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.
Category: Issue 34
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.