May 28 to June 3
The activists for Taiwanese autonomy would just not go away — quite the reverse. They were getting stronger and more aggressive, having petitioned the Japanese colonial government three times in two years to establish an autonomous Taiwan Representative Assembly.
Following a change of the colonial security law, the authorities could start arresting those who formed groups to subvert the government — including the Taiwan Representative Assembly Petition League (台灣議會期成同盟會). The police struck on Dec. 16, 1923, arresting 41 suspected members and summoned 58 more to court. Only 18 were charged, including 30-year-old Lai Ho (賴和), who faced jail time for the first time in his life.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Lai wrote many poems during his three-week incarceration, and some sources say he emerged from behind bars a different man. Regardless of whether this was an important turning point in his life, Lai would go on to be an influential figure with many monikers, including “The Father of New Taiwanese Literature (台灣新文學之父),” “The Lu Xun of Taiwan (台灣魯迅)” and the “Doctor Poet (詩醫).”
DOWN WITH THE OLD
Lai was born in 1894, one year before the Japanese takeover, but he insisted on writing only in Chinese for his entire life. After graduating from medical school in 1917, he returned to his hometown of Changhua to open the Laihe Hospital, where his charitable activities toward the poor reportedly earned him his first nickname, “Matsu of Changhua (彰化媽祖),” referring to Matsu, the revered Taoist goddess.
Photo: Liu Hsiao-hsin, Taipei Times
During a brief stint in Xiamen, Lai was influenced by the May Fourth student protests, in particular the“New Literature Movement,” which championed replacing the standard Classical Chinese with modern vernacular Mandarin.
Lai joined the Taiwanese Cultural Association (台灣文化協會) in 1921, and was active in the group’s efforts to resist the colonizers through promoting Han Chinese nationalism. In 1923, he joined the petition league, earning him his first arrest.
Lai’s poems during this time were still in Classical Chinese, full of revolutionary gusto, angry as ever at the oppressors. In the middle of a heated debate among local Han Chinese intellectuals on the virtues of Classical Chinese versus the modern vernacular, Lai published his first essay and poem in the latter. His revolutionary zeal remained the same, as the poem was about a 1924 farmer protest against exploitation by the state-run sugar company that turned violent, leading to mass arrests and alleged torture.
Photo: Liu Hsiao-hsin, Taipei Times
“The cries of the weak are rewarded with brutality, destruction and oppression; the labor of the weak is rewarded with ridicule, scorn and interrogation… When I heard the news, my belly was full of anger and resentment, but this tragic and perverse environment does not allow me to cry,” Lai wrote in his poem An Enlightened Sacrifice — To Comrades of the Er-Lin Incident (覺悟下的犧牲 ─ 寄二林事件的戰友).
In 1926, Lai published his first vernacular novel Festival Hijinks (鬥熱鬧), which also had strong anti-feudal and anti-colonial messages.
“The goal of New Literature is the synchronization of the tongue and pen,” he said about the vernacular. “Old literature is for scholars, and it is too proud to mingle with commoners. New Literature’s target audience is the masses, and is popular literature.”
DIARY OF DESPAIR
Lai started experimenting with writing in Hoklo (also known as Taiwanese) in 1937, which would further bring literature closer to the masses as few people spoke Mandarin in Taiwan at that time. But his efforts were cut short when the Japanese banned publishing in Chinese in 1937.
On the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, Lai was arrested and locked up again. He was never told why. A diary that he kept expressed his disappointment during his 39 days in jail.
For the first week, the diary contained musings of why he was arrested, his hopes of getting out soon and his worry about other friends who were also jailed. He did not seem well, and frequently complained of physical discomfort.
“I don’t dare reminisce on anything in here, but beyond the wall is a family house, and I can hear people laughing. That just aggravates my homesickness,” he writes on the sixth day.
On the 12th day, he met a justice official and pleaded his case, but the official said he couldn’t do anything. Here, he starts pondering his past, including the effectiveness of his anti-Japanese activities, and expresses concern about Taiwan’s fate.
He wonders at one point if his arrest was due to his insistence on wearing Taiwanese-style clothing, as he believes that he had been careful since his first arrest and had not said anything that would anger the Japanese authorities.
The diary also contained several poems, written in Classical Chinese, expressing his frustration and helplessness and his yearning for his loved ones.
By the 30th day, he writes that he didn’t feel so bad anymore because he had already given up hope of getting out quickly.
“I start feeling that I’m foolish, that I deserve this,” he writes.
His condition began to quickly deteriorate, and soon he was released for medical reasons. But it was too late, as he died of a heart attack shortly after he regained his freedom.
To add insult to his unfortunate death, Lai was removed from the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine in 1958 after someone reported him being a communist, and he was indeed a member of the left-leaning Taiwanese People’s Party (台灣民眾黨). He was reinstated in 1984.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that have anniversaries this week.
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