Mekong Review

Category: Southeast Asia

Caught in between

Rosalie Metro

While the Myanmar military is responsible for the violence, Kaamil Ahmed points out in I Feel No Peace: Rohingya Fleeing Over Seas and Rivers that more parties are complicit in the exploitation and abuse of Rohingya refugees.

Personal embodiments

Will Nguyen

Through his maternal grandfather’s life and his own experiences, Will Nguyen reflects on how personal stories are documented in Vietnam, and the relationship between the diaspora and mainland Vietnamese.

Choosing family

Lam Le

The ‘white saviour’ narrative is a common trope in transnational adoptions. In Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family, Erika Hayasaki tells the story of three Vietnamese adoptees, and unpacks dominant assumptions about power, privilege and the meaning of family.

Leaving a mark

Teeranai Charuvastra

Some might dismiss graffiti as “rubbish”, but street art can tell a story about a city’s history, politics and culture. A review of Bangkok Street Art and Graffiti: Hope Full, Hope Less, Hope Well by Rupert Mann.

Who is Auntie?

Kirsten Han

In Ajoomma, a Singaporean-South Korean co-production directed by He Shuming, an auntie travels to South Korea to visit the shooting locations of her favourite K-dramas… but gets far more than she’d bargained for.

Family and identity

Erna Mahyuni

In The Accidental Malay by Karina Robles Bahrin, protagonist Jasmine Leong—heiress of a Chinese family business dealing in pork products—discovers that she’s actually Malay Muslim. What ensues highlights the fraught nature of race, religion and politics in Malaysia.

Sexy and Merlion-free

Linda Collins

Eighteen Singaporean poets write with a refreshingly mawkish-free assurance about crises of identity, neo-colonialism, the place of LGBTQ people in society and mummy-daddy issues in New Singapore Poetries, edited by Marylyn Tan and Jee Leong Koh.

A family’s love language

Wong Ee Xin

In a family that struggles to express affection physically or verbally, food has become a means of demonstrating connection, care, and a deep love.

Tending to wounds

Nabilah Husna Binte Abdul Rahman

Remembrance of indigenous histories and erasure is painful. But to remember politically and ethically, despite the ways memory has been dismissed or commodified, is to be hopeful and future-focused. Nabilah Husna on the power of indigenous memory.

Knowing and embodying

Faris Joraimi

Due to an outward appearance of bloodless harmony, the experience of racism in Singapore is akin to background noise that only minorities can hear. A review of Brown Is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore, edited by Kristian-Marc James Paul, Mysara Aljaru and Myle Yan Tay.

Dark cityscape

Ben Murtagh

Written in the late 1950s while Mochtar Lubis was under house arrest, Twilight in Jakarta was smuggled overseas, translated by Clarie Holt, and published by Hutchinson & Co in 1963. A revised version by John McGlynn was published by the Lontar Foundation in 2014.

Stand up

Beatrice Go

Amid the bloody war on drugs and the Covid-19 pandemic, political cartoonists in the Philippines, like Kevin Raymundo and Andoy Edoria, have produced hard-hitting work that has struck a chord with their fellow Filipinos.

New sounds for the old order

Yudhistira Agato

For those curious about Indonesian music, Padang Moonrise: The Birth of the Modern Indonesian Recording Industry (1955-69) is a fascinating portrait of a precarious young country trying to protect its cultural identity while opening itself to the world.

Do you love books?

Toh Ee Ming

A profile of Kenny Chan, who worked at Books Kinokuniya from 2001 to 2019. Today, he continues to roam the aisles of the flagship Singapore store, and talks to Toh Ee Ming about his enduring love of reading.

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