Mourning for a dark room
Xuân Tùng
This is what you have to do to navigate life in Vietnam: accept that things are precarious and constantly vulnerable to change.
Category: People & Places
Hold sway the water
Dương Mạnh Hùng
Rather than imposing a narrative or privileging the human perspective, Jeanne Penjan Lassus’s works attune to the rhythms, temporality, and micro-activities of a place—observing plants, animals, and environmental shifts with patience and openness.
Singing in the open air
Angela Sim
In Singapore, Chinese street opera survives not through preservation alone; it also requires constant recreation and regeneration.
The end of an era
Mohsina Malik and Ashish Kumar Kataria
Despite its closure, Parsiana remains an archive of cultural memory, journalistic courage, and collective identity, ensuring that future generations will not be left with a historical void.
Rocking and rolling
Pippo Carmona
The story of Philippine music post-Marcos is not one of political liberation but of a transition from the chains of censorship to the cushioned shackles of commercialism.
Cultural misinterpretation
Nathalie Chi
Hongkongers’ defence of bamboo scaffolding in the aftermath of the Tai Po fire wasn’t just about a material; it became part of efforts to defend the things that make the city what it is.
The tracks of history
Leong Kar Yen
Sri Lanka’s railways aren’t just conveyances with spectacular views; they’re also an integral part of the country’s story.
Quiet persistence
Adil Amin Akhoon
Kashmir has lived many seasons of erasure: newspapers censored, cable channels muted, voices disappearing overnight. But books linger in the physical world longer than speeches or tweets.
To the Timor Sea
Lila Roberts
A trip across Timor-Leste turns into a lesson on its history, its people, and its hope for the future.
Straight outta Kutaraja
Ilya Katrinnada
In Aceh, hip-hop is more than just a genre; it’s also an opportunity to express pride in one’s homeland and pay homage to tradition.
A borderlander’s reckoning
Wavie Hu
“The mountains are high and the emperor far away.” Reckonings from a borderland—on walls, my friend J, and choosing a life in diaspora.
Street cries
Phạm Thu Trang
Street cries in Vietnam are more than simple calls of commerce; they form an urban soundscape—a way of sensing time, place, and season.
Let them sing
Tashny Sukumaran
The documentary Araro Ariraro traces the history of Tamil plantation labour in Malaysia through folk songs.
The murder of Affan Kurniawan
Sylvie Tanaga
Indonesians were already furious at their government, seen as out-of-touch at a time of economic hardship. After an armoured police vehicle ran over a young delivery rider, they became unstoppable.
Bringing Iwao home
Kirsten Han
Hakamata Iwao is believed to have been the world’s longest-serving death row prisoner. For more than half a century, his sister Hideko has never given up on him.
The librarian of Vietnam’s banned books
James Tager
In a nondescript office on a university campus in Taipei, Trịnh Hữu Long maintains one of the world’s most extensive collections of Vietnamese banned books.
Mutual aid
Pablo Bayer
An exhibition in Pattani brings art collectives from three countries together to create dialogue on communal work and solidarity, encouraging people to look beyond stereotypes of Thailand’s deep south.
In search of ilish
Mohsina Malik and Ashish Kumar Kataria
In Bengali culture, ilish is deeply intertwined with identity, memory and celebration. But the fish has also been caught up in questions of trade, diplomacy and politics between India and Bangladesh.
The power of fandom
Nway and Htaike
In a world that often overlooks the power of young people online, fan communities have emerged as an unseen engine of revolution in Myanmar
No straight lines in Shivajinagar
Sudipto Sanyal
Neighbourhood conversations, sights and sounds in Shivajinagar.
The ‘desert book’
Nat Ty
Attempting to rebuild their relationship after her coming out, a daughter finds a momentary connection with her mother over Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara.
In the company of ghosts
Leong Kar Yen
On not coming to terms with the past in Indonesia.
A passage to Bohemia
Jonathan Victor Baldoza
A historian journeys to České Budějovice in Bohemia in search of the archive of Filipiniana left behind by Ferdinand and Friedrich Blumentritt.
Bringing back the dead
Leong Kar Yen
When families affected by extrajudicial killings in the Philippines speak and shed tears of sorrow and anger in front of legislators and flashing cameras, they’re finally able to transform shame into outrage.
In search of Khieu Ponnary, Pol Pot’s first wife
Kate Gauld
Khieu Ponnary, once called the “mother” of the Khmer Rouge, had seemingly vanished from history while the regime was at its height.
Bhopal, forty years on
Claudio Avella
Forty years after the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, activists and survivors are still struggling for justice and accountability.
Far and away
Connla Stokes
Andrew Lam had never set out to be the preeminent chronicler of the global Vietnamese diaspora, but realised that “when I spoke up for those that couldn’t, I found my tongue”.
Growing readers in Cambodia
Tom Marshall
Publishing in Cambodia is still a fledgling, fragile industry, but it’s growing fast.
My brief career as a propagandist
Andreas Pohl
“Apart from illustrating how invested the authorities still are in shaping the official story of Vietnam’s wars of liberation, my experience at Thế Giới also revealed an almost religious faith in the power of the written word.”
Stranger than (Conradian) fiction
Oliver Raw
Did the man who inspired a character in Joseph Conrad’s novels leave behind a fortune in a Swiss bank?
Foreign influence
David Frazier
While the voices and expressions in Chinese rock have come from Chinese musicians, outsiders have consistently injected know-how and resources into the country’s marginalised underground musical movements.
Fleeing the draft
Jatuporn Susuadmo
Young people from Myanmar are being forced to choose between survival and service in a conflict they had no say in and strongly object to.
Making protests fun
Seulki Lee
How does one save the world against evil with little more than one’s own imagination? When faced with hopeless nonsense from the political leadership, what can one do with their writing?
Too much for the lens
Sabahat Ali Wani
Through their exposure in front of the camera—as well as their work behind it—the faces and bodies of Kashmiri women not only become visible but also assert themselves on their own terms.
Encounter and exchange
Marj Evasco, Lily-Rose Tope, Michelle Aung Thin
Scenes and reflections from Bohol.
The long road
Tom Vater
Nepal’s Supreme Court has ruled in favour of marriage equality, but people on the ground say there’s still a long way to go before same-sex marriage gains acceptance across the country.
Points deducted for
Sreedhevi Iyer and Balli Kaur Jaswal
How to score points when the score-board always changes?
Vietnam’s Latin script
Thiện Việt
The adoption of chữ Quốc ngữ, the Vietnamese alphabet that has officially been in use for over a century now, was a notable part of Vietnam’s effort to pull itself out of China’s orbit.
The hardliner
James Crabtree
Matt Pottinger doesn’t much like the term “China hawk”. Even so, he’s become one of the most prominent voices in the United States pushing for a tougher line against Beijing.
Writing Myanmar
Peixuan Xie
For San Lin Tun, writing about Myanmar in English is a way for Myanmar writers to take control or ownership of the country’s narrative.