Claiming home
Carolyn Nash
Ava Chin’s memoir is a story of roots dismissed and homes denied.
Category: Reviews
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.
Translating Javanese
Jennifer Lindsay
She Wanted to be a Beauty Queen is a good read for anyone, but, together with supplementary material like George Quinn’s comprehensive afterword, is an especially terrific resource for students of Indonesian or Southeast Asian literature.
Barnard’s bestiary
Peter A. Coclanis
That animals and plants have been inserted, in increasingly powerful ways, in historical narratives represents a powerful challenge to human-centred accounts that have long been dominant.
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.
Living otherwise
Kirsten Han
The works featured in Joanne Leow’s monograph, Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise, are examples of (mostly) Singaporeans who refuse to conform to top-down formulations of how to live on this island.
Sustaining freedom
Richard Heydarian
How did the Philippines descend into a demagogic dystopia? How can one explain the rise of the proto-fascist ideology of Dutertismo? And what are the lessons for democracies in the twenty-first century?
The massacre America erased
Timothy McLaughlin
Americans like to think that the most cruel excesses of colonialism are reserved for the histories of the British or the French, but Kim A. Wagner draws connections between American behaviour in the Philippines and the tactics of other colonial powers.
Cracks in our memory
Khải Đơn
Not many Vietnamese books keep track of the experience of living under suffocating communism in the North or keeping up with the get-rich-quick sentiment dominant in the South. Thuận’s Elevator in Sài Gòn captures this with nuance and peculiarity.
Jhumpa Lahiri and the things left unsaid
Siddharth Dasgupta
In the celebrated writer’s short story collection, human brittleness and the everydayness of identity play out in quiet episodes beneath the crumbling gaze of the Eternal City.
A family under occupation
Emily Ding
In Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made, a family is undone by a secret betrayal during the British and then Japanese colonisation of Malaya.
A new chapter
Darshini Kandasamy
Over a quarter of a century, Malaysiakini grew from a scrappy start-up to a Malaysian media institution. In some ways, to know the history of this news portal is to know the history of modern Malaysia.
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.
Off the rails
Edith Mirante
Clare Hammond, author of On the Shadow Tracks, did not love the trains she rode. But her exploration of Myanmar’s dilapidated tracks reveals the link between the railways and the military’s power, while documenting the lives on and around ramshackle trains.
Autopsy of a democracy
Colin Meyn
Gordon Conochie’s book amounts to perhaps the most detailed autopsy yet of the death of Cambodia’s democracy.
Weretigers, we’re tigers
Alicia Izharuddin
As the forest and the tiger vanish, the myths that enchant them evolve and find their way into other vernaculars beyond folklore and popular beliefs.
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.
Shades of amnesia
Johanna M. Costigan
In their respective books, Ian Johnson and Louisa Lim look at China’s underground historians of one kind or another.
Chinggis worship
Munkhnaran Bayarlkhagva
The transnational reproduction of Chinggis worship in Mongolia is part of a concerted effort to bring back an identity-defining practice.
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.
Bomb pond
Agnès Bun
In short vignettes, Y-Dang Troeung gives a compelling account of the journey which brought her family from Cambodia’s Kampong Thom to white rural Canada, beyond the feel-good newspaper headlines.
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.
Complex inheritance
Ann Ang
The Second Link curates writing that moves beyond the “exhausted metaphors and dusty tropes” of the longstanding rivalry between Malaysia and Singapore.
Gimme some truth
Nick J. Freeman
Susann Pham’s Vietnam’s Dissidents is a bold piece of empirical work and a welcome and timely addition to the literature on contemporary Vietnam.
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.
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.