Mekong Review

Category: Volume 10

The power of fandom

Nway and Htaike

In a world that often overlooks the power of young people online, fan communities have emerged as an unseen engine of revolution in Myanmar

A bankruptcy and a dream

Mali Wongwiwat

The Miss Universe franchise has been dismissed as a chauvinistic relic, but Thailand’s long-standing fixation with such pageants suggests that there are deeper implications.

The ‘desert book’

Nat Ty

Attempting to rebuild their relationship after her coming out, a daughter finds a momentary connection with her mother over Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara.

빛 (Hope)

Taeyeon Song

While Y2K’s SM Town artists reflected a new era and hopeful future, the K-pop artists of 2025 have been positioned as soft power cultural pawns.

Resurrection

Tse Hao Guang

Waves Rising beautifully commemorates Ho Poh Fun’s life’s work, perhaps feeling like it needed to smoothen out some things bubbling just under the surface.

Malaysia’s reading riddle

Susan Loone

Banning books might bring the Malaysian government short-term political gain, but this restriction of access to different perspectives could have serious long-term repercussions.

Malayness

Rowena Abdul Razak

Dina Zaman brings a lot from her past to Malayland, but she’s also firm in looking forward and seeking the humanness in Malaysia’s obsession for categories and othering.

Singapore’s utopia of rules

Naima Morelli

David Graeber’s notion of “total bureaucratisation” isn’t just a fitting analytical tool for global contemporary life; it also mirrors, with uncanny accuracy, the paradoxes of Singapore’s cultural policy.

Bringing back the dead

Leong Kar Yen

When families affected by extrajudicial killings in the Philippines speak and shed tears of sorrow and anger in front of legislators and flashing cameras, they’re finally able to transform shame into outrage.

Far and away

Connla Stokes

Andrew Lam had never set out to be the preeminent chronicler of the global Vietnamese diaspora, but realised that “when I spoke up for those that couldn’t, I found my tongue”.

Star power

Mathieu Berbiguier

Dorothy Wai Sim Lau undertakes a nuanced interrogation of how fame, altruism and regional identity intersect in Asia’s transnational mediascape.

Detoxification

Kirsten Han

A review of two books on finding—or perhaps ‘freeing’ is a better word—one’s voice through acts of creation, whether it’s prose, poetry, painting, drawing or cooking.

My brief career as a propagandist

Andreas Pohl

“Apart from illustrating how invested the authorities still are in shaping the official story of Vietnam’s wars of liberation, my experience at Thế Giới also revealed an almost religious faith in the power of the written word.”

Foreign influence

David Frazier

While the voices and expressions in Chinese rock have come from Chinese musicians, outsiders have consistently injected know-how and resources into the country’s marginalised underground musical movements.

Activist imagery

John Mateer

In a new banner by Taring Padi and Noongar artists, the Noongar figures and Australian fauna and flora integrate with images from an rebellious Indonesian proletarian class in a bold synthesis, creating a dream-like, political logic.

Real men eat tofu

Nick J. Freeman

Despite tofu’s lack of structural integrity, Russell Thomas notes that its versatility has given it the resilience to “stand up in a range of figurative and real-life settings”.

Persistence

Debra Carney

Luise Ahrens, a Maryknoll nun and education innovator from the US, worked with seismic stamina for twenty-six years to build up higher education in Cambodia.

Fleeing the draft

Jatuporn Susuadmo

Young people from Myanmar are being forced to choose between survival and service in a conflict they had no say in and strongly object to.

Shades of the same colour

Taeyeon Song

Kornel Chang, a diasporic Korean historian and author, paints a picture of a post-Second World War Korea searching for a singular vision of what independence looks like.