Forging identity
Martin Laflamme
Many Taiwanese have developed a new sense of self, proud of the island’s unique history, and Lee Teng-hui played a key role in that process.
First bend of the Nujiang
Jinendra Jain
The Kawa Karpo is one of the most sacred mountains in Tibetan Buddhism. A 250-kilometre circumambulation is completed by thousands of pilgrims every year.
Change
Peixuan Xie
As a mainland Chinese kid, I saw Hong Kong portrayed on TV as the epicentre of capitalism and sophistication; Hong Kong in real life, when I finally got to see and feel it for the first time, was much more than that.
Funny tongues
Dan Koh
The twenty-six films screening in Retrospective: Wang Sha & Ye Feng are a testament to the legendary comedians’ breadth both as solo performers and a beloved pair.
Jangan buang current
Carolyn Oei
bani haykal’s work embodies durational labour, culminating in serial ruminations on topics that keep him awake at night—capitalism, environmental protection, widening inequality divides.
The two gumamelas
Marbin Gesher Jay S. Deniega
A short story by Marbin Gesher Jay S. Deniega.
Chinese / Indonesian
Yudhistira Agato
Living in Indonesia most of my life, I’ve always felt that I might be visibly ‘too Chinese’. In fact, Indonesia’s tricky relationship with its ethnic Chinese population began all the way back to the Dutch occupation.
Complexity in Yunnan
Wong Chee Meng
The Panthay Rebellion is a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when a central government is absorbed in its own priorities, leading to ethnic stereotyping and distrust between communities.
Small state, short stories
Philip Holden
In Southeast Asia, the short story has perhaps been more significant than the novel: it is portable, more easily translated and it also migrates.
Polish Joe
Kam Raslan
In the two novellas, journeys depart from or hope to return to “an eastern port” (Singapore) but instead they both disappear into the obscurities of the seas.
Different futures
Liew Kai Khiun
In Hieyoon Kim’s Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea, South Korean cinema is seen as part of a broader democratic social movement.
Mothers and daughters
Gayathrii Nathan
In eleven short stories, Prasanthi Ram probes the lives and relationships of nine women, exploring the narratives of love (or hate) that we develop within ourselves, alongside the ones shared with our families.
This is not the Galapagos
Robert Wood
Like a magnificent tortoise, my aunt, the long-time Singaporean activist Constance Singam, ambles towards us to meet my children for the first time.
Tanka Studies (水上人描繪))
Yago Tse
A poem by Yago Tse.
Scenes of city life
Amarsanaa Battulga
Both The Sales Girl and If Only I Could Hibernate are contemporary coming-of-age stories set in Ulaanbaatar that thwart most viewers’ expectations of Mongolian cinema.
Assignment: China
David Frazier
An interview with Mike Chinoy about covering China for almost half a century, and his new book, Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic.
A voice abroad
Peter Guest
The Chinese Communist Party has “restructured the social order and silenced the people on the ground. Now they’re trying to extend their hands overseas, to silence overseas activists,” Christopher Mung says from the UK.
North Korean visits
John Gittings
John Gittings, formerly the Guardian’s East Asia editor, looks back on multiple trips to North Korea, from 1976 to 2001.
Just transitions
Kadal Jesuthasan
Climate activists are still stumped by the question of how to ensure that public power results in real, meaningful change. At the same time, the climate movement is setting its sights further than ever.
Street 200
Malin Annie Jansson
Street 200 in Phnom Penh is where people come together with a common passion for cinema.
When good Samaritans have money
Kevin Yam
The Hong Kong elite are said to be interested only in making money and not in universal values like democracy, human rights and the rule of law. But that’s not true.
Colonisation and modernisation
Muhammad Nadeem
Hafsa Kanjwal contends that Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed’s state-building practices helped strengthen India’s hold over Kashmir while also enabling modernisation, which paradoxically reinforced a sense of alienation rather than reconciliation.
Protest and consensus
Paul French
One of the interesting ideas thrown up in Hong Kong a few years back has been a certain nostalgia for the late colonial period. But how enlightened was colonial public policy-making?
Making way
Yann Bigant
Touching that sensitive Cambodian topic of land ownership and dispossession, Further and Further Away questions the nature of relationships entertained with the land.
The bookseller’s revolution
Emma Pei Yin
As a lead bookseller at The Book Cow, I’m not merely selling pages filled with words; I’m at the crossroads where books meet real life.
Fate ball
Damhuri Muhammad
A short story by Damhuri Muhammad
Fists and demons
Marco Ferrarese
The Indonesian film industry is often underrated and overlooked, but Timo Tjahjanto is one of its directors to have attracted international attention for his work.
Art as catalogue
Jonathan Victor Baldoza
What unfolds in Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book is Shubigi Rao’s documentation of her encounters with texts in varying formats that, at some point in the past, confronted ‘banishment’.
Horror with a small ‘h’
Kristian-Marc James Paul
Set in Singapore, catskull is a “neo-noir thriller meets coming-of-age mystery” that explores the violence of the city and the many forms that it takes: physical, racial, institutional.
Past and future
Rhoda Kwan
For Hongkongers, the British Museum exhibition became a space for those living through the ongoing destruction of their home to make sense of their own lives.
Public noise
Mikko Toivanen
Noise can be a powerful tool of protest but also healing, its cathartic value directly correlated with its loudness.
Party membership
Thiện Việt
One does not need to understand communist ideology to become a member of the Communist Party of Vietnam. “All you need to do is to pass their test,” said one state employee.
Dictionary, revis(it)ed
Ben Rost
Tracing a Khmer-language dictionary’s trajectory across the past century of Cambodian history offers insights into the ways language has been called on to construct—and to challenge—notions of national identity and community.
Sea change
Darren Wan
What sets Rachel Heng’s historical fiction apart is how she moves beyond this understanding of History (with a capital H) by showing how grand events are mediated by everyday interactions.
Multitudes
Aditya Narayan Sharma
Saadat Hasan Manto knew that it was not for him to analyse the multitudes people contain, and that often spill out from us without warning.
Real lives
Joshua Yang
The story of Hong Kong has long been subject to the whims of outsiders’ imaginations. Almost nowhere in these narratives is Hong Kong a city for the seven million residents.
Factory voices
Anand P. Krishnan
Japanese Management, Indian Resistance is an important work in understanding the larger ecosystem of foreign capital, more specifically that from East Asia, in India’s political-economic-social terrain.
When grandmother’s gone
Jeric Olay
A poem by Jeric Olay.
The fate of a barrio farmer
Jeric Olay
A poem by Jeric Olay.
Mommie dearest
David Scott Mathieson
Law-Yone’s penchant for the telling anecdote, the observation of, and connectivity to, the seemingly incidental, and the insight into the public and private personality makes this book a seminal contribution.