舊島電話

This poem comes from Sao Xia’s second collection of poetry, 瀕危動物 (Endangered Animals), which addresses land issues and regional and family history, and explores personal themes, such as gender, queer bodies, and desires. Works in this collection experiment between prose and poetry, taking the forms of love letters, exam sheets, and journal entries; they struck me in both eccentric, intimate, and affinitive ways. In our conversation, Sao Xia explained that “Old Island Telephone Call” is a poem about her mother, who grew up on an island called Cijin, off the coast of Kaohsiung City. Sao Xia herself also spent her childhood on the island. She mentioned that the crabs in the poem are white fiddler crabs, which are found along the shore. When I looked them up, I saw they have an unbalanced body structure—lopsided, with one claw comically oversized, the other shrunken, barely formed. 

In Kaohsiung, the “Twenty-five Ladies Tomb,” built for those who perished in the shipwreck mentioned in the poem, became a locally famous haunted site. Folklore claimed that the spirits of these unmarried women turned into vengeful ghosts and took the lives of young men travelling alone to make them their husbands. There were plans to revamp the tombs, but under the pressure from local feminist groups, the government eventually renamed the site as “Memorial Park for Women Laborers.” I treasure this tender invitation to engage with a personal account of Taiwanese history, and this translation seeks to capture the poem’s quiet intensity.