Loa Scales of Injustice

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-9997912-3-0
Verlag: Honford Star
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

L?a Hô (also Lai He, 1894-1943) was a pioneering writer from Taiwan often called the 'father of New Taiwanese Literature'. As a doctor during the colonial period in Taiwan, Loa witnessed the cruelty of Japanese rule and wrote stories which display both his sense of justice and social insight. His writing often utilized irony and satire to criticize the status quo, and his work provides a fascinating window into the struggle for Taiwanese self-determination during the early twentieth century. Scales of Injustice contains the complete fiction of Loa Hô, with an expert introduction from Pei-yin Lin and explanatory notes by translator Darryl Sterk.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Loa, Hô

Weitere Mitwirkende

Sterk, Darryl

Leseproben

1

Born in Chang-hua, central Taiwan in 1894, one year before Taiwan was ceded to Japan, Loa Hô (Lai Ho in Wade-Giles romanization) is often hailed as the ‘father of New Taiwanese Literature’.1 His works have had a lasting impact on Taiwan’s literary establishment, partly because he was one of the pioneering Chinese and Taiwanese vernacular authors from colonial Taiwan, and partly because of his profound humanitarian concern for the underprivileged.

Loa Hô grew up during the early phase of Japanese rule in Taiwan, benefitting from the newly introduced modern Japanese education, which he began at the age of ten, as well as undertaking private Chinese training at a school run by the local sinologist Huang Cho-ch’i. Under Japanese rule, medicine in Taiwan was institutionalized as a tool to civilize the colonized and legitimize the colonial regime, and it was while studying under this system at the Governor General of Taiwan’s Medical School (from 1909–1914) that Loa first began to write poetry in classical Chinese.2 Upon graduation, he worked briefly as a doctor in Taipei and in Chia-yi, south of his hometown of Chang-hua.

In 1918, Loa crossed the Taiwan Strait to Amoy (now Xiamen) in China, where he worked at the Po-ai Hospital in the concession area of Ku-lang-yü (Gulangyu), as an employee of the Taiwanese Governor General.3 As expressed in his classical Chinese poetry, Loa decided to travel to Amoy because he was interested in knowing China, and the death of his first son at only three weeks old in early 1918 might also have prompted him to go for a change of scenery. However, disappointed by the reality of China and feeling awkward about his position as a doctor in Japanese employ, Loa returned to Taiwan not long after the emergence of the May Fourth Movement in 1919.

Back in Taiwan, Loa opened a clinic in his hometown of Chang-hua, joined the Taiwan Cultural Association in 1921, and became involved in the association’s overall cultural enlightenment projects by delivering public lectures. In his leisure time during this period, Loa started to write in vernacular Chinese. Then, in late 1923, Loa Hô was briefly detained by Japanese policemen as part of a crackdown on politically active local elites. Loa’s autobiographical story ‘A-sì’ (published posthumously) is highly illustrative of his engagement with Taiwan’s social movements in the 1920s and his general political attitude before the Taiwan Cultural Association’s split.

The sprouting of colonial Taiwan’s vernacular writing took place in this sociopolitical context of the Taiwan Cultural Association’s cultural enlightenment project and Japanese colonialism. Loa Hô’s own vernacular fiction, which he began writing by 1923 at the latest, and the New Taiwanese Literature movement as a whole can be seen as an integral part of the Taiwanese educated class’s cultural enlightenment.

In April 1937, to prepare for Japan’s military expansion, the majority of Chinese language sections in newspapers and journals were banned, making writing unsustainable for Loa if he insisted on writing in vernacular Chinese. But even before this, perhaps Loa felt his Taiwanese language experiment had come to a dead end, or Taiwan’s New Literature had not been as effective as hoped, as he stopped writing stories in the vernacular around the end of 1935 or the beginning of 1936.4 Loa returned to the composition of traditional Chinese poetry, in particular Chinese bamboo branch ballads (chu-chih tz’u).

On 8 December 1941, the day after the Imperial Japanese Navy’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, Loa Hô was imprisoned for the second time, this time for fifty days. He began to write a diary in detainment but later stopped due to his deteriorating health, which resulted in his being released in January 1942. He passed away one year later, two and a half years before Japan’s surrender at the end of the Pacific War.

In his 1993 book, and with a focus on the trajectory of New Taiwanese Literature, Lin Jui-ming divided Loa’s work into three distinct stages.5 There is a first stage, in which Loa begins writing (1925–1928), a second stage during which Loa nurtures many younger writers (1929–1932), and a mature stage when Loa writes in Taiwanese (1934–1935). However, in order to emphasize the relationship between Loa’s writing and Taiwan’s sociopolitical situation, Ch’en Fang-ming proposed in 2007 to instead divide Loa’s writing into two stages.6 Ch’en suggested a first stage starting from his 1925 essay ‘Untitled’ (‘Wu-t’i’) and ending with the April 1931 poem ‘An Elegy of the South’ (‘Nan-kuo ai-ko’), the first literary work about the Musha (Wu-she) Incident.7 Then, a second phase beginning mid-1931 and ending with the December 1935 publication of ‘A Comrade’s Letter’. To Ch’en, Loa’s literary style is more political in the first stage; then in the second stage, after his frustration at the left-right split of the Taiwan Cultural Association, his works accordingly exhibit a sense of loss.

Ch’en’s periodization, despite its validity, risks over-emphasizing the Taiwanese elites’ ideological lurch left in the 1930s. It also does not fully explain the activism in the 1932 story ‘Getting into Trouble’, nor the sense of hope discernible in the 1934 work ‘The Story of a Class Action’ (literally, ‘The Story of a Man Skilled at Legal Suits’). Taking into consideration the subject matters of Loa’s writing, one can see he started off concerned with cultural enlightenment and then gradually shifted towards a focus on underprivileged people, wishing they could unite together. Loa, in fact, became increasingly sceptical of the social elites’ ability to improve the lives of the masses. Anti-oppression is a particularly significant theme throughout Loa Hô’s oeuvre, as it combines his disgust of Japanese police officers and distinct class awareness. As for his experiment with writing in Taiwanese, it visibly demonstrates his desire to get closer to those in the lower end of the colonial social spectrum.

2

The years 1925–1926 mark the start of Loa’s vernacular publications. He published the essay ‘Untitled’ (‘Wu-t’i’) and a poem ‘A Sacrifice Born of a Realization’ (‘Ch’üeh-wu xia tê hsi-sheng’) in vernacular Chinese in August and December of 1925, respectively. His poem ‘A Sacrifice Born of a Realization’ expresses agony towards the Japanese colonizers’ violence against Taiwanese sugarcane farmers during the Er-lin Incident, when they had tried to unionize.8 Then, on 1 January 1926, he published his first vernacular short story ‘Raising Hell’ in the Taiwan People’s Journal (Tai-wan Min-pao), in which he ridicules the Taiwanese obsession with ‘face’, especially their propensity to squander money ostentatiously.

Soon afterwards, Loa published ‘A Lever Scale’ (1926), a work inspired by French Nobel laureate Anatole France’s L’Affaire Crainquebille (1901). In the story, the vegetable pedlar Chîn Chit-chham tries to give his customer, a patrolman, a small discount by deliberately under-weighing the vegetables without understanding that the patrolman expects them for free. As a result, the patrolman scolds Chîn for using a faulty scale and breaks it in two. Feeling insulted and unwilling to live under the brutal system, Chîn commits suicide after killing the oppressive patrolman. The metaphor of the scale is powerful. It is supposed to be a symbol of justice. However, under Japanese rule fairness is ignored and justice manipulated by those in power.

In these early works, Loa reveals a distinct humanitarian concern for the weak and an insightful diagnosis of the symptoms of Taiwanese society. Indeed, both themes make tributes to Loa Hô as ‘Taiwan’s Lu Hsun (Lu Xun)’ fully justified, as Lu Hsun analysed negative aspects of the Chinese national character and tackled the predicaments of the Chinese masses at the turn of the twentieth century.

‘Going to the Meeting’, a work composed possibly in 1926, again exemplifies Loa’s humanitarian concern for the lower classes, especially manual labourers. On a train journey to a meeting, the intellectual narrator begins to contemplate the attacks on superstition at the Taiwan Cultural Association in the previous meetings. He feels uneasy about what comfort the association and its intellectual members could offer the labourers after eradicating superstition. Overhearing a fellow passenger’s comment that the association is dominated primarily by capitalist Taiwanese intellectuals who studied in Japan, instead of the ‘petty and middle-class burghers and farmers’ who account for the majority of Taiwan’s population, the protagonist yearns to listen to more of the conversation, but he unfortunately has to change trains. In the last segment of his journey, as the narrator sits in the third-class cabin occupied mostly by labourers, he feels embarrassed by his privilege, especially hearing a farmer complain that the association failed to fight for him or show solidarity.

The main themes tackled in Loa’s early stories—concern for the underdog in Taiwanese society and a critique of the Taiwanese character—remain consistent in his work and are both clearly displayed in ‘A Disappointing New Year’, published in 1927. At the...