Mekong Review

Category: Southeast Asia

Passport renewed

Benjamin Zawacki

Yo and Noom choose their books, in English and Thai, with care and purpose to ensure that Passport Bookshop has a clear identity and its patrons a quality read.

Reading Ma Sandar in Chiang Mai

Joe Freeman

It is especially important to pay attention to Myanmar right now, but the future of Burmese-language instruction in English is uncertain. Joe Freeman speaks with linguist Justin Watkins about his work.

Holding the line

Kirsten Han

It was hoped that social media would facilitate democracy. Today, we worry about misinformation polarising society and undermining democracy.

A professional amateur

Brendan Ryan

It’s hard to pin down exactly how to describe Đinh Nhung and what she does. Her work has spanned art installations, photography, curation and the compilation of lexicons of queerness in Vietnam.

Conservation stories

Wayne McCallum

Lifting the stone on ‘Big Conservation’, Sarah Milne’s book demonstrates how conservation is inherently political—an effort to impose meaning on to landscape and people.

The dog days of Burma

Daniel Benowitz

When Oliver Slow writes that the Myanmar military must return to the barracks, he presumably means they should only be in the barracks. Readers may wonder if they were ever so confined.

Operation Corporate

Salil Tripathi

What Philip J. Stern offers is a reflection on the nature of power—how organisations created to share risks and raise capital for economic activities ended up becoming a dominant force.

The road to Muse

Bryony Lau

What happens in a border town when the border is closed? Bryony Lau travels to Muse in Myanmar’s northeast and reflects on its history and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Merantau

Daryl Qilin Yam

Queer Southeast Asia provides a multifaceted mosaic of the region, stretching for all to see the complexities that will always simmer beneath the volume’s name.

Weaving memories

Florence Kuek

The publication of The Age of Goodbyes—the English translation of the award-winning novel by Li Zi Shu—was a celebrated event, eagerly awaited by connoisseurs and enthusiasts of Malaysian Chinese literature.

An upland fable for ailing times

Marco Ferrarese

In Melody Kemp’s debut novel, Tree Crime, a young Lao teenager turns detective as a deadly virus circulates in her village. Marco Ferrarese reviews a story about the costs of ‘progress’ at the expense of natural ecosystems.

The Claim

Akiya

A short story by Akiya, translated by Adriana Nordin Manan.

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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