Virtual meeting link below.
Feminists Do… explores a rotating roster of genres and topics through an intersectional feminist lens. This hybrid book club meets both in-person and online every second Monday at 7:00pm. Themes change every three months—check back for future themes, or sign up for our Feminists Do email list to get updates, reminders, and opportunities to weigh in on the upcoming selections.
Authors across the globe are telling amazing stories in their own languages, and English language translations are a great way to explore writing from other cultures. This theme will focus on contemporary novels written in languages other than English, as well as recent translations of older works.
July 14: Tongueless, Lau Yee-Wa (Hong Kong), translated from Chinese by Jennifer Feeley
We start our intercultural exploration with this riveting psychological page-turner from one of Hong Kong’s rising stars of fiction writing. Tongueless follows two rival teachers at a secondary school in Hong Kong who are instructed to switch from teaching in Cantonese to Mandarin—or lose their jobs. Apolitical and focusing on surviving and thriving in their professional environment, Wai and Ling each approach the challenge differently. Wai, awkward and unpopular, becomes obsessed with Mandarin learning; Ling, knowing how to please her superiors and colleagues, thinks she can tactfully dodge the Mandarin challenge by deploying her social savviness. Wai eventually crumples under the pressure, leaving her colleague Ling to face seismic political and cultural change alone as she considers how far she will go to survive such a ruthlessly competitive work environment.
Join us in reading this book that’s been flying off the shelf all year to engage with important issues facing Hong Kong today during which so much of the city’s uniqueness—especially its language—is at risk of being erased, and consider how the translator manages to interpret a book about linguistic hegemony into a completely different language.
RSVP here for the Google Meet link.
You may also like the following events from Bookwoman:
Also check out other
Arts events in Austin,
Literary Art events in Austin,
Meetups in Austin.
