Susanna Ho

A woman has brain surgery that lasts for fourteen hours, far longer than her surgeon expects. She survives the operation, but the first sentence she speaks after she gains consciousness is spoken in a dialect that nobody in the family understands.-----Like everyone in Hong Kong, the womans family speaks Cantonese. Some older members also use Hakka, a dialect of the Guangdong Province. So when the woman starts talking in Chiu Chow, her family is worried.----Is it possible for someone to lose the ability to speak a language shes been using for fifty years after undergoing brain surgery? The womans daughter is not convinced this is simply a side effect of surgery, and decides to investigate the cause behind the mystery.----Through her detective work, she discovers a chapter of her mothers life that has been hidden from her family. She learns from her mothers older brother that his sister spent her early childhood and adolescence in Chiu Chow, away from her family to escape war and starvation. The storys theme is about making life choices.----What happened in this womans past that is now blocking her language ability? Her daughter intends to find out the buried secrets in the fascinating novel Mothers Tongue: A Story of Forgiving and Forgetting.