The ferry that sank in 1973 was a private vessel operating on the crossing between Cijin Island and Kaohsiung City. By 1973, the expansion of the Kaohsiung port in 1967 had reduced the transportation options for Cijin residents, leaving them dependent on government and private ferries for the essential daily crossing. An overloaded ferry in the harbor on a working morning was not unusual; it was routine. That morning, the vessel capsized. Of the more than 70 people aboard, 46 survived. All 46 survivors were married men and women. The 25 who drowned were all unmarried young women. Twenty-five lives ended in the harbor channel before the morning shift began.

The young women who died were not exceptional in any way that their society recognized at the time — and that is part of what makes their story worth understanding. Taiwan's economic development in the early 1970s created manufacturing jobs at the export processing zones, including the one near Kaohsiung. Families across Taiwan were making decisions about education and work. Boys, more likely to be prioritized for continued schooling, often stayed in school. Girls frequently entered the workforce directly after middle school, contributing wages to households that needed them. The women on that ferry were doing what their families and their society asked of them. They were going to work. Most were young — some still teenagers. They had families who loved them. After they drowned, those families had to navigate grief and a city that did not, for many years, give their daughters a proper memorial.

For years after the accident, the burial site on Cijin Island was known as the Twenty-five Ladies' Tomb. What should have been a place of quiet mourning became something else. Urban legends accumulated around it — stories of stalled cars and vengeful spirits, of a woman in white seen at night, of drownings at the nearby beach attributed to the restless dead. Gamblers visited the tomb looking for lucky numbers; when they lost, some took revenge by defacing the photographs on the headstones. The families of the women found this unbearable. The superstitions did not honor their daughters. They disparaged them — reducing real women with real names to ghost story material, to cautionary figures, to entertainment. For decades the families waited for something better.

The change came through sustained advocacy. Feminist organizations and the Kaohsiung Association for the Promotion of Women's Rights pushed the city government to act — to recognize the women not as tragic or supernatural figures but as workers who died because of unsafe conditions, and to memorialize them accordingly. On April 28, 2008, Workers' Memorial Day, the Kaohsiung City government formally renamed the site the Memorial Park for Women Laborers. The city rebuilt it: a lotus flower shrine, plaques bearing each of the twenty-five names, and text recognizing the contribution women workers made to Taiwan's economic development. The name change mattered. It shifted the memorial from a haunted curiosity to what it had always deserved to be — a recognition of labor, of loss, and of the women themselves.

Every spring, the Kaohsiung City government's Department of Labor hosts a commemorative service at the park — honoring the twenty-five women and raising awareness for gender-related labor issues that did not begin or end with the events of September 1973. The memorial stands on Cijin District, the long narrow island that runs along Kaohsiung Harbor. It is reachable by ferry from Kaohsiung — the same crossing, made safe, that the women made each workday morning. Visitors who come to read the names on the plaques are encountering something that took thirty-five years to build properly: a record that says these women existed, that their work mattered, and that their deaths were not inevitable. The lotus shrine, with its associations of emergence and dignity in Chinese culture, was chosen deliberately. They are remembered here as they should have been remembered always.