"You ask me, how long will it take to reach the bus stop called happiness?/I say, I don't know/Leave it to the bus of love to take us there," Yunika Sari, of Indonesia, recited on Sunday as she read her winning piece, titled Terminal Bahagia at the 7th Foreign Poetry and Essay Contest.
Many of the entries dealt with the issue of separation from loved ones.
Felisa Castro of the Philippines won second prize with her poem A Prison Without Bars.
"How many mothers leave home, for the sake of the family's happiness?/How many babies grow up without their mothers to hold them?" Castro read from her work at the award ceremony held at the 228 Memorial Park.
Poet Chen Ke-hua (
The Taipei City Government Department of Labor said 2,000 foreign laborers submitted material to this year's competition.
The 20 winning entries were selected by a panel of local poets, academics and authors.
The third-place piece, titled Two Loving Mothers by Pham Thi Tuong of Vietnam, compared her employer to her mother.
"[These works] are a sign that migrant workers' relationships with their employers have improved," Chen said.
Department of Labor Director Su Ying-kuei (
"There are over 36,000 foreign workers in Taipei from Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand. Most of you work as domestic helpers and caretakers," he said. "Your significant contributions directly enhances the quality of life of Taipei residents."
The works will be collected and published in a book titled Taipei Listen to Me.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,