Last week we held the final book event for Hilda Hoy’s Mother Tongue summer tour here in Taiwan. It has been a total delight to hold so many well attended, warm and moving events across the country this summer.
The event was hosted by our friends at 不不 Tainan, a beautifully renovated community bookshop and event space in the meandering back alleyways of the old city.
This time Hilda was in conversation with Wind&Bones Books co-director Will Buckingham. And during the conversation talked about the mighty Joan Didion, storytelling and ethics, the politics of stories and the different audiences and readers the book has had so far — in Canada, Taiwan, Europe.
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.
Thank you to everybody who joined us at this event to celebrate Hilda’s beautiful book.
The book is available from the independent Wind&Bones Books bookshop here.
