Mekong Review

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.

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’.

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.

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.

Let the dead speak

Fathima Cader

Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chats with the Dead is a darkly satirical novel with a good dose of the fatalistic humour Sri Lankans will find familiar.

Building an archive

Emi Donald

The Anjaree Archive preserves material collected over the decades by one of Thailand’s first advocacy groups for gender and sexual rights. But can an archive also tell the story of its own messy creation?

What we see

Stephanie Chok

In Now You See Us, Balli Kaur Jaswal has created a social world that magnifies the indignities and frustrations of everyday life as a migrant domestic worker in Singapore.

Intentional forgetting

Paul French

What a country doesn’t collectively talk about can often be more important than what it does. Tania Branigan’s book reveals the complexities of remembering the Cultural Revolution.

Land of smiles?

Stephen Gregory

Our growing Thai family, now into its fourth generation, has given us plenty of smiles and laughter… and outbursts of anger and stubbornness and exasperation.

Reinvention

Abby Seiff

For much of her adult life, Bacani has been known for her photojournalism. But she has extended her practice considerably—a constant reinvention.

Apathy and nonchalance

Loh Pei Ying

This could be After The Inquiry’s intention: to rile us up and stir a sense of indignation at a system in which the truth might not win out over politics and power

Fill in the blank

Johanna Costigan and Hannah Sage Kay

Since participating in a protest in China puts one’s safety in jeopardy, using a blank sign serves as a form of plausible deniability. It’s also consistent with the complex reality of memory and historical events in China.

Transformations

Alex Li

Shanghai has undergone three transformations in three years. First, it turned itself into a bubble, then it clamped down hard, monitoring every resident’s movements. Finally, it bounced back to normalcy, almost as if the previous years had been a fever dream.

To my 2019 self

Sean Tierney

A controversy—involving questions of privacy, consent, autonomy and censorship—began to develop around the documentary To My Nineteen-Year-Old Self, one that starkly parallels the Hong Kong government’s relationship with the youth.

Hope

Hina Husain

Not only did the promise of “Naya Pakistan” never materialise, the country is actually much worse off today.

Sporting attitude

Kirsten Han

Could distance runner Soh Rui Yong’s absence from Singapore’s national team point to something bigger about how things work? He thinks this could be a “good opportunity” to ask questions.

Burgess in the East

Michael Howard

In his memoirs, Burgess recalled Graham Greene telling him (not unkindly) that Time for a Tiger was an amusing but essentially frivolous book. Greene’s evaluation hasn’t stood the test of time.

Mekong apocalypse

Michael Buckley

A sordid saga of greed, corruption, desperate despots and out-of-control dam-building corporations—propelling the rapid demise of the Mekong River.

Peering around river bends

Emily Ding

I’ve often come to forks while travelling. Do I stop where I had planned to arrive, or do I keep going? Maybe if I go on a bit further, I might find something I have never quite seen, in quite the same way, before.

So close, too far away

Peixuan Xie

Mae Sot, Thailand, provides the anonymity a Burmese peace activist needs, although not without guarded boundaries and precarious undercurrents to navigate

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