Mekong Review
LightNews LightNews
banner
mekongreview.com
Mekong Review
@mekongreview.com
1.5K followers 110 following 230 posts
A quarterly magazine of arts, literature, culture, politics, the environment and society in Asia, written by people from the region or those who know it well.

Subscribe: https://mekongreview.com/subscribe/

Newsletter: https://bit.ly/mekongreviewweekly
Posts Replies Media Videos
mekongreview.com
Bring a unique piece of Mekong Review history home with you this year! There's still time to support us by purchasing an original watercolour painting of one of our print issue covers by Erica Eng : ko-fi.com/mekongrevi....

A heartfelt thanks from us to you, this holiday season.
December 23, 2025 at 4:48 AM
mekongreview.com
Looking for a special gift for a loved one--or yourself--this holiday season? How about choosing one of Erica Eng's beautiful watercolour paintings on our online shop: ko-fi.com/mekongrevi....

Purchasine each art piece is also a meaningful contribution to Mekong Review's year-end push!
December 19, 2025 at 12:25 AM
mekongreview.com
Playing with nationalism is to take part in a risky game. A reflection by Peixuan Xie, prompted by Thai–Cambodian tensions earlier this year, before conflict flared up again.

Read here: mekongreview.com/del...

Subscribe: mekongreview.com/sub...
December 10, 2025 at 4:04 AM
mekongreview.com
Celebrate 10 years of inspirational Asian literature by supporting us with an annual subscription! The code MR10 is valid until November 30 so act fast.

mekongreview.com/sub...
November 24, 2025 at 10:00 AM
mekongreview.com
Really looking forward to everyone reading our tenth anniversary edition! It’ll be with our stockists in November, and is already at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival bookstore 🤩🤩🤩
October 30, 2025 at 2:51 AM
mekongreview.com
We're compiling our mailing list for the next issue on 13 October—if you'd like your subscription to start with the November 2025 issue, remember to subscribe to Mekong Review before this weekend! (And remember our discount code!)

mekongreview.com/sub...
October 8, 2025 at 3:40 PM
mekongreview.com
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.

Read more: mekongreview.com/mal...

Subscribe: mekongreview.com/sub...
Malayness By Rowena Abdul Razak Dina Zaman’s Malayland emerged from the pandemic, motivated by questions about what makes Malays tick in the twenty-first century—what drives their politics, beliefs, desires and fears. Across seven chapters, she takes us through the interviews and interactions she’s had, either personally or through IMAN Research, the think-tank she founded. Her range is impressive: from the rural to the urban, from different social, political and academic backgrounds. Although her book is readable and familiar, quite “come close and let me share with you, okay?”, it’s packed with information, research and academic rigour. What makes the work even more potent is that she puts herself under the spotlight too. Malayland is as much a personal quest for identity as it is a community’s. Another important thread is the role of Islam—how it has helped Malays, whether it has made them progress or regress, if it’s a thing to celebrate or fear. As Dina discovers, it really depends who you ask. Everyone has their own unique experience and approach, but everything becomes hazy when you look at things collectively. Read more on mekongreview.com Subscribe to keep us going!
September 19, 2025 at 8:34 AM
mekongreview.com
We're turning 10 soon! To celebrate, we're sharing a discount code, valid until the end of November. If you want your subscription to start with the November 2025 issue (our 10th anniversary issue!), remember to subscribe by 10 October, before we compile our mailing list!

mekongreview.com/sub...
September 17, 2025 at 4:13 AM
mekongreview.com
A rare comic on Mekong Review! This comic by Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray was produced as part of our partnership with RMIT University's nonfiction/lab, responding to the prompt 'hope in the everyday'.

Read it here: mekongreview.com/fli...

Subscribe: mekongreview.com/sub...
September 10, 2025 at 2:30 AM
mekongreview.com
In the face of funding cuts and growing oppression, Cambodian reporters cling on to hope through memories of a golden age of journalism.

Read more: mekongreview.com/mem...

Subscribe: mekongreview.com/sub...
Memories of a golden age By Sokummono Khan As conversations grow heavy, many journalists turn to their “golden age”—a mental refuge. Mech Dara recalls the competition and urgency between the Cambodia Daily and the Phnom Penh Post. Sovann Sreypich, who began her journalism career in earnest at CamboJA in late 2021, feels she “wasn’t born early enough” to witness a golden age but remembers what it used to be like: “I saw people consuming news like drinking bottled water—they had choices and they read and listened with pride… but during my time, covering court cases and social activism has become less confrontational compared to the older generation. I didn’t witness the boldness and raw courage when journalism felt powerful.” The idea of a golden age allows us to tell a story, even if it’s just to ourselves. For me, talking about them means searching for ‘Trey Visay’—a compass—to reclaim meaningful values and understand where we want to go. While it may not be historically precise, it carries emotional truth. If we want to do the right thing, to preserve a vestige of hope, we need to follow Trey Visay, pointing us to a golden age that we must believe could come again. Read more on mekongreview.com Subscribe to keep us going!
September 3, 2025 at 9:06 AM
mekongreview.com
Half an hour to closing time and this is all we’ve got left at the booth 🥰🥰🥰
August 31, 2025 at 11:32 AM
mekongreview.com
Here at lyf Farrer Park running a booth in support of the launch of Mynah Magazine’s latest issue!

If you’re in Singapore, drop by before 8pm to pick up a copy of our magazine or get access to an event-exclusive discount for subscriptions!
August 31, 2025 at 5:48 AM
mekongreview.com
In a world that often overlooks the power of young people online, fan communities have emerged as an unseen engine of revolution in Myanmar.

Read more: mekongreview.com/the...

Subscribe: mekongreview.com/sub...
August 27, 2025 at 2:04 AM
mekongreview.com
"...the moment darker aspects of its past are discussed, Indonesia retreats like a wounded animal into a world of myopia and amnesia."

Read more: mekongreview.com/in-...

Subscribe: mekongreview.com/sub...
In the company of ghosts by Leong Kar Yen Like any young postcolonial nation, Indonesia has spent much of its existence as a sovereign state trying to carve an image it can show the world in all its power and glory. But the moment darker aspects of its past are discussed, Indonesia retreats like a wounded animal into a world of myopia and amnesia. In the Southeast Asian context, notions of ‘reconciliation’ and ‘coming to terms’ are often tantamount to forgetting. It’s as if each successive administration hopes that the perpetrators of state violence will grow old, die and disappear without anyone noticing. It’s so much more convenient this way: the state will not only be able to evade responsibility but also leave the door open to reviving old scapegoats or finding new ones. I suppose that’s why they seem happy to keep the wandering spirits exactly where they are, ready to be weaponised for political expedience. Read more on mekongreview.com Subscribe to keep us going!
August 20, 2025 at 1:05 AM
mekongreview.com
It’s August, which means a new issue of Mekong Review 🥳

In this issue: young K-pop stans in Myanmar join resistance efforts, the contestation of Indonesia’s history, an interview with Saigon Soul Revival… and more!

Order online: ko-fi.com/s/a3e8a4c60d
August 1, 2025 at 6:53 AM
mekongreview.com
Did the man who inspired a character in Joseph Conrad’s novels leave behind a fortune in a Swiss bank?

Read more: mekongreview.com/str...

Subscribe: mekongreview.com/sub...
Stranger than (Conradian) fiction by Oliver Raw A significant presence in Joseph Conrad’s work was Syed Abdullah Al Jufri, Mohsin’s eldest son, who managed the family’s trading operations in Berau and the neighbouring Bulungan Regency. He appears in Conrad’s Lingard Trilogy as Syed Abdulla bin Selim—a pious Muslim, ruthless businessman and son of “the great Mohammedan trader of the Straits” who seeks to take over Lingard’s trade monopoly. “Owner of ships, he was often on board one or another of them. In every port he had a household—his own or that of a relation—to hail his advent… In every port there were rich and influential men eager to see him,” Conrad writes. The real-life Abdullah led a peripatetic life, traveling through Bombay, Calcutta, the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal before taking over his family’s far-reaching business interests. Today, he has direct descendants living in Borneo, Java, Sumatra, Malaysia and Singapore. Read more at mekongreview.com
July 23, 2025 at 5:58 AM
mekongreview.com
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.

Read more: mekongreview.com/sha...

Subscribe: mekongreview.com/sub...
Shades of the same colour by Taeyeon Song In A Fractured Liberation: Korea Under US Occupation, diasporic Korean historian and author Kornel Chang paints a picture of a post-Second World War Korea, finally free of Japanese colonial rule, searching for a singular vision of what independence looks like. Although anything seemed possible for a brief period in time, the ongoing rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union led not only to the indefinite division of the Korean peninsula into a “North” and “South” but also to the shattering of dreams of democracy and freedom for Korean people themselves. For the Korean diaspora (which includes both Chang and myself), the mirror of US history does not reflect back to us the image of John Wayne riding over a hill on his horse to save the day, but rather a bewildering portrait of racism, displacement, sadness and urgency—a portrait without faces like ours. Chang is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark, with a research focus on US–East Asia relations. His academic background comes through exceedingly clearly in a narrative that’s well-researched, compelling and unapologetic in its addressing of uncomfortable truths. Chang skillfully illustrates the ways in which the US government weaponised Korean people against themselves to further propel the US’s Cold War anti-Communist aspirations while, at the same time, horrifyingly employing Japanese colonial techniques of governance to weaponise the southern portion of the Korean peninsula as its own Eastern Hemisphere chess piece. Read more on mekongreview.com
July 16, 2025 at 12:58 AM
mekongreview.com
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.

Read more: mekongreview.com/per...

Subscribe: mekongreview.com/sub...
Set in the year 2035, we’re brought into a world where Hong Kong is under strict surveillance by the Chinese regime—with a social credit system that can detect even an individual’s vital signs—and Taiwan is a military base for the US and a battlefield between the US and China. It’s no longer a competition between democracy and authoritarianism; the US is now ruled by a person who seized power through a coup and drove the nation toward oligarchy. It’s remarkable that the authors started working on this book years ago—their prediction of the US’s political direction seems, unfortunately, to be correct. Read more on mekongreview.com Personal/Political struggles by C.J. Anderson-Wu You Must Take Part in Revolution presents a pre-apocalyptic story co-authored by journalist Melissa Chan and activist artist Badiucao. Chan was expelled by China in 2012, presumably due to her reports on sensitive political issues, such as the use of secret illegal prisons in Beijing. Meanwhile, Badiucao’s works have been banned by the Chinese regime and he now lives in exile. His art in You Must Take Part in Revolution is powerful and nostalgic, vividly representing the spaces he’s no longer able to step into. This book combines powerful imagery with a compelling plot to convey the political turmoil we’ve experienced and might face in the near future.
July 9, 2025 at 7:58 AM
mekongreview.com
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.

Read more: mekongreview.com/for...

Subscribe: mekongreview.com/sub...
Foreign influence by David Frazier In 1979, when Graham Earnshaw, a British journalist, first moved to Beijing to be a Reuters correspondent, he packed a guitar. In the days when the Chinese capital was just emerging from the chaos of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and a musical landscape of little more than revolutionary opera, he formed a rock band with other western expats. They called themselves the Peking All-Stars and performed at expat watering holes—spaces that enjoyed relatively greater degrees of free expression in a restrictive China and, as American scholar Andrew Jones put it, a form of unofficial “extraterritoriality”. In the early 1980s, aspiring local musicians regularly joined Earnshaw’s band in open jams—a young trumpet player named Cui Jian and saxophone player Liu Yuan among them. In May 1986, Cui, with Yuan in his band, became the first in China to perform rock ‘n’ roll to a national audience. Playing on a state television music programme, their rendition of ‘一无所有 (Nothing to My Name)’ is widely credited as the moment Chinese rock was born. It inscribed Cui as the father of the genre and the song as one of its most enduring anthems. Read more on mekongreview.com
July 2, 2025 at 8:04 AM
mekongreview.com
Khieu Ponnary, once called the “mother” of the Khmer Rouge, had seemingly vanished from history while the regime was at its height.

Read more: mekongreview.com/in-...

Subscribe: mekongreview.com/sub...
In search of Khieu Ponnary, Pol Pot’s first wife By Kate Gauld Flicking through a copy of Ben Kiernan’s The Pol Pot Regime, I catch a reference to the Women’s Association of Democratic Kampuchea. Recalling Nuon Chea’s words, I slow down. It’s here that I learn of Ponnary—first, that she was the president of the Women’s Association, then of her relation to three of the regime’s most influential actors. I’m almost indignant that I’ve not heard of her before this. “Ponnary was said to have been ill since 1975 and later to have suffered insanity,” Kiernan writes. She’s not mentioned again. I recall how the international prosecutor had described that day in April 1975 when the Khmer Rouge came into power. Within hours, he’d said, the streets of Phnom Penh “became choked” by over two million people “on a forced march, against their will, into the unknown”. Women who’d just given birth in hospital were “forced out into the heat with their babies in their arms”. Families were separated, often forever. This crime and all that followed, the prosecutor declared, was “among the worst horrors inflicted on any nation in modern history”. What did it mean for Ponnary to have become ill in that year of all years? Read more on mekongreview.com
July 1, 2025 at 4:36 AM
mekongreview.com
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.

Read more: mekongreview.com/det...
Detoxification by Kirsten Han “In itself, the poison is neither good or bad, it becomes bad only when we allow ourselves to be poisoned.” Josephine Chia has lived her life by this philosophy, refusing to be “poisoned” by all the struggles and trauma she’s experienced; from poverty in childhood to divorce and a loving marriage turned toxic by alcoholism and abuse. While cooking has been a way for her to express her creativity and claim her identity as a proud Peranakan woman for a long time, Chia came to writing later in life. Between these two outlets (and yoga), she’s managed to purge the poison that might otherwise have wrecked the colourful, flavourful textures of her life. With The Missing Anthology: Stories from Singapore’s Sex Workers, Project X seeks to correct the severe imbalance in who gets to shape narratives about sex workers. “Storytelling is a deeply human act,” they observe in the prologue. “It helps us make sense of our experiences, build connections, and ask others to bear witness. Yet, in Singapore, the voices of sex workers are stolen from them.” The essays, poems, stories and artwork presented in this anthology—collated from writing workshops and responses to open calls—aren’t just about creative expression; they’re also acts of reclaiming and seeing “what happens when sex workers are allowed to tell their stories on their own terms”. Read more on mekongreview.com Subscribe to keep us going!
June 18, 2025 at 2:49 AM
mekongreview.com
Dorothy Wai Sim Lau undertakes a nuanced interrogation of how fame, altruism and regional identity intersect in Asia’s transnational mediascape.

📖: mekongreview.com/sta...
Star power By Mathieu Berbiguier In this social media age, it’s common to see celebrities use their platforms in service of causes that are, or at least appear to be, important to them. This might be a consequence of repeated catastrophes befalling parts of the world—prompting many people, from the ordinary to the dazzlingly famous, to speak out—but it could also be that there’s an increasing correlation between a fan’s values and a celebrity’s messaging. Simply put, fan support might sometimes depend on what position a celebrity takes on an issue. A celebrity’s publicly expressed political opinions are often not free from professional or financial influences. In this context, what does it mean to refer to a celebrity as an “activist” or “philanthropist”? Lau defines celebrity philanthropists “not as famed individuals but as an imagined alliance that can evoke a sense of ethnic communal identity within and across distinctive geopolitical spaces”. She builds on the concept of “inter-Asia” to examine the dialogue between diasporic communities and their origins. For example, Lau’s analysis of pandemic-era audio-visual texts reveals how Asian celebrities from the global diaspora articulated “crisis-driven solidarity” against Covid-related anti-Asian racism. She points to three initiatives—#OurIdentity, a virtual concert, #WashTheHate, an anti-hate awareness campaign, and #TakeOutHate, an initiative to support Asian restaurants in the US—as examples of activism that, despite being largely centred on the US and the Asian American community, created solidarity among celebrities across Asia. Read more on mekongreview.com Subscribe to keep us going!
June 11, 2025 at 4:36 AM
mekongreview.com
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.

📖: mekongreview.com/bri...
Bringing back the dead by Leong Kar Yen I am told, during my travels in the Philippines, that there’s a superstition where a chick is placed atop a coffin and fed with grains. It’s believed that, as the chick pecks at the food, it’s also nipping away at the conscience of the perpetrator responsible for the death of the person lying within. This was apparently a common practice at the funerals of the many victims shot down by faceless gunmen—or even by the police in alleged instances of “nanlaban”, where law enforcement officers justify their use of lethal force by claiming that the individuals had resisted arrest. Do the beaks of these chicks only peck at the consciences of the killers, or does this symbolic demand for accountability go further up the chain? Sociologists have long pointed out that marginalised groups suffer from disenfranchised grief: given their low status in society, their plights are rarely properly recognised. Like the families of people on death row, the families of EJK victims are burdened with stigma and shame, forcing them to hide their pain away. But now that Duterte’s the one facing judgement, these families have become a potent political force holding a mirror up to the Filipino establishment. The harms inflicted upon them are, at last, being widely witnessed and seen as injustice. When they speak and shed tears of sorrow and anger in front of legislators and flashing cameras, they’re finally able to transform shame into outrage. Read more on mekongreview.com Subscribe to keep us going!
June 4, 2025 at 11:58 AM
mekongreview.com
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.

📖: mekongreview.com/fle...
Fleeing the draft By Jatuporn Susuadmo Fighting on multiple fronts against different opponents, the Myanmar military has unleashed devastating violence but also suffered defeats and incurred massive casualties. In response, the government announced in February 2024 that, if called upon, men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five and women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven will be required to serve in the military. Although this conscription is supposed to be for a term of up to two years, the law says it can be extended up to five years during a state of emergency—which Myanmar has been in since the coup. A spokesperson for the junta said that at least 13 million Myanmar citizens are eligible to be drafted. Zin Ko isn’t sure if he might be arrested before he manages to escape Myanmar. He dreams of becoming a professional video editor but suspects this ambition will never come to fruition. “It won’t be any different from other Myanmar people who also have their own dreams,” he says. “We have to live lives with no way out because of the evil military dictatorship that refuses to accept defeat.” It’s a pain shared by many of Myanmar’s young generation. Just a few weeks after the junta started enforcing the conscription law, it was estimated that thousands of young people flocked to Thailand, joining the many Myanmar citizens already living in Thailand illegally. Read more on mekongreview.com Subscribe to keep us going!
May 28, 2025 at 10:32 AM
mekongreview.com
Forty years after the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, activists and survivors are still struggling for justice and accountability.

📖: mekongreview.com/bho...
May 21, 2025 at 12:59 AM