Between climate change and a lack of jobs at home, working-class Indonesians are increasingly vulnerable to recruitment by scam syndicates in countries like Cambodia.
With Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld, Andrew Rankin provides the clearest and best-sourced narrative history of the yakuza in English.
Bertil Lintner on what first drew his interest in Southeast Asia, his family’s long trek across northern Burma in the 1980s, and his long-standing connection to Burma and its people.
When BTS refused to submit their music to the Grammys for consideration, artists worldwide were filled with pride but also envy. Many know that to walk away from the table, one must first be invited to sit down.
It begins with the scent of dry straw and the hands of devotees, but ends in a 72.5 metre roar of smoke and light. A tradition that survived the 1880s is being woven back to life, one joss stick at a time.
Prabowo’s government now calls the “spread of LGBTQ culture” a non-military threat. Rafly Gilang Pratama grew up in Indonesia carrying some of the same prejudice.
As authoritarian control makes it increasingly difficult to engage in ‘hard’ resistance and confront power directly, fiction can step in to tease out the things that might otherwise go unsaid.
The lives and experiences of queer Singaporeans should not be ignored any further, and books like SQ21 – Families and Fearfully & Wonderfully Made place these stories front and centre.
According to Aluk Todolo, the indigenous religion of the Toraja in the Tana Toraja highlands of Sulawesi, death is not a single event but a passage to Puya, the spirit world.
More than thirty years after the first rave, Taiwan’s rave scene is once again booming, thanks to a surging global interest in electronic and techno music and a new generation of social media–savvy organisers.
A short story by Wawan Kurniawan, translated from Indonesian by the author.
Michelle Cho and Joe Lim of Singing Beetle on the company’s first K-pop group, 1VERSE, and their vision of a space that looks out for artists’ happiness, mental health, and ability to make a sustainable living.
Belonging is of our own making, and it can look like a space just about wide enough to hold all our mismatched parts.
Read together, three books on China take us through short-lived periods of openness, political shifts, and reminders that present realities may not last forever.
For some, wearing áo dài can feel like a hindrance. For others, it’s the only extravagance they have.
Tiananmen Square is a major tourist attraction, but it also carries a far greater political meaning. While working as a fixer for a foreign production crew, a young Beijing native reflects on memory, presence, and silence.
Adorable by Wan Phing Lim makes attempts to make sense of things visible: coping mechanisms appear not as background habits but as part of the very fabric of social reality.
Works like Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia highlight how prone people everywhere can be to excess, even violence, as they pursue competing political visions and ambitions.
A poem by Xin Ru, translated from Chinese by Zheng Wei.