The years immediately following Indonesian independence were optimistic ones. The early 1950s are remembered as the “parliamentary period” of pluralism, when communists, socialists, nationalists, Islamists and the military vied for positions in the government. But debate between these parties was fierce from the beginning and quickly became vicious. After national elections in September 1955, a…
The rise of China as a global superpower, and the myriad impacts of “rising China” on Southeast Asia have energised a sizeable volume of scholarly literature and punditry. Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)-Yusof Ishak Institute—one of the leading think tanks in Southeast Asia—has made notable efforts in explaining these impacts, especially in relation…
Daniel Ehrlich spent four decades as a laboratory head at MIT, leading national programs in semiconductors and optics. Beginning in 1987 and continuing for the next 32 years, he travelled to Myanmar almost every December, crossing twelve time zones, arriving alone in the dark, and checking into a modest Mandalay hotel called the Nylon Hotel…
On June 10, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned two pieces of artwork to Cambodia: an Angkor statue and a sandstone lintel. It’s the latest repatriation effort by the U.S.’s premier art museum, and the third time the Met has had to give up Cambodian artifacts specifically. Matthew Campbell’s The Man Who Stole…
A New York Times headline from late February read “Cambodia Celebrates the Return of Looted Artifacts From a Tainted Dealer”. It wasn’t front-page news, and readers may have missed the connection to previous scandals involving such storied institutions as New York’s Metropolitan Museum, the Smithsonian, the Denver Art Museum, Sotheby’s and Spinks, all of whom…
A sweeping historical novel, Dương Hướng’s No Man River charts Vietnam’s path to independence from the anticolonial struggle against the French to what is known locally as the “American War” and finally the brief Sino-Vietnamese border war in the late 1970s. It covers these conflicts in fewer than 250 pages, and without a single battle…
Eka Kurniawan’s The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks follows the coming of age of Sato Reang, a mischievous boy growing up in a small Indonesian town, whose life moves between childhood pranks, religious pressure, friendship with the deeply pious Jamal, and the consequences of choosing rebellion over obedience. From the very beginning, Sato Reang announces his…
War, in No Man River, is an endless affair. Sprawling from the 1950s to the 1970s, the novel follows a close-knit cast of characters in a northern Vietnamese village from the end of the war for independence from the French colonial power to the war between north and south Vietnam. As fathers, brothers, sons headed to…
On 6 February 1945, just three days after the U.S. army started to fight the Japanese in the city of Manila, General Douglas MacArthur declared that “Manila had fallen.” In truth, the battle would take another month, as U.S. forces fought their way through block after block. By the end of the battle, which featured…
Borneo—split between two countries, home to some of the world’s oldest rainforests and a vast array of animal and plant life—is back in the news. The island is set to be home to Nusantara, Indonesia’s new planned political capital set to, maybe, open in 2028. And the Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak—different from the…
Time is one of the grand themes of literature and art. A new comics anthology, Delay, brings together 11 pieces of graphic fiction in the short form from various Southeast Asian artists including Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and connects the concept of time to such situations as feeling stuck, waiting, hesitation and anxieties…
World War II birthed the anti-colonial Indian National Army (INA), a force composed of former imperial troops and civilian recruits that fought with Japan against the British and helped to accelerate India’s independence from Great Britain. Like most aspects of World War II, these developments were messy, complicated, and filled with tragedy. Gautam Hazarika, a…
A book that attempts to tell the story of one of the world’s largest and most complex islands across vast spans of time—from deep geological history to the urgent pressures of the present—Olivier Hein’s Borneo: The History of an Enigma announces its ambition from the first pages. Such scale is risky: many books with grand…
Keith Dalton was a journalist with foreign correspondent dreams. He had them as a 10-year-old. They never went away. Dalton was 25 when he crammed a typewriter in his backpack and set off from Australia to Southeast Asia, convinced he could be a self-made foreign correspondent. Writing as he went, Dalton took buses, trucks, trains, planes,…
Set in Singapore, Vancouver, London, and the spaces in between, the short stories in Heaven Has Eyes offer an imaginative, penetrating look at the complexities of migration, belonging, and a desire to find a home in the world.