"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.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
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