Wang Chen-Ho’s Rose, Rose, I Love You, a frantic sketch of a mixed group of politicians, elites, and prostitutes in preparing for the arrival of the American GIs during the Vietnam War, sarcastically captures the Taiwan’s awkward position in the Cold War vis-à-vis the hegemonic American power that had been patronizing it since the Korean War. This paper discusses the bitter condition of Taiwan’s colonial modernity and the elites’ anxiety to performe such modernity in the disguise of a hilarious, frenetic, and ironic story. Taiwan’s history is literally a colonial history, and this is nowhere more obvious in this novel. Language is the site of contestation between the colonial past and present, especially between the Japanese colonial legacy and the Chinese nationalist hegemony. Lexical borrowing of Japanese blends …show more content…
This kind of modernity, however, is colonial in nature. As in the Japanese colonial period when Japan was regarded as equal to modernity and vice versa, America took up the role from Japan during the post-war era as the representation of modernity. Yet as a subaltern country, the elites in Taiwan internalized the discourse of modernity under hegemony. Hygiene thus becomes the target here. The discourse of “hygienic modernity,” created by Japan in the Meiji reign and applied to Taiwan and its formal or informal colonies, immediately and closely associates personal and private hygienic practices with a discourse of nationalism (Rogaski 147). In Siwen’s words, the hygienic condition of the prostitutes and the environment they provide sex services has “a diplomatic function for the nation (71),” and that if failed, “the whole nation loses face (115).” The whole arrangement of bar girls, the infrastructure, and language preparation thus “can be viewed as diplomatic activity,” i.e. “Nation to Nation and People to