While Lee Yuri’s stories don’t feel explicitly political, the decades of loss experienced by Korean society stream like a current beneath her characters, who are reacting to their increasingly commodified, high-pressure society.
Is the twenty-first century an Asian one? According to former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan, this is entirely the wrong question to be asking.
Mother Mary Comes To Me is Roy’s most astute political act; in it, she fearlessly makes her most intimate confessions and, by doing so, reclaims the conditions under which she can be known.
A trainee and the tattoo artists that she works with in a studio in Seoul reflect on craft, self-expression, and how upcoming changes in legislation will impact the evolution of both the culture and industry of tattooing in Korea.
This is what you have to do to navigate life in Vietnam: accept that things are precarious and constantly vulnerable to change.
Is Tojo Hideki a “Great Man” who single-handedly determined the course of history, or is he merely a character in a bigger story, a reflection of many crashing political and social forces?
Packed with prose, poetry, stories, and reportage, Ocean, as Much as Rain is essential reading for all Tibetans and for anyone who wants to understand what it means to live under colonial occupation.
Rather than imposing a narrative or privileging the human perspective, Jeanne Penjan Lassus’s works attune to the rhythms, temporality, and micro-activities of a place—observing plants, animals, and environmental shifts with patience and openness.
In Singapore, Chinese street opera survives not through preservation alone; it also requires constant recreation and regeneration.
Even if you declare yourself politically apathetic, politics still has a way of seeking you out and banging on your door.
I strive to become someone breaking my back to harvest something better. A way to be home with my loved ones.
China has resumed the role that it occupied for most of the last two millennia—until the nineteenth century—as the world’s dominant economic force.
DELAY: A Comics Anthology is a timely salve in an era where artists are facing an existential battle against artificial intelligence and digitisation.
A short story by Sasti Gostama, translated from Indonesian by Awi Chin.
The publication of The Albatross File is very welcome for those with an interest in the Singapore story—though less for the hitherto secret documents it reproduces and more for the hitherto secret oral histories.
Arnold Is A Model Student shines a light on an unfair system, challenging the notion of what it means to be a “model” within such broken structures.
Air India, in its heyday, commissioned Salvador Dalí to design an ashtray and paid him with an elephant. If the airline once embodied elite privilege, then its decline also represents the assertion of more normative market forces.
With Tibetan Sky, Ning Ken has written a novel that’s self-aware, complex, and genre-defying. It tackles a few myths about Tibet, while passing over some uncomfortable truths.
In Singapore, queerness is considered an aberration—it jams up the works, causes panic and confusion. Numerous accounts of in-person discrimination support this, especially when it comes to hair.
Casimiro Villas Jr lost everything in Super Typhoon Haiyan. Years later, he finds that family can be rebuilt not from blood, but from grace.
A short story by Liv.
A copy of Koh Hoon Teck’s Panton Dondang Sayang Baba Baba Pranakan
A poem by Ryan J.M. Tan