Mekong Review

Category: Southeast Asia

Onward the water flows

Dương Mạnh Hùng

The arts can remind us of our connections to home and nature as we are propelled forward by development projects that prioritise profit over nurturing rootedness and well-being.

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.

Art beyond tourism

Naima Morelli

Bali is home to a thriving community of local artists with international pedigrees, all actively working from the island, opening their studios to visitors and fostering a local art community.

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.

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.

Jangan buang current

Carolyn Oei

bani haykal’s work embodies durational labour, culminating in serial ruminations on topics that keep him awake at night—capitalism, environmental protection, widening inequality divides.

Chinese / Indonesian

Yudhistira Agato

Living in Indonesia most of my life, I’ve always felt that I might be visibly ‘too Chinese’. In fact, Indonesia’s tricky relationship with its ethnic Chinese population began all the way back to the Dutch occupation.

Polish Joe

Kam Raslan

In the two novellas, journeys depart from or hope to return to “an eastern port” (Singapore) but instead they both disappear into the obscurities of the seas.

This is not the Galapagos

Robert Wood

Like a magnificent tortoise, my aunt, the long-time Singaporean activist Constance Singam, ambles towards us to meet my children for the first time.

Tales from the Shan hills

Kenneth Barrett

In Maymyo Days: Forgotten Lives of a Burma Hill Station, Stephen Simmons does not dwell on the crusty stragglers of the Raj. He chooses to focus on those who made a lasting contribution of some kind, whether tangible, cultural or political.

Just transitions

Kadal Jesuthasan

Climate activists are still stumped by the question of how to ensure that public power results in real, meaningful change. At the same time, the climate movement is setting its sights further than ever.

Making way

Yann Bigant

Touching that sensitive Cambodian topic of land ownership and dispossession, Further and Further Away questions the nature of relationships entertained with the land.

Fists and demons

Marco Ferrarese

The Indonesian film industry is often underrated and overlooked, but Timo Tjahjanto is one of its directors to have attracted international attention for his work.

Art as catalogue

Jonathan Victor Baldoza

What unfolds in Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book is Shubigi Rao’s documentation of her encounters with texts in varying formats that, at some point in the past, confronted ‘banishment’.

Public noise

Mikko Toivanen

Noise can be a powerful tool of protest but also healing, its cathartic value directly correlated with its loudness.

Party membership

Thiện Việt

One does not need to understand communist ideology to become a member of the Communist Party of Vietnam. “All you need to do is to pass their test,” said one state employee.

Dictionary, revis(it)ed

Ben Rost

Tracing a Khmer-language dictionary’s trajectory across the past century of Cambodian history offers insights into the ways language has been called on to construct—and to challenge—notions of national identity and community.

Sea change

Darren Wan

What sets Rachel Heng’s historical fiction apart is how she moves beyond this understanding of History (with a capital H) by showing how grand events are mediated by everyday interactions.

Mommie dearest

David Scott Mathieson

Law-Yone’s penchant for the telling anecdote, the observation of, and connectivity to, the seemingly incidental, and the insight into the public and private personality makes this book a seminal contribution.

Building an archive

Emi Donald

The Anjaree Archive preserves material collected over the decades by one of Thailand’s first advocacy groups for gender and sexual rights. But can an archive also tell the story of its own messy creation?

What we see

Stephanie Chok

In Now You See Us, Balli Kaur Jaswal has created a social world that magnifies the indignities and frustrations of everyday life as a migrant domestic worker in Singapore.

Land of smiles?

Stephen Gregory

Our growing Thai family, now into its fourth generation, has given us plenty of smiles and laughter… and outbursts of anger and stubbornness and exasperation.

Apathy and nonchalance

Loh Pei Ying

This could be After The Inquiry’s intention: to rile us up and stir a sense of indignation at a system in which the truth might not win out over politics and power

Sporting attitude

Kirsten Han

Could distance runner Soh Rui Yong’s absence from Singapore’s national team point to something bigger about how things work? He thinks this could be a “good opportunity” to ask questions.

Peering around river bends

Emily Ding

I’ve often come to forks while travelling. Do I stop where I had planned to arrive, or do I keep going? Maybe if I go on a bit further, I might find something I have never quite seen, in quite the same way, before.

So close, too far away

Peixuan Xie

Mae Sot, Thailand, provides the anonymity a Burmese peace activist needs, although not without guarded boundaries and precarious undercurrents to navigate