Foreign Language

Naoise Dolan’s debut novel, Exciting Times, will inevitably be compared to Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Conversations with Friends. Dolan and Rooney are both young female Irish authors, and both write about young female protagonists who are very self-aware, intelligent, and observant but also rather hapless, often passively accepting events rather than setting a direction themselves. The authors, their protagonists, and their writing are all typically described as ‘millenial’.

Dolan, however, adds a new dimension by setting her protagonist, Ava, in Hong Kong, where she is teaching English as a Foreign Language.

I’d been sad in Dublin, decided it was Dublin’s fault, and thought Hong Kong would help.

My TEFL school was in a pastel-towered commercial district. They only hired white people but made sure not to put that in writing.

Ava’s location and job are a brilliant addition: beyond the Rooney-like self-absorption and passivity (which, to be honest, can get old), Dolan gets to turn her penetrating gaze on the inherent contradictions of a Dubliner teaching British-English to Chinese children in Hong Kong.

The week I started, they told me the common features of Hong Kong English and said to correct the children when they used them. “I go already” to mean “I went”, that was wrong, though I understood it fine after the first few days. “Lah” for emphasis — no lah, sorry lah — wasn’t English. I saw no difference between that and Irish people putting “sure” in random places, it served a similar function sure, but that wasn’t English either. English was British.

as well as the subtleties of class among Irish, British and other expats.

Victoria ushered me over to her “other” Irish friend, as though she’d had each of us imported at the other’s request. [..] He was a rich Irish person, preferred having wealth in common with Victoria to Ireland in common with me, and was annoyed at us both for disabusing him that Victoria saw it that way. His mouth said it was great to see another Mick out foreign, and his eyes said: don’t fuck this up for me.

Ava drifts into a relationship with Julian, the quintessential Oxford-educated British expat banker.

“I’m glad we’re friends,” he’d say, and far be it from me to correct a Balliol man. I felt spending time with him would make me smarter, or would at least prepare me to talk about currencies and indices with the serious people I would encounter in the course of adult life. We got on well. I enjoyed his money and he enjoyed how easily impressed I was by it.

Ava’s occasional phone calls with her mother back in Dublin are also observant, but imbued with the deeper familiarity of family connection.

“And what about the fella?”

“What fella?”

“Tom was telling me. The banker fella.”

“He’s well,” I said. “It’s not serious.”

“And he’d work for a bank now?”

The introduction of a new character, Edith, about halfway through the book turns Ava’s love life turns into a considerably more complicated triangle.

Edith Zhang Mei Ling […] was a Hong Kong local, but she’d gone to boarding school in England, then to Cambridge. Her accent was churchy, high-up, with all the cathedral drops of English intonation. Button, water, Tuesday — anything with two syllables zipped up then down like a Gothic steeple.

Undoubtedly fascinated by Edith, is Ava gay? bisexual? And while she spends her time cyber-stalking Edith as would any worthwhile millenial, is Edith equally attracted to her? And will Ava develop some ethical boundaries at some point? I can’t say I ever got invested in the answers to these questions, but Ava’s quick-witted commentary still kept me reading.

Now the caveats: the existential angst was of moderate interest for me at best, Ava exists largely in an insular world of expats, and the stream-of-consciousness text messages left me cold. This is not a book for readers who want likeable characters. But the novel is an entertaining read simply for the wordplay, the razor-sharp examination of spoken and unspoken communication, what is said and left out, and how this is filtered by class, identity, gender and colonial background.

Edith said that no one had ever explained Cantonese qualifiers either, but she understood them intuitively “Yes”, I said. “Well done, Miss Native Speaker. Congrats on not being robbed of your national language.” She said that if I wanted to play colonial-oppression Olympics then by all means. [although] “white people generally lose.”

Sometimes their world feels as foreign as any unknown country.