Mekong Review

Detoxification

Kirsten Han

A review of two books on finding—or perhaps ‘freeing’ is a better word—one’s voice through acts of creation, whether it’s prose, poetry, painting, drawing or cooking.

My brief career as a propagandist

Andreas Pohl

“Apart from illustrating how invested the authorities still are in shaping the official story of Vietnam’s wars of liberation, my experience at Thế Giới also revealed an almost religious faith in the power of the written word.”

Foreign influence

David Frazier

While the voices and expressions in Chinese rock have come from Chinese musicians, outsiders have consistently injected know-how and resources into the country’s marginalised underground musical movements.

Activist imagery

John Mateer

In a new banner by Taring Padi and Noongar artists, the Noongar figures and Australian fauna and flora integrate with images from an rebellious Indonesian proletarian class in a bold synthesis, creating a dream-like, political logic.

Real men eat tofu

Nick J. Freeman

Despite tofu’s lack of structural integrity, Russell Thomas notes that its versatility has given it the resilience to “stand up in a range of figurative and real-life settings”.

Persistence

Debra Carney

Luise Ahrens, a Maryknoll nun and education innovator from the US, worked with seismic stamina for twenty-six years to build up higher education in Cambodia.

Fleeing the draft

Jatuporn Susuadmo

Young people from Myanmar are being forced to choose between survival and service in a conflict they had no say in and strongly object to.

Shades of the same colour

Taeyeon Song

Kornel Chang, a diasporic Korean historian and author, paints a picture of a post-Second World War Korea searching for a singular vision of what independence looks like.

Preserving Cantonese

Chong Ja Ian

Simin Li’s book is a reminder that continuing assertions about the singularity of Chinese culture and politics belie the pluralism and diversity of the Sinophone tradition.

Architecture in context

Troels Steenholdt Heiredal

Shifting Horizons: The Generation of Emancipatory Architecture in Taiwan is a unique exhibition including the many aspects that make up architectural production and attempting to locate the formation of contemporary Taiwanese architecture.

Lessons in fragility

Radhika Oberoi

Nature provides expressive backdrops for Han Kang’s fiction; while she chronicles human frailty and barbarity, she also allows the light to seep in through the foliage.

When Gilbert & George went to China

Paul French

Among a post-Tiananmen flurry of activity, Gilbert & George, the British duo who’d been a dominant force in the UK’s 1980s art scene, made a trail to China and inspired many looking to break free of their constraints.

Making protests fun

Seulki Lee

How does one save the world against evil with little more than one’s own imagination? When faced with hopeless nonsense from the political leadership, what can one do with their writing?

Political theatre

Calum Stuart

Singaporean actor Lim Kay Siu on the differences between acting in Hollywood and in Singapore, the power of theatre to raise public awareness of important issues, and getting political on live streams while playing a ukulele.

Too much for the lens

Sabahat Ali Wani

Through their exposure in front of the camera—as well as their work behind it—the faces and bodies of Kashmiri women not only become visible but also assert themselves on their own terms.

The long road

Tom Vater

Nepal’s Supreme Court has ruled in favour of marriage equality, but people on the ground say there’s still a long way to go before same-sex marriage gains acceptance across the country.

Goodbye to Cousin Merle

Jeremy Mair

Cousin Merle’s abscission from the family tree didn’t elicit any great feeling on my part, but the fact that there was no Chinese blood in the family was a little more complicated.

Moke

Martin Stuart-Fox

Lieutenant Colonel E.D. Murray—“Moke” to friends and fellow officers—knew nothing about Cambodia, but for a few brief weeks towards the end of 1945, he was, in his own words, its “uncrowned king”.

The valued and the expendable

William Arighi

Both Patricia Evangelista and Neferti X.M. Tadiar’s books question what it means to be human. While some are valued because of their contribution to capitalism, those who are less productive in the profit-making sense are treated as disposable.

The mystery of the Little People

James Baron

Few who encounter Pas-ta’ai, the ritual to the “little people”, and the complex, sometimes contradictory, folklore associated with it are unmoved. Some even become obsessed with unravelling the ceremony’s mysterious origins.

Undiplomatically speaking

Isaac Neo

While the bulk of the book focuses on diplomacy, Living the Asian Century can also be read as an introduction to the governance style of Singapore’s first generation of leaders as seen through Mahbubani’s eyes.

The forgotten lion

Liew Kai Khiun

Despite having held a number of important portfolios as a minister in the city-state’s early years, S. Rajaratnam’s legacy remains largely obscured in Singapore’s public imagination.

We are gonna make it

Ruby Thiagarajan

Instead of asking what is or how to be one’s authentic self under capitalism, Peripathetic is curious about whether capitalism leaves us with any room for authenticity at all.

Survival and unconventional success

Ariel Athwal-Yap

The lesson in Ganapathy’s book is salient and applicable to societies beyond Singapore: working class ethnic minorities disenfranchised by dominant societal structures often find themselves enmeshed with criminal justice institutions.

Lost and found

Miguel de la Fuente-Lau

For a relatively slim volume, Lio Mangubat’s Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period, 1565–1946 covers a broad swath of Philippine history.

Vietnam’s Latin script

Thiện Việt

The adoption of chữ Quốc ngữ, the Vietnamese alphabet that has officially been in use for over a century now, was a notable part of Vietnam’s effort to pull itself out of China’s orbit.