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.
In the celebrated writer’s short story collection, human brittleness and the everydayness of identity play out in quiet episodes beneath the crumbling gaze of the Eternal City.
“Einstein saw space and time as an intrinsically linked existence: how the passing of time is relative to the space we inhabit, which is to say, how we find meaning in our lives depends greatly on where we stand.”
When Witit Chanthamarit was a child, independent bookstores were not the rarity they are today. In opening Vacilando, he hopes to recapture the sense of community he’d felt before.
Bertil Lintner’s book on the Wa isn’t merely a fascinating look at a little-penetrated hermit kingdom; it’s also a case study of how China manipulates the politics of its border zones in pursuit of global ambitions.
In Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made, a family is undone by a secret betrayal during the British and then Japanese colonisation of Malaya.
Over a quarter of a century, Malaysiakini grew from a scrappy start-up to a Malaysian media institution. In some ways, to know the history of this news portal is to know the history of modern Malaysia.
The Uyghurs: Kashgar Before the Catastrophe and Under the Mulberry Tree: A Contemporary Uyghur Anthology are testament to the power of memory as resistance against crackdown and erasure.
A poem from Faiz Ahmad Faiz
Clare Hammond, author of On the Shadow Tracks, did not love the trains she rode. But her exploration of Myanmar’s dilapidated tracks reveals the link between the railways and the military’s power, while documenting the lives on and around ramshackle trains.
A poem by Alyza Taguilaso
A letter to a friend, on thoughts of ‘home’ prompted by the Thai dream-pop duo, HYBS.
India goes to the polls mid-April in a huge democratic exercise that will take over a month. But the nature of Indian society and democracy has changed quite fundamentally in the past decade.
A conversation with Korean queer author and contemporary artist Ibanjiha on their art of humour and succeeding through the heteronormative and hyper-capitalist social order of South Korea.
Gordon Conochie’s book amounts to perhaps the most detailed autopsy yet of the death of Cambodia’s democracy.
The poet Kyi Zaw Aye once asked, “How can we encounter true love in times of war?” Since the 2021 coup in Myanmar, some couples have been trying to find their own answers.
As the forest and the tiger vanish, the myths that enchant them evolve and find their way into other vernaculars beyond folklore and popular beliefs.
Decades after the end of Suharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia, a collective nostalgia for the supposed ‘good old days’—driven by historical revisionism and propaganda—is influencing contemporary Indonesian politics.
Anne Stevenson-Yang recounts the heady giddiness of Chinese economic growth, but concludes that what had once seemed to last forever has turned out to be little more than an illusion.
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.
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.
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.
“Every time I’m here in Taiwan, I get to unpack a bit more of my family’s murky history.”
In their respective books, Ian Johnson and Louisa Lim look at China’s underground historians of one kind or another.
A short story by Lý Văn Sâm, translated from Vietnamese by Ryan Nelson and Khanh Hoa Le.
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.
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.
The transnational reproduction of Chinggis worship in Mongolia is part of a concerted effort to bring back an identity-defining practice.
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.
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.
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.
The China-Australian Migration Corridor delves deep into historical foundations, contemporary trends and policy considerations related to movement between China and Australia.
The Second Link curates writing that moves beyond the “exhausted metaphors and dusty tropes” of the longstanding rivalry between Malaysia and Singapore.
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.
A renga by Mariyam Haider and Emilie Collyer. Commissioned as part of a collaboration between RMIT’s nonfiction/lab and Mekong Review.
Poetry from John Brixter Tino
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.
An interview with Sudeep Sen, a poet who has edited influential anthologies and offered poems to a polarised world in times of crises.
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.
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.