OVERSEAS BRIDE

▞ Mother Tongue Overseas
▞ Overseas Bride

Jennifer Feeley’s note: Written in 2020 and compiled into Wong Yi’s 2021 short story collection Ways to Love in a Crowded City, “Overseas Bride” delves into the emotional and cultural complexities of emigration, particularly regarding what is left behind. Set against the backdrop of a mass exodus from a city that is presumably Hong Kong, the story unfolds from the perspective of a narrator grappling with a loved one’s proposal to marry as a means of escape, contemplating the profound sacrifices involved in leaving one’s homeland, including the loss of cultural identity and one’s mother tongue. The story vividly portrays the challenges of assimilating into a new environment, where familiar comforts and linguistic nuances are absent, and the struggle to find a sense of belonging in a minority community. Themes of love, cultural identity, language, and belonging are intricately woven throughout the story, which ponders the bittersweet reality of emigration, not as a process of simple physical relocation but as a complex emotional journey. Showcasing a vibrant array of Cantonese idioms, the story serves as an homage to the many facets of the language.

Overseas Bride
by Wong Yi, translated by Jennifer Feeley

—after Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Soap Bubbles

The night everyone in the entire city was scrambling for ways to emigrate, you said you might as well marry me, become an overseas bride, and flee the city in which you live. I smiled my usual smile, gently changing the subject. My dearest, how can I say no to you? But there’s no way I can say yes to you. It’s not that I don’t want to make you my wife in name in front of everyone, or be unable to marry anyone else during the many years of our marriage, or that I’m unwilling to bear the title of divorced person after helping you obtain residency here, witnessing you and the person with whom you really want to grow old eventually marching into wedded bliss. Or, during the never-ending period of applying for residency, should you choose to spend the rest of your life side-by-side with me, that would also be wonderful; I’d love you like an ancient tree, like a cool stream beneath the sun, like a quiet, slow breeze, like the past, like the present. As long as you come here, in my home in this other city, I’ll fling open my arms, welcoming all of your possessions and scars, every part of you—I’m willing to accept it all. It’s just I’m not really sure: If you come here, can you truly be happy?

If you marry into my city, you’ll have to leave your mother tongue, from here on out, living in a language acquired in school via exams and inferiority complexes. You’ll repeat your life story time and again in a second language—the other person might understand your reasons for leaving, or they might not. Here, it’s not that there aren’t any people who share our birthplace, but we’re the minority of a minority. Even though there’s a Chinatown, there are no gossip magazines penned in our mother tongue, no ads with slogans containing forced puns tailored to fit whatever product is being peddled, no long-winded, foul-mouthed taxi drivers, no recurring situation comedies playing out in cha chaan tengs, no boisterous, lazy-tongued secondary school students—those oh-so-important, oh-so-cacophonous sounds. Even though we can walk down the streets here, holding hands without fear, openly discussing all sensitive subjects, we’ll no longer be able to rub shoulders with those who understand the two completely different feelings of “cold-blooded” and “blood-chilling,” and the person sitting beside us on the subway won’t know what kind of cakes Johnny half-bakes, or who’s reluctant to eat crow.

Here, there may be local pork raised in a strictly regulated environment, but the people who raise these pigs won’t know why there are people in the world willing to sweat like pigs to bring home the bacon, what is meant by filling up the piggy bank, the meaning of a chauvinist pig porking the bride on her wedding night, or the meaning of the phrase “when pigs fly, on men you can rely.” Here, there are none of your former classmates half-teasing, half-complimenting you years after graduation that your job surely allows you to live high on the hog; likewise, here, there are none of your multitudinous relatives boasting about their travails from rags to riches over Lunar New Year dinners, finally amassing various assets and accolades after weathering storm after storm in the city. I know you’ll miss these things, these exaggerations and vulgarities, those family obligations and perfunctory social gatherings that you’re sick of—when you can no longer see your family and friends often enough to grow tired of them, your loneliness can only be assuaged by me and the pale imitations here, but will it be enough? Here, the char siu pork is so tasteless that even the most good-for-nothing son or daughter is preferable, and people in school remark that I, who clearly don’t eat pet birds, resemble the cat who ate the canary whenever I smile. If I am not enough to replace your entire world, will the lover you find here be able to understand the terms of endearment you utter in a relearned language, and be able to understand the place that taught you what love is, and how very important it is to you?

I don’t believe people from one city must marry people from the same city and give birth to the next “pure-blooded” generation, and if you don’t come, you may not even be able to utter the sincerest terms of endearment as you’d like. I just can’t bear to see you sink into the loneliness of knowing that your mother tongue means nothing to those around you, far away from so many people who share the same language, sentenced to a lifetime of exile. I thought that in the end, I’d be the one who’d cross the ocean to return to you, surrounded by people we grew up with who speak the same language and listen to the same jokes, spouting off the same clichés we’ve heard over and over. I’d laugh at you for continuing to bundle up like a steamed cake on top while baring your legs like grass jelly below, regardless of the weather, pairing a long-sleeved oversized sweater with a miniskirt. Year after year, we’d watch swimsuit-clad Miss Hong Kong contestants answer questions posed by veteran hosts and rudely nitpick the appearances of those women who dream of becoming stars. Each year we could also line up to squeeze into the book fair and see ghostwritten celebrity books sell like hotcakes. I’d listen to you lament once more that everyone says the city is a cultural desert, when obviously there are numerous outstanding authors and international award-winning poets, as well as stage plays deserving of more attention whose ticket prices are much cheaper than foreign productions, and I’d agree, disappointed that you’d been let down. At least where you are, our mother tongue is alive and well, enabling us to be hypercritical, because there, our mother tongue is a matter of course, rather than a minority language that needs to be painstakingly preserved, encouraged to be used, and legally protected. Our mother tongue is the majority in the place where our mother tongue is produced, and we are the clear majority in the place where we were born. Then if you really proposed marriage to me at that time, it wouldn’t be because you wanted to escape, but because you wanted to stay and plant something, grow something: We could grow long-term and socially beneficial careers, offspring who love learning, and even art that moves others, enjoying our golden years with all the old people in the city. And between the two of us, we’d no longer need the city’s trials and tribulations to make you consider staying with me.

Many, many words bubble up on the tip of my tongue, then gently burst and dissipate before being spat out. My dearest, compared to the city where you live, the city where I currently reside may be a stone building that won’t topple in the foreseeable future, but can the scenery here really make you happy? My dear, my dear, how on earth can I use the gentlest and most graceful words to tell you I predict that over here you’ll encounter a tonguelessness that will starve you of oxygen? I find myself speechless. And so, please say something. Keep on speaking, speak to your heart’s content. Like artificial respiration, like blowing smoke rings. Like a living person, keep on speaking.

15 May 25 2020

Chinese text originally published in Fleurs des lettres ‧ Other Words issue 32; reprinted in Wong Yi, Ways to Love in a Crowded City, Taipei: Unitas, 2021. Image via.

How to cite: Feeley, Jennifer and Wong Yi. “Overseas Bride.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 26 Oct. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/10/26/overseas-bride.

Wong Yi is an award-winning Hong Kong writer, librettist, radio show host, and founding member of the Xi Xi Foundation. She was an editor at Fleur des Lettres from 2017 to 2024. In 2020, she was named one of the 20 Young Sinophone Novelists to Watch by the Taiwanese literary magazine Unitas. She is the author of four short story collections: Ways To Love In A Crowded City (2021), The Four Seasons of Lam Yip (2019), Patched Up (2015), and News Stories (2010). She was the Hong Kong Writer-in-Residence for Hong Kong Baptist University’s first Chinese Writers Workshop in 2021, Writer-in-Residence at Hong Kong Education University in 2023, and has participated in events such as the Singapore Writers Festival, Singapore Book Fair, Hong Kong International Literary Festival, and Taipei International Book Exhibition. In 2023, she participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program Fall Residency. Her collaborative work with artists from other disciplines includes participation in the Los Angeles Architecture Exhibition Island__Peninsula, organised by the Hong Kong Institute of Architects in 2019, writing the libretto for the Cantonese-language chamber opera Women Like Us (commissioned and produced by the Hong Kong Arts Festival, premiered in May 2021), and writing an original text for the multimedia concert The Happy Family (part of Tai Kwun’s “SPOTLIGHT: A Season of Performing Arts”, premiered in October 2021).

Jennifer Feeley (translator) is the translator of Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast, Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, and Carnival of Animals: Xi Xi’s Animal Poems, as well as the novel Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa, Chen Jiatong’s White Fox series, and Wong Yi’s Cantonese chamber opera libretto Women Like Us. Her forthcoming translations include Xi Xi’s My City. She is the recipient of the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship. [Xi Xi and Jennifer Feeley in Cha.] [Hong Kong Fiction in Translation.]