Mekong Review

Category: Volume 9

The psyche of ancient China

Brandon C. Yen

Throughout ancient China, mortuary cultures had been evolving for thousands of years before the Qin dynasty, even long before the date of the oldest extant form of systematic Chinese writing.

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.

A tale of two homes

Emma Pei Yin

The China-Australian Migration Corridor delves deep into historical foundations, contemporary trends and policy considerations related to movement between China and Australia.

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.

in-hale ex-hale

Taeyeon Song

The End of August centres voices rarely heard in English-language fiction—Koreans living in Japanese-occupied Korea and the zainichi Korean diaspora of Japan.

Poetry and music

Jhilam Chattaraj

An interview with Sudeep Sen, a poet who has edited influential anthologies and offered poems to a polarised world in times of crises.

The braves

Desmond Sham

Among the Braves is an attempt to tell the story and struggles of a city, through the lives of the people who have been active in a decades-long movement for democracy.

Fact in fiction

Radhika Oberoi

Arundhati Roy’s fiction and non-fiction offer a worldview bristling with the fervour of a pamphleteer, the intuitiveness of old lovers, the curiosity of a child.

Monogatari

David Wills

Beyond healing himself, Haruki Murakami, through his stories, has grown more interested in helping others heal.

Dyeing art

Adil Hussain and Owais Gul

The ancient practice of dyeing yarn in Kashmir used to be the source of livelihood for hundreds of families, but modern techniques and tools have slowly pushed the tradespeople into the margins.

Forging identity

Martin Laflamme

Many Taiwanese have developed a new sense of self, proud of the island’s unique history, and Lee Teng-hui played a key role in that process.

First bend of the Nujiang

Jinendra Jain

The Kawa Karpo is one of the most sacred mountains in Tibetan Buddhism. A 250-kilometre circumambulation is completed by thousands of pilgrims every year.

Change

Peixuan Xie

As a mainland Chinese kid, I saw Hong Kong portrayed on TV as the epicentre of capitalism and sophistication; Hong Kong in real life, when I finally got to see and feel it for the first time, was much more than that.

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.

Complexity in Yunnan

Wong Chee Meng

The Panthay Rebellion is a cautionary tale of what can go wrong when a central government is absorbed in its own priorities, leading to ethnic stereotyping and distrust between communities.

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.

Different futures

Liew Kai Khiun

In Hieyoon Kim’s Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea, South Korean cinema is seen as part of a broader democratic social movement.

Mothers and daughters

Gayathrii Nathan

In eleven short stories, Prasanthi Ram probes the lives and relationships of nine women, exploring the narratives of love (or hate) that we develop within ourselves, alongside the ones shared with our families.  

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.

Scenes of city life

Amarsanaa Battulga

Both The Sales Girl and If Only I Could Hibernate are contemporary coming-of-age stories set in Ulaanbaatar that thwart most viewers’ expectations of Mongolian cinema.

Assignment: China

David Frazier

An interview with Mike Chinoy about covering China for almost half a century, and his new book, Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic.

A voice abroad

Peter Guest

The Chinese Communist Party has “restructured the social order and silenced the people on the ground. Now they’re trying to extend their hands overseas, to silence overseas activists,” Christopher Mung says from the UK.

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.

When good Samaritans have money

Kevin Yam

The Hong Kong elite are said to be interested only in making money and not in universal values like democracy, human rights and the rule of law. But that’s not true.

Colonisation and modernisation

Muhammad Nadeem

Hafsa Kanjwal contends that Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed’s state-building practices helped strengthen India’s hold over Kashmir while also enabling modernisation, which paradoxically reinforced a sense of alienation rather than reconciliation.

Protest and consensus

Paul French

One of the interesting ideas thrown up in Hong Kong a few years back has been a certain nostalgia for the late colonial period. But how enlightened was colonial public policy-making?

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.