The odyssey: A walking and reading tour
Beside the Lai Ho Clinic was the Neighbor Assistance Hall, also called Beggar’s Hall. It was the earliest social housing project in Taiwan. Established for the poor during the Japanese era, it was a place where Lai Ho collected folk stories and songs as material for his writing.
Five minutes’ walk from the Lai Ho Memorial lies Chung Shan Elementary School. In 1928, after taking his son there for the first time, Lai Ho published “A Tedious Memory,” an essay criticizing colonial education, based on his own experiences at the school 25 years before.
Mt. Bagua is a major Changhua landmark. Today there’s a literature trail for you to take up the slope. On the way you can take in the seventh of Lai Ho’s “Ten Poems About Reading Lian Heng’s A History of Taiwan,” and at the end there is the Lai Ho Poetry Wall, constructed out of a hundred vertical steel plates, like the pages in a traditional book. The poetry is excerpted from Lai Ho’s “Progress.”
At the foot of the mountain are several buildings where a park used to be. Today, you can only imagine the park by reading essays like “Catching the Breeze” and “Sitting in the Park in the Evening.” Thence the guides of this reading and walking tour will take you to the Changhua Confucian Temple, which in Lai Ho’s day was the First Public School, where Lai was a student. When you arrive at Yuanching Temple, which the locals call the Lord of Heaven Altar, you’ll hear all about Lai Ho’s engagement in social movements and his pivotal role in the Taiwan Cultural Association.
The police station at the next intersection was formerly the Japanese colonial police headquarters, where Lai Ho was detained twice. These experiences colored his later literary work, which reflects ordinary people’s way of life and their spirit of resistance.
Today’s Chenling Road was Little West Street, a very lively place in Lai Ho’s day, especially the Illustrious Guest House, a hotel and restaurant where Lai and his medical-school classmates held a reunion in 1941. Now a historic site, the building is being restored.
With its impressive archives of Lai Ho’s writings, the Lai Ho Memorial is a pilgrimage site for local and international scholars, who can return to sites in colonial history by reading his writings. Lai’s works have also been translated. The University of California, Santa Barbara has translated his poetry and prose into English for the Taiwan Literature English Translation Series. And in 2015 the Institute for Chinese Studies at Heidelberg University invited the Lai Ho Foundation to participate in a lecture series. It was a chance for Lai Ho studies to take a place on the stage of world literature.
This literary odyssey is an in-depth guided tour on which you’ll shuttle down the streets and lanes of Old Changhua and read Lai Ho’s works out loud as you walk your way into history, developing a sense of the locale and of the Lai Ho spirit: let the flowers of freedom bloom forever!
Lai Ho, with his trademark mustache and Taiwanese-style clothes, treated the poor at the Lai Ho Clinic. (courtesy of the Lai Ho Foundation)
Books and manuscripts at the Lai Ho Memorial.
Li Xianzhang’s Taiwan Folk Literature Anthology, with a preface by Lai Ho.
The Confucian Temple in Changhua was once a public school, where Lai Ho got a Japanese education. (photo by Jimmy Lin)
Lai Ho went to Chung Shan Elementary, founded 120 years ago.
Thrown in prison a second time in 1941, Lai Ho wrote “Jail Diary.”