An appreciation

Seven years ago, Minh Bui Jones founded Mekong Review. Over time, the magazine built a reputation as Asia’s leading quarterly covering literature, culture and politics.

On 14 September, Minh e-mailed you with the exciting news that Mekong Review has a new owner. A copy of Minh’s message to you can be found here. The November 2022 issue will be published as normal, with Minh acting as editor for his Mekong Review swansong.

The new owners of Mekong Review thank Minh for his ground-breaking work for the past seven years. It is our honour to be given the chance to carry on and build upon Minh’s legacy. We would be grateful for your new or continuing support as subscribers and donors

We will be in touch again when the November 2022 issue is published. Watch this space!

A couple of decades ago, I used to fantasise about there being a periodical that had some of the features I liked about the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement but engaged more regularly, more deeply, and more creatively with Asian topics and writers. It was thus literally a dream come true when I learned about Mekong Review in December of 2019 (I was late to the party). I then immersed myself in back issues. I found it all a bit eerie, since it seemed as though its creator Minh Bui Jones somehow had access to my ruminations on what the global literary scene needed. I did, initially, feel a bit disappointed, as someone focusing on East Asia, to discover its focus was Southeast Asia, as nice as it was to see a region often relegated to the margins even in Asian studies circles get the central place of honour. It was uncanny, however, that no sooner had I formed this minor criticism in my head than MR began to pay more and more attention in the early 2020s to the part of East Asia that I was most obsessed with: Hong Kong.

Mekong Review is no imitation creation. It has a mix of themes that sometimes reminds me of NYRB issues I’ve liked, covers that occasionally make me think of a favourite LRB cover, articles shorter than the average ones in those periodicals, and poems and short memoirish essays that are reminiscent of the TLS. Yet it has always been thoroughly its own special thing—and not just because of its regional focus. It has a fresh style, a bit more fiction, a better feel for mixing online-only and print content, and you could buy copies of it in PDF, which I don’t think you can with the other publications I’ve mentioned. In building on but departing from those and other models and from the beginning featuring a lot of female writers and being diverse in other ways, it made me think also of the Los Angeles Review of Books. That’s another periodical created in this century that did something I wished the NYRB, LRB, and TLS did: pay more attention to the popular culture that mattered to me.

From the time I first learned of MR—in a memorable way, I might add, when I was in Hong Kong in the second week of December 2019 during one of the city’s final giant demonstrations, when Antony Dapiran, the author of City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong, proudly thrust a copy of the new issue into my hands which included an essay of his based on a protest diary he had been keeping—it seemed too good to be true. So, I cannot say I am completely surprised that it is ending its run. Dreams cannot last forever. Keeping something this special going in ordinary times would have been hard enough, and we are living in anything but ordinary times.

And yet, MR is not disappearing and there will still be ways to share its magic with others. Past issues will live on, and there is a best-of collection coming soon that I will be eager to share to convey to others why I found this venture so special, initially as a reader and then as a contributor. No such collection could contain all of my own favourite pieces, but an advance look at the table of contents has assured me that it features works by some of the writers—historian Rachel Leow and the impossible-to-categorise Emma Larkin, to name just two—whose bylines I would be happy to see in any periodical. It also, I am glad to see, includes Dapiran’s wonderful piece, which was the first Mekong Review contribution I ever read and liked.