It is the whiggish conceit of a certain kind of cosmopolitan that cultural exchange breeds understanding. But it can just as well occasion contempt. The story Nile Green tells in How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding is a riot of intercultural misunderstanding and misperception.
In The Accidental Malay by Karina Robles Bahrin, protagonist Jasmine Leong—heiress of a Chinese family business dealing in pork products—discovers that she’s actually Malay Muslim. What ensues highlights the fraught nature of race, religion and politics in Malaysia.
A poem in commemoration of Bleak House Books, an independent bookshop in Hong Kong, which ceased operations in October 2021. The store is set to reopen in upstate New York in the spring of 2023.
Eighteen Singaporean poets write with a refreshingly mawkish-free assurance about crises of identity, neo-colonialism, the place of LGBTQ people in society and mummy-daddy issues in New Singapore Poetries, edited by Marylyn Tan and Jee Leong Koh.
In Voices: Essays Celebrating East and Southeast Asian Identity in Britain, edited by Helena Lee, Asians living in the UK ponder questions of identity, belonging, cultural cringe and family relationships.
Ducky Tse was an established photographer in Hong Kong when, at the age of fifty, he decided to uproot and relocate to Taiwan. He bought a van and refurbished it, driving it around the country. Through his photographs, he reflects on a new chapter of his life.
In a family that struggles to express affection physically or verbally, food has become a means of demonstrating connection, care, and a deep love.
Remembrance of indigenous histories and erasure is painful. But to remember politically and ethically, despite the ways memory has been dismissed or commodified, is to be hopeful and future-focused. Nabilah Husna on the power of indigenous memory.
Due to an outward appearance of bloodless harmony, the experience of racism in Singapore is akin to background noise that only minorities can hear. A review of Brown Is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore, edited by Kristian-Marc James Paul, Mysara Aljaru and Myle Yan Tay.
A short story by Kathrina Mohd Daud.
Written in the late 1950s while Mochtar Lubis was under house arrest, Twilight in Jakarta was smuggled overseas, translated by Clarie Holt, and published by Hutchinson & Co in 1963. A revised version by John McGlynn was published by the Lontar Foundation in 2014.
The repressive era of Xi Jinping is often contrasted with the 1980s, when the question of what China could become seemed remarkably open. But it is during the fourteen years between 1978 and 1992, delineated in Julian Gewirtz’s Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s, that the foundations for Xi’s rule were laid.
Amid the bloody war on drugs and the Covid-19 pandemic, political cartoonists in the Philippines, like Kevin Raymundo and Andoy Edoria, have produced hard-hitting work that has struck a chord with their fellow Filipinos.
For those curious about Indonesian music, Padang Moonrise: The Birth of the Modern Indonesian Recording Industry (1955-69) is a fascinating portrait of a precarious young country trying to protect its cultural identity while opening itself to the world.
A diary kept by Esther Kim to document her early months in Taipei, and her interactions with people from different backgrounds who have gathered to learn Mandarin.
A profile of Kenny Chan, who worked at Books Kinokuniya from 2001 to 2019. Today, he continues to roam the aisles of the flagship Singapore store, and talks to Toh Ee Ming about his enduring love of reading.
A short story by Azrin Fauzi, translated from Malay to English by Pauline Fan.
An Australian activist takes on China
An interview with Bilahari Kausikan
Life in the new Hong Kong
A short story from Bangladesh
32 years of Hong Kong’s only French language bookshop
Truth and reflection at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal
Alternative lifestyles under the spotlight in Singapore
Civil war in Myanmar is killing thousands of civilians
The Chinese Communist Party consolidates it’s power
Where does the national language of Cambodia come from?
Chinese – and Taiwanese – identity in the New World
A new book examines the challenges facing Cambodia’s ‘Great Lake’
Sufi poet Zareefa Jan spins words in Kashmir
The spy novel in the ‘Chinese century’
The women of the Vietnamese national weightlifting team overcoming cultural norms
China’s popular prints beguile and enchant
You are never alone in a Kathmandu neighbourhood – or are you?
Indonesia in the 1960s, through the prism of post-colonialism
Buddhist amulets as essential expressions of Buddhist religiosity
Cho Nam-joo puts Korean society under the spotlight
Undocumented and displaced communities in Malaysia
A poem from Johanna Carissa Fernandez.
A poem from Ivan Stacy