Tongues Tied, Mirrors Shattered

Tammy Lai-Ming Ho explores Ho Sok Fong’s “Lake Like a Mirror,” translated by Natascha Bruce, and Lau Yee-Wa’s “Tongueless,” translated by Jennifer Feeley.

By Tammy Lai-Ming HoAugust 31, 2025

• Fiction

• Politics

IN HO SOK FONG’S short story “Lake Like a Mirror”—from her 2014 collection of the same name, rendered in an attentive English translation by Natascha Bruce in 2019—a Malaysian secondary school student reads aloud the E. E. Cummings poem “Spring is like a perhaps hand,” his voice quivering with adolescent earnestness. He is unaware that each syllable might invite censure, the tender cadence of his reading soon reframed as moral deviance. Meanwhile, in Lau Yee-Wa’s novel Tongueless, brought into English in a nuanced translation by Jennifer Feeley last summer, Wai—a Cantonese-language teacher in Hong Kong—commits herself with relentless resolve to mastering Mandarin. She practices it alone in a school office emptied of students, her tongue faltering over unfamiliar phonemes. Her cubicle, crowded with “pinyin” notes and a sea of mirrors—“a small round convex surveillance mirror, a mosaic-studded vanity mirror, a small mirrored decorative box, and on and on, all of them connected like one mirrored sea”—becomes a chamber of obsessive self-scrutiny, where reflection no longer stabilizes identity but instead fractures it.

These two scenes feature not simple pedagogical spaces but crucibles of tension: microcosms in which the gravity of ideology weighs heavily on the air. The school setting becomes a site of ideological collision—a stage where the politics of language, gender, postcolonial identity, and moral control are enacted within the ostensibly neutral act of teaching.

Although Tongueless and “Lake Like a Mirror” arise from different cultural matrices—Hong Kong with its post-handover anxieties, Malaysia with its conservative, multiracial complexities—they converge in their portrayals of the female teacher not as a dispassionate deliverer of curriculum but as a figure burdened, and at times exposed, by her entanglement with institutional authority. In each text, the act of teaching becomes a negotiation, at once intimate and perilous. The language one uses, the texts one selects, the tones one dares to strike—all of these become freighted with risk. Every utterance carries the potential for misreading, every silence the weight of complicity.

In Tongueless, the enforced transition from Cantonese to Mandarin in Hong Kong’s schools is portrayed not merely as educational reform but as an existential unraveling, bureaucratized violence that masquerades as policy. In the shadow of Beijing’s growing influence over Hong Kong following the 1997 handover, the shift reflects a broader campaign to marginalize Cantonese, the city’s native tongue, in favor of Mandarin, the official language of mainland China. For Wai, the teacher who meets this directive not with resistance but with a punishing desire for self-transformation, the struggle is almost corporeal. Mandarin, not her mother tongue, twists her speech and refuses to settle in her mouth. Her attempts to command the imposed language become a kind of self-mutilation, each mispronunciation an index of inadequacy. She is mocked by colleagues and isolated in a space of constant self-monitoring, her own workspace lined with mirrors.

The environment itself exerts a form of surveillance, rendering private effort into public spectacle, and gesturing toward the creeping infiltration of ideological power into the very grammar of being. By contrast, Ling, her colleague, maneuvers through the same system with a veneer of cynical pragmatism and tactical compliance. She flatters, adapts, or otherwise deploys strategic silence to survive when speech might cost too much. Yet she is not untouched. As the narrative deepens, it becomes increasingly clear that no one—neither the outspoken nor the silent, the devout nor the disenchanted—emerges unscathed. Not even those who imagine themselves beyond the reach of language’s quiet violence.

Ho Sok Fong’s unnamed teacher protagonist in “Lake Like a Mirror” offers a portrait of moral peril rendered in a minor key—a slow, almost imperceptible slide from classroom intimacy to institutional condemnation. Her teaching space, situated within a conservative religious school, briefly becomes an enclave of expressive possibility. She encourages her students to read poetry aloud, to encounter language as rhythm, ambiguity, and pleasure. A Muslim boy, emboldened, recites Cummings’s “Spring is like a perhaps hand,” followed by “i like my body.” She allows it, charmed by his enthusiasm, untroubled by the poem’s frank sensuality. The repercussions arrive obliquely. She is later informed, in a conversation threaded with veiled threats, that one of her students has uploaded a video: in it, he reads the poem and delivers a speech interpreted as a declaration of homosexuality. The teacher herself never sees the video; by the time she searches for it, the contents have been blocked, flagged as a “grave threat to the safety of others.” What the student actually said remains unknown.

The story offers no catharsis, no full-blown confrontation, only a sense of lingering unease. She is neither punished nor exonerated. The accusation hovers, unsubstantiated yet irreversible. Her earlier gesture of pedagogical trust is retroactively framed as ideological sedition. The story’s title is no accident: the mirror reflects not only what is but also what others fear to see, and the lake, like the institution, conceals under its placid surface a stealthy, suffocating undertow. In the end, her silence becomes both a defense and a sentence, her image returned to her only through the distorted lens of institutional paranoia.

Language, in Tongueless and “Lake Like a Mirror,” operates as both a medium and a battleground. In Tongueless, Mandarin is the language of institutional aspiration, required for staff evaluations and everyday communication, while Cantonese, though not forbidden, is steadily losing its prominence. To speak Mandarin imperfectly is to risk correction and condescension; to cling to Cantonese is to be unceremoniously left behind. Wai’s voice strains under the weight of this linguistic shift. Her suicide—self-filmed, disseminated online, and disclosed both on the book jacket and in the novel’s opening pages—looms over the novel. It is an act of desperation but also, implicitly, a refusal. It is a final rejection of the slow erasure demanded of her. Her death unsettles the city: “News of Wai’s suicide had generated a lot of buzz. Facebook comments flew everywhere, and the foreign media scrambled to report it.” And Ling, her colleague, is left adrift to reckon with her own complicity. The echoes of Wai’s fractured Mandarin haunt the narrative like a refrain, a broken hymn to a voice that could not be made to fit.

Ho’s protagonist, too, finds herself trapped between speech and silence. Her voice, once a conduit for literature and connection, becomes a liability. She is not even afforded the release of open rebellion; instead, her resistance is spectral, implied in the quiet reluctance to disavow her student, in the sorrow with which she recalls the moment of joy they briefly shared. Her world contracts. Surveillance tightens. Even nature conspires against her. A deer or an elk leaps in front of her car, the animal metaphors she once used to describe her students at the start of the story—a “herd of elk in long grass, nestled meekly against one another”—now echoing as harbingers of chaos. The story shimmers with surreal tension, as if to suggest that reality itself becomes unmoored when the human voice is so profoundly policed. This atmosphere is an extension of the teacher’s psyche—a landscape where dread blooms like mold in a sealed room.

Gender mediates every aspect of these women’s experiences. In both texts, to be a woman in a classroom is to be scrutinized doubly—as a professional and as a moral exemplar. Ling and Wai in Tongueless must not only meet impossible standards of linguistic fluency but also perform femininity in ways legible to a patriarchal institution. Ling is pressured to consider cosmetic surgery, her value increasingly tethered to her appearance. Wai, diligent in her discipline and plain in her presentation, is marginalized for her refusal to play the game. In Ho’s “Lake Like a Mirror,” the teacher’s gender intersects with her status as a member of the ethnic Chinese minority in a Malay-dominant Muslim nation, rendering her hypervisible and structurally vulnerable. She is expected to uphold moral order even as she is excluded from its inner sanctum. Her silence is both coerced by authority and shaped by the sediment of centuries of expectation.

What these stories illuminate, above all, is that the classroom is rarely just a room. It is a stage on which society rehearses its values, a mirror that reflects our collective anxieties, a chamber where silence can be as loud as a scream. To teach is to stand in the crosshairs of history. To speak is to risk. And to remain silent—that, too, is a choice with consequences. These classrooms become cartographies of moral terrain, charts of fault lines that traverse not only institutions but also individual psyches.