Lessons unlearnt
Michael Beltran
The destruction wrought by Typhoon Haiyan will never be forgotten by Filipinos—even if some valuable lessons still haven’t been learned a decade later.
You are not alone
Mili Semlani
Although democracy and media freedoms are declining in India, filmmaker Vinay Shukla seeks to inspire people to show up courageously to create a better society for everyone.
Gentle reading
Maureen Tai
At a time in which large bookstores have fallen to pressures like Hong Kong’s sky-high rents, gentle books survives as a nimble pop-up for used English-language books.
Memory and wheat
Kang-Chun Cheng
“Every time I’m here in Taiwan, I get to unpack a bit more of my family’s murky history.”
Shades of amnesia
Johanna M. Costigan
In their respective books, Ian Johnson and Louisa Lim look at China’s underground historians of one kind or another.
Child of Heaven
Lý Văn Sâm
A short story by Lý Văn Sâm, translated from Vietnamese by Ryan Nelson and Khanh Hoa Le.
By the canal
Linda Collins and Noelle Q. de Jesus
A piece of flash fiction by Linda Collins and Noelle Q. de Jesus. Commissioned as part of a collaboration between RMIT’s nonfiction/lab and Mekong Review.
Onward the water flows
Dương Mạnh Hùng
The arts can remind us of our connections to home and nature as we are propelled forward by development projects that prioritise profit over nurturing rootedness and well-being.
Chinggis worship
Munkhnaran Bayarlkhagva
The transnational reproduction of Chinggis worship in Mongolia is part of a concerted effort to bring back an identity-defining practice.
The psyche of ancient China
Brandon C. Yen
Throughout ancient China, mortuary cultures had been evolving for thousands of years before the Qin dynasty, even long before the date of the oldest extant form of systematic Chinese writing.
Bomb pond
Agnès Bun
In short vignettes, Y-Dang Troeung gives a compelling account of the journey which brought her family from Cambodia’s Kampong Thom to white rural Canada, beyond the feel-good newspaper headlines.
Art beyond tourism
Naima Morelli
Bali is home to a thriving community of local artists with international pedigrees, all actively working from the island, opening their studios to visitors and fostering a local art community.
A tale of two homes
Emma Pei Yin
The China-Australian Migration Corridor delves deep into historical foundations, contemporary trends and policy considerations related to movement between China and Australia.
Complex inheritance
Ann Ang
The Second Link curates writing that moves beyond the “exhausted metaphors and dusty tropes” of the longstanding rivalry between Malaysia and Singapore.
Gimme some truth
Nick J. Freeman
Susann Pham’s Vietnam’s Dissidents is a bold piece of empirical work and a welcome and timely addition to the literature on contemporary Vietnam.
Silos / Renga
Mariyam Haider and Emilie Collyer
A renga by Mariyam Haider and Emilie Collyer. Commissioned as part of a collaboration between RMIT’s nonfiction/lab and Mekong Review.
Friend
John Brixter Tino
Poetry from John Brixter Tino
in-hale ex-hale
Taeyeon Song
The End of August centres voices rarely heard in English-language fiction—Koreans living in Japanese-occupied Korea and the zainichi Korean diaspora of Japan.
Poetry and music
Jhilam Chattaraj
An interview with Sudeep Sen, a poet who has edited influential anthologies and offered poems to a polarised world in times of crises.
The braves
Desmond Sham
Among the Braves is an attempt to tell the story and struggles of a city, through the lives of the people who have been active in a decades-long movement for democracy.
Fact in fiction
Radhika Oberoi
Arundhati Roy’s fiction and non-fiction offer a worldview bristling with the fervour of a pamphleteer, the intuitiveness of old lovers, the curiosity of a child.
Monogatari
David Wills
Beyond healing himself, Haruki Murakami, through his stories, has grown more interested in helping others heal.
Dyeing art
Adil Hussain and Owais Gul
The ancient practice of dyeing yarn in Kashmir used to be the source of livelihood for hundreds of families, but modern techniques and tools have slowly pushed the tradespeople into the margins.
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.