Mekong Review

Writing about depression

Tanmoy Goswami

Baek Sehee writes: “The world tends to focus too much on the very bright or the very dark.” She steers clear of both extremes in her book. For this alone, it merits attention.

Ghosts of a red Ferrari

Yangyang Cheng

More than a conventional detective story, The Soul of Beijing unfolds into a vivid portrayal of the bustling metropolis, filled with colourful characters from all walks of life.

Bombays of the mind

Radhika Oberoi

It is impossible to mention Mumbai without alluding to its former name, Bombay. Radhika Oberoi reflects on reading Salman Rushdie’s writing about the city.

Weaving memories

Florence Kuek

The publication of The Age of Goodbyes—the English translation of the award-winning novel by Li Zi Shu—was a celebrated event, eagerly awaited by connoisseurs and enthusiasts of Malaysian Chinese literature.

An upland fable for ailing times

Marco Ferrarese

In Melody Kemp’s debut novel, Tree Crime, a young Lao teenager turns detective as a deadly virus circulates in her village. Marco Ferrarese reviews a story about the costs of ‘progress’ at the expense of natural ecosystems.

The Claim

Akiya

A short story by Akiya, translated by Adriana Nordin Manan.

The play of power

Pauline Fan

Mak Yong encompasses elements of dance, drama, storytelling, music and ritual, and is a women-centred folk tradition nurtured by community bonds.

To the left

Erin Hale

‘Tò-uat’ means ‘turn left’ in Taiwanese Hokkien—a signal of political orientation rather than literal direction—and the bookstore’s website describes itself as “Taiwan’s only social movement–focused bookstore”.

Caught in between

Rosalie Metro

While the Myanmar military is responsible for the violence, Kaamil Ahmed points out in I Feel No Peace: Rohingya Fleeing Over Seas and Rivers that more parties are complicit in the exploitation and abuse of Rohingya refugees.

Stating the obvious

Seulki Lee

Seulki Lee talks to Raphael Rashid about identity, belonging, and the things that people don’t want to acknowledge or discuss in South Korea.

Life’s choices

Kevin Yam

Murong Xuecun fled China after writing his book Deadly Quiet City: Stories from Wuhan, COVID’s Ground Zero. Today, he’s living in exile in Australia. It was never obvious that his life would go on such a trajectory. Kevin Yam chats to him about his writing and his choices.

Identity on Huaxin Street

Liang Liang

The neighbourhood around Huaxin Street in Taipei is known as Little Burma. Multiple generations have sunk their roots into this neighbourhood. It’s not a question of assimilation, but a mix of everything to create a new and complex political identity.

Personal embodiments

Will Nguyen

Through his maternal grandfather’s life and his own experiences, Will Nguyen reflects on how personal stories are documented in Vietnam, and the relationship between the diaspora and mainland Vietnamese.

China’s sharp power

Richard Heydarian

While his predecessors chose to downplay China’s power, Xi Jinping has led an overhaul of China’s domestic political landscape and foreign policy. A review of Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World by Joshua Kurlantzick.

Engineering away dissent

Nicholas Yong

What can a government achieve when given maximum access to public data? Josh Chin and Liza Lin of the Wall Street Journal do a deep dive into the impact of China’s panopticon in Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control.

Choosing family

Lam Le

The ‘white saviour’ narrative is a common trope in transnational adoptions. In Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family, Erika Hayasaki tells the story of three Vietnamese adoptees, and unpacks dominant assumptions about power, privilege and the meaning of family.

Leaving a mark

Teeranai Charuvastra

Some might dismiss graffiti as “rubbish”, but street art can tell a story about a city’s history, politics and culture. A review of Bangkok Street Art and Graffiti: Hope Full, Hope Less, Hope Well by Rupert Mann.

Who is Auntie?

Kirsten Han

In Ajoomma, a Singaporean-South Korean co-production directed by He Shuming, an auntie travels to South Korea to visit the shooting locations of her favourite K-dramas… but gets far more than she’d bargained for.

Political tech

Peter Tasker

The world uses a staggering amount of processor chips every year. The semiconductor industry is therefore not just a big deal in trade and commerce, but also in geopolitics. A review of Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller.

Solipsism

Pratinav Anil

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.

Family and identity

Erna Mahyuni

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.

In Autumn Gale and Rain

Cleo Adler

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.

Sexy and Merlion-free

Linda Collins

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.

Between cultures

Rowena Abdul Razak

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.

Letting go

Ducky Tse

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.

A family’s love language

Wong Ee Xin

In a family that struggles to express affection physically or verbally, food has become a means of demonstrating connection, care, and a deep love.

Tending to wounds

Nabilah Husna Binte Abdul Rahman

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.

Knowing and embodying

Faris Joraimi

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.

Dark cityscape

Ben Murtagh

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.

Reworking narratives

Jonathan Chatwin

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.

Stand up

Beatrice Go

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.

New sounds for the old order

Yudhistira Agato

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.

Mandarin class

Esther Kim

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.

Do you love books?

Toh Ee Ming

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.