Zheng Mei-rong / 鄭美蓉

Zheng Mei-rong（b. 1978）, a Taiwanese Hakka, was born in Miao Li County. She graduated from Aletheia University majoring in Taiwanese Literature and began her creative writing of modern poetry. Years after graduation, with the encouragement of Professor Lee Kuei-shien, she has taken up writing again, as a therapeutic practice, a time to reflect on life and the social reality.

e-mail：meilong23@yahoo.com.tw

A Wife’s New Year’s Eve Dinner/ 媳婦的年夜飯

New Year’s Eve Dinner

bringing family together for a moment

laughing, eating, drinking, and talking.

Father, mother, brothers, and sisters, united.

Father, mother, brothers a family.

Marriage

New Year’s Eve Dinner

Father-in-law, mother-in-law, brother-in-law, husband and wife, dining together.

Eating, and drinking,

alone a wife calls her mother and father and asks

“what are you eating tonight?”

        Fisherman’s Elegy /漁場悲歌

Rain Pouring Down like Bullets

Ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta

Waves crashing down, through the steel hull,

rain mixed with a red slurry, pulsing weakly,

passing bit by bit, inside the steel of the cabin.

Your strength and my righteousness, have failed to meet.

Nonexistent justice, useless to the world.

Justice Killed by a Nation  

Silver tongued leaders of a nation,

their words cut like blades, forever at the people.

Is justice,

belated, still just?  

Or is this the beginnings of a new folk tale? 

Tragedy, if nothing else, a tragedy

On stage, a fisherman’s daughter cries to the sea:

            The scars of these bullets have marred bodies for decades

            Da-da-da, the deafening sound of death

            save our men,  

            let them though this unscathed.

This tragedy of the south plays out over and over again

Officials look down from their lofty posts, incompetent

Pacing and waving their hands

They have provoked the four winds

Snuffing out the candle on the stage, and burning the set

Chaos erupts around this play

full of noise

in the distance, the fisherman’s daughter recites a fisherman’s elegy.

        Taiwanese Sweet Chili Sauce / 台味甜辣醬

Aboriginal, Holo, Hakka, and Chinese flavors

A brand unparalleled

A taste pure, mild, and blissfully ignorant

Unfazed by force, pressure, assimilation or fraud.

A salty and spicy flavor

with a sweet finish.

譯者：Abram Sitzer(畢凌晨)

審訂：Lin Wei-yun(林葦芸)