talk about Hong Kong.
Jennifer: Yeah, I agree.
Cameron: Yeah, so first of all, we'd love to know what is your relationship with Cantonese.
Jennifer: Yeah, that's an interesting question, because I think my path to Cantonese is more unconventional. I should say that I always wanted to learn Cantonese before Mandarin though, but when I went to college—I did my undergraduate at Oberlin—we did not have Cantonese as an option, so I took Mandarin. And then when I was in Graduate School, Cantonese actually was an option—I was at Yale—but it wasn't fitting into my study plan, so I did not have the opportunity to study it there. So how I got into Cantonese is through literature, particularly through translating literature, and also a bit through teaching Hong Kong film as well in my previous life as an academic. But in terms of literature in Cantonese, I accidentally have found myself in this sort of extended Hong Kong literary circle where I keep on translating Hong Kong literature, and increasingly authors are incorporating elements of Cantonese into their writing. Of course, there are some authors who are completely writing in Cantonese, but the authors I've encountered are mostly writing in standard written Chinese. Some of them are putting their dialogue into Cantonese or their characters’ thoughts into Cantonese or are trying to discuss Cantonese phrases idioms, and as I have been reading these works and translating them I have found myself needing to learn Cantonese—so it's a very peculiar path.
How this really started more seriously is when I was translating a younger Hong Kong writer named Wong Yi—I was translating her fiction—and almost always her dialogue is in Cantonese. There are some cases where it's not, and she would explain to me what the Cantonese meant, so she would make notes when she would send me the Chinese versions. I felt like that's not enough though –– if I'm going to translate literature that is using Cantonese, I have a responsibility to become more familiar with it. And then as it so happened during the pandemic, she and I were sending each other care packages, and so she started sending me Cantonese language materials like textbooks—and they are for people who already know Standard Written Chinese, so it's helpful for learning to read, not so helpful for listening and speaking, but still it was something.
And then when I was translating the book Tongueless, by Lau Yee-Wa, at the same time I started the translation, the author was preparing to send the manuscript to publishers in Taiwan, and that book also has a lot of Cantonese dialogue. For the Taiwanese publishers, she needed to incorporate footnotes, so she put footnotes in Standard Written Chinese, and for me she also created a kind of glossary of translating phrases from Cantonese into standard written Chinese, and sometimes she would even take phrases or words and she would even expand on the definitions using Standard Written Chinese. What was really great for me in this process is there was a point when I was translating the book that I realized I wasn't looking at her notes or the glossary because I was becoming used to the kind of Cantonese that she was using in this book, but then it was also like that moment when you have a child who is learning how to ride a bike with training wheels, and you take the training wheels off and they're flying along but as soon as they know the training wheels are gone they fall over. It was like, “Oh my gosh, I wasn't looking, I have to go back and check it,” and began to doubt myself.
So that is the way I have gotten into Cantonese. I'm able to read, but it's very specific to these writers. I'm learning Cantonese through Wong Yi and Lau Yee-Wa, so it's probably very specific to their literary worlds or to these textbooks that Wong Yi gave me, and then after Duolingo added the Cantonese option, I have been doing that—but I'm sure, Raymond, you must have opinions, it’s probably terrible. But it's still something at least so I can hear the sounds.
The other thing that I have been doing, even before I was trying to make a more concerted effort to learn Cantonese, was when I was translating Xi Xi’s poetry, I needed to know the sounds. For a writer like Xi Xi who grew up in China and was actually educated in Mandarin until the age of 12, it's a bit different from the younger Hong Kong writers who are speaking Cantonese in school. So for Xi Xi, I felt it's important to think of the sounds of her work in both Mandarin and Cantonese. With her poems, I would either have Cantonese speakers read them for me, so I once had Dung Kai-cheung read a lot of the poems to me, and, you know, and other friends, or even I would just use Pleco, and then—because I installed all the Cantonese dictionaries, and if I want to know what the sounds are like, just press play and listen to it—because Xi Xi is, when she writes poetry, her poetry can be very musical, and because she’s writing new poetry—so it's not classical verse where she has certain regulations—if she's going to rhyme, it's a conscious decision. So I want to think about how I can bring that music into English. So I need to hear the music in Mandarin, I need to hear in Cantonese, and sometimes it's different. Sometimes you have a rhyme in one language but not the other.
This is all to say that my relationship to Cantonese is a bit unusual, and I have wanted to actually take a Cantonese language course, maybe in Hong Kong, and that had been my plan in 2020, because I had an NEA grant to translate Xi Xi's autobiographical novel, Mourning a Breast. And so my plan was to spend an extended period of time there in 2020, perhaps take a Cantonese course, to have a chance to talk with her on a regular basis about the book. I had also at that point translated an opera libretto—a Cantonese-language chamber opera libretto by Wong Yi—and that was going debut in March of 2020. Xi Xi was also getting the Cicada Prize for poetry at the Swedish consulate in Hong Kong; there was going to be a big affair. And of course you know the result—which is none of this happened because of COVID. So I'm still waiting for the chance when I can find some time to immerse myself into more of a Cantonese learning environment in Hong Kong, because it's one thing to be able to read these works or press play on the Pleco dictionary, but I still want to improve my listening and speaking. So I have a very bizarre skill set right now of what I'm able to understand and Cantonese—it’s really strange
Cameron: Yeah, I'm curious, Raymond, what your thoughts or reactions are as a teacher of Cantonese.
Jennifer: Yeah, probably he thinks this is terrible.
Raymond: No, no, this is fascinating, actually, because as you mentioned, you have such a rich literary background, and I don't have that many students with that very special or very clear target of learning the language for their work. But actually I recall one of my students, she's from Taiwan, and she's doing her graduate work in Cantonese opera research, so she came to—yeah—she came to us, and then of course she's a Mandarin speaker, but she went along studying the basic Cantonese course with us along with other undergrads. Then it turned out when she was done and she had this project with Cantonese opera, there's an excerpt in in her script, and then she invited me to be part of the project to sing along and do the reading on campus. It opened up like all sorts of very interesting like connections for us with the theater department and people who were in that area. Actually, I'm a very avid fan of musical theater, so I'm always trying to explore different ways to enrich students’ learning experience, and now once in a while we have graduate students who have very special needs for their study, and then I think your experience kind of reminded us, maybe we should explore more using literature, poetry, and how to integrate that into our teaching. Yeah, we probably should consult with you, actually.
Jennifer: That would be so much fun!
Cameron: Hearing you talk about having to hear Xi Xi's poetry in both Mandarin and Cantonese, that's very special to me, because I was very sad when she passed and I was actually studying in Taiwan at the time, and so a lot of the local bookstores were doing sales of her books and featuring them because she's got quite a following there. I remember talking with one of my literature teachers in Taiwan and we were comparing the Cantonese and Mandarin readings of her poetry, not necessarily as one being better than the other, but how there's a different resonance with each reading that can feel very special getting to bring them side by side.
Jennifer: Very much so, and it's so interesting. So one of the poems that I translated by Xi Xi, I translated the title as “Butterflies are Lightsome Things.” I might change that now because I'm not liking “lightsome” anymore, but I did that because the word light has two meanings in English, like light as in “not heavy” or light as in “not dark,” and she means, you know, “not heavy,” but I don't like that anymore, so I might use lightweight in a revision. But anyway, there's a Hong Kong poet who was a little salty because he said that some of the rhyme that I put into the poem is based on the Mandarin reading and not the Cantonese. Well, when Xi Xi was awarded the Newman Prize in Chinese literature, she went to Oklahoma to partake in the ceremonies, which shocked everyone, because she rarely did events in Hong Kong, but yet she came to Norman, Oklahoma, it was amazing, and all of this is due to the efforts of Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, who is just an amazing writer and scholar, and there was a poetry reading.
Xi Xi read that poem in Mandarin and Cantonese—she might have even read it in my English translation, too, I can't remember—but she says she actually likes it better, it sounds better in Mandarin for that particular poem. And in her case, because she really was trilingual with Mandarin, Cantonese, and Shanghainese, when I look at her work, I have to acknowledge all of these linguistic influences, so I thought it's OK sometimes if I'm looking at the Mandarin reading as opposed to, you know, Cantonese, because Xi Xi herself, when she moved to Hong Kong at the age of 12, she actually had a little bit of trouble in school. So, her family moved in the fall, so it was too late for her to start school, so when she went to school the next year, her first problem was she wasn't proficient enough in English, because at the time, Hong Kong was a British crown colony. The second issue was she was born to a Cantonese-speaking family, but her education had been in Mandarin, and then the language she spoke with her friends at school was Shanghainese, so Cantonese was not a language for her associated with education. So her Chinese teachers made a concession, and when she had to read the work aloud in class, they let her use Mandarin instead of Cantonese during a period of adjustment. So I think this makes her quite different from a lot of other Hong Kong writers, and I think sometimes people forget this part of Xi Xi's history because she's so entrenched in Hong Kong culture and such a major Hong Kong writer, and of course she loved her city very much, but she does still have this history in the mainland as well, and bringing these other, you know, linguistic influences.
You can see in her work a lot of nostalgia for Shanghai, and one of her novels—which I think right now, in English, we're all thinking of it as The Merry Building, but one could translate it differently—it's really a polyphonic novel, because it's about this building that's based on where she used to live in Kowloon, and, you know, you hear Shanghainese, you hear Cantonese, you hear Mandarin, and you hear all these languages. The other thing you brought up is the Taiwan connection, which is really interesting, because Xi Xi's longtime publisher is Hung Fan Books in Taiwan. Even though she became very well known as a writer in Hong Kong in the 60s and 70s, it wasn't until her short story “A Woman Like Me” won the prestigious Unitas Literary Prize in the early 80s that she really exploded among the Sinosphere, particularly in Taiwan, and she became so popular in Taiwan that even some people in Hong Kong thought she was the Taiwanese writer, so this is very interesting.
And this brings me to something else that people who are listening might be wondering, which is, why are we using the Mandarin name to talk about her? Why are we not using, you know, her Cantonese name of Sai Sai? And so when I first started translating her poetry, I actually, my editor and I thought that the book, we will spell her name “S-a-i S-a-i,” Sai Sai, based on the Cantonese pronunciation, and I published a poem in a journal under that name, and at that point I hadn't yet met her, but we had been corresponding through her friend, Ho Fuk Yan, who acted as kind of her manager and agent as well as being a very famous critic and her one of her closest friends. And he sent me an e-mail that was like, “Xi Xi doesn't want you to use that name for her, she wants ‘X-i X-i,’ you know, Xi Xi,” and I thought, of course we're going to honor that.
So I've heard a few explanations for why, over the years, and one reason she said was that because among English readers, when her work was published—I believe it was Renditions who were some of the earliest publishers of her work, spearheaded by the efforts of Eva Hung and John Minford and some of their students–that her name was transliterated as “X-i X-i,” as Xi Xi. This may have had to do with the way things were in the Academy, with the preference for pinyin and from Mandarin. I think she felt that if we change the spelling of her name, are people going to know this is the same writer in western languages, so this was one thing. She also brought up her connection to Taiwan, that she felt like this is her name, too, right, the Mandarin pronunciation. When we were in Oklahoma, she brought up a third reason, which is she doesn't like it when people get the tones incorrect on her name in Cantonese. She would basically rather her name be butchered in Mandarin than in Cantonese, which I thought was hilarious, because I think most readers who don't know Chinese will have a much easier time to approximate the Cantonese name than the Mandarin because they see the “X,” and if you don't know pinyin, you have no idea how to pronounce the X.
Cameron: That's fascinating!
Jennifer: It really is! And so I always feel a little bit odd because she's this Hong Kong writer and we're using, you know, the Mandarin transliteration for her name, but this was her preference.
Cameron: You know, I think Xi Xi’s a great example and also provides an interesting point of comparison for some of the things we're going to talk about with your most recently translated novel later on in the episode, but this idea that, well, Hong Kong and Cantonese are very much tightly associated. There is also this interesting undercurrent of multilingualism in this city that's tied to a lot of complex historical factors, and that can reflect in authors’ and writers’ biographies in really interesting ways, so it's really cool to hear that and how it inflects both how we romanize her name in English and also how her poetry is translated.
Jennifer: Yes, and the romanization issue is pretty interesting, because I think this is what gives us an opportunity in English or other languages that use an alphabet, that we can make a distinction that you cannot necessarily do with Chinese characters, which is, we can decide—I mean, it's not just that we can, we have to decide how are we going to transliterate this name, this term, etcetera, and is it going to be based on pinyin? Is it going to be based on Cantonese? Is it going to be based on Taiwanese? You know, what language are we going to foreground? Like, you don't have a choice, you have to pick something. And I noticed in you know, the earlier translation of Xi Xi’s work into English that the names would always be put into pinyin, and I thought, why is this? These are characters in Hong Kong, you know. So I just finished up translating Mourning a Breast, which will come out in July from New York Review Books, and her publisher in Taiwan called it “a novel.” In the preface to the book, Xi Xi says some people call it “a novel,” some people call it “a collected works,” because it feels very much like creative nonfiction, but you've got poems, you've got dictionary entries, you have conversations, you have a lot of things, and then you have these characters in the book, so I thought, well I should use Cantonese spellings for their names, so I would, you know, either look up Jyutping or Yale [Cantonese romanization] and decide what kind of looked better and might be easier for readers to engage with, and then I sent them to Ho Fuk Yan because she had passed away, so he was the closest I could get to her, because I thought these are real people, and I wanted to know, is this how they want their names spelled? And that's how I found out, oh, these are actually characters she created because there are a lot of fictional elements in this book and he was like, yeah the spellings are good. But I felt that it was really important that I'd bring in as much Cantonese as I could through people's names or through maybe certain terms like caa4 caan1 teng1 or something like that just so that you could feel that this is something from Hong Kong. And I am trying to do this with a lot of works I'm translating from Hong Kong, to bring in this Cantonese feel.
Mourning a Breast is a little different though because, as I said with Xi Xi’s background, she spent a lot of her formative years in the mainland, and there's a chapter in this book where she actually talks about when she was a child during the Sino-Japanese War that her family fled to her second aunt’s home in Zhejiang Province in a village, and there was this grand residence that her aunt's family had inherited, and it was really opulent because some female relatives in the family had been wet nurses to one of the Qing dynasty courts, so they were given this grand residence after they came back home. So she's talking about this residence and how it fascinated her, and I really didn't know how to translate it in the book because I didn't know, do I use Cantonese romanization, do I use Hanyu pinyin from the Mandarin, do I try to translate it into English, and for a while I had it in Cantonese, and then I was talking with this writer, Wong Yi, whose work I've been translating, but she was also a friend of Xi Xi's and she has adapted Xi Xi's work for opera and she also wrote her master's thesis on Mourning a Breast when she studied abroad in England, so we talk a lot about Xi Xi, and I was asking her for her opinion, and she said, “No, I think you need to put it in Mandarin because that's a very mainland space, and people don't really associate Zhejiang Province with Cantonese.” So I ended up calling it “Dai Fu Di,” as opposed to the Cantonese name, and I thought, there's no English term that can express this, so readers will learn what this is through reading the chapter. And there were other parts of the book which just talking about classical Chinese literature or historical figures, and I opted to transliterate those following pinyin, but it also felt very arbitrary because realistically, the language these people were speaking in the Tang dynasty, it was not Mandarin, so I could have just as easily used Cantonese, but I went with pinyin because I thought, you know, in scholarship and people writing about those periods today, most people are following pinyin as the standard, but it really did feel very arbitrary, and so the book has this mix of transliterations that I thought worked really well because it reflects Xi Xi herself, who is this linguistic mix, and I do I have an afterword to the book where I do mention this, that I've used a mix, and another translator could come and do it completely differently, but I like how it sort of highlights the fact that we do have these different languages coming from the “Sinosphere,” for lack of a better term. And I know not every reader will realize that, not every reader is going to pick up on the different transliteration systems, but some will, and it really is important to me that we don't just erase the presence of Cantonese in Hong Kong by putting everything into Mandarin because it's the convention. So I really firmly believe when I'm translating these characters’ names and other terms that are associated with the city that it has to be Cantonese.
Cameron: That resonates with me a lot as someone who's currently in the academic world just, you know, going through the PhD process. I think right now it's interesting because people are giving you increased space if you're specifically writing about Hong Kong humanities or culture if you want to use Jyutping as your romanization system, there's growing acceptance, but I know sometimes it's also different; who's publishing the journal or who's publishing the book has rules, but it seems like things are getting looser, and I'm curious also as you work with fiction publishers and poetry publishers, is that something you've had to educate publishers on?
Jennifer: What has amazed me is, I have not really received any pushback about having Cantonese terms that I don't translate or these names. And even when I have said I don't want to italicize them, that I don't want to highlight the foreignness, because that itself has its own issues, I haven't had any problem. You know where I get—have gotten—pushback is with using Hong Kong English. So for example, “cart noodles.” So in the book Tongueless they talk about going to eat cart noodles, and the publisher said, “Can't we just say noodle cart?” and I was like, “No, it's a completely different thing!” And then I happened to be in Hong Kong and I was eating cart noodles and I was taking all these pictures of like the different toppings you can pick and of the menus. I didn't need to resort to spamming my editor with them because once I explained it and sent her some links, she was fine with it, but it seems like that, it's the English where people are like, “This seems a little strange…” But with the two books I have coming out this summer, neither publisher has ever given me any issue about any of the Cantonese, which surprised me in the best way possible.
Cameron: That's very refreshing to hear.
Jennifer: It was amazing.
Cameron: But I wonder if, just because we've been talking about this transliteration issue and then also this “written in” question, if you could just briefly break down what it means for something to be “written in Cantonese” versus “Standard Written Chinese,” and I know this is a big ask because it's a complicated question and people spend many pages of research journals trying to actually define this, but I'm curious how you would define it coming to it as a translator, looking at what the text you’re translating is in and how you're thinking about rendering it.
Jennifer: This is the hardest question, and I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm seeing publishers and journals and presses, places that are publishing book reviews, even the American Literary Translators Association, they're trying to specify between different “Chineses,” which is great, right, because they're finally acknowledging, OK, Chinese is not one monolithic language. But it comes with a problem, which is that there is often a gap between the written and spoken language, and so I don't know what the answer to this is because I think it really is on a case by case basis what you would say. There's a literary agent who has represented the books that I have coming out and other projects I'm working on, and her name is Li Kangqin ,and she's from Nanjing, she lives in London, and she has just been wonderful about taking an interest in Hong Kong writers and finding really good homes for their work. She's the one who has placed both Mourning a Breast and Tongueless and the new translation of My City that I'm working on by Xi Xi at wonderful presses, and this would not happen without her. And on her website for New River Literary, I noticed what they do which I think is interesting is they say “Complex Chinese Characters” versus “Simplified Chinese Characters;” they don't say things like “Standard Written Chinese” or “Mandarin” or “Cantonese,” and that makes a lot of sense to me because there really still is a gap in the written and spoken language. So for example, if I talk about this book Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa, most of it is written in Standard Written Chinese, which means anyone who has been educated in Chinese will probably be able to read most of the book, but the dialogue is either in very bad Mandarin, because there is a character who is attempting to learn Mandarin but she's failing spectacularly and she's always bumbling, so you have very bad Mandarin or you have Cantonese. And Cantonese is sort of the default for the dialogue, it's unmarked, this is the normal language, the Mandarin is what's marked as being really weird because the characters in the book are not native speakers of Mandarin. Mandarin is this sort of foreign language to them. So it has a mix of languages, so it's mostly Standard Written Chinese and then some Cantonese in the dialogue, which is actual Cantonese, so it's not just using lexicon specific to Hong Kong but Cantonese grammar, certain characters that don't even exist in Standard Written Chinese that are very specific to Cantonese, are used in the book. But a book like Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast is completely written in Standard Written Chinese, and again the original publisher is in Taiwan, and then it's been also published in the mainland by Guangxi Normal University Press, and I don't think they've had to make any changes for readers in the mainland or Taiwan. I would not feel comfortable to say Xi Xi’s book is written in Mandarin. I also think it is inaccurate to say it's written in Cantonese. It really is just a book written in Standard Written Chinese, so I don't know the answer to your question because I think about this a lot because I'm seeing translations that say “Translated from Mandarin” or “Translated from the Taiwanese Mandarin,” and I'm even seeing people on works translated from Classical Chinese say “Translated from Mandarin,” and no, yes, and I'm looking at your faces.
I think the intent is good, right, people are trying to acknowledge that there are these different languages, but I think it still doesn't account for the gap between written and spoken language because the majority of—we just talked about Hong Kong for a moment, of Hong Kong writers, the ones especially who are well known are writing in Standard Written Chinese, like Hon Lai Chu, Dorothy Tse, Dung Kai-cheung, Xi Xi, and others—you might find some lexicon that's specific to Hong Kong, but it it's really following, you know, the structure of Standard Written Chinese.
But if you hear those same authors read their work aloud, Andrea Lingenfelter, who's translated works by Hon Lai Chu, she was at an event with Hon Lai Chu where she was reading one of the stories that Andrea translated, and what she noticed is that Hon Lai Chu began to translate her own work from Standard Written Chinese into Cantonese when she read it. So she did not just pronounce Standard Written Chinese in Cantonese but she changed the pronouns, she changed the words that she was using, to reflect how she speaks.
And I was on a panel with translators and writers from Hong Kong last year at the American Literary Translators Association and this writer, Wong Yi, who I’ve been bringing up, she was there, and she was talking about how Hong Kong writers and people in general by default are always translating, because when you're in Chinese class in Hong Kong, what you're learning to read is different from the way you're speaking, and this is before you even bring English into the mix, you know, just between Chineses there's this gap. And I think one could say that even in parts, other places, you know, in Taiwan, how do you account for Taiwanese versus Mandarin, or in different parts of the mainland where there are other languages spoken that are not Mandarin, Southeast Asia and so on.
So all of this is to say that I think it's very complicated and there is not an easy answer to me, but I'm not a linguist, and how to say what the languages are—because there is such a gap between written and spoken language, and I think what's happening in English is people are imposing spoken languages as the classifiers. So that's my very rambling answer that doesn't really answer and just introduces more questions, but…
Cameron: I think that's a great answer, but also I'm an academic—I love it when people bring these questions that open up possibility rather than imposing…
Jennifer: Because I really don't know what the answer is, and I remember, going back to the American Literary Translators Association, so last year we put together this Hong Kong panel, and I asked Wong Yi to join us because she was participating in the Iowa International Writing Program, and when you join the membership, it asks you what your language—languages—are you work with, and there wasn't an option for Chinese; there was Classical Chinese and there was Mandarin. And she said, “How can Classical Chinese be on here but not Cantonese?” She's like, “That's a dead language, right, that's not a spoken language,” so she picked “other,” and then when we got to the conference she had wrote “Cantonese” on her name tag, but already by the time the conference came around they had added Cantonese because the incoming president, Chenxin Jiang, is a Cantonese speaker who spent part of her time growing up in Hong Kong, and she was like, “Oh yeah, we have to change this,” so she added it, so that's great, so we now have this as a spoken language, but it still doesn't solve the written problem. So if I go to sign up for a bilingual reading at this conference, it will ask me the work I'm going to read, what language it was written in, and I have to pick Mandarin or Cantonese or classical Chinese. But, again, if I take Xi Xi's Mourning a Breast, what language is it written in? You know, so it's a problem. At least with Tongueless, you know, I can maybe say—I would not say this, I have heard people say this book was written in Cantonese. Of course the dialogue is but most of the book is not. But for Xi Xi I can't say Cantonese at all because there is no Cantonese in the book, but Mandarin feels like I’m erasing her Hong Kong identity, so I don't know what the answer is.
Raymond: That's fascinating to hear.
Jennifer: It really is. I mean, I was able to do a reading last year because Wong Yi was with me and we could say it's from Cantonese because she's reading her part in Cantonese and there's a lot of Cantonese in her story, but I think this is where good intentions are introducing a new set of problems.
Cameron: That resonates so much. If someone, for instance, asked me to define Tongueless, rather than defining it by language, I’d probably just say it's a Hong Kong novel.
Jennifer: Right.
Cameron: The language politics of how it uses script and sound speaks to a very specific history and sociolinguistic experience.