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.
Category: Southeast Asia
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.
Elsewhere than Here
Brandon K. Liew and Daryl Lim Wei Jie 林伟杰
Poetry from Brandon K. Liew and Daryl Lim Wei Jie 林伟杰
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.
Ekphrasis
Michelle Aung Thin and Khin
Using the photographic archive to rethink Myanmar’s past.
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.
Kurang ajar
Es Foong and Melizarani T. Selva
Two Malaysian daughters reflect on the myths of their upbringing, and how these have facilitated and obstructed their sense of home.
Irises
Eileen Chong
A poem from Eileen Chong
The Word Museum
Damhuri Muhammad
What if politicians had to be confronted with all the words they’d threaded into false promises?
Headlines
Cassiopeia Gatmaitan
A poem by Cassiopeia Gatmaitan.
Who telegraphed the UN that our country is in good hands?
Maung Htike Aung
A poem by Maung Htike Aung.
“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’.
Navigating the fragments of history
Dương Mạnh Hùng
Politics, memory, love, obsession and death… all can become fertile material for a writer like Veeraporn Nitiprapha.
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.
An interview with Janet DeNeefe
Mekong Review
An interview with the founder and director of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival
The stubborn shrine
Matthew Fraser
The Buddermokan shrine in Sittwe is said to have been built in 1756. It has since survived colonialism, war and Nature—a stubborn relic of history in a hostile environment that wanted it gone.
The sea within
Mahen Bala and Gerhard Hoffstaedter
When rising sea levels threaten to submerge the gravesite of his father, a young man is forced to return to his hometown and confront the dilemma between honouring his father’s dying wishes or to give in to nature.
A love letter to bak chor mee
Nicholas Yong
Amid Southeast Asia’s array of noodle dishes, bak chor mee doesn’t have the exalted status of pho or pad thai. Nevertheless, it’s a beloved staple dish consumed by Singaporeans, and even became a political statement once.
A third space
Ian Hollinger
When Witit Chanthamarit was a child, independent bookstores were not the rarity they are today. In opening Vacilando, he hopes to recapture the sense of community he’d felt before.
Political machinations
David Frazier
Bertil Lintner’s book on the Wa isn’t merely a fascinating look at a little-penetrated hermit kingdom; it’s also a case study of how China manipulates the politics of its border zones in pursuit of global ambitions.
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.
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.
Delphi
Alyza Taguilaso
A poem by Alyza Taguilaso
Dear Archie
Peixuan Xie
A letter to a friend, on thoughts of ‘home’ prompted by the Thai dream-pop duo, HYBS.
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.
Love and revolution
Amy Webber
The poet Kyi Zaw Aye once asked, “How can we encounter true love in times of war?” Since the 2021 coup in Myanmar, some couples have been trying to find their own answers.
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.
Political nostalgia
Sylvie Tanaga
Decades after the end of Suharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia, a collective nostalgia for the supposed ‘good old days’—driven by historical revisionism and propaganda—is influencing contemporary Indonesian politics.
Lessons unlearnt
Michael Beltran
The destruction wrought by Typhoon Haiyan will never be forgotten by Filipinos—even if some valuable lessons still haven’t been learned a decade later.