Tag: Hualien

Book Review: Rose, Rose, I Love You, by Wang Chen-ho

The plot of Rose, Rose, I Love You revolves around the expected descent of American GIs, on furlough from Vietnam, upon the town of Hualien, Taiwan, in the mid-60s. Time to get the female companionship ready! There’s greenbacks to be made!

The book is a 180-page long ethnic joke, in which the Taiwanese people are caricatured, as they frequently are, as charmingly, innocently vulgar. Many of the characters inhabit the underworld, and as they improvise at life, they are shown to be faithfully coping with Taiwan’s much imposed-upon history, speaking a mongrelized pastiche of Taiwanese, Hakka, Mandarin, indigenous languages, Japanese, and now, out of the latest necessity, English. People in on the joke, such as the author, Wang Chen-ho, and his Taiwanese readers, will be as amused as people often are to look into a mirror – perhaps a funhouse mirror – but the book’s Taiwaneseness doesn’t translate very well and in any case would probably get old for uninitiated readers outside the Formosan funhouse.

If there is anything profound about this book, then it would be its focus on what I consider a characteristic of Chinese society, namely, the pretentiousness of the leaders vis a vis the led. If an army of American johns is coming, then it should stand to reason that Taiwanese bed-girls would be the ones best equipped to deal with it. It’s not like they wouldn’t know how. But no. In Rose, Rose, I Love You, it is a cohort of mostly male city councilmen, pimps, doctors, lawyers, and pastors who step forward to manage the shit out of the situation, until it is as expensive, complicated, ceremonial, formal, and grandiose as anything this class puts its hand to. The chief busybody is a despotic high school English teacher who assumes the role of minister of orgies despite being a virgin. Talk about weltfremder herrschaftsanspruch!

Book Review: Memories of Mount Qilai: The Education of a Young Poet, by Yang Mu

Memories of Mount Qilai is a prose poem based on youthful reminiscences of Hualien and other places in eastern Taiwan. It (via this translation) is very beautiful and hypnotic, so much so that it will often make you think of other things, until you are turning the pages without absorbing or even reading the words. Yang Mu is an excellent poet, and some of his conventional, individual works are included here, including (from p. 159):

Carrying an oil paper umbrella
alone, I make my way down a
long, long and lonely lane in the rain,
pacing back and forth, hoping to encounter a
young woman knotted with sadness and hate
like a bud of lilac

However, if the cited shorter poems are emotionally compressed, with a high ratio of meaning to word, the prose poetry of the overall book is the opposite: meandering and unfocused, rather obscure. A chapter toward the end concerning a friend who committed suicide never seems to come to any point of power or intensity.

Still, though, some passages will differentiate themselves from the meandering flow and make an impression on you, such as (on p. 201)

The sound I heard, beyond being entangled in my own questioning, was the sound of bicycles braking high on the slope above the north end of the bridge, the sound of bicycle chains.

I knew it was the sound of school being let out. They must have lowered the flag, listened to the speech of exhortation, dispersed, and set off for home. Nine hundred male students were surging out, swinging identical book bags in the same color and with the same weight, their hats on their heads, in their hands, or, like mine, thrust into their book bags. I didn’t attend the flag-lowering ceremony today. Starting around noon, I couldn’t sit still, as a strange, unformed melody floated through my mind, as if from the other side of a high, dark, ancient wall someone abandoned himself to chanting for me a fragmented but still special and recognizable song of prudence, pronouncing words that were difficult to understand but occasionally stressing a certain expression, seemingly also what I frequently heard between sleep and wakefulness. I looked around me: the distant sky, sea, prostrate mountains, the aged banyan tree, hibiscus, canna lilies, and the beehive under the eaves, steadily growing larger by the day. ‘How am I to let go, be free, release myself, and be different from others?’ I repeatedly asked myself such silly questions and then when totally exhausted, ‘How can I prove that I am different from others?’ The blackboard was covered with proper nouns: ‘Age of Enlightenment,’ ‘feudal lord,’ ‘serf,’ ‘guild,’ ‘Galileo,’ ‘isolationism,’ and ‘indulgence.’

Of course, poetry is the best proof that one is different from others. In a passion of ‘unsociable eccentricity’ (on p. 142), Yang asserts, ‘My form of expression is my own….This is the best. No one else has come up with it before; it belongs entirely to me, appropriate, exact, and effective.’

Yang’s book is subtitled ‘The Education of a Young Poet.’