Date of Award

9-25-2025

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Languages, Literatures and Cultures

First Advisor

Jie Guo

Abstract

My dissertation probes the non-West’s “Western” gaze toward itself by examining Taiwanese writer Wang Chen-ho’s (1940–1990) work and life. I argue that Wang’s works crystallize how the non-West locals are haunted by their ideas of the “West,” which bespeaks a gaze shaped by complicity, subjugation, and subversion. This gaze appears across Wang’s fictional characters, including an English teacher in an outlying town, a rural rustic working in a white-collar office, and a Hong Kong student attending college in Taipei. As both a modernist and a nativist, Wang demonstrates a stylistic in-betweenness that echoes with his fictional characters’ intermediary positioning in society. Returning to Wang’s public and personal writings, I show that the writer himself also views locality through the said gaze. Chapter Two analyzes Wang’s satirical novel Rose, Rose, I Love You (1984) to explore how self-deprecation may be used to address complicity. This novel ridicules the character Dong Siwen, a small-town intellectual who exploits vulnerable locals to pursue modernization. I propose that Wang may have crafted Dong after himself to scrutinize intellectuals’ societal responsibilities, positioned between the state and the masses. Chapter Three examines Wang’s short story “Little Lin Comes to Taipei” (1973) and its sequel novel The Portrait of Beauties (1981) to grasp the Occidentalist imagining—how locals construct an imaginary and nonreferential Occident. For example, in terms such as yangming 洋名 (foreign names), the Sinitic script yang 洋 defaults to English to mark foreignness, while other foreign places, like Vietnam, become relegated to a third and often abjected category, as they are excluded from the Occidentalist imagining enveloped in yang. Chapter Four highlights Wang’s “golden middle way,” a strategy to attain literary agency by both conforming to and subverting literary conventions. This chapter draws on Wang’s film reviews and his letter exchanges with the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi from 1986 to 1990. I argue that, while Wang’s literary taste was shaped by Cold War Americanism, he leveraged his in-betweenness to make locally spoken languages visible in writing, at a time when these languages were legally restricted from formal use in Taiwan.

Rights

© 2025, Chih-chi Tsai

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