Cybercrime unchained
Nick J. Freeman
Cybercrime is a big business, and some of its leading perpetrators are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities in Southeast Asia.
Category: Reviews
Pol Pot’s guests
Colin Meyn
Meeting with Pol Pot adds to Rithy Panh’s resume as the most prolific maker of films about the regime that took his family and terrorised his country.
The ink that never dries
Alfian Sa’at
By writing poetry from death row, Pannir Selvam Pranthaman sets out to prove that he’s more than just a condemned prisoner.
Memories of disaster
Shu-Mei Huang
As discussions of a so-called nuclear power renaissance resurface, Return to Fukushima pushes us to (re)consider not only the ways we live but also the exploitative systems through which energy is produced and consumed.
Those who left on those who stayed
Will Nguyen
Claudia Krich’s Those Who Stayed: A Vietnam Diary is an invaluable primary source for those studying regime change, documenting firsthand the disintegration of the South Vietnamese government and the coalescence of a byzantine military administration in its wake.
Taiwan’s historical burden
Jacques van Wersch
The conceit of Chris Horton’s Ghost Nation is that most of the world treats Taiwan like it doesn’t exist, and he makes the case that Taiwan deserves bolder recognition.
After the Malaysian ‘gay novel’
Alicia Izharuddin
The exploration of a character’s sexuality in Tash Aw’s latest novel has triggered backlash among conservatives in Malaysia, but pushing back in today’s fraught times is itself a complex undertaking.
Silencing
Paul French
For English language readers outside China, these translations of The Running Flame and Soft Burial help to reframe Fang Fang as a writer of more than Wuhan Diary.
Lying flat in Qing China
Sebastien Smith
As an attempt to preserve what is gone, Shen Fu’s writing endures as a reminder to treasure what we still have and what we will someday mourn.
A party man
Martin Laflamme
Despite enduring humiliation, punishment, and incarceration, Xi Zhongxun’s loyalty to the Party—and even his “emotional attachment” to Mao Zedong—never wavered.
Reflections on a golden period
Kenneth Barrett
Stephen Simmons has produced an important record, with a wealth of historical information, that highlights the work of artists during the Sangkum era.
Clerical politics
Michel Chambon
With both humanist insight and historical precision, Paul P. Mariani shows how Bishop Louis Jin Luxian was, above all, a Jesuit of his time.
Resurrection
Tse Hao Guang
Waves Rising beautifully commemorates Ho Poh Fun’s life’s work, perhaps feeling like it needed to smoothen out some things bubbling just under the surface.
Malayness
Rowena Abdul Razak
Dina Zaman brings a lot from her past to Malayland, but she’s also firm in looking forward and seeking the humanness in Malaysia’s obsession for categories and othering.
A world that no longer exists
Victoria Audu
If history is written by the victors, then literature is the rebellion of the defeated.
Singapore’s utopia of rules
Naima Morelli
David Graeber’s notion of “total bureaucratisation” isn’t just a fitting analytical tool for global contemporary life; it also mirrors, with uncanny accuracy, the paradoxes of Singapore’s cultural policy.
The curious case of the Cold War
Dương Mạnh Hùng
Two group shows staged in Bangkok question mainstream Cold War narratives through contemporary art.
Star power
Mathieu Berbiguier
Dorothy Wai Sim Lau undertakes a nuanced interrogation of how fame, altruism and regional identity intersect in Asia’s transnational mediascape.
Detoxification
Kirsten Han
A review of two books on finding—or perhaps ‘freeing’ is a better word—one’s voice through acts of creation, whether it’s prose, poetry, painting, drawing or cooking.
Personal/Political struggles
C.J. Anderson-Wu
You Must Take Part in Revolution combines powerful imagery with a compelling plot to convey the political turmoil we’ve experienced and might face in the near future.
Activist imagery
John Mateer
In a new banner by Taring Padi and Noongar artists, the Noongar figures and Australian fauna and flora integrate with images from an rebellious Indonesian proletarian class in a bold synthesis, creating a dream-like, political logic.
Real men eat tofu
Nick J. Freeman
Despite tofu’s lack of structural integrity, Russell Thomas notes that its versatility has given it the resilience to “stand up in a range of figurative and real-life settings”.
Shades of the same colour
Taeyeon Song
Kornel Chang, a diasporic Korean historian and author, paints a picture of a post-Second World War Korea searching for a singular vision of what independence looks like.
Preserving Cantonese
Chong Ja Ian
Simin Li’s book is a reminder that continuing assertions about the singularity of Chinese culture and politics belie the pluralism and diversity of the Sinophone tradition.
Architecture in context
Troels Steenholdt Heiredal
Shifting Horizons: The Generation of Emancipatory Architecture in Taiwan is a unique exhibition including the many aspects that make up architectural production and attempting to locate the formation of contemporary Taiwanese architecture.
Claiming home
Carolyn Nash
Ava Chin’s memoir is a story of roots dismissed and homes denied.
Lessons in fragility
Radhika Oberoi
Nature provides expressive backdrops for Han Kang’s fiction; while she chronicles human frailty and barbarity, she also allows the light to seep in through the foliage.
When Gilbert & George went to China
Paul French
Among a post-Tiananmen flurry of activity, Gilbert & George, the British duo who’d been a dominant force in the UK’s 1980s art scene, made a trail to China and inspired many looking to break free of their constraints.
Moke
Martin Stuart-Fox
Lieutenant Colonel E.D. Murray—“Moke” to friends and fellow officers—knew nothing about Cambodia, but for a few brief weeks towards the end of 1945, he was, in his own words, its “uncrowned king”.
The valued and the expendable
William Arighi
Both Patricia Evangelista and Neferti X.M. Tadiar’s books question what it means to be human. While some are valued because of their contribution to capitalism, those who are less productive in the profit-making sense are treated as disposable.
The mystery of the Little People
James Baron
Few who encounter Pas-ta’ai, the ritual to the “little people”, and the complex, sometimes contradictory, folklore associated with it are unmoved. Some even become obsessed with unravelling the ceremony’s mysterious origins.
A different kind of love story
Catherine Wang
Beyond the reality of family relationships, How To Make Millions Before Grandma Dies paints a portrait of Thai Chinese culture that’s at once singular and relatable.
We are gonna make it
Ruby Thiagarajan
Instead of asking what is or how to be one’s authentic self under capitalism, Peripathetic is curious about whether capitalism leaves us with any room for authenticity at all.
Survival and unconventional success
Ariel Athwal-Yap
The lesson in Ganapathy’s book is salient and applicable to societies beyond Singapore: working class ethnic minorities disenfranchised by dominant societal structures often find themselves enmeshed with criminal justice institutions.
Lost and found
Miguel de la Fuente-Lau
For a relatively slim volume, Lio Mangubat’s Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period, 1565–1946 covers a broad swath of Philippine history.
Racism and repression
Andreas Harsono
Indonesia’s National Library may not contain a lot on West Papua, but five books, reviewed by Andreas Harsono, describe its tormented history.
Imagining Orwell in Burma
Joe Freeman
Theroux’s Burma Sahib is a novel about awakenings: sexual, political and literary. Filling a historical void with fiction, Theroux invents and probes every nook and cranny of Orwell’s life in Burma.
The defector talks
Paul French
Thae Yong-ho’s book, a must read for the dedicated band of North Korea watchers, reminds us of the millions still struggling to survive between the 38th Parallel and the Yalu River.
Compromise(d)
Martin Laflamme
Zhou Enlai might have attempted to temper some of Mao Zedong’s worst excesses, but he did not have the courage to defy Mao when it counted the most.
Enduring
Kirsten Han
Hai Fan’s Delicious Hunger doesn’t focus on major historical milestones, but it doesn’t mean that the experiences described in this collection of short stories are inconsequential—quite the opposite.