(Un)translatable Identities: Dialogic Monolingualism in Wong Bik-wan’s ‘Nausea’ 

Abstract

Colonial Hong Kong (1842-1997) was a multilingual, multicultural ‘migrant society’, and its identity is complex and intersectional. Based on a close reading of Wong Bik-wan’s ‘Nausea’ (1994), this essay discusses how characters from drastically different backgrounds encounter one another in the multicultural space of Hong Kong. These two characters, a Black-Asian biracial woman and a native Hong Kong Chinese man suffered various forms of oppression, geographical dislocation, and political alienation in the postcolonial world. This created a mysterious bond between them, and as the narrative unfolds, the male character gradually contracted the woman’s disease of nausea. A dialogism of empathy emerged, as the characters experience each other’s trauma intersubjectively. At the same time, ‘Nausea’ simultaneously dialogs with Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (1938) through possessing the voice of the Sartean hero while also injecting the voices of a female character/author. This results in a literary double-voicedness, which in turn animates the text’s own deterritorialization and puts Hong Kong literature in dialog with a wider literary discourse of existentialism. Ultimately, the dynamic processes of sense-making and emotive exchanges in ‘Nausea’ resembles ‘untranslation’, defined as the interminable process of translation between incommensurable languages.