Mekong Review

The hardliner

James Crabtree

Matt Pottinger doesn’t much like the term “China hawk”. Even so, he’s become one of the most prominent voices in the United States pushing for a tougher line against Beijing.

Writing Myanmar

Peixuan Xie

For San Lin Tun, writing about Myanmar in English is a way for Myanmar writers to take control or ownership of the country’s narrative.

Racism and repression

Andreas Harsono

Indonesia’s National Library may not contain a lot on West Papua, but five books, reviewed by Andreas Harsono, describe its tormented history.

Imagining Orwell in Burma

Joe Freeman

Theroux’s Burma Sahib is a novel about awakenings: sexual, political and literary. Filling a historical void with fiction, Theroux invents and probes every nook and cranny of Orwell’s life in Burma.
 

The defector talks

Paul French

Thae Yong-ho’s book, a must read for the dedicated band of North Korea watchers, reminds us of the millions still struggling to survive between the 38th Parallel and the Yalu River.

Compromise(d)

Martin Laflamme

Zhou Enlai might have attempted to temper some of Mao Zedong’s worst excesses, but he did not have the courage to defy Mao when it counted the most.

The decoloniser

Munkhnaran Bayarlkhagva

Gankhuugiin Purevbat was never keen to claim credit, but his contribution to the rebirth of Mongolian Buddhism and the decolonisation of Mongolia cannot be denied.

Enduring

Kirsten Han

Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger doesn’t focus on major historical milestones, but it doesn’t mean that the experiences described in this collection of short stories are inconsequential—quite the opposite.

Grey, all grey

Haresh Sharma

Like many in Singapore, artists exist on a strange monochromatic spectrum—the lighter side provides access to opportunities and awards, the darker potentially leading to loss of employment. How should one navigate this space?

Looking in

Ruby Jusoh

The rich traditions of Adat Perpatih in Negeri Sembilan demonstrate how deeply rooted customs can evolve while maintaining their core values.

Family duty

Kang-Chun Cheng

Creating Feeding Ghosts, a graphic memoir, was the only way Tessa Hulls could think of to repair her relationship with her mother and make sense of the responsibilities borne by each generation.

Translating Javanese

Jennifer Lindsay

She Wanted to be a Beauty Queen is a good read for anyone, but, together with supplementary material like George Quinn’s comprehensive afterword, is an especially terrific resource for students of Indonesian or Southeast Asian literature.

A bookworm’s haunt

Nicholas Yong

A focus on Singaporean authors, coupled with the fact that bookstores in the city have found it increasingly difficult to survive, makes Book Bar feel like an anomaly.

A-ma

Sawarin Suwichakornpong

“Whenever I think of a family member, I always think of A-ma. Her life tells the story of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia.”

Barnard’s bestiary

Peter A. Coclanis

That animals and plants have been inserted, in increasingly powerful ways, in historical narratives represents a powerful challenge to human-centred accounts that have long been dominant.

Jade, Pine, Orchid, Kidney

Robert Wood

Eileen Chong’s poetry defies national categories, making its way into cracks and crevices like an orchid in cement, grown beautiful and a little wild.

“I is another”

Sasha Han

In his films, Singaporean director Daniel Hui seeks out peripheral figures, tending to them with the kind of attention usually reserved for prominent historical figures.

Literary censorship

Thiện Việt

With little transparency, top-down literary censorship in Vietnam is complex, capricious and contingent upon those implementing the ‘rules’.

Living otherwise

Kirsten Han

The works featured in Joanne Leow’s monograph, Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise, are examples of (mostly) Singaporeans who refuse to conform to top-down formulations of how to live on this island.

Sustaining freedom

Richard Heydarian

How did the Philippines descend into a demagogic dystopia? How can one explain the rise of the proto-fascist ideology of Dutertismo? And what are the lessons for democracies in the twenty-first century?

The massacre America erased

Timothy McLaughlin

Americans like to think that the most cruel excesses of colonialism are reserved for the histories of the British or the French, but Kim A. Wagner draws connections between American behaviour in the Philippines and the tactics of other colonial powers.

Cracks in our memory

Khải Đơn

Not many Vietnamese books keep track of the experience of living under suffocating communism in the North or keeping up with the get-rich-quick sentiment dominant in the South. Thuận’s Elevator in Sài Gòn captures this with nuance and peculiarity.

Tongue-tied

Divya Vaze

Hong Kongers from the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines and Indonesia have lived in the city for a long time. Yet Asian minority Hong Kongers often end up segregated from ethnic Chinese children in the education system.

The stubborn shrine

Matthew Fraser

The Buddermokan shrine in Sittwe is said to have been built in 1756. It has since survived colonialism, war and Nature—a stubborn relic of history in a hostile environment that wanted it gone.

The sea within

Mahen Bala and Gerhard Hoffstaedter

When rising sea levels threaten to submerge the gravesite of his father, a young man is forced to return to his hometown and confront the dilemma between honouring his father’s dying wishes or to give in to nature.

A love letter to bak chor mee

Nicholas Yong

Amid Southeast Asia’s array of noodle dishes, bak chor mee doesn’t have the exalted status of pho or pad thai. Nevertheless, it’s a beloved staple dish consumed by Singaporeans, and even became a political statement once.