The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Rose, Rose, I Love You by Wang Chen-hoThomas Hove
Wang Chen-ho. Rose, Rose, I Love You. Trans. Howard Goldblatt. Columbia Univ. Press, 1998. 183 pp. $22.95.
Originally published in 1984, this is the first novel by the noted Taiwanese writer Wang Chen-ho to be translated into English. From a variety of perspectives and narrative voices, it recounts the preparations made in the seaside town of Hualien, Taiwan, for the arrival of three hundred American soldiers on R & R from combat during the Vietnam War. Ending before the soldiers even arrive, the novel can be read as a satirical fable of what happens when a small non-Western economy decides to join the game of modernization and international free enterprise. Wang presents an amusing handful of main characters, chief among whom is the obese, mercilessly flatulent English teacher Dong Siwen. With the help of his friends—Councilman Qian, who was elected because he dared to pull down his pants in public, and Dr. Yun Songzhu, a married Christian man whose medical examinations are excuses to fondle young men—as well as the grudging cooperation of Hualien’s “Big 4” brothel proprietors, Dong initiates an outlandish and costly enterprise. His self-appointed mission is to turn Hualien’s “raw material,” its prostitutes, into a marketable “product” by training them in conversational English, modern hygiene, and American culture. The novel’s title refers both to a popular Mandarin song and to “Saigon Rose,” a notorious strain of VD that represents one of the many forms of pollution that preoccupy Wang’s characters. The pollution, however, threatens to work both ways: not only do Dong and his associates fear the disastrous results that would follow from offering the Americans “polluted raw material,” but the prostitutes, pimps, and madams of Hualien uneasily anticipate the pollution that American bodies and cultural practices promise to bring to their community. This scatological, episodic, ambivalent narrative offers several hilarious yet complex dramatizations of attitudes toward Western economic and cultural influence, and it well deserves the attention of anyone interested in postcolonial fiction. [Thomas Hove]