Lai He

Lai He in 1919

Lai He ( Chinese  賴 和 , Pinyin Lài Hé , Pe̍h-ōe-jī Luā Hô , Hakka : Lai Foˇ ; born May 28, 1894 in Changhua on Taiwan ; † January 31, 1943 ibid) was a Taiwanese doctor and writer at the time the Japanese rule over Taiwan . He is considered the "father of Taiwanese literature".

Life

Lai He belonged to the Hakka ethnic group , but his mother tongue was not Hakka, but Taiwanese . He came from a wealthy family, which enabled him not only to attend Japanese elementary school, but also to receive private tuition in classical Chinese literature. After graduating from high school, Lai studied general medicine at the Taipei Medical School founded by the Japanese . During this time he married. After graduating in 1914, Lai attended and practiced in various cities in Taiwan, and in 1918 went to the Chinese port city of Xiamen (Amoy) for a little over a year , where he interned in a Japanese hospital. In 1920 he returned to Taiwan to practice as a general practitioner near his hometown of Changhua. At the same time he began publishing literary works and was involved in organizations such as the Association for Taiwanese Culture and in civil movements such as the Campaign for a Taiwan Parliament , which, like many other Taiwanese intellectuals of the time, brought him into conflict with the Japanese colonial rulers and spent time in prison in 1923 and 1942. Most of his publications dealt with the state of Taiwanese society between backwardness and modernization and with colonial oppression. Lai's health deteriorated during his last stay in prison; he was released early but died not long after on January 31, 1943 in his hometown of Changhua.

Literary work

Lai was part of the thin stratum of Taiwanese intellectuals who had passed through the Japanese educational system. His first literary attempts were to write classical Chinese poetry, but later Lai turned to modern literature as promoted by the May Fourth Movement in China. His works included poems, short stories and essays and were mostly published in newspapers and magazines.

In his doctor's office, Lai maintained a reading room that soon became a modest literary salon. Lai spoke and wrote Chinese and Japanese fluently . While he wrote his literary texts predominantly in Chinese in his younger years, he later devoted himself increasingly to literary work in his native Taiwanese, for which he published the Taiwanese-language literary magazine Nanyin with other intellectuals in the 1930s . When the Japanese banned all non-Japanese publications during World War II, Lai's literary career came to an abrupt end, although he continued to write privately until his death.

influence

Lai He was one of the pioneers of an independent Taiwanese literature, which was differentiated in terms of themes and form from traditional Chinese literature, but also from Japanese literature. As such, Lai was a leading figure for writers of the younger generation, such as B. Yang Kuei and Wu Chuo-liu. Lai's attempt to write literature in Taiwanese, which was unusual at the time, was accepted by other intellectuals such as Tsai Pei-huo. During the post-1949 Kuomintang dictatorship, Lai He was considered a martyr of the anti-Japanese resistance, but his work was largely sidelined in the wake of the general suppression of local Taiwanese culture. With the emergence of Taiwanese national consciousness in the 1970s and 80s and the democratization of Taiwan, Lai He was rediscovered and is now considered the "father of Taiwanese literature".

literature

• 賴 和 全集Lai He quanji ( Lai He's Collected Works), edited by Lin Ruiming (林瑞明), Avanguard Publishing House, Taipei 2000, ISBN 957-801-250-0

Web links

• Lai-He Foundation website (Chinese)
• Lai-He Memorial Website (Chinese)
• Lai He, father of modern Taiwanese literature , The China Post, February 26, 2010

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Lai is the family name here, He is the first name.