Tong Speak Still

Articulating the Silence of Bilingualism
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-916637-15-3
Verlag: 404 Ink
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 30, 112 Seiten

Reihe: Inklings

Speak Still confronts colonial silencing by asking out loud: why do non-native speakers of English feel estranged from the English language, despite having known it since childhood? Is it possible for us to own this silence? If so, how can we find our eloquence from our experience of speechlessness? How can we bring the foreign language home? Blending personal narrative and cultural criticism, Speak Still takes Tong's bilingual experience in Hong Kong and the UK as a point of departure and reflects on the meaning of language, selfhood, and belonging. Through poignant observations of everyday life as it is experienced between languages, Tong conceptualises a possibility to communicate and connect beyond words: by reclaiming silence as an interlocutor that interrupts cultural homogeneity and creates space for the unheard. Speak Still shows that this silence, indeed, speaks volumes.

Wing Lam Tong (???) is a writer, educator, and former lawyer from Hong Kong, currently living in London. Writing in both Chinese and English, her work has appeared in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, the Asia Art Archive's IDEAS Journal, The Oxonian Review, and elsewhere. She holds a BA (Literary Studies) and LLB from the University of Hong Kong, and a Master's in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Oxford. Her research and writing explore womanhood, in-betweenness, senses of belonging, and everyday life. She believes in finding strength in softness.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tong, Wing Lam

Leseproben

Chapter 1: Loss for Words: On Silence, School, and Society

TWO TONGUES

We forget in different ways.

Memories are made, and then some of them go straight into oblivion, some become fragmented over time, and some slowly fade into hazy pictures. For the things I learnt in school, they have become half-forgotten by turning into hollow shapes of knowledge. I do remember studying the various types of clouds, for instance; but I can’t recall any of the specifics, and I’m no longer able to tell if it’s going to rain just by looking at the sky. I also remember memorising poems and feeling so deeply affected by them at the time; but they have now turned into blackout poetry in my mind, leaving only scattered words and phrases behind.

What has stayed over the years against my forgetfulness, however, are my bodily memories.

I still dream, every so often, of my teenage self walking up the slope to my school on the hillside, under the subtropical morning sun. Always sleep-deprived and always stressed out, I walk as I sweat in my white school uniform and blue cardigan. I’m always a bit out of breath, perhaps because of the slope, or because of this sense of urgency that perpetuates my dreams. In those recurring dreams, it always feels as if I’m running late to school as something important is about to happen. I will try to trudge uphill, yet a heaviness in my own body will weigh me down and hold me back. Unfailingly, I will get snapped back into reality with a palpitation before the dream can come into any sort of closure.

Over the years, the context has expanded, and I will find myself trying to run up the slope either to school or work or the hospital; but wherever I need to go, it remains out of reach. Then, as soon as I wake up, another day will have rushed in. Again, I will start rolling the boulder that is the daily grind up the hill and, again, I will become too busy to cast any second thought on the Sisyphus I turn into in my sleep.

It was the mid-2000s when I dragged my feet up that hill for school day after day. The handover of Hong Kong had taken place a few years earlier in 1997, and my city was, on paper at least, no longer a colony. I have only vicarious memories about the actual day when sovereignty over Hong Kong was transferred, for the grown-ups wouldn’t stop talking about it. They would recount, over and over again and in great detail, how that turning point in Hong Kong’s history arrived with a rainstorm that drenched the city and obscured its future.

As a child, I was mostly oblivious that an era had ended that summer. It is only with time that I realise how I have been shaped unknowingly by the aftermath of that historical downpour at the turn of the century.

Throughout my secondary education, I went to a Catholic girls’ school a thirty-minute walk from the caa caan teng my parents ran. The school was by no means in the top tier academically, but it was a decent enough one my mother could get me into. It was aided by government funding, and more importantly, it was what Hong Kong people would colloquially call a ?? (jing1 zung1), English Secondary, meaning a secondary school adopting English as a medium of instruction. In post-colonial Hong Kong, while Cantonese is still the most spoken language among the people, English and Chinese remain the city’s co-official languages; and English-medium schools continue to be well sought after among parents and students.

My school was founded in a hilly neighbourhood with an aging population. The area was modest, but generally also safe and calm. Most of my schoolmates were from Cantonese-speaking local families from the working or lower-middle class; many of them lived in the public housing estates in the vicinity. For girls whose families had better economic means, their parents mostly favoured the school either for religious reasons, or for the humility for which its students were well-known.

Such humility, however, had always been accompanied by a sense of precariousness, centred especially around language. I remember being told repeatedly by our teachers that we needed to work hard on our English, and that we should not take our English-medium education for granted. This was something that would only dawn on me in hindsight, long after I had graduated. In the decade following the handover, schools were confronted with a competitive process to retain the right – or privilege even – to teach their classes in English.

This is because, in 1998, the Hong Kong government rolled out the mother tongue education policy at junior secondary level. Previously, in late colonial Hong Kong, individual schools could decide their own medium of instruction, and most students chose to attend English-medium secondary schools. However, the quality and effectiveness of teaching and learning in English varied, and in the 1990s the government began to limit access to English-medium education and to formulate a shift towards mother tongue teaching.

I found in the archives a guidance that the education department issued in September 1997, addressed to all secondary schools on their medium of instruction.

‘For educational reasons, the appropriate MOI (Medium of Instruction) for most students is their mother tongue. For the benefit of our students, most schools should adopt Chinese for teaching all academic subjects,’ writes the guidance. It was hoped that the mother tongue education policy would lift ‘language barriers in the study of most subjects’, leading to ‘better cognitive and academic development’ among the students, and in turn allowing more time for students to ‘concentrate on the learning of English’. 15

Students were nonetheless still expected to become fluent speakers of English for a pragmatic reason. As the guidance continues to explain, ‘English is the language of business worldwide. To maintain a good standard of English is crucial to our economic competitiveness.’ An important exception was thus made to the mother tongue education policy: some schools would be allowed to continue teaching their academic subjects in English, provided that they met the requisite standard of ‘good results’ in ‘student ability, teacher capability, and support strategies and programmes’.16

The goal, ultimately, was for students to become practical polyglots who were ‘biliterate and trilingual’: mastering both written Chinese and English, and speaking fluent Cantonese, English, and Mandarin.

But as we know, language doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s culturally enmired, and so any language policy can only be properly understood with reference to its historical embeddedness. For a century and a half, Hong Kong was colonised by the British, and because of that, also by the English language. The language that was spoken among the traditional elites in the universities, the law courts, and the business world was predominantly English. Cantonese, on the other hand, had been the language of the ordinary folk and the everyday life. It was the tongue that one would hear most often when walking down the streets, in conversations in the caa caan tengs, or in family tête-à-têtes at home.

Even the colonial government admitted this cultural chasm in Hong Kong’s languaging scene. As early as 1961, the government had identified a ‘problem of language’ in Hong Kong in the population census: ‘English, which is the official language of the place and the language of a great deal, if not most, of commercial correspondence is understood only by 9.7% of the population’.17

Over the next decades, as free compulsory education was introduced and Hong Kong’s economy grew, the number of English speakers in the city gradually rose to over half of the population.18 Yet that deep-seated divide between the city’s two tongues continues to render millions of Hong Kong bilingual speakers at least partially speechless today. This is the problem of language: as we learn to speak our languages, they are always readily situated in a historical stratification of culture and class. As the narrative of who we are develops around this hierarchical social order, a language binarism emerges. One language is elevated as the professional, and the other deemed as the vernacular. One promises to open you up to the sophisticated grandeur of the cosmopolitan world, while the other threatens to enclose you within the sheer banalities of the everyday.

Between our Chinese and our English, Hong Kong’s bilingualism has taken on profound class and cultural implications that go way beyond language learning. It is a loss of innocence: even as we are learning the language as children, we already know that speaking English is not as simple and fun as the Disney readers or the episodes of Gogo’s Adventures with English promise to be. We all realise, at some point in our languaging lives, that to become bilingual means to become eloquent and tongue-tied all at once.

In a society structured around language differences, the English we speak is too convenient a marker of our socioeconomic status, indicating our proximity to power and knowledge. Precisely because of that, English is an opportunity we must desperately hold on to, for proficiency in the tongue will determine our upward mobility. As soon as we speak, we are implicated in a linguistic prejudice: we are the victims, yet we are also the perpetrators.

How do we even...