Taiwan

Rose, Rose, I Love You, Wang Chen-ho
玫瑰玫瑰我愛你, 王禎和

En route back to Singapore after Christmas holidays home in Canada, I had a few days layover in Taipei. Naturally, I took the opportunity to read a Taiwanese author. — I'm usually quite organised with my holiday reading, and plan well in advance. But in the rush up to Christmas, I didn't get around to arranging anything for Taiwan and was left with a last-minute scramble on Amazon. Rose, Rose, I Love You came flying in just under the wire, arriving literally the morning of my flight to Taiwan.

I'm very glad that it did arrive in time, because Rose, Rose, I Love You has been one of my favourites in my reading the world project so far.  Wang Chen-ho is one of Taiwan's most famous writers. Rose, Rose, I Love You, considered Wang's masterpiece, is comic novel set in the coastal town of Hualien during the Vietnam War. The plot centres on the efforts of the town's leaders to come together to set up a brothel to entertain a group of American GIs coming to Taiwan for R&R. The raucous dialogue and outrageous story caused quite a stir when it was published in 1994.

Special credit is due to Howard Goldblatt, the book's translator. As a translator myself, I can recognise the mind-twisting challenges he must have faced trying to translate a book that Taiwanese readers would have easily managed, but in a linguistic hodgepodge that would be completely alien to English-language readers. The book is written partly in Mandarin and partly in Taiwanese dialect, sprinkled with Japanese and contains countless plays on words of the mispronunciation and misunderstanding of English words being taught to bar girls. Quite a challenge to find a way to convey these shifts and nuances when the target audience of the translation will read everything in a single language. I tip my hat to you, Mr Goldblatt, I surely could have never done as well.

I also got the idea for my holiday reading to ask for the place and date to be written on the title page in local script. A great memento of my experiences reading a book in situ.