Mekong Review

Category: East Asia

The decoloniser

Munkhnaran Bayarlkhagva

Gankhuugiin Purevbat was never keen to claim credit, but his contribution to the rebirth of Mongolian Buddhism and the decolonisation of Mongolia cannot be denied.

Family duty

Kang-Chun Cheng

Creating Feeding Ghosts, a graphic memoir, was the only way Tessa Hulls could think of to repair her relationship with her mother and make sense of the responsibilities borne by each generation.

Jade, Pine, Orchid, Kidney

Robert Wood

Eileen Chong’s poetry defies national categories, making its way into cracks and crevices like an orchid in cement, grown beautiful and a little wild.

Tongue-tied

Divya Vaze

Hong Kongers from the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines and Indonesia have lived in the city for a long time. Yet Asian minority Hong Kongers often end up segregated from ethnic Chinese children in the education system.

Memory as resistance

Sophie Beach

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 changing India

Salil Tripathi

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.

The power of queer humour

Seulki Lee

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.

Illusions

Ilaria Maria Sala

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

When good Samaritans have money

Kevin Yam

The Hong Kong elite are said to be interested only in making money and not in universal values like democracy, human rights and the rule of law. But that’s not true.

Colonisation and modernisation

Muhammad Nadeem

Hafsa Kanjwal contends that Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed’s state-building practices helped strengthen India’s hold over Kashmir while also enabling modernisation, which paradoxically reinforced a sense of alienation rather than reconciliation.

Protest and consensus

Paul French

One of the interesting ideas thrown up in Hong Kong a few years back has been a certain nostalgia for the late colonial period. But how enlightened was colonial public policy-making?

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.

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.

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.

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.