Taiwan Today

A new English translation of works by Lai Ho is bringing the writer’s penetrating social insight to modern audiences.

Then Ashee became an ardent participant in the social movement. He would appear at many a rally of the cultural association to speak up with eloquent, imploring gestures, winning ovation after standing ovation. He came to conclude that all the ideal work he had wished to do was nihilistic. He was convinced that the right work for him to do was to serve the public. It’s not just the right work. It’s the glorious work.

—Ashee by Lai Ho, translated by Joe Hung, 2010

Ashee is a Taiwanese graduate of a Japanese medical school and then an activist against Japanese colonialism in Taiwan in the short novel of the same name by Lai Kuei-he (1894–1943), who wrote under the name Lai Ho, sometimes spelled Lai He. Ashee is a semi-autobiographical work that was left unfinished when Lai passed away in January 1943, one year after serving 50 days of a prison term that ended when he became seriously ill. That incarceration was the second time the writer had been jailed by the Japanese colonial authorities, who ruled Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, as part of their effort to silence local dissidents. Lai’s first 23-day term in jail began in mid-December 1923, two years after he helped found the Taiwan Cultural Association with other intellectuals to “serve the public.” The association did so mainly through speeches aimed at helping people understand their rights, which tended to be ignored or suppressed by the colonial administration.

Living in an age in Taiwan that was inextricably linked to Japanese rule, Lai stood out as a versatile man of letters and seminal thinker, especially among writers of the latter stage of the colonial period. A medical doctor, poet, essayist, novelist and newspaper editor, Lai wrote in vernacular Chinese, classical Han Chinese poetic style and Holo, or Taiwanese, the language of Taiwan’s largest ethnic group. He has been widely recognized as the founder of the New Taiwanese Literature movement, which saw the use of language that departed from the forms of classical Chinese literature and focused on local, grassroots issues as well as universal human concerns such as freedom and the rights of the disadvantaged. Lai was also the earliest writer to be included in a 2008 photo exhibition of 233 senior Taiwanese writers by Wenhsun Magazine—a major literary periodical in Taiwan—at the National Central Library in Taipei.

“Lai’s writing echoed the trends of world thought toward ethnic, social and sexual liberalization,” says Chiu Ho-gi, chief executive of the Lai Ho Culture Foundation. The foundation operates the Lai Ho Museum, which is located on the spot where Lai’s family home once stood in central Taiwan’s Changhua City. Lai was born to a Hakka family in a Holo-speaking community.

Powerful Presentation

A major collection of Lai’s 21 short novels was published in 1994. In the preface, editor Shih Shu, now an honorary professor in the Department of Chinese Literature at Tamkang University, points out that both Lai’s life and his fiction centered around social problems.

A new English translation of Lai’s shorter works entitled Lai He Fiction was funded by the Cabinet-level Council for Hakka Affairs and published by the government’s Central News Agency in 2010. In the introduction to the new book, translator Joe Hung, the agency’s chairman, notes that Lai’s work was “not part of or a subspecies of new Chinese literature born in the 1920s. It is uniquely the new literature of Taiwan.”

Hung based Lai He Fiction on Shih’s anthology. Before taking book form, Hung’s translations of Lai’s short works had appeared as serials in The China Post, a local English newspaper where he had worked as managing editor. Hung holds a doctoral degree in history from Georgetown University in the United States and, in addition to his extensive journalism experience, also served as Taiwan’s representative to Italy from 1993 to 2000. This year, Hung published A New History of Taiwan, which he wrote in English.

Hung believes that literature can be defined as a verbal portrayal of human life as it is and that particularly valuable literary works depict the unique aspects of their time. By that standard, Lai’s realistic short novels marked the first true voice of modern Taiwanese literature. Hung points out that the short fiction genre was a new literary development in the 20th century, one that targeted the masses. Previously, literature had been mostly presented in the form of much longer stories that only the upper classes could afford or had time to read.

Meanwhile, the newly founded newspapers, with their low prices and growing circulation among the working class, became a good vehicle for shorter stories, which therefore developed a growing readership. Most of Lai’s short works originally appeared in newspapers including the Taiwan People’s News, which was launched in Japan in 1923, moved to Taiwan in 1927 and was renamed the Taiwan New People’s News in 1930. A major force promoting social causes and local sociopolitical resistance to Japanese colonialism, that newspaper also contributed greatly to the New Taiwanese Literature movement. In 1926, Lai became the editor of the newspaper’s literary page and then its modern poetry section when that was added in 1930.

After graduating in 1914 from the Taiwan Governor’s Office Medical School in Taipei, which is now National Taiwan University’s College of Medicine, and then practicing at a hospital in southern Taiwan’s Chiayi area for two-and-a-half years, Lai returned to his hometown in Changhua to set up his own clinic. For about one-and-a-half years in 1918 and 1919, Lai worked at a Japanese hospital on Gulangyu Island, which lies off the city of Xiamen in mainland China and was then controlled by Japan and Western powers. While working in the hospitals, especially in the one in Chiayi, Lai was treated as an inferior by the Japanese administrators, an experience he recounted in Ashee. Lai’s time in Gulangyu was significant, however, as it was there that he was exposed to the influence of the May Fourth Movement. In China in the late 1920s, supporters of the movement began to mount political opposition to the Republican government’s weak response to the aggressions of foreign powers. The movement later expanded its scope to focus on social and cultural issues. In the literary field, it called for the replacement of classical Mandarin linguistic paradigms with vernacular expression because the latter was seen as a better reflection of the realities of the day.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to link Lai’s use of language and local social motifs directly to the May Fourth tradition, according to the Lai Ho Culture Foundation’s Chiu Ho-gi, who is also a student in the doctoral program of the Department of History at National Taiwan University in Taipei. “He was already showing a natural connection and sympathy with local Han people’s daily lives and folk traditions before he went to China,” Chiu says.

Recurrent Themes

Chiu also regards the recurrent themes in Lai’s fiction—the sufferings of the Taiwanese people under the Japanese colonial system and of women under a patriarchal system, as well as lingering problems of oppressive, hierarchical social structures—as essentially reflecting the established international literary norms of looking at social issues from a grassroots perspective, or from the position of a disadvantaged group. In addition to his strong connection to classical and modern Chinese literary traditions, Chiu says that Lai also read a lot from Western sources including Mandarin or Japanese translations of Russian and French fiction. For example, Lai’s work A Lever Scale, which appeared in February 1926 in the Taiwan People’s News and has found an enduring place in senior high school textbooks, was inspired by the short novel L’Affaire Crainquebille (The Case of Crainquebille, 1901) by Anatole France (1844–1924), a French writer and 1921 Nobel Prize winner for literature. In both the French and Taiwanese stories, the hero is a vegetable peddler who suffers persecution at the hands of presumptuous law enforcement and judicial systems.

In Mr. Snake (1930), another short story, Lai depicts the law sarcastically:

Law! Ah, it’s a treasured word. Nobody knows who coined that word and when. It is a very beneficial invention. That’s why the one who invented it has since enjoyed the privilege to monopolize the word. At any rate, the world has the law and no humans dare do evil. Consequently, the rich are free from the danger of being robbed, while the poor are able to endure starvation resignedly, awaiting alike their inevitable hour. …  Should the law lose its authority, its privileged holder—those people who rely on it for their livelihood—certainly will starve to death. For that reason they won’t let go of anyone who may violate the law.

Despite being unable to escape the “treasured, beneficial” grip of the law and getting thrown into jail twice, Lai did manage to break free from the time-honored literary “law” of writing in refined, classical Chinese and did not hesitate to present the unrefined speech of ordinary people in their mother tongue. Lai wrote some works such as A Letter from a Comrade (1935) entirely in Holo. Especially when writing in Holo, Lai powerfully presented humanity’s sometimes agonized transition to society’s modernity. Holo is a spoken dialect based on Mandarin Chinese and a few writers chose to render it in Roman script to more precisely present its phonetic attributes. Lai, however, used Han Chinese characters, sometimes just to match the sound of the Holo words, as they could be understood by many more people in Taiwan.

Chiu points out that writing in Holo was part of Lai’s open-minded exploration during an age when a number of Taiwanese intellectuals were thinking about their homeland’s future in the broader context of worldwide social development.

Chiu believes that one of the most important things that Lai’s modern Taiwanese contemporaries can take away from his writing is his watchful, questioning view of society. For one thing, Lai recognized that Japanese rule had helped to modernize Taiwan, but he also pointed out its colonial dark side. And while he was eager to shape a Taiwanese identity, he also drew attention to weaknesses of Taiwanese society including the propensity of individuals to remain quiet in the face of authoritarianism because speaking up could result in personal harm, as well as to the cynicism and complaints of intellectuals, which create a stir but seldom lead to action.

In Mandarin, the word “romantic” sounds like “rogue” in Holo. Lai’s roguish outlook can be seen in A Romantic Episode (1931), in which he admires local troublemakers chased by Japanese police because they are atypical Taiwanese who are not intimidated by authority.

Some of them are wanted by the police, but all of them are daredevils setting the law and its enforcers at naught. They cannot be restrained by anybody or anything, doing what they wish at will. To law-abiding people, they may look like [they are] disturbing peace and order, albeit these tough guys must think they perform a heroic feat by defying a dead letter. On the other hand, they value camaraderie inordinately or even sacredly. They are men of their word, too. They never break promises. Audacious and pugnacious, these fellows fear no death and are never tempted by money. In other words, they have a trait that is lacking among the stereotyped Han Chinese on Taiwan. Of course, they have faults. If not, they would be the modern-day knights of the town.

Ultimately, Lai even questioned his own mission as a “modern-day knight of the town” seeking justice and freedom for his fellow people, as seen in Ashee when the hero is about to deliver a speech to an aspiring crowd:

Under such circumstances, Ashee could not feel at ease talking to these people. He thought he would let them down if he could not actually make them a little happier, for they were all so admiringly and trustingly looking up to him for comfort. He was convinced that he would only deepen their hatred and inflict more sorrow on them, if he could only make them know where the root of all their pain was and yet fail to point to a way to rid themselves of their woes. Then they would lose all hope. The net result would be that his talk would drive them to despair. “Wouldn’t that be guilt?” Ashee asked himself.

The protagonist’s question still applies perfectly in Taiwan’s politics and public life today. Sixty-eight years after his death, Lai’s words continue prompting readers to take a hard look at their values, as well reflect upon the society in which they live.

Write to Pat Gao at kotsijin@gmail.com