The fifth Taiwan Literature Awards for Migrants were announced on Saturday, with eight migrant workers from the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam who won awards depicting themes in their works such as longing for family, stories of migration and how they observe their host societies.
The winning works were chosen from a total of 553 entries, of which 230 were written in Tagalog, 165 in Indonesian, 92 in Vietnamese and 66 in Thai, said Chang Cheng (張正), owner of the Southeast Asian bookstore Brilliant Time.
Chang, who launched the awards in 2014, said this year’s competition has received the highest number of submissions, as eligibility for entry was expanded to include immigrants and migrant workers in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Malaysia, in addition to Taiwan.
Laso Abdi, an Indonesian caregiver in Taiwan, won the top prize for her story Tentang Cinta (“About Love”), which tells of the love she bestows upon the children she looks after for her employer and her own children back home, said Lan Pei-chia (藍佩嘉), a member of the five-person jury.
The story delves into a transference of love from the author’s children to the children she takes care of and her struggle of being caught between the two loves, said Lan, a professor of sociology at National Taiwan University who studies migration.
An additional junior panel composed of three people aged 15 to 20 also chose Tentang Cinta as one of the three winners of the Teen Choice Award.
AWARDS CEREMONY
The awards are to be presented to Laso Abdi and the other winners, including three Filipinos, two other Indonesians, and two Vietnamese, at a ceremony on Sept. 30 in Taipei.
The winning submissions are to be published in a collection in November.
The winners were selected based on two panel reviews — a Southeast Asian panel fluent in the four featured languages and a Taiwanese panel that read translations of a shortlist of 40 candidates chosen by the first panel, Chang said.
Hou Chi-jan (侯季然), a Taiwanese director and jury member, said the pieces helped him to look at the world through different lenses.
Hou said he read some of the pieces on the bus or on the MRT, and looked around and thought: “Do we not live in the same city?”
“It is important that we learn to see things from other people’s perspectives,” he said.
A total prize pool of NT$320,000 was provided for the awards by several sponsors, including Pegatron Electronics Co and the Ministry of Culture, award organizers said.
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
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
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,