Kaohsiung’s Hakka Affairs Commission yesterday held a ceremony to honor late activist and author Chung Tie-min (鍾鐵民) and his father, celebrated Hakka writer Chung Li-ho (鍾理和).
At the ceremony at the Meinong District (美濃) public library in Kaohsiung, the commission also unveiled a bronze bust of Chung Tie-min, who was known for documenting the changes that occurred in rural Taiwan.
“Chung Li-ho was one of the most important Taiwanese writers in the post-war period. You can understand the changes Taiwan went through by reading his books,” commission chairman Yang Jui-hsia (楊瑞霞) said.
Photo: Su Fu-nan, Taipei Times
Chung Li-ho was born in Pingtung in 1915, but moved to Kaohsiung in 1932 to help his father with the family farming and textile businesses.
He met a girl while working on the farm, but the two were initially prohibited from marrying as they shared the same family name.
In 1940, he and the girl relocated to Shenyang in China — then part of the Japanese puppet state Manchukuo — to marry and live together.
He moved to Beijing in 1941 — then Beiping — where he began writing and where his wife gave birth to Chung Tie-min.
In 1946, he returned to Taiwan because he had a lung disease, and exhausted the family fortune on treatment. He continued to write, and despite winning a literary award was unable to publish his works due to a lack of funds.
He died in 1960 at the age of 46.
Chung Tie-min also had health problems starting in the 1950s when he was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis. He was forced to stay home until 1965 when he finally received treatment and overcame tuberculosis.
He lived until 2011, when he died of cardiovascular disease at the age of 70.
Throughout his life, Chung Tie-min was an avid writer who followed his father’s writing style and subject matter, which mostly focused on the lives of Hakka farmers.
As rural society and the structure of agriculture in Taiwan changed, Chung Tie-min began shifting the focus of his writing from individual farmers’ lives to the fate of agricultural villages as a whole.
He also became deeply involved in social movements, such as the 1993 opposition movement against the building of the proposed Meinong Reservoir.
The Meinong District public library is hosting an exhibit on the lives and writing of Chung Li-ho and Chung Tie-min on its second floor until Dec. 31.
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