Tongueless in Hong Kong: The Cruel Optimisation of Language in Lau Yee-wa’s Satjyu

This article explores the affective logics of aphasia caused by the standardization of English and Chinese in post-Handover Hong Kong. It offers a close study of Lau Yee-wa’s 2019 novel Satjyu (Tongueless), which features the intertwined demises of a pair of schoolteachers who are disenfranchised by a mandatory change to their subject’s medium of instruction. I argue that the affects of aphasia circulating within this text illustrate a structure of feeling in Hong Kong that I term “cruel optimisation.” My framework employs Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism and Sianne Ngai’s ugly feelings as points of departure in order to trace the affective resonances between schoolteachers treading water in the stretched-out present of the neoliberal, nation-building project of “Hong Kong.” Cruel optimisation reconfigures these concepts to account for the critical role of the standardized languages of English and Chinese in shaping the sense of deficiency and disempowerment underlying the affective atmosphere and social time of post-Handover Hong Kong. Ultimately, cruel optimisation structures and perpetuates an attachment to a language-based fantasy of upward mobility that neither state nor self can fulfil.