Aiden Chee, Taiwan's National Honour, September 2026
Aiden Chee wrote the highest-scoring poem from Taiwan in the Writory International Poetry Contest, September 2026: The Key, scored 97 out of 100 by the blind judging panel across five published criteria. The poem was read in English (Latin script) with Korean (Hang.
The Key
I. THE KEY The refrigerator hums the long note it knows quite loud for how little it holds: a jar, barley tea, a pot of seaweed soup the color of low tide, made in a quantity that means this will last the week. Its light comes on and shows how much of the shelf is only shelf Nine o’clock. Kumon workbook, and the pencil worn to the length of a thumbnail. Kumon: sums down the left, and down the right the kana in their small square cells, like rooms in a building I am learning how to live in. Ten. The eraser sheds its pink crumbs, small evidence Eleven. The building lets its breath out: the elevator, the corridor, a neighbor’s television laughing at a joke in someone else’s room. And then the sound I have been not-listening for: the key. Turned slowly, the way you turn a thing when you would rather not be heard. Then, under the door, the light: the entry sensor’s small orange dawn laid along the floorboards like a ruler by someone who wants me to know he is home and not to know from where. He comes in with his sleeves rolled past the elbow. He brings the smell of black coffee, or of rain. I could never tell which. Both are weather that has been somewhere else 나 왔어. I’m home. He says it softly. to a room he thinks is sleeping, and I keep the answer, 어서와, folded in my mouth like a note i have written and will not pass. Some nights I win: upright, awake as a sentinel, the pencil a small boat I steer. Some nights sleep comes in like a lake and close over the key, the light, the man who is here. By morning, the key is back in its place. His shoes are beside mine at the door, both pairs facing the same way. II. The DOME Saturday, and cicadas screaming from every tree like a siren no one else could hear. Gravel road, something green against the gray: my father’s hand closing over mine: like this, a dome, no seam, nowhere for it to leave. We filled a water bottle he had emptied for me: grasshoppers first, then crickets tracked by ear before the eye, that one I liked best, a chase that started as a sound. Dragonflies he caught by the wings, slow where I expected quick, and let me hold the paper of them just long enough to see the veins, the spikes, the whole machine that from a distance reads as blur. Then we opened our hands and let the field take everything back. He never told me why he was so good at this: holding a thing without letting it feel held. III. TWIN BAR He said he wasn’t tired. He said he’d eaten already. He said we had money enough for ice cream, and split the twin bar down its seam so one half came out bigger: his, somehow, every time, by accident. I took the big half home. I did not know yet what a father subtracts from himself to make a number look whole in front of a child. The soup lasted the week because so much else could not. I only learned that arithmetic years later, doing the sum he’d spent a decade not showing me how to do. IV. WHAT HE SAID I asked him once we were old enough for the question not to break anything: did you know how much I was counting on it: the ten o'clock, the eraser dust, the light. He said, I was tired the whole time. He said, there was nothing you could have done. so why hand a child the weight of a thing he can’t put down. I think of the dome again: a hand closed around something not to trap it, but to keep it from finding out yet how easily it could be lost. 나 왔어, he still says, down the phone. I’m home. And some nights I still fold my answer in my mouth, but now I know the shape of it. 어서와. Though the door has stood open for years, Though no one, anymore, is pretending to sleep.
Every country's leading poet each month is named on the September 2026 National Honours. The contest is open to poets in Taiwan and everywhere else: enter the current round, and every poem receives a score out of 100 and a certificate.