Loa Ho

Loa Ho (Chinese: 賴和; pinyin: Lài Hé; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: Loā Hô) (28 May 1894 – 31 January 1943), real name Loa Ho (賴河) and Lai Kuie-ho, pen name Lan Yun, Fu San, An Tu-shêng, Hui, Tsou Chieh-hsien, Kung I-Chi, Lang, etc., was a Taiwanese poet who was born in Changhua County, Taiwan Prefecture, Fujian-Taiwan Province, Qing dynasty (modern-day Changhua, Taiwan).

On a sojourn as a doctor in a Japanese hospital in Amoy (now called Xiamen), a treaty port in China, he became acquainted with the work of Chinese May Fourth writers such as Lu Hsun.

Through several short stories written during the 1920s and early 1930s, Loa satirized the brutality of colonial policemen, the indifference of the populace, and the impotence of native intellectuals.

[4] His major works include novels such as A Lever Scale (一桿稱仔), A Disappointing New Year (不如意的過年), The Story of a Class Action (善訟的人的故事), Three Unofficial Accounts from the Romance of the Slippery Eels (浪漫外紀), and new poems like “流離曲” (Ballad of Wandering), “Sacrifice with Awareness: To Comrades in Erlin” (覺悟下的犧牲：寄二林的同志), and “Elegy of the Southern Land” (南國哀歌).

Among them, "Elegy of the Southern Land", which is based on the Wushe Incident (1930), is one of the longest poems in the Taiwanese New Literature Movement during the Japanese era.