Losing Plum Blossom
Eleanor B. Morris Wu
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2003 Washington House
ISBN: 1931633932

Romance, intrigue & adventure set in modern Taiwan.

A Vietnamese war widow finds herself hopelessly attracted to a half Japanese, half Taiwanese doctor, the son of a Japanese war criminal & the victim of rape by Chinese Nationalist soldiers during the reclamation of Taiwan from Japan.

Losing Plum Blossom is a passionate prose tapestry of the lives & thoughts of one woman & two men as they cope with their fears, their religions & their sense of duty.

I am impressed by Eleanor Morris Wu's writing, it reminds me of those opulent tomes wherein the narrative floods across the pages, with some paragraphs spread over many. I enjoyed the images & the incidents. Her command of language while distilled & vivid, is prolific.

At 555 long pages, Losing Plum Blossom is a tour de force!
Yes, there is much need of editing.
Yes, all the men are portrayed with operatic gusto, almost caricatures, fighting with their passions, & holding the heroine hostage for their lost loves.
Yes, the heroine is a modernday Madam Butterfly, yearning to love again, choosing (if that is the right word) the wrong men to love & the “right” path to misery, & what a passionate, splendid misery it is!
However, & this is a huge however, Losing Plum Blossom is much more than a dramatic romance. It is a telling of the history of Taiwan few readers in the world have heard about: from the Ching dynasty, through Japanese colonialism to Nationalist rule & its Golden Age of the 60s & 70s.

Losing Plum Blossom offers a multitude of insights into Oriental charisma, obsessions with purity of bloodlines, as well as their penchant for intrigue & religion, their attitude about gaijin - Westerners/foreigners, & love itself!

For an epic prose saga of the complex ways of modern Taiwanese, you can do no better than taking the long & meticulously detailed journey into Losing Plum Blossom

Eleanor B. Morris Wu was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She has a B.A. from Harvard University in English & studied Anthropology in Graduate School in Toronto, Canada. She married Eurasian artist & journalist Kim Sing (Jian Sheng) (Steven) Wu in the United States in 1970. They only son, Jonathan. (Kim Sing) Wu died in 1989. Eleanor B. Morris Wu now teaches literature in University in Taipei, Taiwan.

An awesome effort, if a bit too deep!

More from Eleanor B. Morris Wu:
Beyond the Oedipus complex: super symmetries of the psyche.
From China To Taiwan: Historical, Anthropological And Religious Perspectives.
Oriental Kaleidoscope - poetry.
The Black King in 2004
(06/06/04)

Rebecca