OVERSEAS BRIDE

▞ Mother Tongue Overseas
▞  Overseas Bride

Of all the stories in Ways to Love in a Crowded City, “Overseas Bride” has received the most attention from both speakers and non-speakers of Cantonese. In particular, people seem to like to hear it read out loud. I’ve read it in the Goethe Institut and Parenthèses, the French bookstore in Hong Kong, as well as a few online audiobook projects targeting Cantonese speakers still living in or recently emigrated from Hong Kong. In my own copy of Ways to Love, the story is covered in pencil marks breaking up sentences into manageable chunks, so I’d know when to breathe during readings. It is always a pleasure to verbalise the tenderness in this love letter to my mother tongue, and even more heartbreaking to do so when so many Hongkongers are leaving our hometown, a sad reality that prompted me to write this story in the first place.

Although I speak English well enough to confuse some self-identified “竹升”*¹ I met in New York, travelling outside the jurisdiction of my mother tongue is always like going swimming and having to change the way I normally breathe. When I was putting together a writing sample for readers and students ahead of my participation in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program fall residency in 2023, “Overseas Bride” was one of the first stories I included. Jennifer Feeley’s wonderful translation of the story into English gave me an important tool with which to share my language and my culture, through idioms, jokes, and cultural references from Hong Kong woven into the text. During my sharing at an “International Literature Today” class at the University of Iowa, the students were mortified to learn that “eating someone’s roasted pig” is a Cantonese euphemism for taking a girl’s virginity. I was equally mortified to learn that “porking” is a real word in English, not something Jennifer invented to reference the origins of the euphemism: a vulgar ritual of the groom showing his level of satisfaction with the bride’s performance on their wedding night by the size of the roasted suckling pig he sent her family after a traditional Cantonese wedding.

I enjoy moments like this when readers outside my culture get to meet the fascinating phrases and references that make up my stories, but it also made me nervous: why should anyone care about this story celebrating Cantonese if they don’t speak the language, or have no prior connections to Hong Kong? It was surprising but understandable that during my four-month stay in the US, I had to contextualise Cantonese in relation to Mandarin and Standard Written Chinese more times than I ever expected to. Cantonese and Mandarin are two different languages that can be written using the same script in either simplified or traditional Chinese characters, but the two languages are not mutually intelligible. Most Cantonese-speaking literary writers in Hong Kong write in Standard Written Chinese, with varying amounts of written Cantonese mixed in if they so choose. While Mandarin has an almost identical grammar and vocabulary as Standard Written Chinese, a direct transcription of what a Cantonese writer said in written Cantonese would be very different from what they would’ve written in Standard Written Chinese to convey the same message.

This implies that Cantonese speakers need to translate Cantonese into Standard Written Chinese in their heads whenever they write, with a whole different set of grammar and vocabulary that doesn’t even exist in Mandarin. We were reminded of this amazing fact when a non-Cantonese speaking student in San Francisco attempted and struggled to read part of “Overseas Bride” in Mandarin. I was of no help to her as I had no idea how to say common Cantonese words like “俾” (bei: give) and “乸” (naa: female, usually used to refer to an animal) in Mandarin, as these words simply does not exist in Mandarin. The two languages are so different that my editor from Unitas put in over 100 footnotes to help Taiwanese readers (few of whom would be likely to be able to read Cantonese) understand all of the Cantonese phrases in Ways to Love, and at the same time preserve the unique texture of Chinese that comes from Hong Kong.

Hong Kong literature and Cantonese writing are incredibly marginalised both in the Sinophone world and the international literary scene, and most people who learn Chinese as a second language opt for Mandarin and Simplified Chinese characters, as opposed to Cantonese and the Traditional Chinese Characters that most Hong Kong writers use.  In fact, when I was signing up for the American Literary Translators Association (ATLA) Conference in 2023, “Cantonese” wasn’t even an option on the form for languages applicants speak or work with, despite there being a few subcategories under “Chinese” to choose from, and Cantonese being spoken in so many Chinese diaspora communities around the world. Still, there are many translators working hard to bring Hong Kong literature and Cantonese writing into different languages, and I tried to showcase the beauty of Cantonese as much as I can. At the conference, I joined translators of Hong Kong literature Jennifer Feeley, May Huang, and Chenxin Jiang in a panel discussion titled “Translating from a Marginalised Literature: Hong Kong Cantonese”. Quite a few people showed up to hear us speak about this relatively niche topic, and even asked to hear me read a bit of my work in Cantonese. Later in the day, Jennifer and I showcased “Overseas Bride” in a bilingual reading session at the conference. Apparently, it’s uncommon for authors to show up to ALTA conferences with their translators, so the two of us sharing the stage was a special occurrence that people seemed to enjoy. Right after the reading session, a teacher in the audience asked if she could add “Overseas Bride” to her curriculum. I was very happy about this, as Hong Kong literature gets very little air time in literature classes overseas, even within Chinese literature courses.

I wonder how the teacher would contextualise “Overseas Bride” outside a Hong Kong literature discourse. The various pig idioms would make an interesting translation exercise, as each language has its own idioms based on pigs or their own version of “bringing home the bacon”. At a reading of Lucie Modde’s French translation of “Overseas Bride”, French-speaking readers laughed at the reference to parents wishing they’d given birth to a slab of chaa siu pork instead of their good-for-nothing offspring: perhaps pigs and parents’ disappointment in their children are so universally funny that little will be lost in translation? But I’m guessing that the story is most powerful when it speaks to readers about their relationship with their own or their loved one’s mother tongue. During my stay in the US, I met readers from different ethnicities who related to “Overseas Bride” through their own experiences with immigration and second-language acquisition. After I read “Overseas Bride” at the “Writing in the Sinosphere” bilingual reading in the Iowa City Public Library, a Hispanic student came up to me asking for a hug. They told me that the story articulated some of the tear-inducing homesickness they felt in their own immigration experience, having to leave behind their mother tongue when they came to the US. An Asian American student in San Francisco told me that the story helped him understand the loneliness his Asian ex-wife suffered as an “overseas bride” in the US, where the English language is only an everyday and omnipresent barrier to her and not to him. He was not the only person I met who told me that the story helped them understand their loved ones: a young white man born and raised in Wisconsin told me he felt the heartbreak in the story, and that the reason why he decided to learn a second language is because he wanted to be able to speak his Indian girlfriend’s mother tongue.

Back in Hong Kong, a young bilingual writer who moved to the UK a few years ago wrote to me in English. She said that when she read “Overseas Bride” in Hong Kong, she put herself in the place of the narrator, but when she was in the UK, she read it from the perspective of the “you” contemplating leaving her hometown. That’s a very interesting way to read considering her own movement between nations and the two languages she is fluent in: would bilingual people feel homesick for one of their languages when they live in the other one? Beyond the celebration of Cantonese as a vessel for values, rituals, lived experiences and humour, I am glad to see that “Overseas Bride” acts as an invitation to contemplate our relationship with our mother tongue in relation to immigration, and language as a key experience for people living away from their homeland. I hope “Overseas Bride” will be translated into more languages so that the Cantonese pig idioms can get new renditions, and more people will get the invitation to get to know Hong Kong, and to think about their relationship to their own mother tongue.

1 Jook sing: self-deprecating term for Cantonese people born in the US who cannot speak Cantonese)

How to cite: Wong, Yi. “Mother Tongue Overseas.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 26 Oct. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/10/26/mother-tongue.

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).