Lai He was born in 1894 in Changhua into a modest family and trained as a physician at the Medical School of the Taiwan Governor-General's Office. After a spell practising in Xiamen, he returned home to run a clinic in Changhua, where he treated the poor with such generosity that people called him a living Buddha.

Deeply stirred by the political awakening of the 1920s, he joined the Taiwan Cultural Association and was imprisoned during the Chih-ching Incident of 1923. Turning to writing, he pioneered a plain vernacular literature rooted in Taiwanese life; his stories A Steelyard and The Festival exposed the everyday injustices of colonial rule with unflinching sympathy.

As editor of the literary pages of the Taiwan Minpao, he mentored and published a whole generation of younger writers, earning the title 'father of Taiwanese new literature.'

He was jailed a second time in 1941, and his health broke under the strain. Lai He died in early 1943 at the age of forty-eight, remembered as both a healer of bodies and a conscience of his people.