Overview

""When I speak Mandarin with my mother, I am reminded of the distance that separates us-of my foreignness from the person who made me."" In Mother Tongue, Hilda Hoy explores the manifold capacities of language: to shape one's sense of self, to bring together, to hold apart. Raised in Taiwan by her Taiwanese mother and Canadian father, bilingual from the beginning, Hoy explores her experience of growing up with otherness, and traces how English became her dominant tongue. After many years living in Canada and Europe, her Chinese-speaking self packed into a box and sealed shut, the repercussions of her loss of Mandarin are thrown into sharp focus when her mother is diagnosed with dementia, and begins losing the ability to speak. A tender exploration of grief and reconnection, of belonging and self, Mother Tongue is the story of a journey to locate one's voice between hybrid places.

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9781999376468

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Reviews

""Subtle, yet incredibly tender,"" Jenna Tang, translator of Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise

Author Information

Hilda Hoy (金邦琳) is a Taiwanese Canadian writer, editor, and translator based in Berlin. In addition to working as a reporter for the Toronto Star and the Prague Post, she has published narrative non-fiction in Roads & Kingdoms, Slate, BBC Travel, and Narratively, as well as a travel guidebook titled The HUNT: Berlin. She is currently working on an essay collection exploring the entanglement of identity and language in individuals with backgrounds of migration or displacement. In December 2024, this project saw Hilda serve as writer in residence at the Taiwan Literature Base in Taipei. The diaspora experience and examinations of identity are central themes in her writing. Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese Hakka writer and a literary translator who translates between Mandarin, French, Spanish, and English. She graduated from MFA in Fiction Creative Writing from The New School in New York City. Her translations and essays are published in The Paris Review, Lit Hub, Restless Books, Latin American Literature Today, AAWW, McSweeney's, Catapult, Fare Magazine, and elsewhere. Her interviews can be found at World Literature Today, The Sunrise Times, Okapi, Openbook, and Words Without Borders.

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