In Bengali culture, ilish is deeply intertwined with identity, memory and celebration. But the fish has also been caught up in questions of trade, diplomacy and politics between India and Bangladesh.
In a world that often overlooks the power of young people online, fan communities have emerged as an unseen engine of revolution in Myanmar
In the face of funding cuts and growing oppression, Cambodian reporters cling on to hope through memories of a golden age of journalism.
A comic by Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray, reflecting on her shifting relationship with hope.
If history is written by the victors, then literature is the rebellion of the defeated.
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.
Forty years after the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, activists and survivors are still struggling for justice and accountability.
Dorothy Wai Sim Lau undertakes a nuanced interrogation of how fame, altruism and regional identity intersect in Asia’s transnational mediascape.
Publishing in Cambodia is still a fledgling, fragile industry, but it’s growing fast.
You Must Take Part in Revolution combines powerful imagery with a compelling plot to convey the political turmoil we’ve experienced and might face in the near future.
Nature provides expressive backdrops for Han Kang’s fiction; while she chronicles human frailty and barbarity, she also allows the light to seep in through the foliage.
How does one save the world against evil with little more than one’s own imagination? When faced with hopeless nonsense from the political leadership, what can one do with their writing?
We’re all just finding ways to relieve the anxieties of living in a world that’s spinning out of control.
Scenes and reflections from Bohol.
How to score points when the score-board always changes?
Matt Pottinger doesn’t much like the term “China hawk”. Even so, he’s become one of the most prominent voices in the United States pushing for a tougher line against Beijing.
Indonesia’s National Library may not contain a lot on West Papua, but five books, reviewed by Andreas Harsono, describe its tormented history.
Poetry from Brandon K. Liew and Daryl Lim Wei Jie 林伟杰
Like many in Singapore, artists exist on a strange monochromatic spectrum—the lighter side provides access to opportunities and awards, the darker potentially leading to loss of employment. How should one navigate this space?
Using the photographic archive to rethink Myanmar’s past.
The works featured in Joanne Leow’s monograph, Counter-Cartographies: Reading Singapore Otherwise, are examples of (mostly) Singaporeans who refuse to conform to top-down formulations of how to live on this island.
Americans like to think that the most cruel excesses of colonialism are reserved for the histories of the British or the French, but Kim A. Wagner draws connections between American behaviour in the Philippines and the tactics of other colonial powers.
Hong Kongers from the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines and Indonesia have lived in the city for a long time. Yet Asian minority Hong Kongers often end up segregated from ethnic Chinese children in the education system.
When rising sea levels threaten to submerge the gravesite of his father, a young man is forced to return to his hometown and confront the dilemma between honouring his father’s dying wishes or to give in to nature.
“Einstein saw space and time as an intrinsically linked existence: how the passing of time is relative to the space we inhabit, which is to say, how we find meaning in our lives depends greatly on where we stand.”
A letter to a friend, on thoughts of ‘home’ prompted by the Thai dream-pop duo, HYBS.
A conversation with Korean queer author and contemporary artist Ibanjiha on their art of humour and succeeding through the heteronormative and hyper-capitalist social order of South Korea.
Decades after the end of Suharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia, a collective nostalgia for the supposed ‘good old days’—driven by historical revisionism and propaganda—is influencing contemporary Indonesian politics.
A piece of flash fiction by Linda Collins and Noelle Q. de Jesus. Commissioned as part of a collaboration between RMIT’s nonfiction/lab and Mekong Review.
The Second Link curates writing that moves beyond the “exhausted metaphors and dusty tropes” of the longstanding rivalry between Malaysia and Singapore.
A renga by Mariyam Haider and Emilie Collyer. Commissioned as part of a collaboration between RMIT’s nonfiction/lab and Mekong Review.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Both Oasis of Now and Tomorrow Is a Long Time are meditations on love, time and space.
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.
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.
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.
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.