Mekong Review

Category: Southeast Asia

Political theatre

Calum Stuart

Singaporean actor Lim Kay Siu on the differences between acting in Hollywood and in Singapore, the power of theatre to raise public awareness of important issues, and getting political on live streams while playing a ukulele.

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 forgotten lion

Liew Kai Khiun

Despite having held a number of important portfolios as a minister in the city-state’s early years, S. Rajaratnam’s legacy remains largely obscured in Singapore’s public imagination.

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.

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.

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.

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.
 

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.

Grey, all grey

Haresh Sharma

Like many in Singapore, artists exist on a strange monochromatic spectrum—the lighter side provides access to opportunities and awards, the darker potentially leading to loss of employment. How should one navigate this space?

Looking in

Ruby Jusoh

The rich traditions of Adat Perpatih in Negeri Sembilan demonstrate how deeply rooted customs can evolve while maintaining their core values.

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.

A bookworm’s haunt

Nicholas Yong

A focus on Singaporean authors, coupled with the fact that bookstores in the city have found it increasingly difficult to survive, makes Book Bar feel like an anomaly.

A-ma

Sawarin Suwichakornpong

“Whenever I think of a family member, I always think of A-ma. Her life tells the story of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia.”

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.

“I is another”

Sasha Han

In his films, Singaporean director Daniel Hui seeks out peripheral figures, tending to them with the kind of attention usually reserved for prominent historical figures.

Literary censorship

Thiện Việt

With little transparency, top-down literary censorship in Vietnam is complex, capricious and contingent upon those implementing the ‘rules’.

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.