Interview with Joshua Wong

AUGUST–OCTOBER 2020 VOLUME 5, NUMBER 4 China’s Rise of Japan’s hidden hand Shenzhen pop culture

32 Plus A short story by Bao Ninh 9 772016 012803 VOLUME 5, NUMBER 4 AUGUST–OCTOBER 2020

HONG KONG 3 Kong Tsung-gan The edict

INTERVIEW 5 Elaine Yu Joshua Wong

HONG KONG 8 Jeffrey Wasserstrom City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong by Antony Dapiran; Aftershock: Essays from Hong Kong by Holmes Chan (ed)

POEM 9 Lok Man Law ‘Records of a Floating Island’

CHINA 11 Tom Baxter Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City by Fang Fang

POEMS Yuan Changming ‘Woman-radical: A feminist lesson in Chinese characters’; ‘Fragmenting: A sonnet in infinitives’

FOREIGN RELATIONS 12 Michael Reilly Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party is Reshaping the World by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

SINGAPORE 13 Theophilus Kwek Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited: Essays on Singapore Politics by Cherian George

NOTEBOOK 14 Anjan Sundaram Asia matters

INDONESIA 15 Lara Norgaard The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by Vincent Bevins

MEMOIR 16 Helen Jarvis First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks by abiburahmanH

BIOGRAPHY 17 Gozde Deniz Altunkeser MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

URBAN AFFAIRS 18 Anne Stevenson-Yang The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City by Juan Du

HISTORY 20 Paul French Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai by James Carter

JOURNAL 21 Louis Raymond Personal history

FICTION/TRAVEL 23 Emily Ding Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao

SHORT STORY 24 Bao Ninh ‘White clouds flying’

FICTION 25 David Payne Lucky Ticket by Joey Bui

FICTION 26 Esther Kim The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See; White Chrysanthemum by Mary Lynn-Bracht

THE PHILIPPINES 27 Bryony Lau Insurrecto by Gina Apostol; The Kingmaker by Lauren Greenfield; America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan

FICTION 29 Anna MacDonald Rise & Shine by Patrick Allington

POEM Siddharth Dasgupta ‘Three photographs’

NOTEBOOK 30 Pauline Fan Carried away

POETRY 31 Michael Freeman Moving House by Theophilus Kwek

CONVERSATION 32 Rupert Arrowsmith Jennifer MacKenzie

NEIGHBOURHOOD 33 Febriana Firdaus Ubud, Bali mekongreview.com PROFILE 34 Olivia Norrmén-Smith Voan Savay PUBLISHER & EDITOR Minh Bui Jones POP CULTURE 36 DEPUTYPeter EDITOR Guest Ben Wilson MANAGINGPure Invention: EDITOR How Robert Japan’s Templer Pop Culture Conquered the World CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ko ko thettby (poetry), Matt Alt Preeta Samarasan (fiction) DESIGN Jess Barr WEBSITE Nicholas Lhoyd-Owen TRAVEL 37 Marc deSUBSCRIPTION Faoite MANAGERCoffee Shu in Jeju Wen Chye SUB-EDITORS Allen Myers, Sandy Barron PROOFREADER Izzy Souster POEM Rory HarrisCOVER ILLUSTRATOR‘& Damienin’ Chavanat ARTISTS Gianluca Costantini, Charis Loke, Oslo Davis, Leto Bui Jones BOOKSELLER 38 Andrew Quilty Danish in Kabul PRINTER Phoenix Press DISTRIBUTOR APD Singapore LETTER OFFICE39 34 ForsythErfan St, Dana Glebe, New South WalesDon’t 2037, forget Australia; us [email protected] Mekong Review is published four times a year; next issue May

2 HONG KONG The edict Kong Tsung-gan

t 11 p.m. on 30 June, the Chinese Communist The edict is intended to give the CCP a free hand Party imposed on Hong Kong what it calls a in dealing with HK people however it sees fit, to keep ‘national security law’. The edict effectively HK people guessing, to instil pervasive fear throughout Amarks the end of the ‘one country, two systems’ period, society. It is already, as intended, chilling freedom of which was to last from 1997 to 2047 and the cornerstone expression in the media and on line. of which was a strict separation between the governing The edict has nothing to do with national security. systems of China and Hong Kong. No one in HK has ever threatened the security of the Article 23 of the Basic Law, the city’s mini- Chinese nation. It has to do with preserving the CCP’s constitution, obliges the HK government to enact monopoly on power. We the HK people are the CCP’s national security legislation. It had always been ‘national security’ threat. We the HK people are the understood by all concerned, no matter where they enemy. were on the political spectrum, that this was how The edict grows directly out of the CCP’s fear that such laws would eventually come about. The pro- it has lost HK. And on that point, its perception of the democracy movement argued that if such legislation political situation in HK is correct. The edict is actually were to be passed, it had to arrive ideally after or at an admission of failure: after twenty-three years of least simultaneously with passage of genuine universal rule, the CCP has so entirely lost the consent of the suffrage, for only under such an arrangement would HK people by continually rejecting their demands for sufficient democratic safeguards be in place to prevent genuine autonomy and genuine universal suffrage, as potential abuses. The first mass march of half a million promised in the Sino-British Joint Declaration and the people in post-handover HK in 2003 was against Basic Law, that the edict is the only way it believes it a previous CCP attempt to ram through national can retain control. This is the paradox of tyranny: it security legislation before allowing democracy. Both can appear omnipotent and yet it is so weak. The edict through street demonstrations and representation in represents the failure of CCP rule in HK. It is meant to the Legislative Council, the pro-democracy movement be an assertion of power, but is a sign of defeat. has always had the power to block Article 23 national security legislation until its concerns were addressed. Gianluca Costantini n 1 July, the first full day it was in effect, police So the CCP decided to disregard entirely the Basic arrested ten people under the edict. The date Law (which it authored) and Legco (though it is rigged is the anniversary of the handover of HK from in favour of the CCP, again according to rules of its in China have a long history of being used to crush OBritish to CCP colonial rule and also traditionally the own devising) and imposed upon HK something dissent. They are vaguely worded so that they can be day for a huge pro-democracy march. The march was much more draconian than virtually anyone had applied however the CCP sees fit. banned this year, as all protests have been banned for the heretofore envisaged. The HK government wasn’t The edict legalises the presence of Chinese security last six months, but in spite of police violence and mass involved, not even so much as to present the facade of agencies in HK, creating a new Office for Safeguarding arrests, an estimated 150,000 defied the ban. local participation. Top HK government officials, who National Security, which will reportedly have a staff of Of the ten arrested under the edict, one has so far themselves are unelected puppets of the CCP, didn’t even hundreds, most likely gathered from various existing been charged in court. His case is indicative of how the know what was in the edict. The full text wasn’t even state security agencies in China such as the Ministry of regime plans to use the edict. His alleged crimes are revealed until after it was promulgated. Public Security, the Ministry of State Security and the terrorism and inciting secession. What did he actually In terms of both the process of its promulgation and People’s Armed Police, all of which have a long record do? He drove a motorcycle flying a flag emblazoned with its content, the edict is not a law in any normal sense of of systematic rights abuses. This office is not under HK the most popular protest slogan of the past year through the word. Nor does it have anything to do with national jurisdiction. Indeed, the edict enables the CCP to grant a group of police officers who attempted to block him. security, again in any normal sense of the word. It is it jurisdiction over ‘serious’ cases, and defendants can be The terrorism charge presumably relates to his reckless entirely a misnomer. It is an imperial edict imposed prosecuted under Chinese—not HK—law, presumably driving. The slogan on the flag was ‘Liberate Hong Kong, by the rulers of China upon their colonial subjects in courts in China though details regarding such Revolution of our times’. After the edict came into effect, and, as such, represents the way the dictatorship sees procedures are notably absent from the 66-article edict the HK government implied that the slogan is now its relationship with the people it presumes to rule and its more than 100 pages of implementation rules. illegal as it supposedly ‘connotes independence’. That was over. CCP and HK government propaganda claims The edict also reorganises HK government news to the millions who’ve been shouting it for the past that the edict will affect only a tiny number of people, bureaucracy and requires various government bureaus year. For most, it means they want HK to be free, that but nothing could be further from the truth. It is wide and agencies to serve CCP interests. It sets up a new, is, to have genuine autonomy and democracy. Suddenly, ranging and meant to reshape Hong Kong society in the secret Committee for Safeguarding National Security these demands, which are actually conservative insofar party’s image. headed by the chief executive and a new department as they ask the party simply to live up to its legal The edict has two specific primary purposes: to put for safeguarding national security in the police obligations under the Sino-British Joint Declaration and an end to freedom protests, which have been ongoing force. The police are empowered to conduct searches the Basic Law, are deemed illegal, at least as expressed in since June 2019, and to decimate political opposition. at private properties without a warrant, restrict that slogan. So the edict is clearly meant to police speech The CCP has tried just about every means at its disposal, suspects’ movements, freeze their assets and intercept heretofore entirely within the bounds of the acceptable first and foremost using the Hong Kong police as an communications. They can require publishers, hosting and indeed protected by the Bill of Rights enshrined in occupying force to crush the protests, and found them providers and internet service providers to remove, the Basic Law. The nine others arrested were all found insufficient. Instead, the political opposition built up block or restrict access to content the police believe to be in possession of banners, flags and stickers with steam, to the point of looking to have a real chance of may be in breach of the edict. The principle of judicial statements deemed illegal. If the acts of this twenty- winning over 50 per cent of the seats in the upcoming independence is undermined: criminal trials in ‘national four-year-old motorcyclist flying a flag could constitute Legislative Council elections in September, despite the security’ cases will be heard by judges appointed terrorism and incitement to secession, then presumably fact that Legco is rigged to ensure pro-CCP dominance. directly and specifically by the chief executive for this almost anything could. From the CCP’s point of view, something had to be done sole purpose. Six judges have reportedly already been And that, again, is the point. According to this logic, to head off that democratic eventuality. appointed, but the identities of all but one are secret. I too could be charged with ‘separatism’. My recent book The edict strips away the great firewall between The edict requires educational institutions to “educate” about the protests is called Liberate Hong Kong after China and HK, establishing direct CCP rule. It creates students about ‘national security’. the slogan the regime has just declared illegal. After the four crimes: subversion of state power, secession, The edict is extraterritorial: not only HK permanent edict was announced (but before it was passed by the terrorism and collusion with foreign forces, all residents in HK but anyone anywhere can be found National People’s Congress Standing Committee), the punishable by up to life in prison. Such crimes as applied liable for violating it. book’s original printer refused, without explanation, to

3 do a second printing, and, subsequently to that, three encouragement. The CCP needs to be put on notice that other printers also declined. The trick of successful if it continues down the path of repression in HK, it will tyranny is to get the people to do much of the work of lead to substantial changes in its relationships with other censoring and policing themselves. countries. In fact, since its imposition, just about every act of An indication of just how draconian the CCP edict those involved in the HK freedom struggle has been is, is that I could be arrested, charged with ‘colluding declared to be potentially in breach of the edict. It’s a with foreign forces’, and face up to life in prison just for sword of Damocles hanging over virtually all political calling for sanctions on CCP and HK officials. And due thought, expression and action. On 11 and 12 July, the to the edict’s assertion of extraterritoriality, Mekong pro-democracy movement held primaries to choose Review could also be held liable. candidates to contest the September Legco elections. Beyond defending the integrity of upcoming Legco The evening before the primaries were to take place, elections and opposing the imprisonment of pro- police raided the office of the Public Opinion Research democracy leaders, the other urgent matter to be taken Institute, the group responsible for carrying out the Bleak House Books up by foreign countries is to ensure that HK people polls. Both prior to and after the primaries, the CCP and fleeing persecution will find safe haven abroad, at least HK government said they may be illegal under the edict. Liberate Hong Kong, the book ‘the regime has just declared illegal’ 431 refugees from HK so far. Most of them fled before The repression had the effect of making HK people more the imposition of the CCP edict, a sign of just how long defiantly eager to take part, and more than 600,000 regard to trade and other matters under the HK Policy the crackdown has been going on and that the edict is voted, a number far surpassing expectation. Act, in effect since the handover in 1997. And very just one part of the larger repression. Most HK people The CCP and HK government’s attack on the similar bills that would make it easier for HK people are stuck in HK whether they like it or not. Most HK primaries is instructive: some of the repressive measures fleeing persecution to seek refuge in the US have been people would prefer to stay in HK. It is only with great taken, such as the police raid on PORI, did not invoke introduced in the two houses of Congress, the HK reluctance and sorrow that anyone in the HK freedom the edict, while others did. Here, the edict and the People’s Freedom and Choice Act in the House and the struggle leaves. Those who do must be offered asylum. already ongoing crackdown on the freedom struggle HK Safe Haven Act in the Senate. These follow the HK intertwine. Human Rights and Democracy Act and the PROTECT he states that have spoken out loudest against The crackdown preceded the imposition of the HK Act, which became law last November. the edict are democracies with the strongest edict and has been under way for months. More than The UK declared China in breach of the Sino- ties to HK: its East Asian neighbours and the 9,500 protesters have now been arrested since last British Joint Declaration and announced plans to TAnglophones with many citizens in HK and many June. Around 1,800 have so far been put on trial. All grant a pathway to UK citizenship for up to 2.9 million HK people in their countries. Their response must be protests have been banned, and when protesters dare HK people with British National (Overseas) status. It better coordinated and ideally part of a strategy that to defy the authorities, police attack and arrest them en extended the arms embargo on China that’s been in has as its aim promotion of universal values of freedom, masse. Purges of teachers and civil servants are ongoing. place since the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre to democracy and human rights everywhere in the world. Sixty-eight pro-democracy leaders have been arrested HK, and also placed an embargo on any equipment that These days, one might feel in the minority ninety-three times, and thirty-seven are currently on could be used for ‘internal repression’. advocating such universal values on the global stage. trial, including twelve current Legco members as well as Australia announced immigration changes rendering A majority of countries has either remained silent on candidates for Legco in September. it easier for HK people to emigrate there. HK or actually supported the CCP. That in itself speaks The single most salient result of the pro-democracy The European Union expressed ‘grave concern’, volumes about the state of the world. At the most recent primaries was huge support for new young candidates. which in its typically diplomatic language amounts to session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, They are dynamic and approvingly regarded as more a strong statement, and will be limiting tech exports twenty-seven countries signed a statement condemning militant and assertive than their elders. Many rose to to HK in cases where there are grounds to suspect the CCP edict, but fifty-three others supported it, prominence in the protests. They are HK’s future. This their ‘undesirable use relating to internal repression, endorsing the very abuses the council is supposed to is why the CCP is determined to crush them. The stated the interception of internal communications or oppose. Unsurprisingly, fifty of those fifty-three happen goal of the pro-democracy movement is to win more cybersurveillance’. Japan organised a strong statement to be authoritarian states. than half of the seats in Legco, which would give the from the G7 that will most likely be followed up on later HK is the litmus test, the West Berlin of the twenty- movement power to block any government measures. this year at a scheduled summit. first century. Allow the CCP to do this to HK, and it Once again, the CCP has stated that this aim is illegal And Canada, Australia, the US and the UK have will become all the more emboldened elsewhere in under the edict, as it is intended to ‘subvert the state’, suspended extradition treaties with HK. the world. It’s already flexing its military muscle on its whereas anyone familiar with democracy would say this These are so far mostly symbolic measures, meant contested border with India and in the South China Sea. is a not uncommon objective of political opposition. primarily to express disapproval, but they are important It’s using the Belt and Road Initiative to gain greater It is widely feared that the CCP will do whatever it nonetheless. At the very least, they recognise in no political influence over wide swathes of the developing can to prevent a pro-democracy majority in Legco. It uncertain terms that the political status of HK has world. Forty-three of the fifty-three countries that may use the edict and other tools to disqualify pro- changed with the imposition of the edict. And such supported the CCP edict at the UN Human Rights democracy candidates from running, as it has in the measures are perhaps sufficient for the time being as Council have Belt and Road agreements. past, but this time on an unprecedented scale. It may long as they are part of a strategic approach that includes The imposition of the CCP edict in HK has been arrest others. One reason for the timing of the edict gradual escalation. compared to the Nazis’ annexation of the Sudetenland, is that the regime was terrified by the result of district If foreign powers wish to listen to HK people, they the response of the rest of the world characterised as a council elections last November—an unprecedented will, at a minimum, impose sanctions on CCP officials form of appeasement. Some say that’s pure hyperbole. Of landslide victory for the pro-democracy movement, responsible for HK policy as well as top HK government course, there are differences, and all historical analogies which won more than 80 per cent of contested seats— officials and the current and former HK police are potentially misleading. For instance, unlike with the and it is determined to head off that result in September commissioners. The US is considering this step and has Nazis and the Sudetenland, PRC sovereignty over HK is by any and all means necessary. the legal instrument to do so under the HK Autonomy widely recognised by other states. But the edict is without Act, but the president is said to be reluctant. The UK a doubt the beginning of the end of ‘one country, two his is where the rest of the world has a role to recently imposed, for the first time ever, human rights systems’, a solemn and legally binding promise the CCP play. sanctions on individuals in Russia, Saudi Arabia and made to the rest of the world. And HK is a world city. The strongly critical reaction of a number of Burma and entities in North Korea and is being pushed Its people have never in their modern history been able Tcountries to the edict is encouraging, but one might also by MPs in its own party as well as the opposition to do to exercise their right of self-determination, neither ask what took them so long as well as wonder whether so with individuals in China for human rights abuses in under British nor under CCP colonialism. In some there will be sufficient follow-through. One reason the Xinjiang and Hong Kong. It has not ruled out doing so respects, comparing the CCP to the Nazis may indeed CCP felt emboldened to impose the edict was the rather but has said such measures must be proper and able to be hyperbolic. Then again, since World War II the world tepid response on the part of Western democracies to withstand any potential legal challenges. has seen nothing that compares to the scale of CCP a steady stream of CCP abuses in HK and Xinjiang up The US, UK, Canada, Australia, the EU and the concentration camps for Uighurs and other Muslims in to now. Of course, it’s certainly not the fault of other G7 must make clear to China now that sanctions will Xinjiang. The world’s biggest dictatorship and second countries that the CCP imposed the edict, and it’s not follow if it meddles in the upcoming Legco elections, biggest economy is taking aggressive, expansionist too late to begin to hold it to account. as it appears to be preparing to do. Likewise, if it locks actions to transform international norms to reflect those On 14 July, the US passed the HK Autonomy Act, up Joshua Wong, sanction CCP and HK officials. If of the regime. At the very least, the rest of the world had which requires the president to report annually on Martin Lee goes to prison, sanction CCP and HK best be on its guard. ☐ individuals and entities responsible for dismantling HK’s officials. Liberal democracies need to show they’re autonomy and sanction them. It previously announced serious by drawing clear red lines against interference visa restrictions on unnamed officials responsible for in Legco elections and imprisonment of pro-democracy Kong Tsung-gan is the pen name of the author of the same. It revoked HK’s preferential treatment in leaders. Otherwise, the CCP will take inaction as Liberate Hong Kong: Stories from the Freedom Struggle

4 INTERVIEW Hong Kong rebel Elaine Yu

n late June, days before a dreaded national security law was expected to take effect—which was Beijing’s answer to last year’s unrest—people on an internet Iforum pleaded for Joshua Wong to leave. The law outlined vaguely worded crimes of subversion, secession, terrorism and colluding with foreign forces, punishable by lengthy sentences up to life imprisonment. It clearly targeted figures like him, who had testified before the US Congress and engaged in high-profile international advocacy. Nathan Law, a fellow activist, revealed in a few pained paragraphs that he had fled to an undisclosed location. But Wong wanted to stay. ‘I will continue to hold fast to my home, Hong Kong, until they silence and obliterate me from this land,’ he wrote on Facebook, twelve hours before the law sunk its teeth into the city. On 15 June, on a damp, sunny afternoon, I met Wong in a half-lit lawmaker’s office cluttered with documents and protest banners. Outside, the building was fortified by bulky water-filled barriers, after months of street protests had left the government complex broken and singed. But the face of Hong Kong’s Facebook resistance would sometimes enter and borrow the office space, using it for joint projects with democratic Joshua Wong on the Legco Review programme in 2012 lawmakers. Wong is no longer the scrawny kid with a look of realised how my role as a secondary school student Are you worried about the possibility of perpetual seriousness on the cover of Time in 2014. A could make people care about this subject. If a lawmaker imprisonment again? few years ago, when he was accused of being a CIA agent, who has been out of school for several decades was I’ve only been in prison for 120 days. Chan Kin-man a hobby pro-Beijing figures took up with democracy protesting against compulsory patriotic education, it was in prison for twelve months. We can’t control the activists, he joked that his girlfriend had wondered why wouldn’t be as persuasive. They wouldn’t be a concerned situation, but how can we do our best to contribute to he didn’t look more like Tom Cruise if that was the case. party, a stakeholder. After the saga ended, I felt that the movement? Compared to the front-line activists Today, he looked well-fed and well-exercised. as your ability grew, so did your responsibility, so we who may be imprisoned for ten years or more, what a It has been eight years since he’d burst onto the as students should try to push for political reform. So politician has to bear may not be that much. political scene. In 2012, at the age of fifteen, he helped we pushed for the public’s right to nominate election Our generation has come of age under Beijing’s spearhead protests against mandatory patriotic candidates, for universal suffrage during the Umbrella intimidation. But for the next generation, they are still education in schools that many decried as brainwashing. Movement, and a series of events followed. kids, yet they are already facing tear gas and rubber The government later backed down—a rare triumph for bullets, and risking their lives. But that is the reality the democracy movement in Hong Kong’s history. And you grew up in the public eye, here in Hong for democracy movements. For outside references we In 2014 Wong emerged as a global icon from the Kong and in the world. See, you look bigger now. always talk about Aung San Suu Kyi, although she has Umbrella Movement, which called for free elections Yes, I was glad that there were protests against now been disgraced, and Nelson Mandela, but I still and captivated the world with its colourful tent cities extraditions to China. The media would finally stop think the most suitable reference is the democracy and peaceful civil disobedience. Following a protracted using my pictures from 2014. You can trace my physical movement in South Korea and the era of ‘white terror’ in crackdown over the years that saw the chipping away at growth in pictures. Of course, the situation is so much Taiwan. That feels closer to home. Hong Kong’s democratic institutions and civil liberties, more dire with this looming national security law, And I wouldn’t say I’ve lost my childhood. But protests erupted against a government-proposed bill last compared to the anti-extradition protests. In fact, I don’t it wasn’t something where I could seek balance. summer that would have allowed extraditions to China’s know what Hong Kong will be like by the time this is Democracy movements mean people can’t do the things feared, opaque legal system. This time, the mood was far published. Will this interview be used as evidence for they would normally do. Who would’ve thought that angrier. the crime of ‘inciting subversion of state power’? Or students would need to put on full gear when they’re out will I be extradited to China? You never know. But my marching? Even being a foreign correspondent in Hong How would you look back on the beginning of approach is always to accumulate as much pressure on Kong used to be easy. The expats here hung out at the your activism in 2012? Beijing as possible during this limited time. Foreign Correspondents’ Club, partied at the nightlife The mentality and the environment, of course, are so district, wrote stories about Hong Kong’s sky-high different now. 2012 was a time when everyone would call Have these ups and downs changed the way you property prices, about people living in subdivided ‘coffin themselves a Chinese person and no one was organising look at the political realities of the regime and of homes’, and about the dramatic income inequalities. civil disobedience. High school students coming out to resistance? There are stories like that every two years or so. Who distribute pamphlets was already a miracle. It has been If you asked any Hong Kong person four years would’ve thought they’d be braving a hail of bullets full of ups and downs, from the protests against patriotic ago what they thought of Molotov cocktails, their when the headquarters posted them here? It’s not just education, to the Umbrella Movement, to founding a answer would be very different. But I think resistance politicians and activists who are sacrificing. A unionist political party to run for office, to being disqualified is about how you put your ideas into practice and or a professional are also feeling the same chilling effect. from running, to the movement against extraditions use your tenacity to keep pushing for change. What to China. I’ve been in the eye of the political storm we’re confronting is the world’s largest dictatorship, What do you do to hang on to normalcy in throughout the past eight years. the second-most powerful country. In the past, we turmoil? would say the fight for democracy in Hong Kong was I read comics, play video games, eat and drink. Do you remember when you first realised you had a gentlemen’s fight. Of course, I highly respect people I also do what other Hongkongers do. I went to the a power to mobilise people? like Martin Lee. Martin Lee was like a British-style movie theatre after the social distancing measures were I remember in May of 2012, I spoke with reporters gentleman reasoning with you. It’s a very different relaxed. Oh, I played Animal Crossing too. I’ve done a after organising a march of 200 people, and the feeling. But there is no longer space for that in the era of dozen interviews about protests in Animal Crossing. interview got more than 10,000 views online. I then Xi Jinping. Someone once asked me, you can only have six people

5 Nicola Longobardi

6 on an island, how could you get a thousand people to make them hesitate. Some say the people most exposed people are in fact projecting their own fantasies on participate? to danger are those who have most prominently engaged you? in international advocacy, which includes me. But others Many people will project their different expectations Whatever normal things you do, politics is have suggested that they’d touch this group of people last on me. There’s definitely a discrepancy, and it will never unavoidable. after the national security law is enacted, because such be accurate. But how do I use their assumptions to That’s something anyone in politics or public life has a crackdown would make international headlines, but a generate more concern? Whether they are treating me to consider. The magazine1843 did an interview with crackdown on others won’t make the news. as another Malala, or a young Aung San Suu Kyi, or me, entitled ‘Gaming with Joshua Wong’. So I actually And I can’t deny that the biggest hindrance to Beijing whether they want to make me an icon to show why went up to the office of theEconomist to play their PS4. is the international community, and street protests democratic values are important when democracies The whole thing was pretty hilarious. can shape international development. The Hong Kong around the world are in decline—there’s never an Human Rights and Democracy Act was passed after the accurate projection. With this nuclear option, do you have any regrets university campus battles. And, if not for the China–US or feel like you’ve had to make major sacrifices? trade war and the G7, G20 summits collectively putting Do you feel like you’re sometimes being used? I don’t think it’s that dramatic. I mean, of course pressure on Beijing, I don’t believe the China extradition Each takes what they need. People always say Trump imprisonment is a possibility. Perhaps even a prison bill would have been withdrawn in September. How is only using Hong Kong, that he doesn’t sincerely care cell in mainland China. But first, that’s not happening, much the world cares depends on how strong the about Hong Kong … I don’t care if he’s sincere, as long as say, the day after tomorrow. It’s not that imminent. And momentum in Hong Kong is. There are many million- we get things done. The most important thing is to exert second, back in 2017, I also thought why were only strong marches in the world, but the ratio of two million pressure on Beijing. In international relations, many three people put in jail for the Umbrella Movement, people marching in a city with a population of seven people are realistic and pragmatic. It’s most important to with me being one of them? But of course, later on, I million is a world record, as far as I could tell, at least in serve the public purpose, like the passage of the Human hadn’t thought of how I would only be in jail for sixty the twenty-first century. Rights and Democracy Act, and to generate a lot of days, while people now have to sit behind bars for six international concern, which snowballed into something years. Edward Leung was sentenced to six years. And You don’t seem as despondent as many young the White House talks about and countries around the people who took part in the anti-extradition protests are people are. world opposing this national security law. It helps create facing six, eight or ten years. So this is not something we Well, we’re all taking one step at a time. I’m not external factors beneficial to Hong Kong’s resistance. can calculate. People who were jailed in 2017 became that optimistic. Of course, when doing interviews with the first group of internationally recognised political foreign media, I say things like ‘Threat can’t defeat us, And you don’t find all this imagination projected prisoners in Hong Kong. Of course I wasn’t the first it gives us even stronger determination!’ and then they onto you a bit strange. political prisoner, but I was part of the first group that go, ‘Ohhh, really?! It reminds me of the students I spoke Of course it’s strange. The most classic is a garnered international concern. with in Beijing thirty years ago. It means a lot to us.’ Korean reporter asking if I’ve ever thought you’d get Plus, Hong Kong only has a population of seven A French journalist once asked me if there was light dismembered. And I wonder, what’s your assumption million, and they’ve arrested 9,000 people. More people inside prison. ‘Thirty years ago I covered the Tiananmen behind this question? I don’t get it. It’s nonsensical. have been arrested than there are people currently in jail. Square student movement. Can you eat rice in prison?’ And when I landed in Taiwan last September, twenty- There are only 6,000 to 7,000 prisoners in Hong Kong. So I’d show more optimism in those scenarios. some reporters were there to ask me if I was seeking And 1,800 people are being prosecuted over the protests. But even if I’m taking one step at a time, what’s the political asylum, and if I planned on returning to Hong The implication is that, in the future, a quarter of the alternative? Am I just going to disappear? To do nothing Kong, and if I’d meet with President Tsai. The truth is, I incarcerated population could be political prisoners. from now on? The work must be done. wouldn’t be able to get a meeting with Tsai Ing-wen back It would mean society is in extreme turmoil, and that then. Of course they’ll ask all these questions. That’s the someone you know is certainly in jail … In this context, Is there a lot of pressure not just on you, but on way it is. I don’t see how the government can govern. those nearest and dearest to you? Of course there’s pressure. But is it more pressure Then who’s the real you? he law officially came into force at 11 p.m. on than during the Umbrella Movement? It’s not that It’s hard. You have a different narrative for different 30 June, and its contents—provisions, articles, different. It’s different with the national security countries. So to South Koreans I’d talk about the penalties—were revealed at around the same law, but if you’re talking about the protests against Gwangju Uprising, and they’d think my favourite movie Ttime. The day before, an eerie calm took over the city, its extradition and the Umbrella Movement, I’m pretty is When the Day Comes. And the Americans think restless undercurrents holding their breath for what felt sure my family felt more pressure during the Umbrella my favourite is The Avengers. Both are true. When the like a death sentence. Movement. Because I was still under age, and it was Day Comes and The Avengers are both great, but you That morning, Wong and other key leaders the first time we’ve reached this scale. But with the selectively employ different narratives with different announced that they would withdraw from their anti-extradition protests, to be honest I wasn’t on the audiences to increase their interest in Hong Kong. political group Demosistō. He said he would continue front lines. I always joke that people would recognise to ‘practise my beliefs in a personal capacity’, which was me even in a back bloc. Even if my face is covered, my Do you do anything to destress? interpreted as a move in part to protect his close ones. back is very recognisable. I can’t do anything, so there’s Of course. Eating, drinking, sleeping, video-gaming. The group disbanded later that afternoon. no trouble. I wouldn’t be drinking a few years ago. I wasn’t old This was before the severe punishments were enough to drink alcohol back then. codified, but whenever I tried to probe into the more And they support you? intimate aspects of his years of activism or its personal They support me. As parents, they are most worried What do you drink? toll, he tended to deflect. This or that activist is currently about whether I’m getting injured. And you don’t get Whiskey’s pretty good. spending more time behind bars, he’d say. Or that people injured from doing international lobbying work. There will never know the names and the sacrifices of countless are huge risks, but it’s a different kind of risk. If I was Okay. Let’s try to use our imagination. Say, Hong protesters who are ordinary Hong Kong citizens. arrested by the police, they wouldn’t beat me up, because Kong becomes democratic one day. What would you He also poked fun at the sound bites he would they know that would create a lot of trouble and loose want to do? passionately but also robotically deliver to the media, ends to deal with. But if they do that to a faceless person, I don’t know. I can’t imagine that day. As long as we which were sometimes the ones asking sensational that person can’t avenge it. have Xi Jinping, I don’t know how we’re going to have questions. But he didn’t seem jaded. He had simply democracy. Of course, foreign journalists would always trained himself to be an instrument in a high-stakes, How do you feel about so many faceless protesters ask me when I will be chief executive, or have I ever intricate struggle. But this is also who he is: doing what using their bodies to fight the authorities? thought of becoming president if Hong Kong becomes he feels is right for the fight of his lifetime. It is my responsibility to make their action worth independent. I get asked that twice or three times a more, to be of more value. I’ll never experience what month. It’s the same questions—I can recite them by So you haven’t really thought too much about the they go through. When I get arrested, honestly the now. Once I was sleep-talking at 4 a.m., saying, ‘One personal aspects of this sacrifice. police are surprisingly courteous. At least I was never country, two systems has become one country, one So many journalists have asked if I was ready to die beaten up in a police station, but many others have been. system’. Then I suddenly woke up and wondered why I for Hong Kong. This is a rare occasion where I don’t But I wasn’t beaten not because the police are good, but was speaking in English. I’ve probably said that more give an answer. Because I think this sound bite is a because they know I’m a political figure and they are than 200 times. bit silly and overdone. Did they think I was Mandela? more sensitive. So this is not the kind of pressure I’m But if they were to announce that you’d be handed a facing. The kind of pressure I’m facing isn’t experienced So it’s not about imagination, but survival. life sentence, everyone would regret it. That’s normal. by other protesters because I would really be named and Yes. To survive is to win. ☐ Personally, my approach is more organic, there are so shamed by the State Council’s spokesperson. many uncertain dynamics, so it’s hard to say if I’d really Elaine Yu is a journalist and writer based in Hong Kong. regret things. For now, it’s about how to keep playing As a face of the democracy movement, even if the This interview was conducted on 15 June, before the your cards right, or how to put pressure on Beijing, to protests are largely leaderless, do you think many national security law was passed

7 HONG KONG In Tiananmen’s shadow Jeffrey Wasserstrom

ANTONY DAPIRAN City on Fire: The Fight for Hong Kong Scribe: 2020

HOLMES CHAN (EDITOR) Aftershock: Essays from Hong Kong Small Tune Press: 2020

he rapid shifts in the Hong Kong protest movements in June 2019 took everyone by surprise. I took part in several panels and Tworkshops in the United States and Britain that May, dealing with dissent in China, and I had exchanges about Hong Kong with many people, including Lord Patten, the territory’s last colonial governor, and I don’t remember anyone suggesting that a sequel to the 2014 Umbrella Movement was in the offing. Similarly, writing in the London Review of Books about meeting Hong Kong democracy activists in Taiwan in May 2019, Wang Chaohua, a veteran of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, wrote: ‘None of them anticipated that a new, spectacular phase of Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy was about to unfold’. But that, of course, is just what happened. Sunday 9 June, witnessed the biggest demonstration Nicola Longobardi in the city in years. On the next Sunday 16 June, an even larger number of people marched, by some estimates a Police in Central, Hong Kong, 15 November 2019 quarter or more of the city’s population of 7.5 million. This was due to popular fury at the bullying tactics the a period in November when two university campuses is fluid. It’s a well-paced, clear work, the roughly 300 police had used during a midweek day of protest, tear- became battle zones, and protesters insist there were pages of text mostly given over to detailed narratives gassing peaceful crowds, but also a protest that included martyrs, youths who committed suicide out of political of action. There are, however, interesting digressions the first militant move by activists: a group trying to desperation, a youth who died from being chased off thrown in. Some of these move us back in time and break into the Legislative Council. The 16 June march, a parking garage roof by police and so on. There were explore precedents for 2019 events—precedents Dapiran the first of many 2019 protests in which complaints never tanks on the streets, though, and there was no knows well, having previously written City of Protest, a about the bill fused with complaints about the police, massacre. book on Hong Kong struggles from the 1960s through was the biggest event of its kind in the city’s history. This One problem with the widespread use of the the aftermath of the Umbrella Movement of 2014. In came as a surprise to everyone. Tiananmen analogy was that it had the disturbing other breaks from moving forward through time, the A second surprise of 2019 was that the protest wave result of serving as a check on how much outrage even author provides essayistic looks at general issues, such lasted much longer, gained support from members the most flagrant acts of police brutality generated as the way that the ‘experience—and spectacle—of tear of a wider array of generations and social groups, internationally. Filling indoor spaces with tear gas, gas came to define Hong Kong in 2019, whether fighting and involved actions taking place in more areas than turning a blind eye to thugs attacking protesters it at the frontlines, choking on it or dodging it while anyone expected. The same was true of the protests in and passers-by, injuring journalists with bean bag engaged in a lawful protest, planning one’s journeys and Tiananmen Square thirty years ago, which exceeded shot—actions like these help explain why, despite the schedules to avoid it, watching images of it billowing on in all these dimensions a short-lived set of warm-up vandalism and other militant moves by some protesters, television screens, or just talking about it’. demonstrations in 1986. Similarly, the Hong Kong popular opinion inside Hong Kong remained on the What sets City on Fire apart most from books on protests in 2019 exceeded in all these dimensions the side of the movement, for, according to surveys, the both Beijing’s 1989 and Hong Kong’s 2019 is the unique Umbrella Movement in 2014. There were key 1989–2019 majority of people continued to feel that the police were mix of skills and experiences of its author. To say that differences: the Tiananmen movement ended sooner, causing the most harm. Such actions also generated Dapiran was well positioned to write City on Fire is for example, but spread more widely, since it affected international criticism, but not as much as they might the height of understatement—and not just because not just districts across a city but urban centres across a have if Tiananmen talk had not made observers think: it he did graduate work in Chinese cultural studies and country. Still, both movements had surprising reach and could have been worse. wrote City of Protest. He spent day after day on the staying power. The final surprise that has a Tiananmen parallel streets between June and November of 2019, a constant A third surprise was that, by the autumn, so many relates not to bullets but books. It seemed likely a year observer of everything from a vigil-like march by commentators were regularly, often insistently, asking ago that the 2019 protests would be chronicled in a few lawyers clad in black on 6 June (held to symbolise the a question associated with 1989: will there be a second volumes, as the Umbrella Movement had been, but there idea that the extradition bill’s implementation would ‘Tiananmen’? In some ways, Hong Kong by that point has been not just a trickle but a flood of publications. sound the death knell of judicial independence and true was already the site of a second Tiananmen (or a third, if By the end of this northern summer, at least ten books rule of law), to clashes months later between frustrated the Umbrella Movement counted as a second), that is, of dealing with the 2019 events will have been published protesters and police itching for confrontation. He a sustained and broadly popular galvanising movement in English alone. What this early rush of publications on published many instant online commentaries on protests that captured the attention of the global media. The 2019 resembles more than what followed any previous he observed in venues such as the Atlantic and the New name of the famous plaza in Beijing, though, was being Hong Kong struggle is what happened after Tiananmen. Statesman. And while not from Hong Kong, he has used as a specific shorthand in the question. What the strong local bona fides. When the protests began in commentators were asking was whether there would be ntony Dapiran’s City on Fire provides a wealth 2019, he had been living and working there for much a military action involving tanks and automatic weapons of information about last year’s events, especially of the previous twenty years. He is well connected in that resulted in bodies dead on the streets. those of the dramatic six-month period from both journalistic and activist circles, and well liked, too, In the end, this did not happen. There were tense Athe annual 4 June vigil to the November district council due to his amiability and tireless coverage of protests. clashes, during which some protesters lobbed Molotov elections that pro-democracy candidates won by a Adding to all that, he is a lawyer. This makes him an cocktails and some police fired their weapons. There was landslide. The book was written quickly, but the style ideal person to explain the intricacies of the extradition

8 bill, which was finally withdrawn in September. His legal background also allows Dapiran to combine accounts POEM of protests he observed as a journalist with two he participated in as a lawyer: a 1999 march by members of his profession staged soon after he moved to Hong Kong Lok Man Law and its 2019 sequel. There is one last quality of Dapiran’s that adds to his credibility as a commentator on Hong Kong: his readiness to admit that even the best-prepared analysts will often be caught off guard by what happens next. He does not claim in City on Fire to have seen what was Records of a Floating Island coming as the 2019 struggle unfolded, unless one counts his modestly and vaguely phrased assertion that during —on reading Xi Xi’s ‘Strange Tales from a Floating City’ before 1 July 2020 the 6 June demonstration by lawyers he had a sense that ‘something was building’ and that the extradition bill ‘was not just another issue destined to fade away into the What’s the taste of sinking? mists of indifference’. A floating island headed for a hard landing, an ever-flowing stream Similarly, in interviews he has given and pieces he Of leaping magma henceforth has written this year, he has admitted that 2020 events Stuck. Downward tree roots buck the trend, grow upwards toward continue to surprise him when it comes to the specific The sole scorching sun among the clouds. Someone cheers forms that activism and repression take, even if he The floating island is still called the floating island expected protests to go on and Beijing to keep tightening the screws. As dim as the prospects for Hong Kong’s The floating islanders are still floating islanders future look now, he refuses to give up completely on Some people leave as always the idea that there could be a surprising improvement Some people lead the frontlines in the situation down the line. This comes through, Play tug-of-war with pirates charmingly, in an interview with Dapiran that Bleak For those who turn the pages those who hide their faces those who are blinded House Books, a leading fixture on the local literary They are crucified. Final gestures and breaths landscape, posted on its website this spring. When asked Vanish at the root where there is no light if he might someday complete a trilogy by writing a What’s the taste of closing your eyes? third book on Hong Kong, Dapiran muses that if he did, he would need to have its title begin with the same first The floating island doesn’t float, beneath our feet, there’s no word as City of Protest and City on Fire, but he had no Void, no window of a dream way of knowing for sure if he would call it City of Hope But there are many, many mirrors or City of Despair. Mirrors that forge corners The 2019 events that Dapiran describes are also the Mirrors that split images focus of Aftershock, a slimmer, more personal volume Mirrors that spout lies edited by Holmes Chan with eleven bracingly candid, What’s the taste of often emotionally searing short reflections on living in Being unable to see your own back side? and reporting on Hong Kong in tense and dangerous times. In addition to Chan’s memorable chapter, which Why don’t we just be floating people describes his obsession with a graphic act of violence Every June dreaming of he can’t stop thinking about, it includes ten by other A group who’s never floated, never sunk talented young journalists. The contributors are all locals Holding up candles and breaking into song except for Taiwanese contributor Hsiuwen Liu and one One early morning many years ago journalist, writing anonymously, from the mainland. Someone carrying two plastic bags One effect of the longevity and scope of the 2019 Confronted the barrel of a tank gun protests is that it became hard for anyone to remain One afternoon many years ago neutral about it. Political issues had created tensions Someone in a yellow raincoat within families and social groups before, but they did Fell from a high-rise this with special power in 2019. Some of the most Said ‘We are not rioters’ moving passages in Aftershock deal with these tensions. One afternoon many years ago ‘For many households,’ Frances Sit writes, ‘politics have Someone was shot and lost an eye become the elephant in the room, and relatives with Someone was struck and broke a hand split views would squabble over shared meals.’ Later in Someone was burned by stray gunfire her essay, ‘New Territories’, she refers to ‘relationships, Someone went missing families, and friendships torn apart by incompatible political beliefs’. Reading memoirs and fiction written by Every June, floating people throughout the world participants in the 1989 movement shows that this was Dream for four days true in Beijing thirty years before as well. Dream that the floating island will rise For those who live in Hong Kong or have been Becoming a self who can breathe following events closely from afar, Aftershock will Confronting mirrored reflections make for immediately illuminating reading. There have Crying out the names of the newly born been many Tiananmen books that, like Aftershock, are collections of essays, and several that involved collaborations between journalists (for example, Tiananmen, The Rape of Peking, by the talented Translated by Jennifer Feeley reporting duo of Michael Fathers and Andrew Higgins). Aftershock stands apart from all of these, however, due to the special charge the editor put to contributors: Lok Man Law is a poet, editor and publisher to weave together reporting, memoir and personal based in Hong Kong reflection. The result is a genre-defying publication that might be as good an addition to the syllabus of a course Jennifer Feeley’s translations from Chinese include Not Written Words: Selected on journalism as one on Hong Kong. ☐ Poetry of Xi Xi, the White Fox series, and a forthcoming collection of stories and essays by Shi Tiesheng

Jeffrey Wasserstromis Chancellor’s Professor of History at University of California Irvine and the author of Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink

9 CHINA Frozen in Wuhan Tom Baxter

FANG FANG Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City HarperVia: 2020

he world froze over, the Chinese novelist Fang Fang writes in the preface to Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City. Millions Taround the world now feel as the author felt at the beginning of February—stranded, isolated, frustrated, angry. The pandemic has frozen our lives. Honest and resilient in the face of tragedy, government failure and censorship, Fang Fang’s diaries, originally published in sixty instalments on social media, captured the public imagination and became a source of solace for millions through the seventy- six days of lockdown for Wuhan. Back then, as spring unfolded quietly outside my apartment window in Beijing, my social media feeds were flooded with reposts of her diaries. They were a site of collective emotion. Friends commented that the daily entry was the one thing they had to read to get to sleep at night. Others would engage in conversations in the comment boxes. Her readership reached tens of millions. Ranging from the mundanity of life under lockdown to grief and sympathy for her fellow Wuhanese to calls for truth and accountability, Fang WikiCommons Fang’s diaries were not free from controversy. Her search for answers about the outbreak caught the attention of citizens and censors, as well as China’s ntil Covid-19, Fang Fang, the nom de plume the hospitals blew whistles, and residents organised ultra-nationalists. Eventually the government enforced of Wang Feng, was little known outside China. memorial cavalcades through the streets. On that night control over the narrative: China had been victorious At home, she has been an important figure in Fang Fang, in her understated style, wrote, ‘Everyone is over the virus, proof of its superior system. Fang Fang’s Uliterary circles for decades, particularly since winning crying … And I am broken.’ personal and stubbornly honest writing found itself the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2010. Having In the weeks after Li’s passing, his Weibo page outside these lines. This reached a peak when news lived through the Cultural Revolution as a teenager became an outlet for pent-up emotions. Fang Fang of the translation of the diaries into English became and young woman, she published her first novel in the called it a ‘wailing wall’ for the public. Even today, public. For many, Fang Fang had turned from the voice opening years of China’s ‘reform and opening up’ era. people continue to leave comments under his last post, of the people to a traitor of the nation. Fang Fang is also central to Wuhan’s local literary scene. sometimes nearly once every two or three minutes. They But the diaries’ role as a popular outlet has also She has lived there almost all her life and served as range from the ‘Good morning Dr Li, it’s raining outside’ been given greater legitimacy with their international president of the Hubei Provincial Writers’ Association. to these: publication. Fang Fang’s words, reflections and Since the 1980s, her fiction and non-fiction have put emotions represent something consistent and a spotlight on the working classes and those whose 05:03, 28 June: ‘I managed to get my emotions off recognisable. And not just for those in China. Her voices tend to go unheard. Much like her Wuhan my chest yesterday, and finally my strength has been intimate portrayals of daily life under lockdown would diaries, her previous work has also not shied away from restored. Thank you for being my place of refuge.’ be familiar to readers in Lombardy, London or New uncomfortable truths. Her award-winning and now York. Her words transcend time and space. Take, for banned 2016 novel Soft Burial, an English translation of 03:27, 28 June: ‘Ah, Dr Li, life is really not easy. I example, the relief expressed when she finds out that which is forthcoming, triggered intense criticism from really want my husband to come back and be with her ex-husband, who had been feeling ill, only had a China’s ‘ultra left’ for its focus on the brutality of land me and our child. The epidemic has really gotten cold. That meant that he was safe. It also meant that reform in 1950s Hubei province, a period of history the everyone into a state of anxiety. How are things for her daughter who had just had dinner with him was Chinese government prefers to gloss over. you over there? Perhaps you are able to meet up safe and would no longer have to isolate. Which meant Wuhan Diary is not a record of what happened in with my mum and grandparents. I really miss them.’ that Fang Fang could see her daughter again—cook for the hospitals, the quarantine centres and the streets (translations by the author) her, care for her and share the warmth of motherly love during the lockdown; rather it focuses on her personal through the darkest of Wuhan’s days. Millions have experiences and anxieties. ‘To my dear internet censors,’ Fang Fang’s diary became a similar space. since been through such moments. she writes on 9 February, ten days into the lockdown, Throughout the nearly three months of lockdown I The care and compassion that have been magnified ‘you had better let the people of Wuhan speak out and followed her daily entries via the WeChat account of her by Covid-19 were never just for family either. In another express what they want to say! ... If you can’t even permit fellow writer, Er Xiang. The comment and discussion recognisable moment, Fang Fang is moved almost to us to complain ... or reflect on what is happening, then space at the end of the article, normally sparingly used, tears with respect for medical workers on the frontlines: you must be intent on driving us all mad.’ filled up with thousands of users voicing their thoughts, The passing of Li Wenliang, the whistle-blower expressing thanks to Fang Fang and sharing tips on how A few days ago I actually saw some video clips of doctor who was reprimanded and silenced for warning to evade the censors. exhausted medical workers ... collapsing, and I can about the virus outbreak as early as December, brought Fang Fang picks up on small details of city life tell you that I don’t think I have ever seen that kind these psychological traumas to the surface. The night he under lockdown and the nebulous connections that tie of helpless sadness in my entire life. Professor Liu passed away it seemed as if the whole of China was in society together, even in the toughest of times. ‘There Chuan’e from Hubei University said that he feels like mourning. Social media spaces filled up with his photo, would always be at least one sanitation worker out crying every day. Don’t we all? images of candles and whistles, words of condolences, there, meticulously sweeping the streets. Whenever I words of pain. In Wuhan, people lit candles and caught a glimpse of one of them, I would ... feel guilty Don’t we all. flashed phone lights from their windows, doctors in for feeling so scared and anxious; one sight of them is

10 always enough to set me at ease.’ Or this: ‘[There is a] positively. In an international setting, however, the lines knot that needs to be untangled … If we don’t untangle of acceptable criticism are drawn far tighter. Criticism these knots, how can the knots inside our hearts be in this context is seen as ‘selling out the country’ and unravelled?’ ‘providing ammunition’ to China’s enemies. While For Fang Fang, ultimate healing can only come Fang Fang is caught in the blame game between China through a process of uncovering the truth and holding and the United States, she is neither the traitor to the accountable those responsible for the knot of hidden nation the Chinese trolls accuse her of being nor is she a truths, half-truths and lies that marked the initial dissident. response to the outbreak. ‘I always stand on the same side as my government, The mistakes made by the Wuhan government cooperating with all official actions … The only in the early weeks are well established, though difference is that I use an alternative method and, increasingly omitted from the official narrative, as occasionally, over the course of writing, I also reveal Beijing attempts to sculpt its own version of the truth. some of my personal thoughts,’ Fang Fang writes. First, the city government silenced those who knew Perhaps she is best understood as a conscientious citizen about the outbreak, such as Dr Li and his colleagues who sees it as her responsibility to speak truth to power. in late December. Second, despite knowing about Wuhan and Hubei have been released from their the outbreak of a ‘SARS-like’ virus, Wuhan district Elsie Herberstein lockdowns and are beginning to return to normality. government insisted on holding a New Year banquet But rather than the period of psychological healing Fang for 40,000 guests on 19 January. And third, there were Fang called for, a new and singular narrative has been the government inspectors who refused to walk back imposed. China beat the virus. As the rest of the world on their initial assessment that ‘the virus is absolutely emotion in her diary entries from the comfort of his suffers, China’s victory against the virus is evidence of controllable and cannot be transmitted from human desk in Beijing. the country’s superior system. In Wuhan, this narrative to human,’ even though one of the inspectors was Others came to Fang Fang’s defence and questioned was even pushed in the form of the city government actually infected during their visit. This was the line Zhang’s selective critique of the diaries. In her final entry asking the people to give thanks to the party, a request state media reported for a number of weeks. It was only on the last day of the lockdown, Fang Fang returned that Fang Fang angrily rejects, alluding to the fact that on 20 January, when Zhong Nanshan, a well-known to the issue with stoical humour: ‘I would like to give any real Marxist should believe that the government respiratory disease expert from a government-appointed special thanks to those ultra-leftists who attack me every serves the people, not the other way round. panel, publicly contradicted this that the government day. If not for their egging me on, a lazy person like Meanwhile, the window for alternative stories acknowledged the full dangers. me would have stopped writing long ago … What I’m has been firmly closed. There has been an attempt The outbreak was overlooked by a month, losing a especially happy about is the fact that their attacks have to discredit Fang Fang’s diaries, citizen journalists in critical opportunity to prevent it. These were mistakes gotten everyone to pay attention.’ Wuhan have been rounded up and not heard from in made by humans in a system that is not equipped to That’s putting a brave face on the issue, however. months, and a number of the volunteer organisers of a absorb bad news. Fang Fang notes that bureaucrats As she commented in an interview with the magazine GitHub archive of all censored reporting on Wuhan— in any city or provincial government in China would Caixin, ‘the atmosphere on social media is basically like the first drafts of history—have been detained. have responded in the same way. It is a disease running the Cultural Revolution … Think about it … just writing So where is the space for healing? ‘The coronavirus through the system, she says. Of Dr Wang Guangfa, who a personal diary attracted so much hatred. Of course outbreak seems to have stabilised, but people’s hearts stated that the disease was ‘preventable and controllable’, countless numbers of people are scared [to express their have not,’ Fang Fang wrote on 21 March. And where she writes, ‘Is he able to just psychologically walk away opinions]’. are the truth and accountability that Fang Fang believes from this free and clear? Isn’t there even an ounce of While Fang Fang’s diaries were sensitive and lie at the heart of healing? ‘All we have got is waiting ... guilt in this man’s heart?’ tested the boundaries of acceptable criticism of the waiting for an explanation.’ ☐ Towards the end of February, when the situation was government, they still fit into a tried-and-tested model improving, she writes, ‘Simply firing a few officials is of domestic political commentary which points the not enough to settle this matter. The people of Wuhan finger at local government, while largely steering clear will settle for nothing less than full accountability for all of criticising the central government or the system at Tom Baxter is a Beijing-based writer focused on climate those who had a part in orchestrating these lies. More large. In fact, she writes of the central government quite and environmental issues in China than 2,000 “murdered” souls and their family members have died and suffered.’

ince Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China POEMS has not tolerated different voices. Fang Fang’s persistence bought her enemies, in the form of Yuan Changming Saggressive internet trolls from what are known as ultra- leftist groups. Neo-Maoists who relish the Cultural Revolution politics of persecution, they attack anyone they deem suspect of disloyalty to the party. Woman-radical: A feminist lesson in Chinese Fragmenting: A sonnet in infinitives Fang Fang’s first major encounter with the trolls characters occurred when a Weibo user attempted to discredit a To be a matter when there’s no question diary entry which mentioned discarded mobile phones 妇：lady is a woman who has overthrown a mountain Or not to be a question when nothing really matters at crematoriums as markers of the lives lost. The Weibo user uploaded a photo of second-hand phones 好：wo man spelt as one word simply means good To sing with a frog squatting straight for sale at a market and claimed that Fang Fang had On a lotus leaf in the Honghu Lake near Jingzhou uploaded the photo and misleadingly used it to tell a 妙：young women supporting each other are always story of death and tragedy in Wuhan. The user accused wonderful To recollect all the pasts, and mix them her of spreading rumours, online behaviour illegal Together like a glass of cocktail under Chinese law. Though the user, Xiang Ligang, 嫁：to marry a man is for a girl to have her own subsequently deleted his post, it opened up a floodgate family To build a nest of meaning of abuse, including death threats. Their writing was so Between two broken branches on Ygdrasil vitriolic that Fang Fang describes it ‘as if our family had 妖：weird would be a woman if she goes broken some kind of multigenerational blood feud’. To strive for deity Some well-known nationalist professors also joined 姣：handsome is a woman standing with her legs Longevity and in the attack. Zhang Yiwu of Peking University, a crossed Even happiness prominent scholar and public commentator with over nine million Weibo followers, targeted Fang Fang for 婢：maid is a girl who is by nature humble To come on and off line every other while misleading the public and ‘writing sensationally in order to attract readers’. He also criticised her for branding 婵：beautiful is she who remains single To compress consciousness into a file, and upload it her critics as ‘ultra-leftists’, saying it was a tactical Onto a nanochip. To be daring, to die distraction. Not shying away from the attack, Fang Fang 娘：mother is perforce a lady who is good and kind addressed Zhang head on in one diary entry, inviting him to Wuhan to witness the tragedy with his own eyes rather than pick apart inconsistencies or excessive

11 FOREIGN RELATIONS Seeing red Michael Reilly

CLIVE HAMILTON AND MAREIKE OHLBERG his diaries? No mention either of Lord Powell, one of the Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist key advisers to Osborne on his China policy. Party Is Reshaping the World This focus on naming and shaming distracts from Hardie Grant: 2020 some important points that the authors do raise. Among these is the common view in Western officialdom that it is always an advantage for ambassadors to have wo decades ago, I was a guest of the Chinese prior, and preferably long, experience in China. Not government on an expenses-paid, escorted ‘VIP surprisingly, this view is assiduously promoted by tour’ of the country. Over the years, I have also those who stand to benefit, but Hamilton and Ohlberg Tattended receptions in Chinese embassies. The wine produce evidence that it may not be the best approach. served at them was universally awful, but no matter, in They are not the first to do so, Kerry Brown’s trenchant the eyes of Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg, this is critique What’s Wrong with Diplomacy? having probably sufficient to make me suspect of being under previously aired it. It certainly deserves further scrutiny, Chinese influence. Janice Cheong but the authors do not pursue it. They make good In Hidden Hand they aim to expose the way in points, too, on the lamentable weakness of too many which the Chinese Communist Party is trying to Western universities in facing down Chinese pressure undermine democratic systems in its pursuit of global rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng and his family. in their pursuit of students and funds, but rarely are the influence, through intimidation, coercion and the Similarly, Angela Merkel’s ‘crime’ was to ignore examples cited followed through or explored in detail; ‘dark arts of economic statecraft’. Chinese behaviour security advice over awarding contracts for 5G instead we are rushed on to the next one. is certainly deeply worrying, and there are too many telecommunications equipment to China’s Huawei. Perhaps the most telling remark comes from a film disturbing examples of Western governments and Not only was German policy on the use of Huawei producer who is quoted as saying, ‘We underestimated businesses looking the other way. Recent cases include equipment still under consideration when this was not the influence of China but the fear. The fear of Zoom blocking the accounts of users planning to written, but it overlooks Merkel’s consistent stand on China in the free world’. A book that sought to analyse commemorate the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen human rights in China—her boycott of the Beijing or explain this fear would do us all a great service. A massacre, Apple removing certain apps from its phones Olympic Games over Chinese behaviour in Tibet, her starting point might be to examine how Taiwan copes on sale in China and China’s global TV network securing the release of the widow of Nobel laureate with the daily intimidation, coercion and inducements broadcasting forced confessions in flagrant violation Liu Xiaobo from detention (she now lives in exile it faces from China. For Taiwan, this is about far more of UK broadcasting regulations. Meanwhile, China in Germany together with other prominent Chinese than influence; it is existential: China is determined to continues to incarcerate perhaps one million of its own dissidents) and her granting refugee status to young deny Taiwan and its citizens the very right that most citizens in concentration camps on largely racial grounds, Hong Kong democracy activists. The book even quotes Westerners take for granted, that of nationhood, and with minimal Western reaction. A book that exposes how a senior German business figure complaining about his goes to great lengths in its efforts to achieve this. China secures Western acquiescence in its transgressions own country’s prioritisation of ‘values-diplomacy’ in Financial Times journalists have detailed how of international norms is therefore surely overdue. its relations with China, with no apparent sense of the Chinese interests have bought Taiwanese media, which Hamilton and Ohlberg start promisingly, setting out contradiction this represents. the CCP then uses to manipulate public opinion. what they see as the CCP’s strategy and the susceptibility Helmut Schmidt is blamed over Germany ‘breaking Chinese trolls seek to manage and direct debate on of Westerners to go along with it. They emphasise that ties with Taiwan and recognising the PRC’. But in 1972, Taiwanese social media. China has used direct threats their target is not China but the CCP, albeit observing when Germany recognised the PRC, Taiwan was a one- against Taiwan (the firing of missiles ahead of elections), that much of the success of the strategy has been in party authoritarian state under martial law and engaging inducements (a free trade agreement, a meeting between conflating the two. But it is not long before they start in much of the same behaviour of which the CCP stands Xi Jinping and then Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou to do the same, reeling off a long list of Westerners and accused here, while the Federal Republic of Germany in November 2015), coercion and more. But opinion Western organisations who, in their eyes, wittingly or had never recognised the Republic of China, and so polls in Taiwan show that the CCP is steadily losing the not, have helped the CCP achieve its objective. They could hardly ‘break ties’ that didn’t exist. battle for ‘hearts and minds’. Taiwanese welcome good have cast their net widely and indiscriminately: the In this neo-McCarthyite world, fringe groups and relations with their neighbour, but not at the price of Trump family is guilty, so too is Joe Biden. We have fellow travellers are accorded a status that they probably their independence. (Democrat) Michael Bloomberg and (Republican) Mitch only dream about. Germany’s far-left political party, Die Nor have Taiwanese leaders felt it necessary to McConnell. Successive Canadian prime ministers are Linke, which has polled less than 10 per cent in each of stay quiet on human rights or other matters for fear of implicated, as are German chancellors living (Angela the last two federal elections, is mentioned in almost the provoking China. Ma Ying-jeou successfully negotiated Merkel) and dead (Helmut Schmidt). same breath as Merkel for its pro-China views. Britain’s a bilateral free trade agreement with China, but he has But too much of this is guilt by association, or even 48 Group Club, a largely inconsequential assortment of never allowed the anniversary of the Tiananmen square innuendo. In Hamilton’s and Ohlberg’s eyes, merely for a business people that lists on its website ‘patrons’ either massacre in June 1989 to pass without calling on China, think tank to have accepted Chinese money is evidence dead or who have long since moved on to other roles, in his words, ‘to squarely face and redress this historic of compliance with the CCP’s grand strategy, or worse. is described in reverential terms as ‘playing a decisive tragedy’. Western leaders anxious to stay in Beijing’s There is too little analysis of individual involvement, role in shaping British attitudes to China’. Its members good books might be even more surprised if they knew and the details of alleged transgressions are limited, or must be flattered: in a little over one paragraph, they that Singapore trains its army and air force in Taiwan, even circumstantial. It is as if Joe McCarthy had done a have probably been given as much attention as they have something no Western country would even dream of Google search, combining random names and ‘China’. received from British policymakers over several years. doing for fear of upsetting China. Those where a match is found are duly listed, considered Yet the authors conclude that, thanks to this group, the Surely there are lessons for Western countries here, guilty, and we move on to the next culprit. CCP’s influence among British elites ‘has passed the Spain especially, which is mentioned three times by the We have unnamed ‘ethics experts’ accusing Gary point of no return’. authors for caving in to Chinese pressure over Taiwan. Locke, former US ambassador to China, of a conflict So all-embracing is the ‘guilt list’ that the omissions This would have been a productive avenue to explore, or of interest for selling his house to an ethnic Chinese are more surprising, almost as if the book is purposely at least an examination of how Taiwan has coped with property developer. Not mentioned is Locke’s own designed to draw attention away from the real culprits. this relentless Chinese pressure to extinguish its separate (Chinese) ethnicity, much less his popularity on Chinese Why no mention, for example, of George Osborne, identity. Instead, and unfortunately, the book seems social media for his ‘common man’ approach while the former British chancellor, enthusiastic Sinophile more aimed at using sensationalist reporting to stoke ambassador. This was much to the discomfiture of the and architect of the country’s egregious ‘golden era’ paranoia. Not so much reds under the bed as in it. ☐ Chinese politburo, with whose aloof arrogance he was relationship with China? Or of Tony Blair, whose favourably compared. Nor is there mention of his role reluctance to raise human rights with the Chinese was Michael Reilly is a senior fellow in the Taiwan Studies in securing the release into exile in 2012 of blind human documented by his former adviser Alastair Campbell in Programme at Nottingham University

12 SINGAPORE Control nation Theophilus Kwek

CHERIAN GEORGE Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited: Essays on Singapore Politics Ethos Books: 2020

irst published at the turn of the millennium, Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation arrived in a post-Cold War world where—despite the Fdisappointment of the dotcom bubble—the nascent World Wide Web was still a realm of infinite possibility, and the deep psychic blow of 9/11 a mere shadow on the horizon. Its chosen subject? A city-state that, at all of thirty-five years old, loudly trumpeted its own philosophy of governance (the so-called ‘Asian way’), and prided itself in heading off the worst effects of the Asian financial crisis. SubtitledEssays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, the volume took a hard look at this ascendant nation, while cherishing the ideals which (in time) came to define that upbeat moment: the promise of openness, civil discourse and individual WikiCommons liberties. Then a first-year PhD student at Stanford University, the author had already made his name as a political aspects of George’s thinking will resonate with readers. Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited takes a different commentator after a decade at Singapore’s pre-eminent Least persuasive, to this reviewer, are his views on tack, creating a space for readers to reflect on whether broadsheet, the Straits Times. Cherian George was also immigration and xenophobia, part of a section on the ideals and insights in George’s earlier collection a founding member of The Roundtable, a non-partisan ‘National Identity’. Writing after complaints by aggrieved have stood the test of time. But the audience has group that called for more robust public debate on locals triggered the cancellation of an Independence Day changed. The original sans-serif, glass-and-steel cover policy issues. Reviewing the book in November 2000, celebration by the Filipino community in 2014, George for Singapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation spoke the poet and public servant Alvin Pang commended characterises the protesters as an ‘online mob mouthing truth to the thoughtful young professionals who George’s gutsy decision to ‘tread formidable (and the language of patriotism’, who should know better found themselves suddenly in the fast lane of the early potentially risky) waters’, confounding critics with his than to push an agenda ‘not in keeping with our identity 2000s. The new edition’s quirky design, inspired by the ‘vexing ability to communicate intelligently rather than as a multicultural immigrant nation’. His high-minded geometries of public housing, ushers in a generation of lecture’. Others were hooked by his central thesis: as one cosmopolitan principles are hardly the issue. What sits millennials who are more likely to show up at Hong Lim reader remarked, the metaphor of a centrally controlled uneasily is the shallowness of the verdict: the decision to Park over the shared calamities of climate change than air-conditioning system was an inspired choice that castigate the mob without delving into the roots of their the muffling of any one voice by climate control. Their ‘[got] to the essence of the nation’s soul’. discontent (beyond the state’s failings), or considering language of advocacy has shifted noticeably in emphasis, The idea that Singapore should ease the ‘illiberal, that they might not hold to the same ‘national’ values. from individual freedom to collective action. centrally planned politics’ by which it maintained social Thankfully, this is a rare exception. Elsewhere, Beyond each book’s appeal to this new audience, the stability and fulfilled middle-class expectations was a George’s views are generous, patiently argued, and question remains: taken together, how well have they line of argument for which George would come to be delivered with sufficient good humour to soften—or fared at carving out space for academic views amid the best known. Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited—newly at least sweeten—the blow. Most insightful are his hurly-burly of public debate? Drawing on the credibility released by Ethos Books—preserves the key essays explorations of civil society dynamics, rooted in his own of an independent publisher and the chutzpah of which made this case in the 2000 edition, including time at The Roundtable and as an academic observer their authors, they have set valuable norms for such the landmark ‘Introduction’. Alongside are more recent of Singapore’s media landscape. Turning anecdote into engagement. Gone are the days of lecturing from the commentaries that occasionally challenge, but more analysis, his case study of how the independent forum bully pulpit of tenured professorship. Not all have had often strengthen, their insights. Now a professor of Sintercom defied all expectations in the late 1990s is the benefit of a veteran journalist’s way with words. media studies at Hong Kong Baptist University, George as telling of today’s online space as when it was first But while their writings will (and should) continue to is as observant in documenting the changes of the past written. And towards the end of the book, his reflections inspire lively debate, few will be able to dismiss them as twenty years as he is eloquent in defending his earlier on how we now benefit from the sustained advocacy of pontificating or detached. principles. our forebears has especial relevance as we ponder the Coming off the high of 2019’s Bicentennial festivities, The seven sections ofAir-Conditioned Nation blind spots that produced our recent missteps. Where the first, sobering half of this year has proven an Revisited map George’s core argument across various might we be now if the voices that come alive in these opportune time to revisit the observations in Air- facets of governance in Singapore, from elite power pages had been given a fairer hearing all those years ago? Conditioned Nation. Of course, there is every chance dynamics (‘Palace Intrigues’) to media regulation that readers will disregard the clarion warnings in these (‘Controlling the Message’) and—closest to the meat wo decades later, Air-Conditioned Nation pages, and, as days spent under a ‘new normal’ turn into of George’s thesis—limits on speech and opinion Revisited joins a cohort of fresh titles that seek to weeks and months, content themselves with a return to (‘Disciplining Dissent’). Each section contains a handful present academic voices for public consumption. business as usual. And yet. As each volume of writing of pithy essays which generally function as stand-alone TBeginning with Teo You Yenn’s This Is What Inequality from our most thoughtful critics finds its way onto our commentaries, with the year of their writing clearly Looks Like, followed by the edited volume They Told Us shelves, their collective voices, urging change, become signposted, and their provenance in the footnotes. To Move by Ng Kok Hoe and the Cassia Resettlement harder to ignore. Whether we turn debate into action Tracing the course of George’s own career, the older Team, each has made a timely contribution to public will be the true test of their salience. As Cherian George pieces (some of which are adapted from his writing for discourse. The first brought a debate on structural is so fond of arguing: the choice, quite literally, is in our the Straits Times) are noticeably richer with journalistic inequality from within the social work profession into hands. ☐ colour, while recent ones (from 2015 to the present) the open, inspiring a semantic shift in civil society. are more grounded in academic analysis or personal The second modelled a way to foreground the voices encounters. of underserved residents, alongside those of diverse Theophilus Kwek is the author of Moving House Given the book’s remarkable range, different academics and practitioners. (reviewed on page 31)

13 NOTEBOOK Asia matters Anjan Sundaram

he Black Lives Matter movement has people the world. It focuses inwards. Its wisdom—shaped by across the world questioning their identity and a history of civilisations and wars, colonialism and history—asking who wrote their history, and independence, communism and capitalism—does not Twhether they must now participate in creating history’s bear on other places. It is as though Asia hesitates to next iteration. speak. Its economies generate incredible wealth. Yet its Unravelling identities involves pain—we all, to a curiosity is restricted. It remains relevant, almost by degree, grow comfortable with our power or lack of it. principle, only to itself. And to succeed we learn to mimic the powerful. In the The future may force Asia to forge its own narrative. twenty-first century, to a degree, many people of colour One already discerns the signs of a new identity. have learned to become white. Gianluca Costantini We are now embroiled in a great polarising debate It is common for those claiming to break free of about who can speak for whom and about whom. The their own shackles to become the new oppressors. They authority to tell stories about others, once taken for take the place of the powerful and leave the system granted by many, is questioned, particularly since many that oppressed them largely untouched. It is as though still tell stories about people who do not have a voice, the desire to be white stubbornly remains. And many world’s peripheries. It is as though Asia’s heritage has less or who are now finding a voice. New rules are being revolutions fail for this precise reason—for a lack of value if it is not acknowledged by the rest of the world. defined; old rules are being rewritten. imagination. For liberation is not only overthrow of This has left long-lasting wounds in Asia’s psyche. Some Asian governments twist this opportunity the powerful; it requires a psychological examination It is still rare for Asians—writers, journalists, artists, to create a new identity into a reason to perpetrate and new creation. If the models of success and power historians and politicians—to tell stories about the rest violence on their people. Democracy and independent that we know are Western, we are required to imagine of the world with the sense of authority that foreigners institutions are branded as Western and thrown out: something other than now arriving at ‘our turn to eat’. tell stories about Asia. There is a sense of smallness in power is concentrated in governments and individuals. In many Asian and African nations that liberated the Asian mind, a feeling that Asians don’t have the The argument often made by the powerful is that Asia themselves from colonialism, we have seen Western- permission to tell the world’s stories. must be decisive in order to catch up with the West, in educated local leaders continue legacies of corruption Recently I proposed making a television series about order to grow, in order itself to be powerful. and subservience to Western orders: to embark on great the United States to a respected Asian television channel. This violence speaks to a lack of trust; it conveys projects to make their nations worthy of the world stage. They asked if I could make a show about Indians in the the Asian failure to accept itself, to work with what It is to attempt to win a game whose rules were made US. I insisted; they asked if I could make a show about is present instead of aspiring to targets embodied by by the West. And success can then seem like a form of Asian tycoons in the US. They doubted our authority other nations. It is a product of Asians forced endlessly revenge. and capacity—when an Asian perspective would in fact to compare themselves with the world and judge Such a lack of imagination sometimes leads to illuminate the US’s current transformation. themselves poorly. tragic public failures. Just these past months, as Black In doing so, they give the world undue power. Such authoritarian moves in Asia must be Lives Matter was forcing the world to reconsider its There is no reason for this psychological capitulation. condemned. There is no shame in admitting that prejudices, Spike Lee released Da 5 Bloods, a film that Many Asians accommodate the world’s dominance democracy serves Asians. Stories told by outsiders are used racial stereotypes and clichés of Asians, of the by submitting to it—by defining themselves as the similarly useful to Asians. Vietnamese in particular, to advance the Black American world sees them. Asian intelligentsia and elites dress by The protests in Hong Kong show us that the existing cause. He oppressed another people to attempt a liberation Western norms, speak and behave in Western ways and world order is no longer guaranteed—rising Asian of his own. still measure themselves by Western ideas of progress, powers increasingly challenge the status quo as the West Lee is not alone in his failures, however. He and civilisation and success. Asian nations are obsessed with stands by and watches. To secure their own identities, many of us—Asians, and Blacks—have had to become their GDPs as a measure of their achievements and as freedoms and futures, individual Asians demand their ‘white’ in order to succeed in a white world. Many compensation for their past humiliations. rights, fearing that the power vacuum left by the West successful people of colour have feared speaking out in But, along with many communities in the world, will simply be occupied by repressive politicians. The favour of Black Lives Matter because they are acutely this continent is finding its voice and challenging the new violence may come from within Asia. aware of the price exacted for their acceptance in a white narratives that have defined it. Perhaps economic Other Asians resist such structural change, having world in return for success. Whiteness has infiltrated our growth, and the accompanying feeling of independence, gained a measure of success and power in the world beings, and liberation is to discover the ways in which it have conferred a new confidence. that exists. This continent will have first to perceive its has done so. This has made some people in the rest of the world freedom, individuality and power—psychologically—as What, then, does the Black Lives Matter mean for uncomfortable. something worth having. Then whatever freedom that is Asians? defended and won will be truly Asian, not granted and ut first, what will Asia become? Will this vast guaranteed by someone else. To take on Asian powers sia is still defined by the world outside it. The continent be curious about the world and become and take on the world thus offers the Asian psychology definitive books, news and television about Asia relevant to it? a way out of its self-confinement and its ideas of still come to its people from global capitals such B Asia’s great achievements were arrived at smallness. Aas New York and London. Even if Asians produce their through a process of evolution. Leaders like Mahatma People are helping one another in this age of own stories, they are forced to acknowledge Western Gandhi, Tan Malaka, Ho Chi Minh and José Rizal self-discovery and evolution. Support is unlikely to views as the established narrative. Asians are forced shaped Asian and world history. The continent must come from abroad. Asians owe it to themselves to see to see their own world, and themselves, through this now evolve once more—and the past is a useful themselves anew. cultural lens. reference, not immutable law. People do not have to This requires confidence: to shake off the outsider’s This is true about the Asian past, present and future. fall reflexively on the ancient ways. The old culture and perceptions and act and speak in spite of the way Asia is From its empires to colonialism and the Second World Asian achievements will need to emerge from museums perceived. It will take time, perhaps a generation. Slowly, War. From its poverty and pollution to its twenty-first- and textbooks and be transformed, made new. Asians are growing more assertive about how they century progress. From its ancient literary epics to its But it is unclear how Asia will matter to world envision their future. new culture. history other than through its own prosperity and a The next century, economically, may well be the This reality mirrors colonial processes used by new domination—a recreation and mirroring of its Asian century. It should be so also for a new narrative Western powers to define narratives about their colonial past. Can Asia prosper without deepening about itself and the world. ☐ colonies—often in order to diminish, divide and rule the environmental crisis precipitated by Western them. The colonies were disparaged as primitive and industrialisation? Instead of retreating into its past, can Anjan Sundaram is the author of Bad News and exoticised as a mysterious unknown. Mythical Western Asia inspire? Stringer. He presented the TV shows Coded World and adventurers brought stories and treasures home from the For this continent rarely seems concerned with Deciphering India

14 INDONESIA Jakarta is coming Lara Norgaard

VINCENT BEVINS communist revolution, motivated US intervention. They writes: ‘The goal of Operação Jacarta was the physical The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist are among many examples Bevins uses to argue that the elimination of communists. It called for mass murder, just Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped US prevented democratic social reform in the developing as in Indonesia.’ Our World and recently decolonised world. It was in Chile, heavily influenced by Brazil’s anti- Public Affairs: 2020 The Jakarta Method offers groundbreaking insight communist ideology, that this reference to ‘Jakarta’ on how anti-communist ideas and methods of violence became a more public phenomenon. Bevins catalogues circulated, with US support, between distant and examples of how the phrases ‘Yakarta viene’ and ‘Jakarta enny Widyono, an Indonesian of Chinese descent different nations. Bevins first exposes odd parallels in se acerca’—Jakarta is coming—began popping up as born in 1936, bore witness to iterations of United the propaganda narratives established immediately after graffiti in Santiago’s wealthy areas and on postcards sent States Cold War interventions across decades, the Brazilian and Indonesian coups. In 1964 a small anonymously to left-wing journalists prior to the 1973 Band from three continents. The 1950s: Benny received conflict internal to the Brazilian military took place in coup against Salvador Allende. Jakarta was a narrative an opportunity to study at the University of Kansas. Rio de Janeiro; lower-ranking soldiers mutinied against intimidation tactic, a ‘terror meme’. Then, through There he met Indonesian soldiers on a different kind their superiors, demanding better working conditions. interviews with members of the Chilean armed forces, of exchange programme: they were receiving hardline Goulart was not involved, nor were soldiers planning a Bevins exposes a concrete strategy that also lay behind anti-communist training just forty minutes away at communist revolution. And yet this event served as a the city’s name, in the military’s El Plan Yakarta (The Fort Leavenworth. The 1960s: some of these soldiers scapegoat for a right-wing coup. Military leaders created Jakarta Plan): ‘The plan was to kill around ten thousand became involved in mass violence against leftists a narrative that the incident was a communist plot, and people, the left and its core supporters, as a way of following General Suharto’s US-supported 1965 coup, they framed their new authoritarian regime as one that ensuring a stable transition to a right-wing government.’ murdering between 500,000 and one million people. would save Brazilian democracy—a coup to protect the Stationed in Chile in 1975, when General Augusto Benny was working for the United Nations in Bangkok nation from a different ‘coup’. The US lauded the move as Pinochet was in power and the Jakarta method was already at the time; he was questioned because of his Chinese wildly successful. being carried out, Benny was present when Chilean ethnicity, which immediately made him suspect. The Readers aware of the Indonesian narrative about an soldiers asked Indonesia’s ambassador how his country 1970s: Benny received a new UN post in Chile in the alleged communist coup on 30 September 1965 will find this had so effectively decimated communists—and both he years following the US-orchestrated Pinochet coup. story surprisingly familiar. Bevins summarises the parallels: and the ambassador were disturbed that their country’s In Santiago, he heard soldiers reference ‘Jakarta’, the capital now carried such violent associations. But as he capital of his country, as ‘an example of glorious, anti- Just a year after a coup in the most important nation listened to those soldiers, he thought back to Kansas. communist terror’—the city now symbolised successful in Latin America was inspired partly by a legend ‘That’s where it all started,’ reads Benny’s reflection. extermination, a model and method for state violence about communist soldiers stabbing generals to ‘That’s why the name of the city I grew up in, where I halfway across the world. death in their sleep, General Suharto tells the most studied, where I learned about socialism and marched Benny’s story is one of many transnational narratives important nation in Southeast Asia that communists against colonialism and racism, has become a synonym recounted in The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins, a and left-wing soldiers whisked generals away from for mass murder.’ journalist who has reported from Southeast Asia and Latin their homes in the dead of night to be murdered At the end of the 1970s, Benny returned to Thailand, America. The book approaches Cold War-era mass violence slowly with knives. and saw emaciated and traumatised Cambodian by focusing on the US role in extermination programmes refugees running across the Thai-Cambodian border, and authoritarian regimes in roughly twenty countries across How Brazilian propaganda may have travelled to fleeing the Khmer Rouge. Ironically, Benny would the Global South. Combining journalistic interviews and Indonesia remains unclear. Bevins quotes the historian witness how the Carter administration continued to historical research, Bevins reveals how each occurrence of Bradley Simpson to assert that it was ‘highly likely’ that recognise the authority of the Khmer Rouge in the UN mass murder was instantiated by US government anti- US covert operations helped craft state propaganda in even after the Cambodian genocide was exposed; Bevins communist and neo-colonialist ideologies. Indonesia. Having noted the success of Brazil’s narrative, highlights that, hypocritically, the US would support one Brazil and Indonesia, which suffered anti-communist the US government may have encouraged the Indonesian of the most violent communist regimes in the world if it coups in 1964 and 1965 respectively, serve as central case military to use a similar story. It’s also possible that the meant fostering a new strategic partnership with China. studies for Bevins’s broader portrait of Cold War terror. idea was formed and exchanged at Fort Leavenworth, Ultimately, Benny would play a central role in rebuilding These two nations may seem like a surprising pair. After near where Benny studied: thousands of Brazilian officers a country so destroyed by US intervention and its the Second World War, the Brazilian Communist Party studied alongside Indonesian soldiers in the decade destabilising consequences, leading the United Nations was banned, strikes were made illegal, and literacy preceding the two coups. By exposing the parallels to Transitional Authority in Cambodia. requirements prevented most black and low-income this extent, Bevins explores how authoritarian regimes Extending far beyond Benny Widyono’s vast Brazilians from voting. By contrast, after fighting for might not have been structured in isolation. lived experience, Bevins follows state violence to independence, Indonesia was globally known for its Such propaganda was not mere rhetoric. It enabled Central America, northeast Asia, the Middle East and non-aligned stance—the city of Bandung hosted the mass murder. Analysing the state violence that took place Africa, consistently showing how policy and ideology 1955 Africa-Asia conference—and after 1948 it had a in Indonesia in 1965, Bevins intersperses his first-hand crafted within the US government circulates globally. broad-based, legal and democratic communist party. interviews with survivors of Suharto’s concentration This unprecedented scope reveals US ambitions to Why discuss such disparate contexts in tandem? The camps with historical research on the mass killings comprehensively secure its influence over the developing huge, resource-rich countries of Brazil and Indonesia to describe state violence driven by anti-communist world—and at what human cost the US was successful. were strategically important to the US—more so than ideologies—and he traces how the US government And the US was largely successful. One need only Cuba and Vietnam, nations more frequently associated celebrated that regime change with knowledge of the peruse President Jair Bolsonaro’s virulent statements with the Cold War. Brazil and Indonesia are, in fact, violence taking place. The Jakarta Method then shows about communism in Brazil, or read the defence inconvenient examples for the US, since they resist the how this anti-communist annihilation programme minister Prabowo Subianto’s statements on the ‘latent typical narrative binary of a tug-of-war between the became a literal model for state violence that other US- threat of communism’ in Indonesia to understand how US and Soviet Union, between capitalism and armed backed anti-communist regimes copied across the world. both countries’ current discourses continue to model the communist revolution. Neither Brazil’s João Goulart nor Brazil’s dictatorship did not carry out a comprehensive rhetoric of their authoritarian pasts. Bevins concludes Indonesia’s Sukarno, leaders at the time of the coups, extermination policy. Leftists were murdered in the by arguing that it is precisely because the United States were aligned with Moscow, nor where they communists. hundreds, not in the hundreds of thousands as in achieved the hegemony it so desired that we need to Both were interested in making progressive reforms Indonesia. But under General Emílio Médici, a hardliner study and unpack its comprehensive project. Such an domestically—land reform was a notably controversial in a series of military leaders who assumed control of the undertaking demonstrates the importance of research move in both contexts—while also asserting their regime in 1968, plans for extermination were discussed. on transnational networks in mapping how ideologies independence from Western powers. Bevins thus chooses According to Brazil’s National Truth Commission, that are formed and violence takes place. ☐ to frame his book around two countries in the Global plan was called Operação Jacarta—Operation Jakarta. South where non-alignment, rather than the threat of Summarising from the Truth Commission, Bevins Lara Norgaard is a freelance writer based in the US

15 MEMOIR Homeless and stateless Helen Jarvis

abiburahman’s, or Habib’s, life story begins with HABIBURAHMAN WITH SOPHIE ANSEL in Myanmar appear to constitute a protected group ‘Grandma’s Stories’. (TRANSLATED BY ANDREA REECE) within the meaning of the Genocide Convention’ is itself First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks highly significant. The court further accepted that ‘there HA long time ago, Habib, the world was vast and Scribe: 2019 is a real and imminent risk of irreparable prejudice … infinite. Men and women travelled slowly, keeping to the right of the Rohingya group in Myanmar and time with nature and God as they searched for of its members to be protected from acts of genocide peaceful and fertile lands. Entire peoples boarded In 2012, as the persecution of the Rohingya reached and related prohibited acts’. In doing so, it rejected huge ships and crossed oceans. Sailors invoked the new depths, and the hopes placed on Aung San Suu Kyi Myanmar’s claims to be sufficiently engaging in efforts clemency of nature by offering up a small gem each proved empty, Habib wrote his memoir, First, They Erased towards repatriation of refugees, ethnic reconciliation day that was swallowed by the waves and deposited Our Name, during his period of detention in Australia. and military accountability. on the ocean bed. This is how our ancestors arrived As he writes, ‘My people disappeared in the euphoria of The court went on to order Myanmar to implement safe and sound in the Kingdom of Rohang, which a new age of democracy in Myanmar. Genocide was a a number of provisional measures proposed by The we now call Arakan. It is this land of plenty, blessed taboo word, and the Rohingya, once again, did not exist Gambia: to take all measures within its power to prevent by God, which gave rise to the Rohingya, a peaceful … The one voice of Myanmar had not spoken for us, and the commission of all acts enumerated in the Genocide tribe of fishermen and farmers ... Your memory is so now we would have to speak for ourselves.’ Convention against the Rohingya; to ensure that its all you will have to keep our history alive, Habib. So And so he did, not only in penning his own story, military and any irregular armed units do not commit listen to me carefully, because your grandmother but also organising among Rohingya refugees. The such acts; to take effective measures to prevent the won’t be here forever. final chapters of the book shift register from dialogue- destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence based storytelling to a cri de coeur. Habib founded related to allegations of such acts; and to submit regular Habib goes on to relate the increasing persecution the Australian Burmese Rohingya Organisation; he is reports to the court on all measures taken, until it came of his family and community at home in Rakhine state, currently secretary of the Arakan Rohingya National to a final decision on the case. Myanmar. He recreates personal incidents and informal Organisation and a refugee ambassador appointed by the While these orders are provisional in nature and dialogue as his family sought to escape by moving into Refugee Council of Australia. do not yet constitute a ruling by the ICJ on whether the highlands, near the former Arakan capital of Mrauk First, They Erased Our Name is a rare first- genocide has been or is still being committed by U, constantly pressed for official and unofficial taxes hand account of what the Rohingya have endured. Myanmar against the Rohingya, they represent an and bribes. He recounts the bans on movement between Its publication fills in the narrative gaps in the legal enormous step forward in international judicial villages and the brutal forced labour, including being facts and arguments laid out before the judges of the recognition of the crimes and consequent implicit press-ganged as army porters. International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague in condemnation of the state of Myanmar for its failure to Myanmar’s nationwide democracy uprising that December 2019, when their plight finally reached the prevent or punish these acts. began on 8 August 1988—known by everyone as 8888— highest chamber of international law. The case was This ICJ order is the third significant victory was crushed and resulted in a bloody military coup brought to the ICJ by The Gambia, which alleged that achieved by the Rohingya in the international arena. by the State Law and Order Restoration Council. This Myanmar breached the 1948 Genocide Convention, More than two years ago the Permanent People’s was followed by Operation Clean and Beautiful Nation which was enacted after the horrors of the Holocaust. Tribunal in Kuala Lumpur, in which I was a judge, of 1991 and 1992, in which the junta forced 260,000 The Gambia’s team of lawyers opened their case with a became the first judicial body to make a finding of Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh, while their land was request for immediate provisional measures to protect genocide regarding the Rohingya, which was reaching confiscated, and mosques and whole villages were razed the Rohingya remaining in their homeland. its most intense and horrific climax at the time. This to the ground. was followed by a number of strong statements and As Habib tells his version of these catastrophes, he he wood-panelled room, adorned with stained- resolutions by various United Nations bodies and special returns constantly to two themes: his father’s efforts in glass windows, where the ICJ hearing took rapporteurs, and particularly by the detailed findings helping him to obtain an education, both by passing place is a world away from the bamboo huts in made by the fact-finding mission established by its on his own knowledge of Rohingya history and TCox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, the world’s largest refugee Human Rights Commission and recent resolution by traditional medicine and by bribing officials to allow settlement. Yet those two worlds were somehow bridged the General Assembly. All these unequivocal statements Habib to attend formal school; and his father’s constant in court. The few Rohingya who managed to get places built on the detailed and corroborated reports by victims injunctions, from as early as 1986, for Habib never to in the chamber sat near their legal team. They rose one and other witnesses as well as by individual researchers reveal himself as a Rohingya, but to use an assumed by one to present their arguments for the court to order and non-governmental organisations, made both before Burmese name for his schooling. protective measures to help preserve the very existence and after the Permanent People’s Tribunal judgment. In 1994 the army requisitioned the family home, of the Rohingya community. Four international lawyers The ICJ’s order on provisional measures is a built on land they had purchased legally. A Christian spoke—the lead taken by The Gambia’s attorney general vindication of the valiant efforts by the Rohingya to pastor managed to buy it back, providing the family with Ba Tambadou, who filed the case against Myanmar resist attempts to destroy them, in whole or in part. It enough money to seek shelter with Habib’s grandmother on behalf of his country, supported by the fifty-seven- also offers momentum to those activists, researchers, in a relocated village on the outskirts of Sittwe, the member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. journalists and humanitarian workers who have capital of Rakhine. The Gambia’s presentation was followed by the documented their cause. It remains to be seen whether But things kept getting worse. And at seventeen, appearance of Aung San Suu Kyi, appearing as the agent even this high-level judicial ruling will shake the having completed secondary school with high grades, leading Myanmar’s response. The Lady spoke eloquently seemingly implacable denial by the government of Habib left his family to try to find anonymity and safety, for more than an hour without even once referring to Myanmar not only of genocide but also of the very ending up in Irrawaddy where he joined a group of the Rohingya people by name. While acknowledging existence of the Rohingya. The prospect does not look student activists circulating anti-government pamphlets. that some Myanmar soldiers had committed excesses good. In the months since the ICJ order, and in the They were informed on, beaten and jailed until a large (though never mentioning the words ‘rape’, ‘sexual midst of the coronavirus pandemic, persecution on the bribe paid by their teacher allowed them to escape. violence’, ‘murder’, ‘torture’ or ‘massacre’), she asserted ground in Rakhine state continues unabated. Habib headed back to Yangon and then to Mandalay, that Myanmar was punishing these rogue offenders. Habiburahman’s urgent book is a devastating crossed into Laos and then Thailand. After a further She went further. Any intervention by international testimony of a long history of persecution, of the will to fourteen years on the run across Southeast Asia— judicial bodies was meddling that could jeopardise these keep history, then and now, alive. It is a vital voice—to surviving exploitation, arrest, detention, deportation remedies. Suu Kyi concluded proceedings by petitioning add to the others—of the urgent claim to justice which and trafficking—Habib reached Australia. But only the court ‘to remove the case from its List’. still awaits the Rohingya. ☐ to be placed in detention for thirty-two months, first Far from throwing out the complaint, however, on 23 on Christmas Island, then in Darwin and finally January 2020 the seventeen ICJ judges accepted to hear Helen Jarvis is vice-president of the Permanent People’s Melbourne, where he now lives. He remains stateless but the case and issued strong protective rulings. For the Tribunal and a former member of the panel of judges at by no means voiceless. world’s highest court to state clearly that ‘the Rohingya the 2017 PPT on Myanmar

16 BIOGRAPHY Son of terror Gozde Deniz Altunkeser

BEN HUBBARD after Saudi Arabia pulled funding, the radicalisation MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman of Muslim populations won’t stop there. It will be very Tim Duggan Books: 2020 difficult to halt. ‘It seemed Saudi Arabia had lost control of the effects of its own teachings,’ Hubbard writes. Where was the West, with its self-proclaimed beliefs hirty years ago, in 1990, Nourah Alghanem, a in democracy, liberalism and secularism, as the Saudi- thirty-four-year-old elementary schoolteacher induced tragedy unfolded across the Middle East? in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, held a Hubbard is insightful when he recounts MBS’s bonding Ttea party. Women weren’t allowed to drive in Saudi with Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Arabia. They could sit in the passenger’s seat and be It’s an opportunistic alliance built on oil, money and driven around by men. But Saudi Arabia was the only power. In October 2018, the far from strident Saudi country in the world where women could not get critic and writer Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi behind the wheel. She wanted to change that. Alghanem embassy in Turkey in order to get papers for his got together with a small group of women, mainly upcoming wedding, only to be ambushed, suffocated highly educated professionals, to drive around Riyadh. and dismembered. The assassination of Khashoggi was The police learned about it and quickly arrested and ghastly, condemned by countries around the world. Yet questioned the people involved. Trump tweeted: ‘It could very well be that the Crown For Saudi Arabia, the act of a female driving Prince had knowledge of this tragic event—maybe he did became a matter of national security. Who were the and maybe he didn’t! The United States intends to remain organisers? Did they have foreign backing? Had Saddam a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests Hussein—the dictator of Iraq later toppled during the of our country. Very simply it is called America First!’ US invasion in 2003—encouraged them in order to WikiCommons Hubbard writes that in 2018, when Canada destabilise the kingdom? ‘No,’ Alghanem said, ‘we just demanded the immediate release of the Saudi human want to drive.’ Almost all the women lost their jobs. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 2019 rights activist Samar Badawi and her brother Raif They were smeared, harangued and chased out of their Badawi, a blogger who had been sentenced to ten years social circles and communities, thanks to coordinated as a ‘reformer’, a young globetrotter who would reshape in prison and a thousand lashes for running a liberal attacks in Saudi Arabia’s censored media. Muslim clerics his backward domain into a modern one: empowering website, the Saudi Foreign Ministry accused Canada of denounced them as ‘loose women’ who wanted to women, decentralising power, and reforming oil ‘blatant interference in the internal affairs’. The Canadian destroy society. companies with new ownership beyond the royal family ambassador to Saudi Arabia was declared persona non In 2018 Ben Hubbard was a New York Times while freeing the kingdom from dependence on oil. On grata, and new trade deals were suspended. Samar and journalist covering Saudi Arabia. That year the the surface, his high-profile decision to allow women Raif Badawi remain in prison. government made the much-lauded decision to lift to drive suggested he might indeed be a reformer. But Drawing on confidential conversations and the women’s driving ban, an act that female activists, MBS was determined not to credit the women who anecdotes, as well as serious research, Hubbard’s lively including Alghanem, had been campaigning for at campaigned for years for the right to drive. As Saudi narrative has the hallmarks of a political thriller. We get great risk to themselves. Hubbard met with Alghanem. diplomats and leaders faced the world, showing off that the inside story of the Saudi merchants and royals who Relieved, she said, ‘What we are seeing today, I never they now allowed women to drive—as if that’s a major have been purged and detained, most notably those thought I’d see. I thought that maybe I’d die before I saw reform to begin with—women activists were arrested held in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, forced there it. But it’s good for our daughters, our granddaughters. and tortured. They stood accused of the heinous act by MBS himself. We follow the account of undercover What’s important is that our kingdom entered the of trying to end the kingdom’s ‘guardianship laws’, Saudi operations in Yemen, stoking civil war, poverty twenty-first century. Finally!’ which treat women as lifelong children, requiring the and extremism in search of political influence. We learn At the centre of the reforms was Saudi Arabia’s permission of their male ‘guardians’—husband, father, about Saudi Arabia’s devastating embargo on Qatar, emerging leader, Prince Mohammad bin Salman, brother or uncle—to work, travel, apply for a passport upset about news coverage by the state-run Al Jazeera whose life is documented in incredible detail and with and get married. news network. Then there is the kidnapping of the flair in Hubbard’s biography,MBS: The Rise to Power Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri in 2017, ordered of Mohammed bin Salman. Hubbard, a fluent Arabic am a woman from Turkey, a more ‘liberal’ Muslim by the crown prince during Hariri’s bizarre visit to Saudi speaker, interviewed hundreds of people in six countries country whose adherents are mainly Sunni. Over Arabia, apparently in an attempt to force the withdrawal and spent over six years gathering research inside Saudi time, religious ideology and practice there have of Iran-backed Hezbollah forces from Yemen by causing Arabia, a difficult reporting environment, an absolutist Icome under some influence from Saudi Wahhabism, civil strife in Lebanon. And we go behind the scenes state under stringent surveillance. the ultra-conservative doctrine that emphasises a literal as Saudi operatives prepare to kill Khashoggi and We learn about how MBS, now the crown prince, interpretation of the Qur’an, rejecting any rationalisation dismember his body. became a pragmatic and ruthless leader who overcame or adaptation. I was raised as a Muslim and left the This is the incredible story of a fall from grace. It’s the odds, since ‘there was little reason to expect that faith at a young age, seeing the atrocities against women the tale of the young prince who started out as the he would become more than a middling prince who taking place in countries like Saudi Arabia. I can trendy moderniser, opening cinemas and concert halls dabbled in business’. He is King Salman’s sixth son and connect to them. And I am worried about our future, and in thrall to Silicon Valley, seeking out investments before 2015 hardly under consideration to succeed too, as these interpretations of Islam gain popularity in to diversify his country’s oil dependent economy. It his father; he wasn’t educated abroad at a prestigious my homeland, at schools and mosques. In the Turkey ends with our protagonist in a twisted tragedy, as an university; he had not served in the military; he spoke of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, women have been silenced authoritarian and ruthless mafioso whose gangsters poor English; and he hadn’t demonstrated his abilities or smeared for asking for equal rights, or voicing their aren’t afraid to put away a journalist or torture critics for by running a successful oil or construction business like dissent about religious and social traditions. speaking out. MBS has even used the Covid-19 crisis to his elder brothers and cousins. His extended family rules Hubbard talks about the spread of Saudi Wahhabism tighten his grip over the levers of power and to double over Saudi Arabia like a medieval religious kingdom. in Islamic countries including Turkey, bankrolled by down on criticism of his arch-enemy, Iran. In this environment, and once his father became king, the kingdom until it announced in January 2020 that When the time comes, MBS will surely stay in power it was only through shrewd politicking and vicious it would stop funding mosques in other countries. But for many decades, unless he too somehow succumbs to dynastic infighting that he was able to become the the announcement was too little, too late, coming some the no-holds-barred infighting of the House of Saud. prince-in-waiting. ‘An absolute monarchy is essentially five decades after Saudi Arabia began exporting its And from Ben Hubbard’s account, when he does ascend a democracy of one, and MBS got his father’s vote, the religious ideology in the 1960s, fundamentally warping the throne he will be yet another tyrant. ☐ only one that mattered,’ Hubbard writes. the religious terrain of the Middle East, North Africa At first, some in the international media lauded MBS and parts of Southeast Asia. Hubbard shows that even Gozde Deniz Altunkeser is a physician from Turkey

17 URBAN AFFAIRS Rise of Shenzhen Anne Stevenson-Yang

JUAN DU The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City Harvard University Press: 2020

hinese cities are mostly marked by a uniformity and unity of purpose more commonly associated with army barracks. Living spaces are designed Cto minimise community mingling, and every city is cut through with avenues wide enough to accommodate four tanks abreast. These heroic spaces dwarf street life, which gets relegated to back alleys that are constantly besieged by new urban renovation plans. In its first decade and a half as a major player in the ‘Factory for the World’, Shenzhen was no exception to this imposed dreariness. Political authorities threw up factory compounds with concrete dormitories on the sparsely populated marshland abutting Hong Kong to contain a planned export-processing base. They wanted the new city sealed off from the rest of the mainland so as not to pollute innocent Chinese minds with foreign ideas. Sterile and pointedly dull, Shenzhen was a place where low-wage migrant workers would spend eighty WikiCommons hours a week making widgets for the export market, sleep in dormitories, earn cash wages and go back Shenzhen, 2018 home when they were no longer needed. Until 2006, passports for foreigners or special permits for Chinese Shenzhen’s special status grew from the seed of a actors but has eschewed nationwide reforms that would were required even to enter the Special Economic Zone central-level SEZ established in 1980. The national-level have forced institutional change. In fact, Shenzhen has (SEZ), then the densest portion of the city. status conferred a number of important privileges in buffered reforms on the mainland, not piloted them. The city burst the rigid confines of the economic the import of components and machinery and in the While Shenzhen’s relative openness and diversity helped planners, and today is probably the happiest and most export of finished goods, radically lower taxes, rights it become China’s tech incubator, the zone is also a cash functional city in China. Shenzhen is known inside and to land use, freedom from all sorts of local fees and register for political and military elites, a fact that has outside China as a cauldron of innovation, and many the right to cooperate with foreign companies without put Shenzhen in service to the elites’ justification of tight young graduates aspire to move there, as evidenced by seeking higher-level approval. By 2004, China had control outside the SEZs. Hukou reform is one example Huawei’s apocryphal but often recounted story about fifty-four ‘national-level’ zones, and the slivers of land of a policy that not only did not spread across China but flying 10,000 new graduates into Shenzhen. Juan Du’sThe they occupied accounted for 20 per cent of the country’s most recently has been in visible retreat. Shenzhen Experiment explains why. Shenzhen, she writes, foreign investment, nearly 14 per cent of foreign trade Indeed, the proliferation of special zones in China unlike other special zones, became China’s Pinocchio, and 5 per cent of GDP. signifies a degree of paralysis that reigns among a real city, not just a uni-functional export-processing The bureaucratic divisions among the special zones policymakers when they have to face the real economy. zone, the kernel of the central government’s development rival the ornate protocols created by mandarins of past Authorities have been singularly unable to implement plan. It was the relaxation of government programmes dynasties. No civil service could be more exacting about true institutional reform and instead have parcelled rather than their focused application that enabled that. its procedural rules and the fine distinctions between out limited franchise rights to entrepreneurial county ‘Shenzhen’s success is founded in the efforts of local city zones that report to the national level versus those that governments that annex relatively unoccupied pieces of makers to create not just a “zone” but a real city,’ Du report to the province. One key achievement of the land and are typically permitted to keep all zone taxes writes. ‘Viewed as a comprehensive city rather than a zones has been to provide very special opportunities for for three to five years. It is not unlike the system of treaty zone, Shenzhen is truly unique among China’s SEZs.’ local cadres and other elites. ports that prevailed after the Opium Wars, when foreign Du’s mission is to persuade governments hoping to The special treatment of the SEZ began rolling out governments were handed pieces of territory in places emulate Shenzhen’s success that the city did not grow across other regions of the city as Shenzhen was broken like Dalian, Shenyang and Shanghai. from a test tube and cannot easily be replicated. The book loose from the rigid, five-tier system of governance and So, Shenzhen has not been a prototype, but it is a is engaging on the history of the area, with fascinating taxation in China, keeping more of the money made in very successful city and the only Tier 1 city created since vignettes of migration from the war-torn north in the the city to use for investment. Other parts of the country 1949, despite efforts to promote Chongqing. Most cities third century, the Song Dynasty salt trade, Japanese started to scrutinise Shenzhen’s special privileges and in China by design provide rearguard support to major bandits of the Ming and, in the Qing, forcible evacuations to gripe about the corruption and the foreign influence urban centres. Shenzhen is among the small handful of of coastal areas in order to set up a perimeter of defence leaking in, and Shenzhen had to roll back some benefits. cities that have been permitted to become integrated, against a rebel general who had seized Taiwan and was In 1992, retired leader Deng Xiaoping made his famous multi-function areas with significant autonomy, launching attacks against the ruling house. southern tour to Shenzhen, giving his personal support although also the cheap labour logistic support entity to But Du’s considerable scholarship focuses on urban to the economic freedoms there. From that time, monetise the sophisticated trade, financial service and planning and architecture, not on economic policy, Shenzhen’s development was virtually unbridled. management expertise in Hong Kong. That was done and her book misses the core developmental reality. Du’s argument that Shenzhen has been a proving with deliberation and design. It was not the raw materials of indigenous people and ground for policies elsewhere does not really hold up. ‘Tiers’ are a bureaucratic classification. The villages that made Shenzhen into a living, breathing ‘The SEZs were instrumental in shaping the central progressive diminution of wealth from top to bottom city but instead the calculated relaxation of rules that government’s reform policies,’ she writes early in the that they represent is directly linked to and created by stifle integrated development everywhere else. In that book. She later reports that policies in Shenzhen inspired that classification system: simply being designated ‘Tier sense, Shenzhen is less a prototype than a poignant nationwide reforms to hukou or residence policy. 1’ pretty much guarantees wealth in the centre-takes-all counterfactual. As we watch the freedoms of Hong Kong In reality, no single zone-based regulatory change system of governing. dissolve and threats to Taiwan grow, that poignancy has has gone national, although many have proliferated in Like the military, regional governments are managed a particular sting. other zones. China has multiplied special zones for special vertically, like nesting dolls, with the highest of the five

18 tiers reporting straight to the Politburo. The Chinese system places the central government alone at Tier 1, but, for commercial purposes, Tier 1 is usually defined as the four cities with the highest GDP: Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Next come all the provincial capitals and Tianjin and Chongqing, because they have the bureaucratic status of provinces. The Third Tier consists of 166 local administrative regions that were brought directly under party control during the Cultural Revolution and that still report to the National People’s Congress rather than to the provincial government. At the Fourth Tier are counties, and towns lie at the fifth. Shenzhen started down the road to becoming a Tier 1 city in 1980, when Deng Xiaoping, acutely aware of China’s need to generate hard currency, gave the green light to the opening of three special zones that would process goods for export. Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou were chosen for proximity to areas of Chinese irredentist interest, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan respectively. All three areas are in Guangdong, a key military base for China. Xiamen, in Fujian province, directly across the straits from Taiwan, quickly followed in establishing an SEZ, and the island of Hainan, not yet a province, followed as the fifth ‘special zone’. Arman Aziz Scenes of Everyday Life: The abolition of rules that applied to the rest of China was a big contributor. In 1984, Shenzhen began A replica of the Eiffel Tower in Shenzen Poems of Vietnam, Indonesia, to issue ‘temporary residence certificates’, meaning Cambodia, Russia, 2016 that migrants from inland provinces could reside there securities, real estate, electronics, motorcycles and by Richard Milazzo (with mixed media works by Aga Ousseinov) legally as long as they could find a job. By 1988, the media. The company collapsed under unpayable debt in majority of the population was from other parts of the 2005. But these are anecdotes without a bridging thesis. Published by TSUKUDA ISLAND PRESS country. Shenzhen was first to abolish the food coupon Du rightly points out that the central government Hayama-Tokyo system, allowing residents to buy food with only money. announced Shenzhen-scale plans for other areas. Shenzhen in 1987 introduced China’s first fixed- In 2017, for example, authorities ‘announced the term grant of land-use rights, to the China Aviation government’s plan for a new satellite urban center Technology Import-Export Corp. The city was first to located one hundred kilometers from Beijing’, called implement labour-contract rules. And there is much more. the Xiong’an New Area. So far, Xiong’an has been an Jonathan Lasker No other territory enjoyed this much policy flexibility. abject failure. She points out that Kashgar, in Xinjiang, New Complete Essays There are many political reasons for that, surrounding is among the few areas granted national-level SEZ status - the special place of Guangdong province in the Chinese but that it is very far from becoming a Shenzhen. 1984 2019 political order and the pesky problem of roughly one ‘Shenzhen is not a formalized and easily replicable million Chinese who successfully used Shenzhen—just top-down model,’ Du writes, ‘but a complex and shifting across a stream from Hong Kong—as a launching pad to set of bottom-up and informal negotiations’. flee the mainland during the 1960s and 1970s. The problem is not that these areas lack the organic Perhaps the master key to Shenzhen’s success has elements of new economies. Instead, it is that Beijing been the dominance of China’s military presence there precisely does not want organic growth. In Kashgar, in business as well as defence, something that Du’s the city with the highest proportion of China’s Muslim book largely misses. The less discussed chaser to Deng’s Uighur minority, the reasons hardly need to be southern tour was a declaration by the powerful military enumerated. As for Xiong’an, the central government leader Yang Baibing a few months afterwards that the has tried to force it into becoming a bedroom for the military would be the ‘escort and protector’ of China’s capital’s tech elites. But given the lack of reform in social economic reforms in Shenzhen. The Central Military welfare, migrants would need to put their children Commission then dispatched several high-ranking in pricey private schools and get treated at private delegations to Shenzhen. hospitals. That means that only the wealthy can afford E D G E W I S E China’s military is an integral part of the political to live in Xiong’an—and the wealthy can afford to live system and enjoys special privileges out of reach to state- instead in Beijing. owned companies and regions, no matter how close they Shenzhen is truly remarkable among China’s cities may be to the central government. Among the privileges for its acceptance of cultural diversity, tolerance of New Complete Essays: 1984-2019 that made a major difference in the development of migrants from less-developed inland areas, varieties by Jonathan Lasker Shenzhen were special access to Hong Kong visitor of food and of course the exuberance of its business (edited and with an introduction and permits and passports. They also included preferential climate. Juan Du’s book rightly celebrates that and commentary by Richard Milazzo) rights to commodities and land. explains a good deal of what makes Shenzhen special. Pblished and distributed by Shenzhen’s development was prompted by the But the extent to which Shenzhen is or can be a model EDGEWISE PRESS military demobilisation and falling defence budgets of for other SEZs and cities in China must take account New York the mid-1980s, which sent former military officers out to of several factors in its success not easily replicated, manage companies that were still owned but no longer including being first out of the starting gate; proximity managed by the military. Reforms of the late 1980s to Hong Kong and a shared language and culture with gave the political green light to the military operators, Hong Kong that all but erased the border; internal assuring them that they would not be required to logistic advantages of the broader Pearl River delta; relinquish control of these companies. concentration of PLA investment during the 1980s; These companies were key to Shenzhen’s growth commercialisation of military companies; and a softened into a fully functioning city, while the other SEZs policy with regard to use and conversion of the renminbi remained focused on export processing. Du gives and the Hong Kong dollar. some attention to these issues, writing about the It is a fascinating history, but perhaps more for its military property developers Kaili and Poly, the uniqueness than for its historic role or potential as a ninety companies belonging to the Great Wall Huihua pilot for broader reform. ☐ Available through Edgewise Press, Inc. Industrial Corp., which belonged to the 42nd Group 24 Fifth Ave. (No. 224), New York, N.Y. 10011 Army, and discussing the enormous 999 Group, formed [email protected] | edgewisepress.org from companies under the General Logistics Division Anne Stevenson-Yang worked in China for twenty-five richardmilazzo.com and quickly becoming China’s largest pharmaceuticals years as a trade and investment analyst and a tech/ manufacturer as well as a diversified corporation in media entrepreneur

19 HISTORY Shanghai’s last race Paul French

JAMES CARTER Club members apparently disliked Sassoon’s overtly equitable, if also rowdier and less well policed, social Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai professional approach to racing rather than the affected spaces than the seasonal and snooty Race Club. W.W. Norton & Co: 2020 amateurism of the British upper middle classes. Like The Race Club’s answer would have been that those pantomime, every racecourse must have its villains sports were all fixed. Maybe so—greyhounds did get among the jockeys, owners, and trainers, as well as its nobbled, boxers took dives, drug dealers owned the hey used to say that, wherever the British turned heroes. Sassoon was cast as the eternal villain of the tracks. But was the Race Club innocent? Carter doesn’t up, they started out by building a club, a town Shanghai races. say, but there were always rumours of Australian race hall and then a racecourse. Follow the expansion Of course, for most, if not all, the races were swindling gangs and Chinese gambling syndicates that Tof the British Empire, and horse racing follows the flag primarily about betting. Stylish and cosmopolitan as put the fix in when necessary. as assuredly as gunboats and bad food. The Brits had a Shanghai may have been for its wealthier inhabitants— Carter does discuss other entertainment alternatives racecourse up and running within a couple of years of Chinese and foreign—it was always a vulgar town. to the horses: nightclubs and cinemas. But without securing Shanghai as a treaty port in 1842. The Shanghai Displays of wealth were often gaudy and flagrant exhibits doubt it is horse racing that has lingered longer in Race Club and its track were established in the centre of spending power. So bet large they did. By the time the imagined Old Shanghai than just about anything of the International Settlement by 1862. Walk through Carter focuses on, the club it was pari-mutuel (aka the else. And Champions Day does give us a sense of how the highly landscaped, but rather soulless, People’s Park ‘Tote’, where all bets are pooled and the total pot divided thrilling it would have been to sit in those stands, wave sandwiched between the Yanan Expressway and Nanjing among winning bets, less the track’s commission). It was that betting slip in the air and cheer your preferred Road today, and you’re on the Race Club’s hallowed turf. reasonably well organised by 1941. But it hadn’t always Mongolian pony on. What a thing to have seen! Suspend your imagination, squeeze out modern been. Up until around 1910, the betting was organised Shanghai, and you can still mark out the ring of the old by individual bookmakers, and rowdy race day parties hose grandees up in the club house that track. First you need to remember that back then the were organised by criminals in hotels along Bubbling November day in 1941 were planning Shanghai’s traffic drove on the left and the horses ran clockwise, Well Road. By 1941 the Race Club, which hated the centenary, 1842–1942. On 8 December 1941, both British style. From the old 1934 race club building ‘mob’ of touts, had formalised things and ensured that Tmoments after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese (now the Shanghai History Museum), the track curled those hotels were long gone. soldiers entered the International Settlement. It fell round to what is now the Shanghai Art Museum by the Champions Day is partly a list of the great and the without a fight. The racecourse had played its role in Expressway (formerly the old Avenue Edward VII). It good of bourgeois Shanghailander society (as those many Shanghai conflicts. The space inside the track was then headed down the back straight that ran parallel foreigners living in Shanghai liked to be known), with in constant use—during the Shanghai massacre of 1927, with Xizang Road (then Thibet Road) dominated by some wealthy Chinese equestrian fans thrown in for good when the Kuomintang slaughtered the city’s left, the the Chinese YMCA with its traditional upturned eaves. measure. A litany of proud executives of the ‘Hongkers Royal Air Force maintained a squadron of fighter planes Finally, a last turn by the Great World amusement and Shankers’ bank and millionaires in the shipping on the racecourse. During the Japanese attack of 1932, complex to thunder down alongside the Bubbling Well business. Which raises the question as to just how much army arc lights lit the skies over the track and artillery Road (now Nanjing West Road). It was a glorious track, of Shanghai was represented at the races? Carter frames was installed to prevent Japanese bombing. Shanghai an always crowded members’ stand and pretty much the horse racing as a modernist activity, a place where the spent so much of its existence, as the great US journalist dead centre of the Shanghai Settlement. distinctive ‘Shanghai style’ (hai-pai) was on display. who lived twenty five years in the city, J.B. Powell, once James Carter, an academic who has written before It’s certainly interesting that modernist writers like Mu said, ‘living on the rim of a volcano’. Throughout, the on China’s other great cosmopolitan city of Harbin, has Shiying, in his 1932 short story ‘Shanghai Foxtrot’, and Race Club managed to keep going, race by race, winners’ chosen to tell the story of the Shanghai International Liu Na’ou had characters who saw the Race Club as cup by winners’ cup. Settlement through the lens of the last major race embodying the modern in Shanghai. Racing even managed to limp on throughout the day at the Shanghai track—Champions Day on 12 Maybe so, but amid the panoply of activities available Japanese occupation. But the heart had gone out of it. November 1941. It was a doomed party. Since Japan in Shanghai, horse racing, with its high financial bar and Many of the trainers, jockeys and owners had evacuated had attacked Shanghai’s Chinese-controlled environs in discriminatory exclusivity, seems low on the modernist or were interned. Stagflation killed the Tote. Champions the summer of 1937, the Settlement was reduced to a agenda. The ‘sport of kings’, the proverbial phrase for Day 1941 passed and soon after the old Shanghai of fraction of its former self. The portions north of Suzhou horse racing, is arguably far from the cutting edge. Since the treaty port era too—officially scrapped by mutual Creek—Hongkou, Tilanqiao and Yangpu—were all the 1920s, Shanghai had multiple dog racing tracks open agreement in 1943. Of course, the gee-gees and the Tote under Japanese control. To the south of the Settlement, to all to race their mutts and gamble. Dogs raced almost didn’t sit well with Mao, so that was that. the once neighbourly French Concession was under nightly around town at tracks attached to jazz clubs, And it looks like that will be that for some time yet. pro-Japanese Vichy control. The remaining Settlement with electric hares, under flood lights, allowing those Back in the early 2000s, with lotteries back in China and of Shanghai was the Gudao, the lonely island, left alone who had to work during the day to attend. after Macao liberalised its casino industry, the Wuhan only until Japan felt strong enough to take it. That Boxing too was big, with hard contested bouts Sports Administration somehow got permission to run moment was just twenty-six days later, seconds after the between US Marines, visiting British fighters, Japanese some races. No betting though, just an experiment. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. On Champions Day 1941, army champions, Russian émigré boys and nimble and Hong Kong Jockey Club got excited. Could this be the the Settlement was already a contested zone of Japanese fast Filipinos, Thais and Chinese. The Friday night fights route to off-course betting shops across China? Well, aggression, warring Chinese collaborators and resistance at the Canidrome in Frenchtown attracted huge, raucous no was the answer. Party bosses saw only illegal online fighters, a struggling and increasingly impotent and partisan crowds with huge betting (they built a Bank betting and underground touts popping up. Shanghai Municipal Council and an international of China right next to the track) and regular brawls in Still rumours arise now and then. The Wuhan assortment of gangsters. But hey, horses gotta run! the stands. Soccer too if you wanted a fight; on 15 March experiment may be restarted, tracks in Inner Mongolia Carter is right: the Race Club was a microcosm 1941, a game between the police and a Chinese team could be opened to betting. Most recently the free port for many of the ills of treaty port Shanghai. It was turned into a riot, causing 20,000 Chinese spectators to of Hainan Island has been suggested as a way to bring a members’ club and, ‘nowhere was the racism of flood the field, with numerous injuries reported. And racing back to China. Can it ever happen? Consider the Shanghai more evident than in its clubs’. Chinese jockeys let’s not forget the jai alai with all those fast and furious Hong Kong Jockey Club’s last annual statement—after were OK, but, despite some rules jiggling, no Chinese Basque, Portuguese and Argentinian players who had paying dividends of HK$58 billion and betting duty of was ever a member of the club. Indeed, Carter also large followings among sports fans and young ladies. They HK$9.5 billion, the club’s betting commission revenue tells the story of the Chinese-run International Race were the white boy pin-up stars of inter-war Shanghai. was HK$3.9 billion. The club contributed fully 11.7 Club at the city’s Jiangwan stadium to the north of the Membership? Just pay at the turnstiles and move on per cent of Hong Kong’s total tax revenues. So far that’s Settlement, established as an alternative. out of the way of the man or woman behind. Gamble? not been quite a big enough inducement for Beijing. It The discrimination didn’t stop with the Chinese. Choose between the Tote, the on-site bookies, the seems that for now Champions Day November 1941 will The rather snooty and self-important Race Club types off-site illegal bookies and the rows of slot machines remain the last one. ☐ didn’t have much time for Jews either, especially when between races. The various Canidromes, the boxing and local taipan David Sassoon’s horses kept winning. the fronton (which were all year-round) were all more Paul French is an author and historian

20 JOURNAL Personal history Louis Raymond

n 4 October 2013, Vietnam announces the death of Vo Nguyen Giap. Immediately thousands of people line up on Hoang Dieu Street, amidst Othe giant xa cu trees and the colonial villas. In this leafy district where the general lived until the age of 102, young people sit casually on the garden wall of the neighbouring house as they wait to pay their respects. The line extends hundreds of metres, the more elderly holding flowers and incense. There are people from every age and profession. War veterans, rich and poor, government officials and business owners all wait their turn. The hero of Dien Bien Phu, victorious over France and the United States, was one of the few figures left who could bring everyone together, not just for his war record, but as a symbol of anti-Chinese nationalism and a critic of state corruption. At the time I was working as a consultant for a documentary film about the Indochina War, which the Vietnamese call ‘the War of Independence against the French’. The idea was to collect and confront the narratives of all sides: the French, the Vietnamese in the Democratic Republic’s People’s Army, the Vietnamese enlisted in the French army and civilians. With Giap’s death, I realised the urgency of our work. It would be the last chance to hear the history directly from participants. Louis Raymond Most of the veterans were born in the 1920s and so were around ninety years old. Many of them still spoke The author with Dang Van Viet flawless French, which greatly helped my work. My only experience as a historian up until then was Vietnamese at all costs, even if this meant swallowing He stares at me, his dark eyes suddenly flashing: ‘The working in archives. I was a young Franco-Vietnamese the official narratives about national identity. I was righteous cause must always tackle ferocity, humanism whose Vietnamese was limited and who believed that by scared not to be Vietnamese enough, or to be called shall win against barbarism!’ It was all about patriotism learning the country’s history I could connect with my ‘anti-Vietnamese’. and virtue. Marxist-Leninist ideology had no influence identity. As early as 1946, many in France turned against until, at least, 1950 or later when the Maoist Chinese My father was born in Cambodia in 1958, to a colonialism and supported the Viet Minh, particularly advisers started to arrive. Vietnamese mother and a French-Vietnamese father those on the left. After France withdrew in 1954, Two weeks later, I visit a veteran named Han Thuy who fought in the French army in the early years of the intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre spoke out against Vu, who once held the rank of colonel in the People’s Indochina War. My grandfather, born in 1920, was an the US war there, supporting the large student Army and served for decades with the Army newspaper, orphan, probably the child of a Vietnamese prostitute demonstrations. To them, northerners were the only Quan Doi Nhan Dan. He lives with his family, the and a French soldier. He died from an illness when true Vietnamese patriots. Much later, as a student, I younger generation taking good care of him because his my father was four. Neither my relatives nor my father had absorbed these influences along with the work of health is poor. A scrupulous archivist, he shows me the remember him well; they say he was a secret man. My postcolonial intellectuals like Aimé Césaire, Frantz many pictures he took with his Nikon camera in 1951–52. father was raised by my grandmother and sent to France Fanon and Albert Memmi. I was inclined to accept the I ask: ‘So, how did you end up in the Viet Minh in 1944, at the age of ten, under the control of an organisation stories from Viet Minh veterans at face value. But I also as you were only sixteen at the time?’ He was enrolled in a which aimed at raising French-Vietnamese orphans in had a growing sense of unease. History seems easy in Viet Minh clandestine organisation, ‘just like everybody’. France, a remnant of French colonialism in Indochina. methodology classes, but it is much more difficult when Noticing in my silence that I am expecting more details, He never saw his mother again and grew up there in a you’re confronted with the sense that you are not being he explains: ‘I am happy that I made the right choice. religious institution. His main aim was to become as told the whole story. Otherwise I could have been enlisted in some of the French as possible. He lost his mother tongue to the counterfeit nationalist organisations.’ He had in mind point that, when he came back to Vietnam for the first he first veteran I meet is Phạm Hong Cu, a the two other parties that existed in 1945 and were part, time in 1998, he could barely communicate with a sister brigadier general in the People’s Army, born in along with the Communist Party, of the first Viet Minh who had raised him as a child. 1926. Already an activist in high school, he was government in 1945: Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi I grew up in France, not knowing much about Tjailed in 1944 but managed to escape when Japanese and Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang. Vietnam, but I could eat with chopsticks from an early forces led a coup against the French on 9 March 1945. At first, I buy these stories entirely, but a few days age. Sometimes, my classmates in middle school would He joined the Viet Minh and the nascent People’s Army, after, when reviewing my notes, I start questioning call me ‘chink’. It felt weird, as I didn’t identify as Asian, taking part in many strategic campaigns, from the ‘Viet them. Both Hong Cu and Vu made their careers in the even less as Chinese. At most, I was a French boy with Bac’ battle of 1947 until Dien Bien Phu in 1954. For People’s Army and were party members. Both ended up Asian eyes: I was as eager in my support of the French most of the war, he was a party commissioner in a key in high military ranks. To what extent has their exposure soccer team as my fellow pupils. Vietnam was the regiment. He was also, through his wife, the late General to the official discourse on history weighed on their destination for some family holidays, but in my daily Giap’s brother-in-law. personal narratives? life as a teenager, it didn’t have much influence. Its only We are seated in the living room of his house in Kim The historian Christopher Goscha has written that mark was the cheap soccer jersey from the Vietnamese Ma district in Hanoi. He is wearing casual clothes, his there was an Asian Communist ‘Art of War’, crafted national team I wore proudly during sports classes. legs crossed, his back slightly arched. Around the coffee during Mao Zedong’s Long March in 1934–35, and that When I came back to Vietnam as a young adult table, his son and the retired Vietnamese journalist who this greatly influenced Vietnamese as early as 1938. after having studied its history, I felt a deep personal made the introduction are paying as much attention as There is a very high probability that the Maoist methods involvement. I wanted to be what my father could I am to his combat anecdotes. We quickly turn to the of mass mobilisation brewed like a red tea among the have been, if only fate and history had not thwarted principles of Giap’s people’s war, and how to mobilise early party members and that it lingered long after. the development of that part of his identity. I hoped to soldiers when you have no weapons or logistical support In 1948, there were two lines among the Communist reclaim what he could not pass on to me. I wanted to be and are facing an enemy with overwhelming firepower. leaders, one pro-Stalin and the other pro-Mao Zedong.

21 Onlyrequired after for 1950 context. with theIf the internationalisation reader wants to know of the what mumbles so that the footage is useless. I am convinced he sold vegetables in the streets to survive. Only in the conflictKeyes thought did the abouttwo merge.what heHong was doing,Cu was howdownplaying he came to he deliberately sabotaged the interview. Private 1990s could he write books and tell his life’s story. thethe role conclusions of ideology he indid the or earlyhow hisyears experiences of the war, shaped because his conversations are not for public consumption. I visit him often and develop a deep attachment. I hebeliefs, wanted one to must minimise read betweenthe role of the Marxism-Leninism, lines. Nowhere, for I want to get the testimony of a southerner who had want Viet to be the Vietnamese grandfather I never had. terrorexample, and doesconstraint Keyes and explicitly pin the argue blame for on the the signi cance Chinese supported the returnDiscover of Bao Dai, Vietnam’s Thailand’s last emperor, Mine was lost born in the cinemas same year, 1920, even though he forof thehistory harsher in shaping ideology the that culture emerged and societylater. As that a political an after 1949. Through a friend, I find someone in Ho died long before my birth. But he is not my grandfather commissar,anthropologist he would observes have during been aware relatively of China’s brief eldwork, role but Chi Minh City: a man in his eighties who studied at a and wanting this just lessens the critical distance I need. wasthough still reluctantthe extent to and acknowledge degree to which it, as this history goes provides against Vietnamese Christian Redemptorist school in the late Viet remains faithful to the ideals of 1945, thea crucial myth ofdimension the great ofpatriotic Keyes’s victory work on of ailand1954. is by 1940s. When I talk to him over the phone, he sounds independence and freedom. He is proud that he did his noThe means same common kind of across doubt a occursdiscipline when that I think notably back to enthusiastic: ‘Yes, I can definitely speak about what the part, helping his country reach that goal. But he also Vuentertains recounting structural how he and joined functional the Viet explanations. Minh. The Viet Communists have done in the south’. There was much considers himself a victim of the party: he is convinced Minhe dealt most harshly fascinating with domestic event that opposition Keyes recounts as early to say about it, starting with the infiltration of the south that his glory was stolen by people who did much asfrom 1945. his There years inwas northern a fierce ailandstruggle forwas powernot the in visit Hanoi by the Viet Minh and the targeted assassinations against less than he did, and he holds the party responsible startingof King from Bhumibol the early and days Queen of the Sirikit, August but Revolution,an expedition pro-French Vietnamese, particularly the many Catholics for the death of his parents. He carefully chooses his andaccompanying it was Ho Chi the Minh abbot who of the decided Mae Sariang to integrate wat to and the urban bourgeoisie of the south. But once in stories to build his memorial. Even the details tended representativesrecover ancient from manuscripts other parties that hadinto beenhis first discovered cabinet. in front of the camera, he says: ‘You know, politics is none to demonstrate how and why he was deprived of Thea remote nationalist cave. Itparties took daysof 1945 of travel were bythen elephant defeated through and of my business’. Was he threatened? Or did he just know recognition. Many times, he asked me: ‘Do you know oustedmountainous from Hanoi forested by Giap country himself to reach in July Red 1946, Cli while Cave it is always safer to keep your mouth shut? that most of those who fought under my command Hooverlooking Chi Minh thewas Salween in France. River. It was Some about manuscripts influence: had It is striking how intertwined the individual in 1950 became generals? Chu Huy Man [the political thebeen Communist damaged byParty robbers wanted and to others have itseaten grip by on termites; the narratives become with the official discourse over time. commissar of the regiment he commanded] even resistance.but a sucient Can allies number of Ho were Chi still Minh intact really to ll be ninelabelled large Individuals tend to reconstruct their memory and to became a Politburo member, just like Giap. Whereas me, asplastic ‘counterfeit sacks. patriots’?is was not just an adventure, but an adjust their narrative so as to avoid any trouble. If you I reached my highest rank at the age of twenty-eight. I extraordinaryWhen you are nd, trying for all to theunderstand manuscripts these had stories, been were told for decades that the Communist Party was am just an old soldier, a general without stars.’ In the way youcopied confront prior theto the enormous end of the difficulties eighteenth of century oral history. and the nation’s only saviour, then there is a possibility you I orient our interviews, I think I help him build his own Youprovided can see new why insights historians into prefer northern the coldai realityhistory. of erase from your memory all the things that do not statue. Only once do I see the human being behind the documents.Keyes took People up alie, two-year either intentionally teaching position or not, in social demonstrate this. Is it just fear? Or does fear cause a hero: when he tells me of the nightmares he suffered for becauserequiredscience theyat for the arecontext. University locked If intothe of readerChianga political wants Mai agenda into Julyknow or 1972. what deeper amnesia? decades after the war. becauseKeyesIt was anthought they interesting want about to promote timewhat to he be themselves.was in doing,ailand, how But for whathe the came to Among the many veterans I interview, one couldtheworldwide conclusions I do about student it?he Lettingdidprotest or how themmovement his know experiences was my aboutdoubts shaped to reach his particularly moves me. I don’t remember how I got in earching for your own identity while trying to weeks,beliefs,ai university if onenot mustmonths, campuses. read after between Ofthe more interviews the lines.concern Nowhere,would to Keyes have for touch, but I have his number and address written down maintain academic rigour is an almost impossible beenexample,than pointless radical does student and Keyes rude. politics,explicitly however, argue for were the accusationssigni cance on the first page Discoverof my old notebook. He Thailand’sis expecting task. lost I don’t believe cinemas it was possible for me. Identity The Vietnamese Communist Party has built its me at 9 a.m., after his early-morning dance class in a Smotivated me to learn Vietnamese and to dig into the ofthat history US academics in shaping studying the culture ai and village society life werethat an legitimacyanthropologistcontributing on itsto observes thevictories, anti-communist during against relatively the counterinsurgency French, brief the eldwork, USA Hanoi park. He lives in a small flat on the fourth floor of twentieth-century history that had uprooted my father. andthoughcampaign, the Chinese. the and extent thus They and were degreehave little used to more whicheducation, than history lackeys propaganda provides of US a public housing block. At age ninety-four, he is still able I’ve learned that there is no end to this search. It is andaimperialism. crucial censorship dimension Keyes to convince was of Keyes’s so incensedtheir work people onthat ailandand he agreedthe world is toby to climb the stairs. I know he was legendary, as he played always under construction and becomes richer with the thatnoparticipate meansthey fought common in a and lm wonacrossnarrated ‘just a discipline inwars’, ai thus that that whitewashing demonstrated notably a leading role in one of the key victories in the war. His books you read, the people you meet, the stories you theirentertainswhat own he, asideological structural an anthropologist, and managerialfunctional had actually explanations. mistakes. been It doing. friends, and former enemies, call him ‘the Grey Tiger’. collect from old soldiers. workede extremely lastmost three fascinating chapterswell. Somehow, event of the that book they’ve Keyes shi managed recounts focus Dang Van Viet was born in 1920 in central Vietnam. Among the veterans I mentioned here, many have tofrom implement ailandhis years and toin themaintainnorthern United anailand States, official to was Keyes’s memorynot careerthe visitwhere A son of a high-level mandarin who served under Bao since died. Some are still alive, aged over 100 now. I’ve ÇéÞÝîçëêÝìåßðëîåÝèæëñîêáõðäîëñãäðäáðáéìèáïëâßåêáéÝåêThailand’s Movie Theatres: Relics, thoseofas teacherKing who Bhumibol doand not administrator, fit and in Queenare relegated as Sirikit, supervisor to but a shadowy an of expeditionboth Dai as well as in Ho Chi Minh’s first cabinet in 1945, he tried to put their stories into perspective, but I must Ruins and the Romance of Escape Öäåï ßñèéåêÝðåëê ëâ  õáÝîïĊ óëîðä ëâ ğáèà óëîç åêßèñàáï limbo.accompanyingai and Contesting non-ai the such postgraduates,abbot a monopoly of the Mae and on Sariang as the an truth academic wat is to received a French education. He joined the Viet Minh a repeat the great admiration I have for this generation, Þëðä ëîåãåêÝè Ýêà òåêðÝãá ìäëðëãîÝìäï ðîÝòáè áïïÝõï Ýêà Ý îåßä ßëèèáßðåëê ëâ éëòåá ðäáÝðîá tough.recoverambassador, If ancientyou do,fostering manuscriptsyou get relations called that ‘anti-Vietnamese’,between had been US anddiscovered Southeast if not in few weeks before the August Revolution of 1945, then who’ve gone through so many hardships. When they are ìÝîÝìäáîêÝèåÝ Ýï óáèè Ýï Ý ïáßðåëê ëâ ðäá éëòåá ðäáÝðîáï ëâ êáåãäÞëñîåêã ÎÝëï Ãñðäëî Òäåèåì ‘reactionary’aAsian remote scholars cave. or and‘revisionist’.It took institutions. days of travel Given by the elephant cloud that through quickly became an officer in the People’s Army. Holding all gone, when there is no one left to tell those stories of mountainousanthropology wasforested under, country Keyes’s to rst reach task Red in takingCli Cave up a the rank of lieutenant-colonelÌÝÞèëêäåãäèåãäðïéëîáðäÝê!ëâðäáéëïðßëéìáèèåêãïåãêåğßÝêðÝêàÞîáÝðä™ðÝçåêãëâðäáïá at the age of twenty-eight, war, fear, love and resilience, Vietnam is going to lose so overlookingpositionspend atthe the thespring University Salween of 2014 River.of hangingWashington Some out manuscripts waswith to an establish had he was sent to theÝîßäåðáßðñîÝèïìáßðÝßèáïåêðäáðóåèåãäðëâðäáåîèåâáïìÝê border with China to harass French much. beenanthropologyelderly damaged man as calledby a disciplinerobbers Nguyen and whose Van others Su.value eatenI first lay byin meettermites;promoting him troops stationedÖëëîàáîÝïåãêáàßëìõóåðäßëéìèåéáêðÝîõòåêðÝãáéëòåáðäáÝðîáðåßçáðàåîáßðèõâîëéðäáÝñðäëî there. Taking back control of the border If I could go back in time, I’d try to imitate what at the library of the French School of Asian Studies was vital if Vietnam was to benefit from support from the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievitch did in her buttolerance a sucient through number revealing were the still cultural intact diversityto ll nine of large ïáêàÝéáïïÝãáðëðäáSoutheast Asia Movie Theater Project Facige.Facebook. Iin Hanoi. He invites me to have pho and coffee at his the Chinese Communists, who were poised to win their masterpiece of oral history, Secondhand Time. The plastichumankind. sacks. And is that’s was notwhat just he ancontinued adventure, to do. but an place,extraordinaryWhat a small Keyes flat nd, felt at forthewhen, allsecond thein October manuscripts floor of1976, a dilapidated, had the been brief civil war. In October 1950, Viet led the assault that questions she asked her interviewees were very simple: andcopiedexperiment now prior demolished, in to democracy the end colonial of thein ailand villaeighteenth on Cao was century Babrought Quat and decimated the French forces in the area. How did you get food? How was daily life? How was Street.providedto an endWe newdrinkwith insights the instant massacre into coffee northern of onstudent his aibalcony, activists history. and, in after Revolutions devour their ownPraise children. for After Thailand’s the love? Movie How about Theatres your brother? Your sister? Then she just puttingBangkok,Keyes his tookwecup are backup not a ontwo-year told. the But table, teaching it is he evident embarks position from upon inhis social war, Viet’s parents died after enduring persecution and listened. I guess that’s how you capture life in its purest hissciencelater war publications memories. at the University that,The fromman of Chiang aboutwas a spy, then Mai as inon, early July he tookas1972. 1945. public shaming during“Philip the Jablon land has reform done programme miracles here. of The templesform. of Whatlights, madethe ships Alexievitch’s or dreams, workare revived. possible is that she ButItincreasing was a spy an charged interesting interest with in time the monitoring politicalto be in ailand,dimensionshis compatriots for of the social in the mid-1950s, a Wepolicy have that forgotten encouraged the beautiful class hatred rituals and involving started cinema, talking all the toingredients people only that once made the every USSR was gone. Hanoiworldwideand cultural and reporting student change protest theirin ailand. misbehaviour movement And itwas towas aboutthe the party. political to reach social resentment,ğèéïìáßåÝèÖäåïÞëëçåêÝêáéëðåëêÝèæëñîêáõðëçááìč had a destructive effect on traditional This doesn’t mean oral history is impossible in Vietnam Heaicrisis describes university of 2008–10 in detail campuses. that how brought theOf moreinternal Keyes’s concern workintelligence fullto Keyes circle, culture and killed about 50,000 people. Due to his until thereÃìåßäÝðìëêãÙááîÝïáðäÝçñèğèééÝçáî is a regime change; it just means getting as officethanback radicalto worked.the villagers student I want ofpolitics, to northeastern use hishowever, testimony ailand were to accusations showfor whom how aristocratic family, Viet was removed fromœÒÝèéáàĊÑîóåêêáîâëî the army and closeUncle as Boonmee possible Whoto the Can truth Recall is nothis Pasteasy. Lives ) ☐ thethathe partyhad US such academicscontrolled sympathy studyingpeople, and aection.and ai so village we plan life a werevideo began a career as an engineer. After retiring in the 1980s, interview. When the film crew comes two weeks later, he at a time of deep social and economic misery for Vietnam, Louis Raymond is a journalist based in France contributinge Red Shirt to the demonstrations anti-communist of thosecounterinsurgency years are ČÒäåèåìÌÝÞèëêĊïàáğêåðåòáèëëçÞÝßçÝððäáÖäÝåéëòåáìÝèÝßáïëâðäáìÝïðåïÝéÝïðáîâñè required for context. If the reader wants to know what campaign,not covered and in this thus memoir, were little but more I wonder than if lackeys Keyes of US óëîçëâßñèðñîÝèÝîßäÝáëèëãõ›ÝðáïðÝéáêððëðäáîÝìåàèõßäÝêãåêãáòëèñðåëêëâòåïñÝè Keyes thought about what he was doing, how he came to imperialism.recognised the Keyes villagers was ofso Ban incensed Nong thatTuen he among agreed the to ïðëîõ™ðáèèåêãč the conclusions he did or how his experiences shaped his participatedemonstrators in a who lm so narrated persistently in ai struggled that demonstrated to defend ÐáóðëêÖëéÝïÕåãáèÃéáîåßÝêÕëßåáðõëâÅåêáéÝðëãîÝìäáîïœÃÕŝ whatthebeliefs, government he, one as anmust anthropologist, they read had between elected. had the In actuallylines. Finding Nowhere, been eir doing. Voice for , Discover Thailand’s lost cinemas example,Keyese argued last does three that Keyes chapters the explicitlypolitical of the activism argue book for shi of the the focus signi cance Red “For a few short decades in the twentieth century, Thailand produced some of the most fromofShirts, history ailand overwhelmingly in shaping to the Unitedthe from culture States,northeastern and to societyKeyes’s and thatcareer northern an ÇéÞÝîçëêÝìåßðëîåÝèæëñîêáõðäîëñãäðäáðáéìèáïëâßåêáéÝåêThailand’s Movie Theatres: Relics, asanthropologistailand, teacher isand understandable administrator, observes during as as the supervisorrelatively outcome brief of of both a eldwork,process innovative movie-theater architecture in the world. But as the Thai public has turned to Ruins and the Romance of Escape Öäåï ßñèéåêÝðåëê ëâ  õáÝîïĊ óëîðä ëâ ğáèà óëîç åêßèñàáï aithoughof historical and the non-ai extent change andpostgraduates, in thedegree course to whichof and which as history an ‘traditional’ academic provides other entertainment mediums, and theaters have closed, those great dream palaces are Þëðä ëîåãåêÝè Ýêà òåêðÝãá ìäëðëãîÝìäï ðîÝòáè áïïÝõï Ýêà Ý îåßä ßëèèáßðåëê ëâ éëòåá ðäáÝðîá ambassador,apeasants crucial becamedimension fostering ‘cosmopolitan’ of relations Keyes’s workbetween citizens on ailandthroughUS and Southeast taking is by àåïÝììáÝîåêãâîëéðäáèÝêàïßÝìáÙåðäÝçááêáõáâëîÝîßäåðáßðñîÝèàáðÝåèïÝêàÝàááì ìÝîÝìäáîêÝèåÝ Ýï óáèè Ýï Ý ïáßðåëê ëâ ðäá éëòåá ðäáÝðîáï ëâ êáåãäÞëñîåêã ÎÝëï Ãñðäëî Òäåèåì Asiannoadvantage means scholars commonof new and opportunities institutions. across a discipline Givenin a globalising the that cloud notably economy,that understanding of history, Phil Jablon has set out to preserve the memory of Thailand’s movie anthropologyentertainsand that it wasstructural was this under, that and promoted Keyes’sfunctional rst growing explanations.task in awareness taking up a ÌÝÞèëêäåãäèåãäðïéëîáðäÝê!ëâðäáéëïðßëéìáèèåêãïåãêåğßÝêðÝêàÞîáÝðä™ðÝçåêãëâðäáïáhouses. His spectacular photographs reveal the glamour and ambition of a world that was as positionof theire politicalmost at the fascinating University power within eventof Washington a thatdemocratic Keyes was recounts order. to establish He is ÝîßäåðáßðñîÝèïìáßðÝßèáïåêðäáðóåèåãäðëâðäáåîèåâáïìÝêĠááðåêãÝïðäáßáèèñèëåàåéÝãáïðäáõßáèáÞîÝðáàč anthropologyfromprobably his yearsright; as inbut a northern discipline sadly, of ailandcourse, whose valuesince was Keyeslaynot in the promotingpublished visit ÖëëîàáîÝïåãêáàßëìõóåðäßëéìèåéáêðÝîõòåêðÝãáéëòåáðäáÝðîáðåßçáðàåîáßðèõâîëéðäáÝñðäëîËêãÝÕÝĞîëêÃîßäåðáßðñîáÅîåðåßThe Philadelphia Inquirer of King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit, but an expedition tolerancehis analysis, through ai democracy revealing the has cultural been all diversity but demolished. of ïáêàÝéáïïÝãáðëðäáSoutheast Asia Movie Theater Project Facige.Facebook. humankind.accompanyingI can’t speak forAnd the Keyes, that’s abbot butwhat of everything the he continuedMae Sariang in this to memoirdo.wat to recoversuggestsWhat ancient that Keyes he mustmanuscriptsfelt when, hope inthat thatOctober the had impermanence been1976, discovered the brief that in experimentacharacterises remote cave. in human democracyIt took existence days in of ailand travelextends by towaselephant the brought current through ai ÕñììëîðáàÞõ tomountainouspolitical an end order, with forested andthe massacrethat country Isan voicesof tostudent reach will be activistsRed heard Cli again.in Cave ☐ Praise for Thailand’s Movie Theatres Bangkok,overlooking we the are Salween not told. River. But it Some is evident manuscripts from his had laterbeenMartin publicationsdamaged Stuart-Fox by that,robbers is emeritus from and about othersprofessor then eaten on,of history byhe termites;took at the “Philip Jablon has done miracles here. The temples of lights, the ships or dreams, are revived. increasingbutUniversity a sucient ofinterest Queensland number in the were political still intact dimensions to ll nine of social large We have forgotten the beautiful rituals involving cinema, all the ingredients that made every andplastic cultural sacks. change is was in notailand. just an And adventure, it was the but political an ğèéïìáßåÝèÖäåïÞëëçåêÝêáéëðåëêÝèæëñîêáõðëçááìč 22crisisextraordinary24 of 2008–10 nd, that for brought all the manuscripts Keyes’s work had full been circle, ÃìåßäÝðìëêãÙááîÝïáðäÝçñèğèééÝçáî backcopied to prior the villagers to the end of northeasternof the eighteenth ailand century for andwhom œÒÝèéáàĊÑîóåêêáîâëîUncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives) heprovided had such new sympathy insights intoand aection.northern ai history. Keyes took up a two-year teaching position in social e Red Shirt demonstrations of those years are ČÒäåèåìÌÝÞèëêĊïàáğêåðåòáèëëçÞÝßçÝððäáÖäÝåéëòåáìÝèÝßáïëâðäáìÝïðåïÝéÝïðáîâñè science at the University of Chiang Mai in July 1972. not covered in this memoir, but I wonder if Keyes óëîçëâßñèðñîÝèÝîßäÝáëèëãõ›ÝðáïðÝéáêððëðäáîÝìåàèõßäÝêãåêãáòëèñðåëêëâòåïñÝè It was an interesting time to be in ailand, for the recognised the villagers of Ban Nong Tuen among the ïðëîõ™ðáèèåêãč worldwide student protest movement was about to reach demonstrators who so persistently struggled to defend ÐáóðëêÖëéÝïÕåãáèÃéáîåßÝêÕëßåáðõëâÅåêáéÝðëãîÝìäáîïœÃÕŝ theai government university campuses.they had elected. Of more In concernFinding eirto Keyes Voice , thanKeyes radical argued student that the politics, political however, activism wereof the accusations Red thatShirts, US overwhelmingly academics studying from ainortheastern village life and were northern “For a few short decades in the twentieth century, Thailand produced some of the most contributingailand, is understandable to the anti-communist as the outcome counterinsurgency of a process innovative movie-theater architecture in the world. But as the Thai public has turned to campaign,of historical and change thus in were the littlecourse more of which than lackeys‘traditional’ of US other entertainment mediums, and theaters have closed, those great dream palaces are imperialism.peasants became Keyes ‘cosmopolitan’ was so incensed citizens that through he agreed taking to àåïÝììáÝîåêãâîëéðäáèÝêàïßÝìáÙåðäÝçááêáõáâëîÝîßäåðáßðñîÝèàáðÝåèïÝêàÝàááì participateadvantage of in new a lm opportunities narrated in inai a globalising that demonstrated economy, understanding of history, Phil Jablon has set out to preserve the memory of Thailand’s movie whatand that he, itas was an anthropologist,this that promoted had growing actually awareness been doing. houses. His spectacular photographs reveal the glamour and ambition of a world that was as of theire politicallast three power chapters within of the a democratic book shi focusorder. He is ĠááðåêãÝïðäáßáèèñèëåàåéÝãáïðäáõßáèáÞîÝðáàč from ailand to the United States, to Keyes’s career probably right; but sadly, of course, since Keyes published ÇéÞÝîçëêÝìåßðëîåÝèæëñîêáõðäîëñãäðäáðáéìèáïëâßåêáéÝåêËêãÝÕÝĞîëêÃîßäåðáßðñîáÅîåðåßThailand’sThe Movie Philadelphia Theatres: Inquirer Relics, as teacher and administrator, as supervisor of both his analysis, ai democracy has been all but demolished. Ruins and the Romance of Escape Öäåï ßñèéåêÝðåëê ëâ  õáÝîïĊ óëîðä ëâ ğáèà óëîç åêßèñàáï ai and non-ai postgraduates, and as an academic I can’t speak for Keyes, but everything in this memoir Þëðä ëîåãåêÝè Ýêà òåêðÝãá ìäëðëãîÝìäï ðîÝòáè áïïÝõï Ýêà Ý îåßä ßëèèáßðåëê ëâ éëòåá ðäáÝðîá ambassador, fostering relations between US and Southeast suggests that he must hope that the impermanence that ìÝîÝìäáîêÝèåÝ Ýï óáèè Ýï Ý ïáßðåëê ëâ ðäá éëòåá ðäáÝðîáï ëâ êáåãäÞëñîåêã ÎÝëï Ãñðäëî Òäåèåì Asian scholars and institutions. Given the cloud that ÕñììëîðáàÞõ characterises human existence extends to the current ai ÌÝÞèëêäåãäèåãäðïéëîáðäÝê!ëâðäáéëïðßëéìáèèåêãïåãêåğßÝêðÝêàÞîáÝðä™ðÝçåêãëâðäáïá anthropologypolitical order, was and under, that Isan Keyes’s voices rst will task be inheard taking again. up a ☐ position at the University of Washington was to establish ÝîßäåðáßðñîÝèïìáßðÝßèáïåêðäáðóåèåãäðëâðäáåîèåâáïìÝê anthropologyMartin Stuart-Fox as a discipline is emeritus whose professor value oflay history in promoting at the ÖëëîàáîÝïåãêáàßëìõóåðäßëéìèåéáêðÝîõòåêðÝãáéëòåáðäáÝðîáðåßçáðàåîáßðèõâîëéðäáÝñðäëî toleranceUniversity through of Queensland revealing the cultural diversity of ïáêàÝéáïïÝãáðëðäáSoutheast Asia Movie Theater Project Facige.Facebook. humankind. And that’s what he continued to do. 24 What Keyes felt when, in October 1976, the brief experiment in democracy in ailand was brought to an end with the massacre of student activists in Praise for Thailand’s Movie Theatres Bangkok, we are not told. But it is evident from his later publications that, from about then on, he took “Philip Jablon has done miracles here. The temples of lights, the ships or dreams, are revived. increasing interest in the political dimensions of social We have forgotten the beautiful rituals involving cinema, all the ingredients that made every and cultural change in ailand. And it was the political ğèéïìáßåÝèÖäåïÞëëçåêÝêáéëðåëêÝèæëñîêáõðëçááìč crisis of 2008–10 that brought Keyes’s work full circle, ÃìåßäÝðìëêãÙááîÝïáðäÝçñèğèééÝçáî back to the villagers of northeastern ailand for whom œÒÝèéáàĊÑîóåêêáîâëîUncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives) he had such sympathy and aection. e Red Shirt demonstrations of those years are ČÒäåèåìÌÝÞèëêĊïàáğêåðåòáèëëçÞÝßçÝððäáÖäÝåéëòåáìÝèÝßáïëâðäáìÝïðåïÝéÝïðáîâñè not covered in this memoir, but I wonder if Keyes óëîçëâßñèðñîÝèÝîßäÝáëèëãõ›ÝðáïðÝéáêððëðäáîÝìåàèõßäÝêãåêãáòëèñðåëêëâòåïñÝè recognised the villagers of Ban Nong Tuen among the ïðëîõ™ðáèèåêãč demonstrators who so persistently struggled to defend ÐáóðëêÖëéÝïÕåãáèÃéáîåßÝêÕëßåáðõëâÅåêáéÝðëãîÝìäáîïœÃÕŝ the government they had elected. In Finding eir Voice, Keyes argued that the political activism of the Red Shirts, overwhelmingly from northeastern and northern “For a few short decades in the twentieth century, Thailand produced some of the most ailand, is understandable as the outcome of a process innovative movie-theater architecture in the world. But as the Thai public has turned to of historical change in the course of which ‘traditional’ other entertainment mediums, and theaters have closed, those great dream palaces are peasants became ‘cosmopolitan’ citizens through taking àåïÝììáÝîåêãâîëéðäáèÝêàïßÝìáÙåðäÝçááêáõáâëîÝîßäåðáßðñîÝèàáðÝåèïÝêàÝàááì advantage of new opportunities in a globalising economy, understanding of history, Phil Jablon has set out to preserve the memory of Thailand’s movie and that it was this that promoted growing awareness houses. His spectacular photographs reveal the glamour and ambition of a world that was as of their political power within a democratic order. He is ĠááðåêãÝïðäáßáèèñèëåàåéÝãáïðäáõßáèáÞîÝðáàč probably right; but sadly, of course, since Keyes published ËêãÝÕÝĞîëêÃîßäåðáßðñîáÅîåðåßThe Philadelphia Inquirer his analysis, ai democracy has been all but demolished. I can’t speak for Keyes, but everything in this memoir suggests that he must hope that the impermanence that characterises human existence extends to the current ai ÕñììëîðáàÞõ political order, and that Isan voices will be heard again. ☐

Martin Stuart-Fox is emeritus professor of history at the University of Queensland

24 FICTION/TRAVEL Echo in Sahara Emily Ding

SANMAO years before—quietly found himself a job there with a her baby when she had never done so. How, after they Stories of the Sahara (translated by Mike Fu) phosphate mining company so he could be with her, and bought a car and she was driving, she would pick up Bloomsbury Publishing: 2020 they married there. anyone she saw trudging along her way. How a young Instead of spending months in wandering solitude, man from the grocery store implored her to help him she ended up in a strange domesticity on the outskirts write love letters to a woman in Monte Carlo who had hen I learned recently about the vagabond of El Aaiún (or Laâyoune)—a settlement with ‘just a entrapped him to swindle his meagre savings. How she Taiwanese writer Sanmao, she came as handful of streets, a few banks and a couple of shops’— tried to save a mute slave from his owners. I wondered a curiosity more than a revelation. The amid the ‘poetic desolation’ of dunes and plains. Then, how much of all this was inspired, but nonetheless the Wlone Asian woman, travelling to far-flung places and it was the capital of Western Sahara under Spanish observations and feelings underlying the stories feel defying well-trodden paths laid out for her, is nothing control. Today, it’s still disputed territory—between heartfelt, and ring true. so unconventional today, but it must have been decades Morocco, which annexed it in 1975, and its indigenous ‘It was different here. Back in civilisation, life was ago. Sahrawi people. ‘Why had I wanted to come to this long- too complicated. I wouldn’t have thought other people Not known to me, generations of Taiwanese and forgotten corner of the world all by myself?’ she asked or things had anything to do with me. But in this barren Chinese women had come of age with Sanmao as an herself. ‘As there were no answers to these questions, I land, fierce winds howling the year round, my spirit was inspiration. Many who are named Echo apparently continued to settle in, one day at a time.’ moved by the mere sight of a blade of grass or a drop of trace its origins back to her, as it was the English name Sanmao lovingly fashioned a home for her and morning dew, let alone a human being,’ she writes. She she sometimes used. The retrospectives I read depict José in the desert, building furniture out of scavenged could not turn away anyone in need—even if it put her her as a literary celebrity in her day, staring out from wooden coffins, and befriended her Sahrawi neighbours in the crosshairs of communities with existing enmities photographs with melancholic kohl-rimmed eyes, posed and Spanish expatriates. She figured out how the basic that, as an outsider, she had no hope of resolving. in long flowy dresses with an air of effortless glamour. details of life worked in El Aaiún: getting a driver’s In his translator’s note, Mike Fu described his Until her death in 1991—reportedly by suicide, about licence, carrying water on foot for miles before they difficulty in squaring Sanmao’s ‘profound empathy’ a decade after her Spanish husband José María Quero bought a car, reckoning with sandstorms and power with the few instances where her judgment of Sahrawis died in a diving accident—she travelled to more than outages. When José was away working for longer may come off as ‘insensitive at best, derogatory or fifty countries and published more than twenty books, stretches, she ventured into the desert on her own, racist at worst’. One might read this in the way she and also wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed filmRed tagging along on the big trucks that sold water and describes their hygiene and traditions, their apparent Dust. camped near nomadic herders to document them. mendacity in so freely borrowing her things, the I have long wrestled with my own wanderlust, which Occasionally, she and José would dress up for the voyeurism with which she sometimes expressed her has taken me to remote, unfamiliar places, and I was Hotel Nacional in town and watch films at the only curiosity, and the paternalism she assumed in taking intrigued by Sanmao. We had been to different places, cinema in the desert. In time, she learned to inhabit a it upon herself to divest them of their ignorance or but I had also often travelled on my own and learned to place simultaneously miserable and enchanting with superstitions. At the same time, one can risk being speak and navigate part of the world in Spanish, and I ‘artfulness and pleasure’. too much of a relativist while travelling to places that wondered if her journeys would reveal anything to me Sanmao describes her time in the Sahara as both practise vastly different cultures, and her reactions to about mine. lonely and liberating, and I feel the truth of that customs like child marriage and slavery at least feel ‘I couldn’t understand the feeling of homesickness completely. It took me back to my first extended solo honest. Seen in a different light, not hiding her distaste that I had, inexplicable and yet so decisive, towards travels in Central America. I remember hopping onto any may come across as less condescending. And she that vast and unfamiliar land, as if echoing from a chicken bus along the main artery winding along remote doesn’t expect anyone to be unimpeachably ‘good’ in past life,’ she writes in Stories of the Sahara, recently highlands, stopping at each village along the way for at order to befriend them, complicated as the friendship published in English for the first time. Due to some least a night or two, maybe a week, maybe longer, and might be. discrepancies in the historical detail, I realised the being the only foreigner in the whole place. These were Stories of the Sahara is largely the account of one book to be a mix of memoir and fiction—though it’s not places with attractions, and there was nothing, really, woman’s life in the desert, narrowly focused on herself, not introduced as such—about her time in the desert, to do but take a walk in the cool air, break bread with the her marriage and her direct interactions with people. published in Mandarin in 1976 and since translated into people who live there and get on the next bus again. Some of it feels quotidian, and obscures an awareness various languages, with more than fifteen million copies For Sanmao, however, the loneliness skirted self- of the territory’s historical context and political tensions reportedly sold. destruction. A deep thread of melancholy pervaded her brewing beneath the veneer of everyday life. But when In fact, Sanmao is her narrative persona, derived being throughout her time in Western Sahara, especially it does come, bursting forth with narrative force in from the protagonist in a well-known Chinese comic in the early months when she and José spent more time the penultimate chapter, it’s a complete testament to strip: a homeless boy who has only three hairs on his apart because of his work, and she hadn’t yet made Sanmao’s romantic imagination. There’s a star-crossed head—chosen, she said, to reflect how she wanted many friends. ‘I was so low in spirits I’d often weep. The love triangle involving Bassiri, the guerrilla leader to record the lives of ordinary people whose voices Sahara Desert was stunning, yet living here required an fighting for the Sahrawi people’s independence—and it often went unheard. Her real name was Chen Ping, unfathomable determination to adapt,’ she writes. In ends with his lover’s public lynching. and she was born in 1943 in Chongqing before fleeing a foreshadowing of the tragedy that would come years Regardless of which parts are true or inspired, with her family to Taiwan when Mao proclaimed the later, she wondered if she harboured a ‘subconscious Sanmao writes about the feeling of wanderlust and People’s Republic of China in 1949. She dropped out of impulse’ to end her own life. yearning for connection most evocatively in her quieter school after troubles with a teacher, read philosophy at For the most part, though, Sanmao doesn’t dwell moments. Reading her Sahara stories reminds me of university, studied and worked in Spain, Germany and on her inner world, at least in writing. Her Sahara the lure of desolate places I’ve been to—places ignored the United States, learned many languages, travelled stories began as columns in Taiwan’s United Daily News by the correspondents of the world until wars come for alone to various places, and suffered an early tragedy and have a breezy conversational quality to them— them, alluring in part because of the imaginativeness it when her first fiancé died of a heart attack. By the time alternately self-aggrandising, deprecatingly funny, and wills in its inhabitants in order for them to survive. she arrived in the Sahara in 1974, lured by a National disarmingly sincere in facing up to the absurdities It takes me back to a passage in Stories of the Sahara: Geographic spread, it seemed she had already lived of life. They are filled with riotous anecdotes of her ‘An indescribable vitality and joy can be found wherever several lives. teasing affections with José and her frustrating and humans exist. Even this barren and impoverished In her stories, Sanmao claimed that when she heartwarming encounters with the Sahrawi. She seemed backwater was teeming with life, not a struggle for set out, she had intended to become the first female to have a knack for getting entangled in strangers’ lives, survival.’ ☐ explorer to cross the Sahara. Due to the logistical spurred on by a well-meaning, unbridled compassion impracticalities the desert presented for an independent that often made José comically anxious. traveller, however, she never did. In the end, she wasn’t She tells of how Sahrawi women came knocking on there alone either. Upon learning of her plan to live her door asking her to cure their ailments with her stash Emily Ding is a Malaysian writer, editor and in the desert, José—whom she first met in Madrid of medicines, with one woman begging her to deliver photographer

23 SHORT STORY White clouds flying Bao Ninh

t was raining when the airplane took off. The sound of the I felt a little dizzy, as if I were going round and round on landing gear retracting up into the body of the plane seemed a Ferris wheel. It was probably the storms over the central louder than usual, putting the cabin on edge. I wished that highlands that had created air pockets, because suddenly we II’d listened to my wife’s suggestion. I should have cancelled this experienced some turbulence, which caused some commotion trip—it was a bad day to travel, with bad weather. among the passengers in the cabin. There was a noise that Suddenly the entire aircraft lifted up into the air. Next to me, sounded like something cracking underneath us. directly to my right, sat a man wearing a suit. He looked pale. His The man in the suit struck a match to light a cigarette. eyes were closed and his lips trembled. Although I myself was a heavy smoker, the smoke annoyed Meanwhile, I clutched the armrest tightly. I felt like a tiny me. He should have waited to light up until after he got off the being who had been dangled over a canyon that was growing airplane—he shouldn’t have just disregarded the ‘No Smoking’ deeper and deeper. sign right in front of him. But he was obviously scared, which ‘Clouds are floating in the sky! Do you see them?’ said an explained his oblivious behaviour. elderly woman sitting in the window seat, to the right of the man Carefully, I glanced over at him. The cigarette smoke and his in the suit. huge shoulders blocked my view of both the elderly woman and Once the plane had reached a desirable altitude, it flew the window. straight and level. The electric seat belt sign was turned off, ‘Hey you, Miss Flight Attendant!’ The man stood up suddenly, though fluffy clouds were still flying outside the windows. straightening his suit jacket. ‘Is this an airline or a noodle stand? ‘The clouds are so close to us, aren’t they?’ the elderly woman An airplane or a pagoda, huh?’ said. ‘I can touch them with my hands, just like I touch the leaves ‘I beg you …’ the elderly woman said quietly. ‘Sir, I beg you. on the trees in my garden.’ Today is the anniversary of my oldest son’s death. It has been The man wearing a suit opened his eyes. His lips were still thirty years, and now I have a chance finally to visit the place closed tightly. He seemed nervous and cranky. where he died.’ ‘I don’t know why people say airplanes can fly above the The man in the suit hurriedly stepped over me to get to the clouds,’ the elderly woman said. aisle. His face was red—he looked angry and disgusted. The man in the suit remained silent. The elderly woman sat quietly, bent over, her skinny hands ‘There’s no direction here in the sky, so how do we know held in prayer against her chest. On her tray table she had laid out which way to go?’ the woman asked. a vase of flowers, some green bananas, a few rice cakes, and three But nobody answered her question, so she didn’t ask anything incense sticks standing in a glass of dry rice. There was a small else. Instead she sat quiet and still for a moment. She was holding framed photo leaning against the cup of rice. a rattan sack. Her small body seemed to sink deeper into the The flight attendant hurried over. But she stopped right next seat. When a flight attendant came past, pushing a cart down the to me all of a sudden and didn’t say a word. She observed in aisle to serve the passengers breakfast, the elderly woman refused silence. to accept her tray of food. She said she was not used to eating The aircraft began to climb higher above the clouds, making without a bowl and a pair of chopsticks, and anyway, she’d already the floor of the cabin steep. The shrine the elderly woman had set eaten an early breakfast. Besides, she said, an old person like her up tilted and slid to one side. I reached over to hold the framed didn’t have much money. The flight attendant politely explained photo so it wouldn’t fall. I could see that the photo had been cut that the woman need not worry since the food was included in out from an old newspaper, but the pilot in it looked very young. the cost of the ticket. Smoke from the burning incense gently curled in the air ‘No wonder it costs two million dong for a round-trip ticket!’ above our seats. The incense emitted a pleasant smell. Outside the the woman said. ‘When my son’s air force friends offered me this window was the bright, endless ocean. ☐ ticket, they said it cost only a few hundred thousand dong. They were being very thoughtful, because in the countryside we don’t talk about millions—a thousand and a hundred are already hard enough to earn!’ Bao Ninh is Vietnam’s most internationally renowned writer, The elderly woman lowered her tray table but didn’t put her known primarily for his novel The Sorrow of War, which was food on it. Instead she put everything she’d been served into her published in English in 1994. He was born in 1952 as Hoang Au rattan sack. She didn’t eat anything. When the flight attendant Phuong in Nghe An but has lived most of his life in Hanoi. At the came by again to serve drinks, the woman asked for only a glass age of seventeen he joined the North Vietnamese Army, where he of water. was one of only ten soldiers from the 456 in his unit to survive ‘Are we close to the Ben Hai River?’ she asked the flight the war. Most of his writing deals with the lingering psychological attendant. trauma of war. Though he has won nearly all of Vietnam’s ‘Well,’ the flight attendant said, glancing at her watch, ‘in top literary prizes and honours, his work is often considered about fifteen minutes, ma’am, we’ll be crossing the 17th parallel controversial at home because it does not present the war effort as air zone. But we’re flying over the ocean, ma’am, not the river noble and heroic. On the contrary, Bao Ninh’s writing often treats exactly.’ the war as a cause of deep, ongoing psychological and emotional ‘When we get to that area, will you please open this round suffering. ‘White Clouds Flying’ was first published in 1997. window here for me so I can get some fresh air?’ the elderly woman asked. Excerpted from Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the ‘Oh no—it can’t be opened.’ The flight attendant laughed. American War and Its Aftermath, translated and edited by Quan Outside the window, the sun was shining. For a moment the Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock. Copyright (c) 2020 Columbia wings of the airplane glittered in the bright sunlight, but it was University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All only a short moment. The sky was still full of clouds. rights reserved

24 FICTION Luck out David Payne

JOEY BUI Lucky Ticket Text Publishing: 2019

brief note at the beginning of Lucky Ticket indicates that this collection of stories was written ‘based on interviews with Vietnamese Arefugees around the world’. But there is more in Joey Bui’s debut collection of stories than this note implies: multilayered perspectives from many parts of the world, from Zanzibar to Abu Dhabi, Buenos Aires, Washington DC and Kathmandu, cis and queer characters, women and men, from all of these places and more. Just under half of the twelve stories are set in Vietnam, all in the south. They are stories of those who stayed, mostly. And occasionally of those who came back. The opening story, ‘Lucky Ticket’, plunges the reader into the world of Kiet, an expansive, mercurial, legless veteran of war (yes, that war, however you prefer to name it, and Christian Berg not from the winning side), scraping an honest living selling lottery tickets on the pavement in Ho Chi Minh City in the early 2000s. Kiet is the momentary holder of happened to her there. ‘The assumptions everyone this time in Nepal. Ngodup Thapa, a university student the lucky lottery ticket that gives the collection its name— held were so strong that I had to either make dramatic from just outside Kathmandu, is approached by an handed to him, wordlessly, by a passing Asian woman confessions to correct them or play along. It was easier American woman, Julie, who has seen some photographs with yellow hair, ‘bright like the sun’—before it is snatched to play along.’ he took for a university assignment and wants to include away by chance, or his own carelessness. Later in the story, Three other stories in the collection are set in one in an exhibition she is organising. In foregrounding after several lurching twists of fate, he happens to meet Melbourne, Australia, centred on the experiences of the awkward, inconclusive experience of Ngodup and his Phuoc, the son of a former comrade-in-arms, who is back Vietnamese Australians, migrants and the children family with the war, the story also explores the lure, the visiting from the United States. Phuoc asks Kiet why of migrants, many of them refugees, navigating the essentialism and the glibly obliterative function of the he chose to stay, why he never took the H1 visa offered consequences of their particular ‘lucky ticket’. These white gaze in action. The exhibition opening is a scene by the US under the Orderly Departure Program. Kiet stories unfold in the living rooms in Melbourne’s played out, endlessly and without significant variation, in struggles to explain himself, and how he couldn’t bear outer suburbs, in low-paid manual labour jobs with diplomatic bubbles all over the world. to ask anyone for help. How everything just moved on. Chinese or Vietnamese bosses, and in efforts to become Reading Lucky Ticket in southern Vietnam, its And how everything, every seeming good fortune, will visible, and invisible, in the white corridors of the city’s capital and on the coast, there were many moments in have its price. ‘So many people pass me on the street. universities that seem to offer only the lousy, loaded the stories when I found myself straining for glimpses of How can I explain myself to each one? I have been alive choices of succeeding or failing to whitewash oneself. the author, her family and the refugees she interviewed. so long like this, it isn’t good for me to ask myself, “What Areej, Binh, Vi and other characters here are sharply At times I imagined these stories as translated fiction, if things were different?”’ drawn portraits of first and a half and second generation translated before they were written down, by the The next story in the collection is a spiralling migrants in the United States and Australia. author and her interlocutors, straining to imagine the monologue from a Vietnamese man who left as a Bui’s talent and range are impressive. In the story process by which the places and people and events they refugee during the mass post-war exodus of the ‘Abu Dhabi Gently’, she takes us from Tanzania to Abu recounted became the embers igniting these stories. previous century and is now back visiting. Drinking Dhabi through the first-person voice of Fredy, a young How to explain a stray diacritic in the name of a river, in a hammock in a fishing village while his silent local Swahili man from Zanzibar, newly married and unsure or a district upgraded to a province, in the south? What companion tends to the fire, he talks and talks, with a of himself and his place in either world. It is a tender, was the source of the idea—geographically, historically kind of boastful confessional hectoring, of what he has vital examination of the world of a migrant worker, as and metaphorically awry—of one of her young seen and done, of the brutalising trauma of the boat months become years, and Fredy slowly begins to feel characters, in the story ‘Mekong Love’, that the Red River journey, being picked up by a French ship, clawing his out a sense of ease with himself and his surroundings. in the north, ‘thick and brown as old blood’, had carried way from an immigrant banlieue on the edge of Paris to To me, the story’s power lies in the vulnerability of the the coldness and greed, and ultimately communism, of an apartment in the 13th arrondissement, and returning main character, and how it traces his fragile, hopeful, China down into Vietnam? to Vietnam to find a pretty wife, the youngest of four uncertain arc. Things are not easy. We root for him, in And it is surely a perfect moment to be reading Joey daughters. As the alcohol takes hold, his tone turns the inescapable knowledge that they could have been, Bui’s deft and subtle interrogations of chance and choice darker, and it becomes clear that he and his wife have and may yet become, so much worse. and consequences, of refugee and migrant experiences, not found the companionship of shared struggle in a And then in ‘Dinosaurs’ we are in Buenos Aires those holders of a ‘lucky ticket’, and of other displaced distant land. She, no longer the timid, pretty girl he first in the late 1960s. Everything is in flux, it’s all drinking characters, and of representation and identity, at a time met, is bored and lonely in Paris, and complains that he sessions with Guevaristas and beat poets and protests when the world is being turned on its head. When we has stolen her life. His own life has become a misery of and music festivals and the birth of rock nacional, at a are entering a new era of cold conflict, and the West is weekends spent hiding drunk in the toilet of their tiny moment when it was still possible not to be sure what looking so tarnished. When an increasing number of Parisian apartment, and it is clear that he desperately it meant when people disappeared. This is an intimate, second-generation diaspora Vietnamese are coming misses the idealised country of his youth. perfect story that couldn’t be further from Ho Chi Minh to Ho Chi Minh City in search of employment and From here, Bui takes us to the United States, to City or Melbourne, and I read it over and over and over business opportunities. And even more so right now, Washington DC, where Areej, a young woman from a again. All the song references are kind of mixed up, from when Vietnam’s success in fighting Covid-19 has led to small town in Ohio, is working for an NGO, making different years altogether, and from different groups, and a new phenomenon: Vietnamese heading home from wine in the bathroom of her shared house, dating a somehow this bleeds perfectly into the loss and denial Europe and the United States for the sake of their health. senator’s staff assistant from New Haven, and fielding of the musician, Manu, whose lover, the poet Gabo, has ☐ endless, incurious, exhausting questions about where disappeared. she is from. All the while thinking about where she ‘Before the Lights Go Out’, like several other stories in is from, her family, their expectations, and what had the collection, engages with the layered aftermath of war, David Payne is a writer based in Hanoi

25 FICTION Sea mothers Esther Kim

THE ISLAND OF SEA WOMEN The two girls are opposites in their personalities well as Japanese. The Imperial Army’s ‘comfort stations’ Lisa See and class upbringings. Young-sook explains, ‘I was like dotted thousands of shores and existed as far south as Java S&S Scribner: 2019 the rocks of our island—jagged, rough, all edges but and New Guinea. Estimates reckon that between 200,000 useful and no nonsense. She was like clouds—drifting, to 400,000 women and girls were raped and enslaved. WHITE CHRYSANTHEMUM melting, impossible to catch or understand’, and while White Chrysanthemum advocates the remembrance Mary Lynn Bracht Young-sook has never travelled far from the town of and reparations for these war crimes, especially as the Penguin Putnam: 2018 her inherited diving rights or learned to read, Mi-ja is a current Japanese government of Shinzo Abe continues city-born girl, able to write her name and speak fluent its outright denial. But it does so by caricaturising the Japanese. They grow up among thehaenyeo , learning haenyeo as a kind of ‘wonder women’. Author Mary he haenyeo or sea-diving mothers of Jeju Island that ‘[w]hen a girl is born, there is a party’, but over time Lynn Bracht meshes the two, comfort women and are now living legends. Featured in countless they are burdened with the strictures of neo-Confucian haenyeo, into a clumsy political protest. television documentaries and recognised as patriarchy: ‘It’s better to be born a cow than a woman.’ In contrast with See’s novel, Bracht’s debut is Tintangible cultural heritage by UNESCO, they are Thehaenyeo take immense pride in their labour but disappointing in its lack of historical accuracy about the mini-celebrities in South Korea and beyond. My first feel equal heartache over the sacrifices made for and haenyeo she ennobles, glorifies and celebrates. History is encounter with their legend was through a lullaby. lives lost to the water work. And, as with so many flattened in the first lines of the novel. Strapped to my mother’s back, I fell sleep as she sang me women’s histories, their fates are tied inextricably to ‘Seomjib agi’ (Island Baby) accompanied by the police their arranged husbands’—pragmatic Young-sook to her Hana is sixteen and knows nothing but a life lived sirens of Brooklyn wailing in the night. It was the same socialist, Tokyo-educated one, and elegant Mi-ja to her under occupation. Japan annexed Korea in 1910, and lullaby her mother sang to her twenty-eight years before. wealthy fascist one—with tragic outcomes. Hana speaks fluent Japanese, is educated in Japanese In the lullaby, a haenyeo must leave her newborn See’s novel is ambitiously encyclopaedic. The Island history and culture, and is prohibited from speaking, alone at home in order to provide for her family. She of Sea Women marches quickly through the onset of the reading, or writing in her native Korean. She is a dives and harvests the ocean floor for oysters to sell. The Second World War, the division at the 38th parallel and second-class citizen with second-class rights in her own wind and waves soothe the baby to sleep. But when the the exchange of one brutal coloniser (the Japanese) on country, but that does not diminish her Korean pride. child’s mother hears the crying of seagulls, she grows the island for another (the Americans). Thehaenyeo startled and rushes back home. are banned from diving in the water. Under martial But Jeju history is less straightforward. While a Today, the media romanticises the haenyeo’s law starvation sets in as supplies are blockaded. Then ‘Korean’ consciousness grew, linking Jeju islanders matrifocal society and the South Korean government come the tragedies of the Asian Cold War: communist with the mainland, much of the strong, militant protest subsidises their work. But it is tough, back-bending uprisings, the brutally violent crackdown by the against fascist Japan throughout the country was labour that was historically stigmatised. For centuries Americans and then the Koreans, such as the April directed by the communist insurgency. they were shunned as the lowest slave caste and for their 1949 Bukchon massacre, and finally civil war from 1950 It is true that the Japanese colonised Korea from revealing swimming costumes fashioned out of white to 1953. Interwoven with the painful history are the 1910 to 1945, banning the Korean language in public cotton. ‘Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin haenyeo’s daily routines. We learn about her seasonal spaces, and made Koreans second-class citizens. For the on her back,’ warns Young-sook’s mother, the leader farming, knowledge of the ‘wet fields’ (seas) and ‘dry sake of the plot, Hana is given this ability to converse of her diving collective, in The Island of Sea Women. fields’ (land), the diving collective’s hierarchy, and the fluently in Japanese with her captor Corporal Morimoto. ‘In this world, in the undersea world, we are crossing island’s shaman mythology around the dormant volcano But girls like her, like my maternal grandmother, were between life and death every day,’ she explains to her Mount Halla that lies at the centre. hidden in the home and forbidden from attending daughter on their first dive. And most important for a The language is blunt, matter-of-fact, avoiding the elementary school, for fear that they could be kidnapped haenyeo’s survival: ‘A greedy diver equals a dead diver.’ embellishment of historical details. Often the story reads and enslaved. Haenyeo often came from the poorest A Chinese American New York Times bestselling like research notes. See takes great care to fit the span of families and spoke the Jeju dialect, uneducated and author, Lisa See churns out popular historical novels history, sacrificing convincing character internality, but unable to read and write in ‘native Korean’, let alone with unfortunate titles like Snow Flower and the Secret it feels more important to lay the groundwork, teaching able to speak fluent Japanese, and this was partly why Fan. But her latest, The Island of Sea Women departs future storytellers and historians this fairly dark, they took on such a dangerous job. And Jeju had its own from her usual fare, set in Jeju Island. unknown history. fierce struggles against those who claimed the island in An elderly grandmother collects algae in a plastic ‘To understand everything is to forgive,’ Clara national terms. bag at a rocky beach. Her name is Young-sook, and later urges the elderly Young-sook in fluent Jeju. As enticing as the idea of the indomitable haenyeo she’s one of many grandmothers crouched along the Reconciliation and forgiveness are the novel’s main might be to the modern feminist movement, they were shore. An American family, half-white, half-Korean, point, especially between Koreans. It is voiced and are not Amazons but labourers/farmers of the seas approaches her, asking if she knows a Han Mi-ja, and the through the character of Clara, the mixed-race Korean and fields. Jeju’s communist histories are deeply linked mother fishes out a black-and-white photograph of a girl Californian whom the elderly Young-sook meets on the to them. Sea diving was and is physically punishing, in a white cotton swimming costume. Though Young- beach in 2011. if lucrative, labour, and this centuries-old tradition, sook recognises the girl, she denies it, ignoring the passed on from mother to daughter, is dying out. Today mother’s broken Korean and her daughter’s surprisingly y contrast, rage burns through White the youngest divers are in their sixties and the oldest passable Jeju dialect. See informs us that pure Jeju ‘is Chrysanthemum. Two haenyeo sisters are in their nineties. Years of freediving—without oxygen different from the mainland’s standard Korean as French separated by the Second World War. Hana tanks—to depths of twenty metres mean that nearly all is from Japanese’ and ‘the Jeju language also has words Bsacrifices herself to protect her younger sister Emi from of them live with significant hearing loss and the bends. from China, Mongolia, Russia, and from other countries being abducted into sexual slavery in 1943. Emi is left to It is an occupation chosen out of necessity and love. The too … Like Japan. Fiji and Oceania too.’ grow up wondering what happened to her sister and tells sea mothers dive in freezing winter waters and rough The story leaps back to 1938, tracing the beginnings her story from 2011. Hana travels from a Manchurian summer currents even while pregnant, menstruating or of Young-sook and Mi-ja’s long, fraught friendship over brothel to the Mongolian steppes, dreaming of their undergoing the menopause. the course of decades. A teenage Young-sook and her impossible reunion. Their childhood on Jeju Island is Today the haenyeo are celebrated for their work best friend Mi-ja embark on their first dive. Mi-ja is the only incidental to the novel’s main political message, which sustains their families, Jeju Island’s economy and daughter of a known Japanese collaborator, who Young- that is so-called ‘comfort women’. ecosystems. The lullaby I grew up with leaves out the sook’s mother, the leader of her collective, informally During their imperialist campaign to expand across dangers of swimming in the treacherous ocean, human adopts as an orphan. The ‘cloven-footed’ Japanese have Asia, the Japanese abducted girls and teenagers across violence. It makes no fuss about her resilience. It is about occupied the Korean Peninsula for twenty-eight years, their territories to become sex slaves, euphemistically her outsized love. ☐ and are both feared and despised for conscripting Korean called ‘comfort women’. Most were Korean and Chinese, men into the Imperial Army and enslaving young girls. but there were also Taiwanese, Filipina, Indonesian, Esther Kim edits the Transpacific Literary Project out of They will continue to do so for nine more years. Vietnamese, Burmese, Australian and Dutch women as the Asian American Writers’ Workshop

26 THE PHILIPPINES Fallen history Bryony Lau

GINA APOSTOL Insurrecto Soho Press: 2018

LAUREN GREENFIELD The Kingmaker Showtime: 2019

CARLOS BULOSAN America is in the Heart Penguin: 2019

n the Philippines, the past is perpetually intruding on the present. As Magsalin, the protagonist of Gina Apostol’s novel Insurrecto, asks: ‘The question, it seems Ito me, is how to keep the past from recurring. I mean, what the fuck is the point of knowing history’s goddamned repetitive spirals if we remain its bloody victims?’ History has not been kind to the Philippines. Colonised by both Spain and the United States, twice ruled by a despot of the electorate’s own choosing, besieged by a myriad of insurgencies. Extrajudicial killings are a hallmark of the country’s violence, consistent in their method from the martial law era to the present. Rabosajr/WikiCommons Presiding over these horrors is a small cast of characters who spin through the revolving door of electoral politics. Balangiga Massacre Monument, Eastern Samar, The Philippines If the past is bound to repeat itself, do we have agency? One kind of agency can be found in fiction, different periods: the present as President Rodrigo which has the power to challenge official versions of Duterte wages his merciless drug war and the two history in subtle ways: destabilising existing narratives women argue over the right way to tell the story of by surfacing forgotten facts; or shifting perspectives by Balangiga; the 1970s as Chiara’s father is on location retelling events through different eyes. In an essay in in the Philippines filmingThe Unintended during the Caravan on fiction in the time of fake news, Arundhati Ferdinand Marcos era; and a fictionalised account of Roy describes fake history as ‘the oldest form of fake the events of 1901 depicted by Chiara in her screenplay, news’. While fake history is of course a form of fiction, as edited and rewritten by Magsalin. In interviews, Roy points to the power of fiction that subverts untruth Apostol has described the structure as a weave, with the Showtime by recreating ‘the universe of the familiar, but then makes disparate strands of the story braided together but some visible what the Project of Unseeing seeks to conceal’. deliberately left hanging by its end. The Kingmaker Apostol seeks to reveal a different truth about the Reading Insurrecto feels more like being trapped in Philippine-American war and how it reverberates in a historical house of mirrors as names, actions, even in her that quaver that readers have, as if the artist the present. A comic novel that wears its politics lightly, metaphors reappear with slight distortions. Some of should be holding her hand as she is walked through Insurrecto tells the story of an American filmmaker, these repetitions are signalled by a cast of characters that the story. Chiara, and her Filipino translator, Magsalin. Their lives opens the book. There is Cassandra Chase (the ‘white- But she rides the wave, she checks herself. intersect when Chiara, the daughter of a famous director petticoated protagonist’ of Chiara’s script, an American A reader does not need to know everything. who filmed his cult classic,The Unintended, in the photographer who documents the atrocities at Balangiga); Philippines, returns to Manila to shoot her own film set Caz (a schoolteacher who meets and falls for Chiara’s It would be hard to read the novel without emerging in Balangiga, Samar. She finds Magsalin via a crackpot father, before he mysteriously dies in Manila); and wiser about the atrocities committed during the Philippine academic who believes that The Unintended, Casiana Nacionales (the real turn-of-the-century female Philippine-American war. The violence inInsurrecto while ostensibly about the Vietnam War, is based on revolutionary known as ‘Geronima of Balangiga’ who is is visceral: from the revolutionaries’ ambush of the massacre of American troops stationed in Balangiga also the insurrecto of the title). Each of these characters unsuspecting marines on the morning of a fiesta, to by Filipino guerillas in 1901. Magsalin is sceptical of is struggling against the strictures of her society and time the retaliation meted out by American soldiers in the Chiara. She doubts her Hollywood glamour that even yet finds freedom in embracing instability. months afterward. General Jacob Smith, the commander the tropics cannot muss, her capacity to tell this pivotal If one theme of the novel is agency—especially of the campaign, was court-martialled the following episode in the Philippine revolution, and her conviction female agency—another is the legacy of violence and how year for ordering his men to kill everyone older than ten in what may just be a meaningless parallel with her it is remembered. Apostol is a writer in love with history. on Samar. Appalled by his actions, the first head of the father’s film. When the women first meet, they spar: In her previous novel, The Gun Dealers’ Daughter, as well colonial police force, Henry T. Allen, described Smith as in Insurrecto, the characters discuss whether they have as ‘a disgrace to the army’ in a letter to William Taft, then ‘It seems as if The Unintended were constructed out read Joseph Schott’s The Ordeal of Samar, an account governor of the Philippines and later president of the of the story of Samar, but the reverse is also true. of the Balangiga massacre and seemingly the urtext of United States. Allen, like Smith and Taft, is one of the The Unintended also produces, for us, the horror Apostol’s conjured world. These forgotten episodes from many Americans from the war who appears briefly in the of Balangiga. We enter others’ lives through two the Philippine past receive tongue-in-cheek explanations novel. As Magsalin explains to Chiara as they approach mediums, words and time, both faulty. And still, one in notes at the end of the novel. Yet Apostol—via the town named after him on Samar, Allen left behind a story told may unbury another, and the dead, who Magsalin—reassures her readers that they need not system of policing and surveillance that endures to this knows, may be resurrected …’ understand all the historical references: day. ‘The tortures and killing by the police have a long ‘So it’s a zombie flick?’ Magsalin asks. history—extrajudicial is kind of traditional.’ At times, she feels discomfort over matters she The genius ofInsurrecto is that it works on multiple Insurrecto jumps back and forth across three knows nothing about, and Magsalin hears rising up levels. As an indictment of American colonial violence,

27 as a celebration of the Philippine revolution, and as own image, Imelda understands better than anyone her et even the powerful struggle to control what we a meditation on women finding their way through success as an envoy for her country on the world stage: know about the past. This is what makes writing, narratives they write for themselves. ‘Sometimes it helps that you’re not taken too seriously.’ whether fiction or non-fiction, a political act. Greenfield allows Imelda to present an extravagant YFor Carlos Bulosan, the Filipino-American activist melda Marcos wields a different kind of power lifestyle as the ‘excess of love’ while juxtaposing her self- and author, writing was intertwined with his political than the women of Insurrecto. Watching her in serving justifications with countervailing truths. Among awakening as a migrant labourer during the 1930s. The Kingmaker, Lauren Greenfield’s incisive their grandiose infrastructure projects—the widow America Is in the Heart, reissued under the Penguin Idocumentary about the matriarch of the Marcos family of Marcos’s foreign minister, Beth Day Romulo, drily Classics imprint, is as much a political tract as it is a and self-proclaimed ‘mother’ of the Philippines, horrifies refers to Imelda’s ‘edifice complex’—was the San Juanico work of fiction. Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical novel and fascinates in equal measure. The film immerses bridge, built to join the first lady’s home province of starts in the countryside of Luzon where his family the viewer in Imelda’s vainglorious account of her Leyte to neighbouring Samar. Later in the film, the barely ekes out a living on four hectares of land. The husband’s dictatorship. The best explanation for why journalist Pete Lacaba describes police forcing him to lie narrator’s world is one of concentric communities— many Filipinos accept this version of history comes from between two beds, his head on one and feet on the other, his family, the town of Binalonan, the province of Imelda herself: ‘Perception is real, and the truth is not.’ until he fell, only to be told to ‘do the San Juanico bridge’ Pangasinan, the Philippines, migrant labourers in the US Married to Ferdinand Marcos in 1954, Imelda again. To Imelda, the bridge was a symbol of love, but to and the US empire. The book starts and ends within this became first lady when her husband won the her husband’s security forces and victims like Lacaba, it imperial frame: his eldest brother returns from ‘a strange presidential election in 1965. He ruled the Philippines was a method of torture. war in Europe’; thirty years later, the narrator campaigns for more than twenty years, placing the country Imelda is a fabulist with an iron resolve. ‘I don’t just for Filipinos to be included in the US forces fighting under martial law for most of the 1970s. The regime’s dream. I want to give birth to it. I want to make it real.’ against the Japanese in the Second World War. machinations are seen in glimpses, largely in the effect The film hints strongly that she played a pivotal role in the In the opening pages, Bulosan signals his they had on victims jailed, tortured or killed. Greenfield assassination of the opposition leader Benigno Aquino ambivalence towards the US, whose colonial rule has gestures towards the role of the United States in enabling who was shot dead on the tarmac of Manila’s airport divided his people while offering him opportunities these abuses in order to maintain an ally, without after he returned from exile in the United States in 1983. beyond the peasant life of his parents: dwelling on the larger geopolitics of the Cold War. That Aquino’s wife, Corazon, and son, Benigno ‘Noynoy’, Huge protests forced Marcos from office after both served as president before another member of the For a time it seemed that the younger generation, he refused to concede the 1986 election to Corazon Marcos family has ascended to the highest office in the influenced by false American ideals and modes Aquino. As his security forces defected, his position Philippines clearly rankles. Imelda, now ninety, is still of living, had become total strangers to the older became untenable and the United States arranged for the determined that her son will become president even generation. In the provinces where the poor family to flee to Hawaii where Marcos died in 1989. As an though Bongbong himself seems discomfited by the glad- peasants lived and toiled for the rich hacienderos, or American friend of Marcos observes, ‘there are elements handing and showmanship of campaigning. landlords, the young men were stirring and rebelling of the United States that don’t like dictators, even though Despite Bongbong losing his vice-presidential against their heritage. Those who could no longer the dictators are our dictators, they don’t like them’. Soon campaign, the Duterte presidency is a triumph for the tolerate existing conditions adventured into the new afterwards, the family’s enormous wealth came to light. Marcos family too. Duterte and Imelda are both outsized land, for the opening of the United States to them Protesters who stormed the presidential palace found personalities who have bent Philippine politics to their was one of the gratifying provisions of the peace Imelda’s outrageous closet, stuffed with couture and shoes. will. Masters of narrative and image, these politicians treaty that culminated the Spanish-American War. The infamous shoe collection is one of many symbols have revived the glory of the Marcos years in order to of excess in this film: from the giraffes and zebras justify strongman rule. Imelda is all too aware of how Arriving in the US in the 1930s is a rude awakening. imported from Kenya to the Philippines, to the stacks to construct fake history from lies, selective truths and The narrator is extorted, exploited and assaulted. He of legal documents left over from cases that aimed to amnesia: ‘There are so many things in the past we should lives a nomadic existence along the west coast, his recover the billions that Marcos stole while in power. forget; in fact it’s no longer there.’ movements dictated on the one hand by the harvest and Greenfield shows how the family hid their wealth in on the other hand by episodes of terrifying violence. If plain sight. She films Imelda alone, in the centre of the Insurrecto depicts violence in a fractured, postmodern frame, her possessions arrayed around her. Spectacular style, America Is in the Heart presents it shorn of literary paintings—a Picasso, a Fragonard and a Michelangelo— pyrotechnics: ‘Julio hit him between the eyes, and the hanging in the Manila apartment where Greenfield Southeast Asian Affairs 2020 bookkeeper struggled violently. Julio hit him again. The interviews the former first lady later disappear when Malcolm Cook and Daljit Singh, bookkeeper rolled on the floor like a baby.’ a government commission mandated to investigate editors Despite the hardship Bulosan recounts, the novel this ill-gotten wealth attempts to seize them. At the “Southeast Asian Affairs, first is suffused with longing for unity among the Filipinos time the documentary was made, in the run-up to the published in 1974, continues who are brutalising each other to stay alive and among today to be required reading 2016 elections, the family’s assets were bankrolling for not only scholars but the the workers—Filipino, Mexican, Japanese—whom he is the vice-presidential campaign of Imelda’s son, general public interested in seeking to unionise. It is only through unity that they Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos, as well as their preferred in-depth analysis of critical will improve their lives and advance their cause. The cultural, economic and political presidential candidate, Duterte. On the campaign trail, issues in Southeast Asia. In this narrator also wants to become part of the United States, Bongbong rides on his father’s name while deflecting annual review of the region, but this quest is thwarted time and again by the racism accusations about his family’s money. renowned academics provide he experiences. Describing the failure of a bill that comprehensive and stimulating The Marcos family and their supporters live in a commentary that furthers understanding of not only the would grant Filipinos citizenship, Bulosan writes of the haze of nostalgia for the past. In the film’s opening region’s dynamism but also of its tensions and conflicts. It is a ‘race-haters in California … [who] worked as one group minutes, Imelda reminisces about the clout she had as must read.” to deprive Filipinos of the right to live as free men in a first lady and describes her husband’s reign as a ‘paradise – Suchit Bunbongkarn, Emeritus Professor, Chulalongkorn University country founded upon this very principle’. Yet his belief lost’. Bongbong’s candidacy is recognised by virtually Soft cover US$42.90 978-981-4881-30-2 426 pp 2020 in the US remains intact and guides his ambitions as a everyone in the film to be a stepping stone to the writer ‘to make my own kind understand this vast land presidency. While he narrowly loses the election—and from our own experiences’. contests the results in court—the family wins a different Non-Traditional Security Elaine Castillo, who titled her own novel America Is battle: the remains of Ferdinand Marcos are finally Issues in ASEAN: Agendas for Not the Heart, writes in her introduction that Bulosan’s interred in the heroes’ cemetery in the heart of Manila. Action text is ‘an American horror story of the highest order; The Kingmaker covers a large sweep of Philippine Mely Caballero-Anthony and the highest order being, of course, the historical’. The Lina Gong, editors history and politics, but Greenfield keeps a tight focus Philippine–American relationship is about the hard on Imelda. Her voice and vision—her will to power Non-Traditional Security Issues truths that Bulosan and Apostol reveal. Imelda Marcos in ASEAN examines the current thinly disguised by vacuous statements about love— state of governance of non- is not wrong that perception matters, but it is the dominates the film to powerful effect. Politics is personal traditional security challenges multiplicity of perceptions that makes it hard for her— confronting the ASEAN region. in the Philippines, but Imelda goes one step further in The book takes an issue-specific or anyone—to monopolise the past. It’s impossible to seeing politics through the narrow prism of her own approach to investigating how hide because it is still there—embedded in the shape psychology. Self-pitying, sentimental and self-absorbed, ASEAN states and societies of politics and the structure of society. Insurrecto and govern many of the pressing she laments her exile in Hawaii: ‘Losing your country non-traditional security issues, America Is in the Heart are novels that show how the after being mother of your country for more than 20 such as climate change, food security, environmental protection, power of fiction lies in its ability to accommodate these years then you [are an] orphan. It was like losing my humanitarian assistance and disaster response, health security, fractured, diverse accounts of history and to allow us, as nuclear security, and human trafficking and forced displacement. mother again.’ She refuses to reflect on the subject of readers, to decide what to believe for ourselves. ☐ her husband’s affairs, but Greenfield’s other interviewees Soft cover US$29.90 978-981-4843-64-5 244 pp 2019 suggest that it was through her marriage that she learned Website: bookshop.iseas.edu.sg Email: [email protected] how to wield love as a form of power. Canny about her Bryony Lau is a researcher based in Southeast Asia

28 FICTION A future darkly Anna MacDonald

PATRICK ALLINGTON the ice caps turned yellow. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe across the city to feed the people the latest footage of Rise & Shine Vitamin C turned out to be carcinogenic. Maybe it battles staged by Holland and performed by expertly Scribe: 2020 didn’t. Governments of all brands, the UN, the anti- trained soldiers who use weapons specially designed to UN, the World Bank, FIFA all spoke loud and long wound, not kill. When a soldier is severely injured—the about what needed to happen, but by then no one loss of a limb, perhaps, or in the case of Sergeant Sala, here are times when the publication of a book, could tell information from lies. the mangling of half her face—they are pensioned off, or your discovery of it, appears prescient in the their duty done. extreme. In February, for instance, I read Jenny Cause aside, the effect is clear. In the New Time, only The people of Rise feast on this footage for weeks. TOffill’sWeather and via it found a way to think through two habitable cities remain and they are protected by After the first, free public viewing, they can choose to the immediate aftermath of Australia’s most catastrophic a ‘domefield’ that, when needed, keeps the acid rain at pay a download fee. They can replay war at all times fire season on record. In April, mid-lockdown, I read bay. Water is toxic. Food as we know it—plant-based, of the day on personal screens. And because, despite Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena and discovered in animal—is unsafe: ‘Lightly steam, eat, and convulse. Die appearances, the New Time is heir to the Old, some his discussion of how the Black Death fundamentally in minutes if you’re lucky, weeks if you’re too stubborn of them are drawn towards excess. Clandestinely, they altered the way we understand our place in the world, to see reality.’ visit peep shows, they purchase close-up images of Sala’s and our aesthetic representations of it, an echo of the At the end of Old Time, in order to ensure the damaged skin. They fetishise. In secret, they gorge. question I have been asking myself and those close to survival of the remaining population, a small group— And then they try to hide their shame. By staging this me: how will Covid-19 continue to shape our private Walker, Barton, Cleave, Curtin, Hail and Holland— war, Walker and Barton have saved those who survived selves and the face we make public into the future? In devised a strategy. Walker will preside over Rise, Barton and made possible the lives of everyone born in the late May, I read Teju Cole’s essay ‘Death in the Browser over Shine. Cleave, a scientist, will coordinate research New Time: ‘we found a way to feed the people—all the Tab’, his response to the 2015 shooting of Walter Scott by and the collating of data from around the globe to people—because we remembered that people can feel police officer Michael Slager, to the video footage of that monitor water, soil and air health, and to study the Old the pain of others’. Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of shooting, to the experience of viewing that footage on Time in order to avoid making the same catastrophic Others haunts Rise & Shine which, like Sontag’s essay, line, and I thought, again, of George Floyd. mistakes in the New. Curtin, a doctor, will take charge like Woolf’s Three Guineas before them both, and like Now in June, when the city where I live is on the of the population’s health. Hail will assist Walker. And Cole’s ‘Death in the Browser Tab’, is an interrogation of cusp of a new upsurge of infection, I’m reading Patrick Holland, a military commander, will stage war between the uses, and abuses, of images of war. Allington’s Rise & Shine, in which he imagines a future Rise and Shine, footage of which will now provide the Maybe all the people of New Time are well fed. But when disaster has reduced the habitable world to two cities’ populaces with ‘[t]wo full and fabulous meals a day’. maybe they’re not. Trouble is brewing in Rise. A wasting cities, Rise and Shine, in which the environment and illness is spreading through the population, including the populace are politely and tenderly controlled, but The six of them gathered on a gentle slope in within Walker’s compound, where he is closeted, zipped in which a new threat has begun to emerge: a ‘strange the foothills overlooking a city of rancid air and into a shirt that conceals his distended belly, made up to illness’ that is ‘moving quickly from aberration, lingering fires and floods, the place stripped of hide the open and seeping sores on his face. Walker and frightening but isolated, to a full-fledged emergency’. plants and animals, even rats, the people bereft, sick, others like him are slowly starving, having ceased to feel February’s Weather seems like a very long time ago. starved, bloody, dazed. the pain staged for them twice daily. But reading Allington’s vision of the future—which, ‘We’re going to need an enemy if we’re going to What conclusion are we to draw from this? That being prescient in the extreme, is uncannily familiar—I make this thing work,’ Walker had said that day. it is possible to become inured to the pain of others? keep coming back to something an Iranian friend tells ‘I’ll be the enemy,’ Barton had said. That, because the war between Rise and Shine is staged, Offill’s narrator, Lizzie. It’s after Trump’s election (which its images are essentially hollow? That because the also feels like a long time ago), and over dinner this Thirty years into the New Time, things seem to be visual feed of this war captures injury only, not death, friend says: ‘Your people have finally fallen into history going well. The citizens of Rise credit Walker and Barton it fails fully to nourish, hence the increasing tendency … The rest of us are already there.’ with their continued survival. When prompted, they toward either fetishistic feast or famine? Or, like the It’s mid-2020 now, and the world has changed raise their voices as one to sing the city’s anthem and causes leading to the destruction of Old Time, is it all in ways that, six months ago, I thought comfortably credo: ‘Let’s be TENDER. Let’s be TENDER. Try a little of these things and more? Is it, at heart, a failure of belonged in the past and to the realm of fiction. I’ve read TENDERNESS.’ And twice a day autoscreens descend representation, and does this wasting illness indicate a Defoe and Camus on the plague. Most of what I know deep need for the actual? Actual rain, not that simulated about the Spanish flu I learned from Virginia Woolf. I in a calming moving image. Actual air, not that caught keep it safe in the image of Mrs Dalloway reclining on and rendered stale beneath the domefield. Actual food, POEM the chaise after lunch, taking her compulsory, and to rumours of which the prime minister of Rise brings be honest quite pleasant, afternoon rest under doctor’s to Walker: ‘I’m talking about seeds, water—water, for orders while she regains her strength. But today, Three photographs goodness sake—trading on the black market. I’m talking thinking about Lizzie’s friend and picturing the strange about people out there trying to grow plants.’ Even actual illness spreading across Rise (where this novel is set), I Che Guevara took three photographs of Calcutta once. war, like the one Walker and his advisers are beginning to still can’t decide: have we finally fallen into history, or They’re from anywhere between nineteen fifty-seven wage against their own citizens, those ‘dissenters’ who are are we now living in some dystopian vision of the future? and nineteen fifty-nine. Nothing special, to let you in attempting to cultivate plant-based foods and drinkable Of course, the best dystopian fiction amplifies the on the truth. Just cows on the streets, rain lashing water, and who, for the sake of ‘the majority’, are politely world we already know. Hence its uncanny familiarity the earth in horizontal stripes, those familiar tropes disappeared and imprisoned. ‘We’ll do whatever we have and deeply unnerving affect.Rise & Shine is no of poor men and women, juxtaposed against the equally to do to preserve our way of life,’ says Walker. ‘But we’ll do exception. Allington is not specific about what has familiar counterpoints of the wealthy and the cultured, it in our restrained way. Our compassionate way.’ rendered the globe more or less uninhabitable, but the rushing past in horizontal stripes. Just goes to show As I write this, the Australian Defence Force has causes he suggests—or a variation on them—could have that you can be trusted with the throat and the reins been called in to help control the spread of Covid-19 been lifted from reports of actual or anticipated events of a revolution that rattles the earth; don’t mean you and contain the effects of new infections in Melbourne. any time in the last twelve months: can be trusted with scavenging truth and them rare When I heard the news, my first thought was: thank drops of blood from a foreign city’s midst, or be goodness. And I still think that. But I’m also still No one who survived could really say whether it was trusted with a camera, come to think of it, lickety-split. wondering: have we fallen into history or have I failed to a single big catastrophe, or a series of smaller messes, emerge fully from Patrick Allington’s uncannily familiar or if it was just the slow grind of excess. Probably version of our future? ☐ it was all of that. Maybe Russia dropped a bomb Siddharth Dasgupta on San Francisco. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe the Nile Anna MacDonald is the author of Between the Word became poisoned. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe the last of and the World, and a forthcoming novel, A Jealous Tide

29 NOTEBOOK Carried away Pauline Fan

‘The world is gone, I must carry you.’—Paul Celan The poem addresses itself to Herr‘ ’ (‘Lord’), an invocation that recurs eleven times throughout the n our isolation there was not quite enough solitude. poem, engaging the Lord directly in a personal manner. I wanted to seal myself off for a while, not from the The next lines offer ambiguous but powerful images of open wounds of the world but from the shrillness grasping and being grasped, as well the merging of our Iof its cries. Surely there was a deeper language of loss bodies with the body of the Lord, gestures that are both that could speak to the darkness of what we were living intimate and violent, evoking the act of embracing or through. I wanted to reach a place of silence, where I wrestling or choking. The scholar and Celan translator could listen for that voice of witness and elegy. And John Felstiner suggests that Celan’s striking phrase it was not enough to listen: I needed to grapple with ‘ineinander verkrallt’ is rooted in the specificity of the language as a way of grappling with the world. Jewish experience of the Holocaust. He notes that a In this search, I returned to a project I had put aside German translation of a study by Gerald Reitlinger for several years—translating the poetry of Paul Celan entitled The Final Solution was published shortly from German to Malay. Considered by many to be the before Celan’s composition of ‘Tenebrae’. In it a passage greatest European poet of the twentieth century, Celan’s depicting ‘a cluster of Jews pressing against the gas poetry profoundly addresses the human condition in the chamber door, suffocating,’ is described as ‘even in death modern age through his strikingly personal response to clawed into each other’ (ineinander verkrallt). If we the Holocaust and its aftermath. The Frankfurt School follow Felstiner’s interpretation, Celan has transformed, thinker Theodor Adorno, who famously proclaimed with a single phrase, the landscape of Golgotha into that that ‘it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz’, is of the Nazi concentration camps. said to have reassessed and clarified his statement upon How does ‘Tenebrae’ and its density of meanings encountering Celan’s poetry. Even now, Celan speaks translate into Malay? Celan’s use of ‘wir’ (we) in this to us like a terrifying angel of history, poised on the poem differs from most of his others, in that the ‘we’ threshold between life and death, language and silence, here does not include the one who is spoken to. The memory and oblivion. Charis Loke Malay language, with its various forms of first person During the long days of lockdown, Celan’s words plural pronouns, demonstrates clearly the separation ran through my mind in ceaseless refrain: ‘Die Welt ist between the Lord and the ones speaking the poem. I fort, ich muss dich tragen’ (The world is gone, I must explore the vast poetic possibilities of both the German used the Malay ‘kami’ here, which emphasises otherness, carry you). In the absence of the world, Celan held me and Malay languages. It has attuned me to the subtlety, instead of the inclusive ‘kita’. For the term ‘Herr’, I had up and bore me across with his words. As I immersed versatility and lyricism of the Malay language. Celan’s initially used ‘Tuhan’ (God), the most obvious and myself in his poetry, the world became present once German is deeply unconventional: it is a Gegenwort direct choice. I eventually settled, however, on ‘Tuan’, more, transfigured through Celan’s language. In his (counter-word) that utters itself against the sovereignty which means ‘master’ in Malay, and is also the term used poetry, Celan thoroughly redefined and reconstructed of known and expected meaning, a Gegentakt (counter- for ‘Lord’ in Indonesian translations of the Bible. Tuan, the German language, his mother tongue which was also beat) against the limitations of language itself. Celan’s then, captures perfectly Celan’s double meaning of the the language of those who had murdered his parents and singular German insisted that I translate his poetry into crucified ‘Lord’ and the ‘death master’ of the Nazi death his people. For Celan, language was the last graspable unconventional Malay, a task I embraced with both camps. My translation of the opening lines of ‘Tenebrae’ thing in a world of devastation: ‘Reachable, near and not exhilaration and trepidation. reads: lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language.’ Celan forged his poetry from language ne of the most characteristic and challenging Kami sudah hampir, Tuan, that had to ‘pass through its own answerlessness, pass aspects of Celan’s poetics is his recasting of Dekat, dapat digenggam. through frightful muting, pass through the thousand liturgical forms into a kind of ‘anti-prayer’. Celan darknesses of deathbringing speech’. Ocalls into question fundamental theological notions Sudah digenggam, Tuan, Years ago, around the time I began translating including the existence of God, the fallen state of man saling mencengkam, seolah Celan’s poetry into Malay, I had dreamed that I was through sin and guilt, and the possibility of spiritual setiap satu tubuh kami travelling with Celan on a boat down a river. He stood redemption. Celan’s iconic poem ‘Tenebrae’ (the Latin tubuhmu, Tuan. at the bow and kept turning back to look at me, as if to term for ‘darkness’) presents a radical reconfiguration make sure I was still there. We exchanged no words, but of the Christian liturgy of the same name. Traditionally The Malay wordshampir (near), digenggam (grasped), I understood everything he said to me. The Celan of my delivered during Holy Week from Maundy Thursday mencengkam (clutching), tubuh (body) underscore dream was a ferryman, carrying me across dark waters, to Holy Saturday, candles are gradually extinguished not only the visceral nature of the poem but its raw between shores of departure and arrival that we never during a Tenebrae service, until the congregation is left physicality. reached. Who carried Celan through life? Celan was in pitch darkness in commemoration of the Crucifixion. In Celan’s poems, the experience of the Holocaust his own ferryman—when his slowly splintering world The poem begins: is not an abstract horror, it is felt in the bodies of those finally ruptured, and even language was lost to him, he who were annihilated and those who survived. The carried himself across to death. Half a century ago, on 20 Nah sind wir, Herr presence of the body in Celan’s poems carries over April 1970, Celan committed suicide by drowning in the nahe und greifbar. powerfully through the innate earthiness and tropical River Seine in Paris. fecundity of the Malay language. One of the most To translate is to ‘carry across’. The German term for Gegriffen schon, Herr striking aspects of Celan’s poetry, which became more translation, Übersetzung, is rooted in the preposition ineinander verkrallt, als wär vivid to me during the process of translation, is the über (over, across) and the verb setzen (to set or to der Leib eines jeden von uns eroticism that lies buried within even the most desolate place). Translating Celan’s poetry is my way of carrying dein Leib, Herr. of his poems. Significantly, this places Celan as an heir him across, to a new language and topography that of the German literary tradition of Liebestod (love and may form part of his literary afterlife. I never wanted We are near, Lord, death). Perhaps this is not entirely surprising. After all, to simply translate Celan’s words, I wanted to breathe near and at hand. the erotic is the most powerful affirmation of life—an Celan into Malay, to experience what he had described insistent crossing of thresholds between self and other, as Atemwende—a turning of breath where silence takes Handled already, Lord, the ultimate Gegenwort against death and forgetting. ☐ shape to become words, where words reach beyond clawed and clawing, as though language to become poetry. the body of each of us were The process of translating Celan has allowed me to your body, Lord. Pauline Fan is Mekong Review’s translation editor

30 POETRY Shake in our sleep Michael Freeman

THEOPHILUS KWEK ‘Operation Thunderstorm’ typifies one area of this Moving House collection’s territory, the title deriving from a codename Carcanet Press: 2020 for the Singapore operation to detain and deter the refugees from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975, whereas a complementary—to a degree contrastive— hese poems are polymorphous probes into area is typified by the book’s title poem’s reflections memory. In form they morph from villanelle on ‘losing what we cannot keep’ and ‘These are things Night Song of the Cicadas: to dramatic monologue, and in memory they that shake us in our sleep’. (That line opens and ends Poems of South Korea, Japan, Treach into Theophilus Kwek’s own and those of national the poem, and in many of his poems Kwek drops in Vietnam, Cambodia, 2017 cultures, their collective slippages and conflicts. ‘It a sudden rhyme, not part of a set scheme.) These two by Richard Milazzo always turns out that much is salvageable’ is borrowed areas interleave throughout the book, and, rather oddly, First edition paperback: August 2018. 144 pages, 52 original from John Ashbery as epigraph for Kwek’s poem Kwek’s publisher has let him dispense with a contents drawings created for the book by Joel Fisher, with an ‘Chinese Whispers’, while the book is dedicated, ‘For page; so to return to a poem you have to flick your way introduction by the author and a note by the artist. 9.25 x 6.5 those who build our houses / and those who believe in through the interleaves. Perhaps that’s the intention: to in., printed, sewn and bound in Savignano sul Panaro, Italy. keeping them open’. Many of these poems, cross-cultural ruffle the links, to pre-empt categorising: a poem about ISBN: 1-893207-43-9; ISBN: 978-1-893207-43-1 Published by Galerie Albrecht, 2018, Berlin, Germany. in scope and postcolonial in critique, set out to ‘salvage’ leaving your country and one about moving your house “What is the common ground the poems and drawings by or reclaim moments of history, ‘keeping them open’ can be read to resonate. Joel Fisher in this book share? Much in the same way artist by imaginative inspection, drawing them out of the The formal range deployed includes the villanelle arbitrarily photographed the stains left by rain or other sources margins where they had been left in official documents ‘Love Poem’ on the porous meanings of ‘a poem must in Paris, seeing in their shapes the potential for drawings and and newspaper reports. There are quieter poems and love the thing it lives within’. Choosing this form, and sculptural forms, the author traveled from place to place in South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, encountering and translations, but it’s the contested, events-laden poems adhering to it fairly strictly, gives a shape to what he recording various experiences, making observations, collecting that dominate the collection. knows is the sheer openness of ‘no matter if we can impressions, that might later, back in his hotel room, precipitate The poem ‘Marginalia’ typifies many of the know what we mean’. But in several lines the metrics something more than spurts of inspiration or single lines, preoccupations and stylistic manoeuvres of Moving falter (‘So take this word that holds itself like a tune’) inspiring perhaps the briefest of stories, or what the author calls House, interleaving documentary sources and imagined as it moves to a final line ‘The more we use the word faux sonnets, steeped in the pathos of the human condition.” experiences. It begins with the remains of a training the more it means’, though that sounds like a re-baked school for Communist cadres trained by the British for villanelle by Auden or Empson. More successfully, anti-Japanese guerrilla tactics ahead of the occupation. ‘Notes on a Landscape’ is a sequence of seven sonnets, Each of the five sections opens and closes with a line of in a Petrarchan octave-sestet form though with just description of the building but then separated by two an occasional rhyme, to hold together an expansive quatrains of the imagined voices of the soldiers: ‘we are description of Icelandic landscape and its gods and being prepared for eventualities … by native men under legends. Intriguingly, in the final sonnet a footnote European instruction’ (italics sic). thrown up by the first word then becomes the whole of A similar recuperation of history is the poem the closing sestet. ‘What Follows’, about a deer cull in an ‘HO 213/926’ with the voices of officially designated English woodland, moves through stanzas of alternate ‘undesirable’ Chinese seamen under compulsory half-rhymes until a closing set of full rhymes, albeit with repatriation after that same war. ‘The Fall’ and ‘The some loose scansion. It’s a touch pedantic to chatter Week It Happens’ are about Singapore squaddies killed about these mechanics, but they contrast sharply with in peacetime training, their names to be memorialised: the more open-spaced, more loose-limbed poems in fiat Private Dave Lee Huan Xuan, and 3rd Sergeant what is a formally restless collection. Gavin Chan. Each poem is a requiem albeit in very Kwek’s imagery tends to work less for sensory different forms, the first in couplets, the second close to detail, for concrete this-ness or symbolic patterning, a prose poem, though both moving across the page with and more for associative flow. The images accumulate, deliberative, disruptive spacing. as it were hovering to build a penumbra of resonance, One Thing at a Time: This is the fifth collection of Kwek’s poems. Born which works well for the ‘stream of consciousness’ of the Poems of Japan, 2016 in Singapore, he was educated there and in England, imagined voices. It’s only occasionally there’s a need for by Richard Milazzo now consciously drawing on his Chinese Singaporean the auditory textures of ‘Instead of skin, steel. Instead First edition paperback: April 2017. 96 pages, with 30 original cultural heritage. While he was studying in the UK he of matted / curls swept back with laughter, casques.’ drawings created for the book by Abraham David Christian, had personal experience of xenophobia and racism. Or ‘two deer, mud-sprayed / and plunged with melt, and an introduction by the author. 9.25 x 6.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Turin, Italy. He said in an interview: ‘I think what I was hoping lips puckering / to a hoarsened bark, dark eyes like slate’. ISBN: 1-893207-37-4; ISBN: 978-1-893207-37-0 to capture with many of the poems in this book was More typically, in the poem about the Vietnamese ‘boat Published by Galerie Albrecht, Berlin, Germany, 2017. a sense that we cannot understand our communities people’, it’s the ebb and flow of the images—breakwater “In the poems about Hiroshima, I felt sure indirection was the or the positions that we are in without considering and harbour, rivers and straits, currents and storms—that only possible approach. The hope is that the sincerity of my the positions of the migrants or those who pass, albeit convey the disorientation and desperation of the refugees. intentions will carry me and that no part of my life-long-shock will be misconstrued. As for the rest, we can clearly see at work temporarily, through them [our communities] .’ I’ve been emphasising the poems that probe layers here, in these poems, history rooted in the most visceral of The poems here don’t set out to analyse or polemicise and complexities of history, the lives caught up in ontological predications, where it is not simply symptomatic explicitly these issues, but they do cut into them in history. The shifts in form and idiom are to fend off any of an erotics of retrospection. When this author gazes up at terms of lived experiences, historic or imagined. Most comforting resolutions: ‘no way to map a way to map the burgeoning fruition of the plum or cherry blossom tree, he sees only an overwhelming population, a fleeting consort of the securely successful poems gain their strength not the way’. Yet there’s another facet to this collection: the and delicate conceit, of erotic thresholds. Clearly, he is dizzy through Kwek’s subjective voice but through variants quietly accomplished lyrics and elegiacs which almost with the pollen of existential spring, even as the thought of of dramatic monologues, of assumed personae. A allow themselves a limpidity, almost a serenity. But everlasting devastation and winter can never leave him, both by paradigm is ‘Monologues for Noh Masks’, giving voices only almost: there’s a controlled restlessness, a watchful nature and circumstance. The ‘blossom’ here is simultaneously for imagined characters behind four masks he came unease from start to finish, from the first poem’s jejune and apocalyptic.” across in the Pitt Rivers Museum. There’s a lot of ‘came ‘Imagining gains no ground’ to the final poem’s ‘These Available through Edgewise Press, Inc. across’ in these poems: official reports, press notices, are the things that shake us in our sleep’. ☐ 24 Fifth Ave. (No. 224), New York, N.Y. 10011 annals, paintings, a travel guide, from which the poem [email protected] | edgewisepress.org then takes off, draws out a backstory, imagines an Michael Freeman is the Mekong Review’s poetry richardmilazzo.com individual history. reviewer

31 CONVERSATION Ganesha at large Rupert Arrowsmith

JENNIFER MACKENZIE and time. When I commenced working on Borobudur, Navigable Ink the initial question was, what kind of person could have Transit Lounge: 2020 created this monument, and what kind of culture did he represent? The search took me on a wonderful journey through Buddhist Asia in the ninth century, and to the he Australian poet and translator Jennifer thrilling world of the Javanese kakawin, its epic literary MacKenzie has held a lifelong fascination for tradition. In Navigable Ink, sculpture works as key Indonesia, having spent long periods in the emblems through which history can be refracted, while Tcountry while working on her first volume of poems, also emphasising their fragile status when hostile forces Borobudur—an engagement with the histories and are bent on destroying them. cultures of Java that was well received there when it was republished as Borobudur and Other Poems. Her You’ve told me before that the poem ‘Ganesha new collection, Navigable Ink, continues with many of Lost to View’ came out of an engagement with the same themes—the immanence of the artist in the the writings of the canonical Indonesian author material world, the centrality of nature, the intricate Pramoedya Ananta Toer. How does this episode of mechanisms of the passage of time. A poem from it, the destruction of an ancient Javanese statue fit into ‘Ganesha Lost to View’, engages with the work of the Pramoedya’s world view? great Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose In the novel, Pramoedya highlights a moment of novel Arus Balik MacKenzie is currently in the process massive cultural change. It is set in the early sixteenth of translating into English. century at the time of the first Portuguese incursions I spoke with MacKenzie about her engagement with into the area. At the same time, there were internal Indonesian literature and art, and about what poems conflicts between Javanese states, basically between the set amid the deep past of Java might have to say to the northern cultural states, which were becoming more contemporary world. Islamic, and the thousand-year-old Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of the hinterland. The Islamic forces eventually You’ve described yourself in the past as ‘strangely prevailed but adopted many practices from the old at home, in a poetic sense, in Central Java’. How did culture. Pramoedya focuses on a number of incidents that entanglement begin, and when did you realise it where artists are under attack. As sculptors begin to would become your life’s work? Isidore van Kinsbergen find their craft banned, they are forced to flee to the When I first visited Central Java, I felt drawn to a friendly states of the old culture. The incident with the sense of place in such a powerful and irresistible manner Sculpture of Ganesha at Bara in Kediri, Indonesia Ganesha statue is the first example of this destruction in that it can only be described in a spiritual, poetical the book. It is a poignant first instance of a number of sense. Only recently I have come to feel that it is due to incidents of a flowering culture being undermined, and a sense of closeness to the elements, of becoming aware old rituals sidelined. Pramoedya’s focus, in this novel of earth, stone, air and water which appear to come to and elsewhere, is on the power of culture centred in the life for me creatively. I think it may relate to it being at a POEM artistic practice (here mainly sculpture and dance) of time when I was just starting out as a writer, because it the village community as opposed to that of the court, was quite some years before Java developed as a crucial Jennifer MacKenzie which he saw as both abject and authoritarian. It is theme in my work. Other than travel, it seems to relate significant that the Ganesha disappears from a fishing to my growing interest in Ezra Pound’s poetics and the village, where it would have been an object of local general aesthetic tenets of Modernism, which were very production and of veneration. important for the composition of Borobudur, and most Ganesha Lost to View likely for Navigable Ink as well. When I came across Old And the episode resonates particularly loudly Javanese literature, my immediate response was to think 400 sampan today, doesn’t it, at a time when religious intolerance, that Pound would have loved these works, with their carrying soldiers goaded by fundamentalism and the politics of exquisite imagery and evocative melody. made shore at Panjan island division, is on the rise in every part of the world? Did only a few fishermen appeared in front of you intend the poem to speak to the present in that Most of my own work up to this point has been their armed adversaries, the rest having fled regard? concerned with comparing the sculptural traditions the mangrove trees Very much so. The episode with the Ganesha is of diverse culture provinces. And I believe strongly flourished in such tropical balm something that we have seen time and time again, that sculpture is absolutely key to understanding hidden in their density as hatred and division continue to rule the world. different periods of any particular civilisation’s an unfinished Ganesha Pramoedya based his work on a sense of the refraction development, because its aesthetics and techniques a scattering of chisels lay near of history through the episodes he recounts, and as I are far easier to track and to ascribe meaning to than its curling trunk worked on Navigable Ink, I felt that he was speaking the fickle impulses of flat art. Sculptures, and their ‘Spit on it!’ someone ordered very much to the present. The destruction of the associated architecture, feature regularly in your ‘Touch its trunk, it has no sakti!’ Ganesha speaks to the destruction of his own work, and work. How would you say such elements underline nervously, they touched the statue the destruction of the work of many artists over time, your presentation of history? nervously, they knocked it down whenever war, ideology or religious intolerance took I very much agree. An encounter with a piece of cold to the touch abandoned just a lump of stone issue with its existence. The episode reads like the slow sculpture, or a sculptured monument, and the place Ganesha and painful death of a beloved object, for which we are in which it rests, gives us a sense of the essence of the heaved rolled pushed all the poorer. ☐ culture which created it. And it is the experience of through the brambles & roots of the swampland the apprehension of it in situ, which can give rise to up a small hill & valuable artistic and/or critical responses to the work. out to sea One of the reasons I was so drawn to the book you it took a long time edited, William Empson: The Face of the Buddha, was that it set out, in such an engaging manner, Empson’s Rupert Arrowsmith is a Myanmar-based author and complex interaction with Buddhist statuary over space sculpture historian

32 NEIGHBOURHOOD In my banjar Febriana Firdaus

Gustra Adnyana

n January I walked down a main street in the heart Calon Arang story speaks both of the past and to the lockdown order. And she wouldn’t be doing that. of Ubud wearing a mask. Ubud is located in the present. As an outsider who moved to my banjar, Nyuh It’s little known that Bali was an agricultural region northeast of Denpasar, the capital city of Bali. It’s Kuning, just a year ago, it now makes sense to me that until global tourism shifted the economy and turned Ifamous for its terraced rice fields, art market and yoga the hamlet is well organised and local people cooperate many of its rice fields into land for holiday villas. Young classes. It’s not yet a common thing to wear a mask. I as part of the collective ethos. For many Balinese, the Balinese like Intan still dream of building businesses to couldn’t see anyone else wearing one. But that would pandemic might be a warning from the universe, as it help local farmers. My landlord tells me stories of people soon change. was in the past. returning to the village to farm since the pandemic In early March Indonesia announced its first case In March I began staying at home as ordered by started. He said that after the Bali bombing of 2002 of Covid-19. Although Bali is a thousand kilometres the banjar authorities. Thepecalang —local security it was the farmers who rescued the island after the from Jakarta, almost all the banjar on the island officers—were in charge of overseeing the lockdown. economy collapsed. immediately closed off access and went into lockdown. They announced the quarantine schedule through Many Balinese like Intan believe in sekala and A banjar is usually described as a ward or hamlet, with a loudspeaker tied to a bamboo post in front of the niskala—the seen and unseen, the tangible and the its connotations of a ‘communal house’. It’s the lowest pecalang gate. Two officers were readied to screen intangible—as a way to maintain balance and overcome level of official decision-making, run by the community everyone entering the hamlet. They had two bottles of misfortune. For them, staying at home is part of the through councils of all households. It is governed by hand sanitiser. ritual in sekala, while praying at home to Sang Hyang adat—local customs and traditions—as the basis of I had to say goodbye to Ni Wayan, the woman who Widhi Wasa (the Divine Order) is a manifestation the law and regulatory practices. There is an ethos of cleans my house. ‘Do not leave your house,’ she warned of niskala. One cannot fail these two. Many Balinese cooperation. As a site of mutual help, the banjar is me. Fortunately, I had done my monthly shopping, believe it would be shameful for their family if they the primary means for dealing with issues relating to so there was no danger of me going hungry during broke the law. The punishment would be social isolation, common interest. Bali is the only province in Indonesia the lockdown. During the first two weeks, almost no so they don’t. that is permitted to have customary institutions involved motorcycles passed my house. I could only hear the In stark contrast, social media was flooded with in its system of governance. sounds of insects, of bamboo leaves rustling, of frogs in pictures of foreign tourists holding parties; surfers The system has survived since at least the eleventh the fish pond or my cat whining for food. No one was hitting the beaches; and in one notorious case, a yoga century, through the Dutch colonial era to the Suharto outdoors. Everyone was very obedient. teacher holding a class with dozens of students. The regime and beyond. Thebanjar is also a primary source It was a different story on WhatsApp, where teacher ended up in immigration detention. of culture, such as gamelan and dance, Hindu rituals people were actively sending messages to their friends June. After four months in strict quarantine, I and collective knowledge. Since oral tradition remains and parents to keep connected. Intan, my friend in can finally chat with my neighbour again. Wayan has strong, elders who run the banjar are the repositories of Denpasar, shared with me her dream of going back to returned to work. stories about significant historical events: the rise and farming when the pandemic ends. ‘I graduated from the July. I’m back on the main street in Ubud where I fall of kingdoms, and of survival against the odds. One agricultural faculty. I want to cut the market chain so was in January. The restaurants have started to reopen, of the most powerful of these folk stories—so resonant the farmer can reach the buyer directly,’ she texted me. though with limited hours. But I’m no longer alone in today—is Calon Arang, which recounts a flood and More recently, Intan told me it had been months since wearing a mask. ☐ plague that afflicted Bali in the twelfth century. From she visited her parents, and she missed them so much. mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, the But getting out of the house would mean violating the Febriana Firdaus is a journalist based in Bali

33 PROFILE Unbroken courage Olivia Norrmén-Smith

eet scuttle across the floor. Bare skin rubs against I’m already seventy, I’m old now. I am in a rush to give art form. Voan Savay returned to Cambodia to keep the black mat. The occasional squeak pierces the the things I possess to those that have received this this embodied knowledge alive. She says there are 4,500 music. calling. It is very urgent for me now.’ formations in Khmer ballet, yet only 1,000 of them are FVoan Savay is in the front row. Though she sits, her ‘[Dance] is like the food for my heart,’ she says. still known: ‘What about the formations only I know?’ body is pulsing with potential energy, at the ready to According to the Transcultural Psychosocial In watching ballet, Voan Savay says, the past is bolt from her seat to the edge of the proscenium, arms Organisation, Cambodia’s largest mental health NGO, brought to life, and spectators are offered a window brandished in the articulation of physically conveyed roughly 40 per cent of Cambodians suffer from mental through which they can come to understand that their critique: Bring your shoulders back, your hand should health and psychological problems. The ‘appalling country rung reang (prospered, flourished) through the look like this, exaggerate that motion … She is a sharp mental health crisis’ is largely attributed to the country’s lens of this art. Khmer ballet is an ancient form with critic: she has utmost respect for the form and does not traumatic history. Read about mental health in records dated as early as the seventh century. For most seem to tolerate anything less from others. But, she can Cambodia in the popular press, and you’ll encounter of its history the form was sacred. Temple dancers or be playful too. Some of her comments elicit grins and phrases such as: ‘exceptionally high rates’, ‘psychological apsaras were messengers of divinities. chuckles from the bodies onstage. scars’, ‘psychological fallout’, ‘post-traumatic stress’, Khmer ballet is a conduit to the past. Present- It’s 5 o’clock and rehearsal is under way. All sounds ‘major depression’, ‘decades of conflict coupled with day dancers perform the same formations as dancers now seem amplified after the rain subsided. The chronic poverty’, ‘miserable conditions’. Even those who centuries earlier. Their bodies become linked to bodies aggressive but short-lived downpour on the tin roof had did not live through genocide or civil war are often who held and nourished this identity throughout an overwhelming purchase on the soundscape of the assumed to have inherited this suffering. history. There is a sense of eternity. open-air theatre at the National Museum of Cambodia Khmer psychiatrist Chhim Sotheara has spent his Voan Savay connects this notion of temporality and in Phnom Penh. career examining mental health in Cambodia. Over identity with art’s capacity to enact cultural healing: Voan Savay was the prima ballerina for the Royal the years, Dr Chhim has heard numerous patients use ‘[The audience] can forget about the sorrow of the Ballet of Cambodia before Phnom Penh was taken by the word, bak or baksbat: ‘I am bak after this’ or ‘I am moment, and bring themselves into our ancient times, the Khmer Rouge regime in 1975. In 1965, at fifteen bakbat’. The term comes frombak , ‘broken’ and sbat, converge themselves with this state, and find a measure years old, she was made the principal dancer, a position ‘form’: broken form. The term has also been translated as of peace for their feelings. They can come to understand she kept right up until the overthrow of the royal family ‘broken courage’. that now, this is what this modern time is, but their true in 1970. She continued to dance, however, until 1975, ‘I started to think that maybe baksbat is the spirit as it was before is actually like that.’ when she and her family were driven out of Phnom Cambodian way of explaining traumatic events; it could The form continues to evolve. Modern performances Penh: a city of over 2 million people left a ghost town. be a Cambodian version of PTSD. It refers to something diverge from their ancient roots. Voan Savay explains The death toll in Cambodia between 1975 and that has broken and has never returned [to its original that in the performances for King Sisowath 100 years 1979 is estimated between 1.5 million and 3 million. form],’ Chhim says. ago, ballerinas danced in a manner that reflected no In addition to the forced evacuations of urban Dr Chhim believes many Cambodians are baksbat. emotion. Their expressions were blank, each powdered populations and widespread executions of artists, But how does one treat it? Is baksbat a paralysing white face a mask. intellectuals, bureaucrats, Buddhist monks, hundreds phenomenon? ‘[Today] we dance with feeling. This means that our of thousands of people fell victim to starvation and Dr Chhim believes baksbat can be overcome. main performers, in times of pain they express pain, if disease. The Cambodian genocide, perpetrated by ‘There’s still a way out of this. Cambodians may be in a they are joyful they will smile and let you know. That’s Pol Pot’s regime, is one of the greatest horrors of the hibernation state at the moment, like the frog in the dry the difference between 100 years ago and now.’ twentieth century. season.’ Artistic expression forces the artist and the viewer to Voan Savay survived this regime. He suggests that Cambodians have not yet found a confront their own vulnerability. When the form opens ‘During the reign of Pol Pot, traditional ballet, way through baksbat. They are hibernating. itself as an outlet of expression, it becomes human, melted away, ah leay,’ she says. ‘There was no more ballet Yet, if to hibernate is to lie dormant, inert, latent, fragile, while maintaining a direct bond to the sacred: in those three years, many artists were killed. We maybe then the antithesis of this state is activation and a bipolarity of fragility and divinity. The form’s dance only have 10 per cent of artists that survived that period.’ movement, nowhere better exemplified than on between that which is expressive and human, on the one In Khmer, ah leay reflects a violent, devastating or Voan Savay’s stage of swift motions and dexterous hand, and that which is stoic and godlike on the other, complete sense of loss. articulations. makes a powerful coupling of embodied memory and As the rehearsal progresses onstage, a few individuals Voan Savay is firm in her declaration. ‘I don’t have presence. tasked with transforming the space adorn the rows baksbat. I have to walk forward.’ ‘I believe that before, we danced as an offering of black wooden benches with sherry-coloured silk to the gods, or a holy object of some sort. But in this cushions. Voan paces back and forth at the base of the n the small staff office adjacent to the open-air generation, we dance because there is a story inside [of stage, while matching sherry-coloured sheaths of fabric theatre, the table is covered in make-up palettes, each dance].’ billow behind her, tossed into the air to cascade over the a sweaty plastic cup of a once-iced drink, a stand Baksbat means ‘broken form’. But the fluid motions backs of benches in preparation for the spectators who Iwith a golden headdress and sundry other articles. Two of this Apsara are a kind of anti-baksbat. She has acute will flood the space at half-past six. young men are buzzing around the Apsara dancer. All control, articulating isolated parts of her body. She is Voan Savay believes art can be a form of therapy. are immersed in various preparations: the application of a master manipulator of her own form. If baksbat is ‘Even us who were dedicated artists did not dare to say fake lashes, dramatic eyeliner, the tightening of a corset, broken body, this dance is an expression of corporeal we were ballet dancers. Because we were afraid to die. the pleating of a silk skirt, ebullient fanning to ward off wholeness and power. That’s why we hid our identity. Some would say that after beads of sweat that compromise the make-up. Between And if baksbat is treated as a psychiatric pathology, the Pol Pot period, people have baksbat, or are scared, stretches of concentration, the three erupt into bouts of does the range of possible solutions become boxed into worried, forever. But not for me; after the Pol Pot period giggles. An iPhone plays the song that will accompany the medical sphere? Does art have healing power? Dr I returned to who I was originally. I don’t have baksbat. the dance. It is at max volume and a bit tinny. Chhim Sotheara suggests the answer may exist outside Maybe because of ballet.’ Apsara stares with focused attention into a small of medicine. ‘We need to prescribe the courage.’ After two decades in France, Voan Savay has recently hand mirror as she applies a deep red lipstick. To look Voan Savay is determined and hopeful. ‘When re-established herself in Phnom Penh. She is the artistic over her shoulder into the glass is to see a goddess. you believe you have baksbat, you cannot do anything director of Earth and Sky, a show from Experience Noticing the attention her reflection garners, Apsara anymore. I don’t have baksbat. I want to walk forward.’ Cambodian Living Arts (ECLA), performed by the new smiles slightly self-consciously, revealing a mouthful ☐ Mek Theang dance troupe. ECLA is a programme of of braces. As the boys continue to flurry about her, Cambodian Living Arts, an NGO whose mission is to be she takes one hand and pulls her fingers backwards, ‘a catalyst in a vibrant arts sector’. stretching them into one of the shapes of the dance. Olivia Norrmén-Smith is a researcher, writer, and ‘I am trying to give all I have to the next generation, These shapes, passed down through generations, are filmmaker currently based in Montréal. This article was so there is no loss, because we have already lost so much. evidence of the physical memory fundamental to this supported by the Pulitzer Center

34 Olivia Norrmén-Smith

35 POP CULTURE Yesterday’s tomorrow Peter Guest

MATT ALT numbers. Why at cosplay conventions European, Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture North American and South Asian people identify with Conquered the World characters so deeply as to try to inhabit their worlds. Alt Crown: 2020 comes closest to examining this towards the end of the book, where he tilts at the strange second act of American otaku culture and the bastardisation of the anime n this pandemic season Tokyo’s Electric Town is and manga message board 4chan into a wasteland of drab and half-empty. Akihabara, just to the north conspiracy and contempt. A direct lift from Japan’s 2chan of Tokyo’s financial district of Marounuchi, emerged message boards—whose founder now owns 4chan—this Iafter the Second World War as a hub for the trade in white community of self-defined outsiders has become a cultish goods, appliances and electronic components. Its narrow and adolescent mass of dark and strange politics, one backstreets are still lined with hole-in-the-wall outlets which was deliberately targeted by Trumpian strategists selling neon strip lights, fibre-optic cables and resistors WikiCommons ahead of the 2016 US election, drawing a direct line from and transistors from plastic haberdashers’ cabinets. tentacle porn to Breitbart to the White House. Now those warrens are patrolled by young women, To choose to be out of the mainstream culture—to many dressed in police uniforms or military fatigues Japanese companies to package their products for global choose Miyazaki over Disney—is perhaps a rational cut high on the thigh, handing out fliers for theme clubs audiences, and has spent years inside the industry— response to the homogenisation of late capitalism, as and cafes. Above, the upper floors are barnacled with although to call it such might be a stretch, as Japan’s is to seek a culture you can feel you own, even if that neon and billboards, and contain emporia hawking a creative sector is atomised and tangled. culture is flying robots or chemtrail conspiracies. Art is mix of adult toys and toys for adults; sex shops stacked The peak of Japan’s global cultural influence is often a conversation between the fringes and the mainstream. on top of second-hand phone retailers; and hobby shops associated with its economic swagger in the 1980s and In the United States, it seems to have soured. In Japan, stocked with figurines of pneumatic doe-eyed heroines 1990s. Alt proposes a different backstory. He shows that the conversation has often been a monologue. and angular robots. With the state of emergency barely the country’s most exported artforms more often than Japanese economic and cultural gatekeepers over, the theme cafes—maid, cat, military—are not not came from hardship and graft in times of distress. have consistently misunderstood and undervalued doing much trade, but there are still glimpses into the From the poverty and deprivation of the postwar period the country’s creativity. Video games—a $12 billion depths of Akihabara’s strangeness. Outside Bic Camera, came exquisite hand-tooled toy cars, recycled from scrap industry—were first dismissed as a social blight that a young woman in a nylon gothic maid’s outfit clutches discarded by occupying US forces. The social turmoil would distract young people from productive enterprise. an albino hedgehog in a Tupperware box. and student radicalism of the 1960s led to the creation It is still true today. Although the Japanese government Akihabara is the birthplace and Babylon of otaku of darker, adult manga that elevated the form from has occasionally thrown money at its cringingly titled culture—that extreme fandom that transcends obsession its childish roots. Even in the boom times, when the ‘Cool Japan’ cultural initiatives, they have often been and binds the identity of the fan with the source salaryman ruled supreme—he still does, in a shopworn expensive busts. ‘Big Japan’, the politico-industrial material. It is almost the fictionalised Japan of the form—the frustration of those forced onto the treadmill complex, has never really understood outsider culture. Western imagination, a mix of pre-pubescent kawaii and the alienation of those unable to get on drove the Witness the indignity of the prime minister Shinzo Abe hyper-cuteness with grubbiness and overt sexualisation, creation of outsider cultures that flourished in the gaps dressed as Mario emerging from a pipe at the closing neon signage and plastic cartoon robots. On any given between the dominant culture. ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, to general day before the borders shut it was crowded with wide- Alt is strong on the personal narratives of creators, confusion. eyed tourists soaking in that unique weirdness. and on the juxtaposition of radical politics with art that For more than three decades, Japan’s subcultures to the uninitiated looks infantile. Hence the Anime New n many ways, Japan has also caught up with its own have built beachheads overseas. Although the prevailing Century Declaration of 1981, a Shinjuku rally in support imagination. The shimmering retro paradise of depiction of the Western otaku is one of the nervous of Mobile Suit Gundam, an anti-war polemic Trojan- Akihabara is not just a sign of Japan’s cultural draw, loner—as in Japan, where they were often portrayed horsed into a kids’ television show. Gundam had failed Ibut also of its stasis. Having barely emerged from two as dangerous and pernicious, a threat to the fabric dreadfully in its primary mission of selling toy robots to lost decades, Japan is pitching back towards another of society—today fragments of Japanese subculture children and had been cancelled, before being resurrected recession. First-time visitors of a certain age are wont to are now so ubiquitous as to be part of the global by the demands of its furious—and mostly adult—fans. compare Tokyo’s more overwhelming neighbourhoods mainstream. From China—where pirated anime and Even Hello Kitty, which was just one of many decorations to the Japanised California of Blade Runner, Ridley pornography from Japan laid the groundwork for added to cheap crap in the 1970s to try to sell to a frugal Scott’s 1982 science fiction epic. The comparison, once the legal market—to the United States, consumers population, rode a wave of female empowerment inside cliché, is increasingly apt. Like Blade Runner, Tokyo have found resonance in Japanese stories and digital the design industry and in society at large, creating a is yesterday’s tomorrowland, a future conceived in the experiences despite, or because of, their distinct $500 million a year media empire and cementing the past, where artificial intelligence and advanced robotics narrative structures and visual languages. place of young Japanese women as global trendsetters. coexist with ubiquitous fax machines and women Although some of these cultural exports remain in Pure Invention is Japan’s greatest hits—the many forced to dress like 1980s air hostesses in everyday jobs. their niches, others have found far wider audiences. In births of the karaoke machine, Super Mario and The great leaps forward that were expected to come 2016, the augmented reality smartphone game Pokémon Godzilla—but it deftly pulls the disparate strands from Japan’s all-powerful zaibatsu have generally been Go was downloaded more than a billion times. It was together into causal lines. Without kawaii and kaiju, iterative, not revolutionary, so today Japan is a country not just a commercial success—although it made there would be no Pokémon. Alt argues convincingly that dreams of flying robots but still pays its bills in cash. gross revenues of more than $3 billion worldwide— that through their exposure to these waves of Japanese Nostalgia has become a powerful draw in a country but a cultural phenomenon, as players hunted virtual design, Western tastes have subtly ‘Japanised’. The that is going through another of its periodic spasms of monsters in public spaces, occasionally wandering onto cultures, iconography and visual languages of the nationalism, and is questioning its relationship with military bases or stepping into traffic. This year, Animal internet have their roots in Japan—text-messaging, the world. The hardening of social attitudes to ethnic Crossing: New Horizons launched into the teeth of internet forums, selfies and emojis could all be claimed minorities and immigrants, and the glacial pace of change the Covid-19 pandemic. The game sold more than 13 as Japanese innovations. The millennial generation, on women’s roles and LGBT+ rights show that the cultural million units in six weeks, as locked-down consumers which rebuilt the internet economy after the dotcom norm is reasserting itself. Perversely, that could mean turned to its virtual villages to live out their otherwise bubble, was raised on Nintendo and Sega and primed that we are on the cusp of another great wave of Japanese unachievable fantasies of buying affordable real estate to accept the alien storytelling and character design of creativity. Japan’s exportable weirdness comes from its and socialising with their friends. anime and manga. outsiders, untethered from the mainstream and left to the Matt Alt’s Pure Invention is a kinetic canter through What the book leaves unanswered is why. Why purity of their own invention. ☐ the social history of globalised Japanese culture. Alt audiences from Jakarta to London are streaming is a translator and localisation expert, working with anime—in Japanese—on Netflix in ever-growing Peter Guest is a journalist based in Tokyo

36 TRAVEL Coffee in Jeju Marc de Faoite

he wind-whipped ocean is in turmoil. Frenzied variety comes from Kenya, he boasts. He winds the waves, tossed and thwarted in their assault by grinder handle, talking all the time about his life, his buffeting crosswinds, race in to dash themselves travels as a tour guide, his love of Eastern Europe. The Tin a sibilance of white foam, not unlike the hiss of steam living room-cum-kitchen is small but comfortable. I sit the dark rocks must have made during their formation on a chair by the dining table, while Simon stands, still while still smouldering magma. Spent, the waves retreat winding the coffee grinder handle, as if winding up a with a sigh, then swell and crash again. clockwork toy or somehow animating his own speech My cheeks tingle with the cold. I pull my hat down with the rotated movement. low over my forehead, pull my scarf up high around my He is interrupted by the postman, who bears parcels neck. containing toothpaste, toothbrushes, hair dye. There Further along the island’s coast and uphill inland, are many things Simon can find in Seoul that aren’t the giant arms of wind turbines flail. There is something easily available in Jeju, including coffee all the way joyous in the symmetry of their ranked movement, like a from Kenya. I count three different coffee-making dance carefully choreographed and directed by the wind. contraptions. He chooses a fire-engine-red Italian I’ve been walking from more than an hour, first Bialetti moka coffee pot and adds water. past Hamdeok Beach, where the vast stretch of sand is As he carefully fills the funnel with the ground curiously covered by an equally vast stretch of woven Oslo Davis coffee, I recall having once owned a similar device, plastic. Whether this mesh is meant to protect the beach which I ruined decades ago by leaving it on a hot flame from erosion or to facilitate the well-dressed sightseers and falling asleep, only to be awakened by the smell of who venture to the water’s edge to pose for cold the house, intent on living on the island for a year. He burning rubber caused by the inner gasket melting. coastal selfies is unclear to me. Perhaps it is a seasonal seems eager to talk, visibly enthused at having this While the coffee is on the stove, Simon boils water precaution. In any case, it’s the first time I’ve seen an unexpected chance to practise his English on a cold in a kettle. The moka pot gurgles. When the water and entire beach wrapped in plastic. windy afternoon. When he invites me in for coffee I coffee are ready, he pours a little of each into my cup. I’ve come to Jeju for winter—not the whole winter, allow myself to be persuaded, while warily suspecting Do I want milk and sugar? They are for people who but ten days’ escape from Malaysia’s tropical heat. his coffee might be of the instant variety. don’t really like coffee, I say. Simon chuckles and nods This is my first ever visit to South Korea, and I am My host’s name is Simon, and a combination of this in agreement, but he still doesn’t sit. Instead he moves rendered illiterate by the Hangul script. When faced and the crucifix above the door and the picture of Jesus across the room, a distance of just two or three steps, to with a bifurcation of paths in the pinewoods, I choose by the window and the thick black book that might be the piano. I ask if he plays. the wrong trail, despite the signboards, and follow the bound in leather, or a material meant to resemble it, that He doesn’t. The piano is for his son. How old is his steepest route, which brings me to the summit of a hill. sits atop an off-white upright piano, all lead me to the son? It’s complicated, he replies. He is twenty, but his There is a clearing on the hilltop, benches, a view conclusion that Simon is one of the 27 per cent of South mind is only ten years old. He has an IQ of fifty. I don’t down along the coast. The sun emerges from behind Koreans who espouse Christianity, the country’s largest know what that really means. Can he talk? Yes, of course. the scudding clouds, pines shelter me from the wind, religion. Can he read? Yes, but he doesn’t understand everything and suddenly I am warm. Near the benches is a stone Simon lives with his wife and son, both of whom he reads. I want to say I know the feeling, but keep this monument. I can’t read the inscription. are absent. His wife is originally from Jeju. As he talks, to myself. I offer some platitudes. He is close to tears. Behind me, and out of sight for the moment, the Simon fills a hand-cranked coffee grinder with coffee As I wait for my coffee to cool—a precaution mountain that dominates the centre of the island is beans, which I later learn he buys online. This particular learned through burning the tip of my tongue far too streaked with snow, though most of the time I spend many times—I watch the steam rising from the cup, on Jeju the summit remains obscured by clouds. At condensing in a miniature cloud that hovers hesitantly 1980 metres, the Hallasan, or Halla mountain, is South POEM in the cold air. I touch the sides of the cup to check Korea’s highest peak and from a distance looks every bit the temperature. Hot drinks cool much more rapidly the volcano it once was. A week earlier I laboured up the & in in this wintery climate. As I raise the cup, I breathe in slopes of an iconic and archetypal volcanic coastal tuff the slightly bitter aroma, taking a moment to consider cone called Seongsan Ilchulbong, a much more recent & in the meantime the long and complicated path the coffee has travelled, addition, less than 5,000 years old, to stand on the jagged between the rush berries plucked from an East African bush, processed, crest and peer down into the vast bowl that once boiled transformed and transported, with so many people with molten lava. Nowadays the scene is more sedate. of heat thrown up involved, people unknown, apart from Simon, who I Tourism brochures show the bowl glowing meadow in the mismatch seasons hardly know, the last link in an invisible chain before I green, but winter has bleached the wind-whipped grass take my first sip. beige and straw-like. the night folds its The coffee is excellent, and I tell Simon so. He I have been following stretches of the island’s famous wings & perches smiles weakly and nods, then drinks from his own cup. Olle Trail, which hugs the coastline. The full 425- I mirror him, savouring the warmth of the drink again kilometre circuit would take much longer than the time along the boardwalk and the flavour that vaguely resembles roasted hazelnuts. I have. The part of the trail I’m on leads me through the sun sizzle Describing his life to a stranger has upset my host. little ports where brightly coloured fishing boats nestle, The beverage offers me an escape route, then I move rocking gently in unison but sheltered from the ocean’s set brings up the subject from coffee to his mountaineering trousers. tossing waves. The walls of several houses in a village I the next & the one As we talk about mountains and travel, he perks up and pass through have been decorated with brightly coloured it becomes easy to take my leave by saying I too must murals, each depicting a different type of flower. after that continue my journey and take to the trail. I am barely out of the village when a man about my white skies & waiting I walk away, out into the watery wintery light, leaving age—early fifties—hails me in English. I reply, and he Simon behind, the cold wind glazing my eyes. I reach a asks me where I’m from. So far, I haven’t met anyone a morning kick start day bend in the road and turn back to see him still standing who speaks much English or, if they do, they don’t as coffee gushes in the kitchen in front of his house, exactly where he stood when I first choose to speak it with me. We fall into conversation, saw him. In a final farewell we both raise our hands in me standing in the road, he on the wooden terrace in unison, as synchronous as the whirling turbine blades front of a small blue-painted house. Rory Harris whose actions are directed and dictated by wind. ☐ He tells me he is a travel agent taking a break from his busy life in Seoul and is just temporarily renting Marc de Faoite is a writer based in Penang

37 BOOKSELLER Danish in Kabul Andrew Quilty

Janelle Retka

t’s only a myth that the people of Laghman province thick toshaks, he thought. He’d forgotten that his mother, previous storefront, stopped at a security checkpoint are the smartest Afghans. In reality, the famous worried her husband’s books would be confiscated and detonated by its driver. More than 100 people Laghmani intellect comes from its rugged terrain, by the Communists, had hidden twenty or thirty were killed. It wasn’t the damage to the store, nor his Ibereft of the cultivable land that employs most Afghans; throughout the mattress’s loose cotton clumps. recollections of the dead strewn across the road outside instead of spending their days tilling fields, says Asad The Afghan resistance was being orchestrated from that caused him to search for a new space though; after Danish, Laghmanis read. Peshawar and Asad continued to fight, crossing back the security breach, police had banned delivery trucks Asad, who doesn’t know his exact age, was born in into Afghanistan several times under Burhanuddin from entering the street. Laghman, between the Afghan capital Kabul and the Rabbani, who became president between 1992 and 1996 Nowadays, with universities closed and most Kabulis Pakistani border, further east, in the late 1960s. His and was assassinated in 2011. trying to stay out of the reach of the coronavirus, Danish father was an Islamic scholar, who was fond of religious But Asad became disillusioned with the jihad. Book Store is quiet. I visited Danish in June, the day and non-religious texts alike. Among his father’s modest Themujahedin , he said, valorised martyrdom and after he’d opened for the first time since the government library were volumes by Shakespeare and Victor Hugo. portrayed themselves as noble warriors while acting like imposed a lockdown in late March. ‘I’m not sure people There was also a bible. criminals. In 1985, he took the books his mother had even know we’re open,’ he said, removing his face mask In 1979, before Asad finished high school, the Soviet hidden and which the fruit trader carried to Peshawar to eat from a plate of cold watermelon wedges. Army invaded Afghanistan to prop up the fledgling embalmed in cotton, and opened a tiny bookstore. He As a small, all-male staff stacked books for delivery Communist government in Kabul. Groups of rebel named it Danish, (pronounced dah-nish), ‘knowledge’, to booksellers in the provinces, Asad explained some mujahedin formed in resistance and war erupted across and adopted the name himself. ‘In place of fighting,’ of the idiosyncrasies of publishing in Afghanistan. The the country. Within a year, his father was caught with he remembers thinking at the time, ‘I’ll provide these laws around copyright, for instance, while extant, aren’t documents implicating him in a mujahedin attack plot books.’ strictly recognised, nor enforced. ‘There is no one to ask,’ and thrown in jail. All the schools in Laghman closed In 2001, after the fall of the Taliban, Asad returned he says. and the older boys, including Asad, took up arms. ‘I to Kabul. By the time, Danish had some 200 employees His bestseller is a Pashto translation of Mika Waltari’s had no interest in fighting,’ he says, ‘but this was the in Peshawar and was publishing and printing scores of Finnish adaptation of the ancient Egyptian tome, The situation.’ books every year in Pashto. Story of Sinuhe. Another favourite Pashto translation is In 1981, Asad and his mother left their home and Today, the Danish Book Store sits at the tops of a 88 Days to Kandahar; a more recent tour de force about joined more than 3 million Afghans seeking refuge in narrow flight of stairs sandwiched between construction how the CIA shepherded Hamid Karzai, then a little- Pakistan. Months later, a fruit trader offered to salvage suppliers selling steel piping and rebar on one of Kabul’s known anti-Taliban figure, to fill the vacuum left by belongings from their home on one of his cross-border main arterial roads, Salang Wat. In the afternoon, the group as it were pushed from power and across the runs. He found their home in Laghman partly destroyed. the sun floods the main room in the store with light border into Pakistan after the US invasion in 2001. ‘Who When he returned to Peshawar, in Pakistan, where Asad yellowed by plastic window tint before it ducks below a gave you permission to publish this?’ asked its author, and his mother had settled, the fruit trader explained saddle in Asmayi mountain, known better, nowadays, former CIA Station Chief in Islamabad Robert Greiner, that the library had been reduced to rubble, probably by as TV Mountain, for the dozens of television antennae when he first heard about the illicit publication. In his aerial bombardment or artillery. His father’s books were punctuating its high ridge. reply, Asad simply asked, ‘Who gave you permission to buried or desiccated by the elements. It’s not the ideal location for a bookstore, and Danish write about the Afghan people?’ ☐ As he and his mother unloaded the belongings the is still looking for a better alternative. He moved to trader had recovered, Asad was struck by the bulk of Salang Wat in 2018, after a cold Saturday that January the long pillow-like mattresses, toshaks, coming off the when a van, painted to look like an ambulance and truck. Families as poor as his could never afford such filled with explosives, was driven sixty metres past his Andrew Quilty is a journalist based in Kabul

38 LETTER Don’t forget us Erfan Dana

y name is Shams but I am also known as Erfan. I’m a Hazara refugee from Afghanistan, currently living in an International MOrganisation for Immigration (IOM) shelter in Indonesia. Most people are just finding out about life in lockdown but I’ve been living it for years. Not surprisingly, my fellow refugees and I have found it causes severe psychological and physical distress. All this has just got worse with the pandemic. Before the outbreak of Covid-19, I filled my days studying, exercising and swimming at a nearby beach. But under the lockdown we are all confined to an overcrowded shelter with no facilities. Social distancing is not possible when you live in an IOM shelter. The 230 people here live eight to a room designed for four, and we all share the same bathroom, the same kitchen, the same stairways, the same space. There is no hand sanitiser and there are no masks. Thankfully, nobody has tested positive here so far, but the risk of catching the virus is high. There are many elderly refugees with chronic health conditions. We can only access medical treatment for life- threatening conditions. The IOM, the United Nations- linked organisation that deals with issues of migration, claims they cannot provide medical treatment for sick refugees because they don’t have enough funding. So Damien Chavanat we are waiting to see who gets sick. We are experts at waiting. Erfan Dana, left, and his fellow refugees

’ve been waiting in one way or another for six years could ever have imagined—not enough food, no water azard is my age. Like me, he escaped now, since I fled my home in Ghazni in eastern to shower. persecution in Afghanistan, but has been Afghanistan. Hazaras are a mostly Shia ethnic group Then they sent me to Pontianak detention centre waiting here for nearly six years. Hazard is very Ifrom the centre of the country. We’ve been persecuted in West Kalimantan, a place of grey bleakness. Here, Htalented at baking naan, the flatbread eaten across the for decades and this got much worse when the Taliban within four high walls topped with razor wire, I was region that is central to our diet. The dough—a mixture came to power in 1996. It is getting worse again. On confined for nearly three years, during which I never of flour, yeast, salt, oil and water—is kneaded for at least 12 May gunmen attacked a maternity ward in a Kabul left the centre. As refugees in detention we lived the ten minutes, then set aside in a warm place to rise for hospital mostly used by Hazaras. They killed sixteen lives of prisoners, though we had committed no crime. several hours. It is then flattened and baked. Hazard gets women, some of them while they were giving birth, as The uncertainty of never knowing exactly when our up very early every day to make sure we all have our well as two children and seven others. confinement would end cast many of us into despair. naan. I was sixteen when I left my homeland. I was The doors were locked twenty-four hours a day. We Inevitably, refugees are at high risk of developing working as an English teacher and someone reported could only gaze at the sky, and wait. mental illnesses. Severe depression and anxiety are me for teaching boys and girls in the same classroom. At last, in June 2018, I was released into an IOM common. ‘All the everyday problems, along with long- Teaching both sexes together was forbidden. Worse, the shelter in Batam, the largest city of the Riau islands, term uncertainty and having no hopeful future, have Taliban considered those teaching English to Muslims only to discover that there is no significant difference led to the spread of mental illnesses,’ said Ishaq, another to be infidels promoting Western culture. As well as between this shelter and the detention centre I had left. refugee from Afghanistan. MJ, from Sudan, said, ‘I have teaching, I had another job: collecting educational Refugees have no access to education, no right to developed a sleep disorder due to the stress of living in supplies for the school from Kabul, which involved work, get married, have a bank account, drive vehicles the shelter. I have nightmares every night, and never travelling along dangerous roads. Inevitably, I was or travel outside the city. The shelter imposes strict stop wondering when this life here will end.’ The rate reported to the Taliban, and from that moment I was rules, including a curfew—anyone who leaves the of refugee resettlement is very low. In all the time I’ve in constant danger of being kidnapped and killed. shelter must return by 9 p.m. Nobody is allowed to been here, only a handful of people have been offered Eventually my situation became so precarious that my stay out overnight. If caught, they are sent to solitary resettlement through the UNHCR, and even they have only option was to flee. confinement. Each month, immigration officials not yet left. I left Afghanistan and travelled through Malaysia come to check and sign our ‘monitoring’ cards. No Recently it was our Eid festival. Back home we used and Indonesia until I reached Jakarta, where I went one may be absent on checking day. If someone to celebrate Eid with our families, visiting our elders’ straight to the United Nations High Commissioner misses twice in a row, they are returned to detention. homes, exchanging gifts, enjoying special foods, and for Refugees office to register as an asylum seeker. I We live under constant threat of punishment. We spending three days roaming the village, happily playing asked for somewhere to live while they attempted to keep on waiting. traditional games. The past few years Eid has been no find a resettlement country. They refused, telling me We are practical people and do our best to ease each different from any other day. This year there was little to surrender myself to an Indonesian detention centre, other’s burdens. We take it in turns to do the cooking. joy over the holiday. It was just another day under where I would be under the care of the IOM. In our room, Bashar is an excellent cook. ‘I spent eight lockdown for us. I was an unaccompanied minor; I had no friends; I’d years in Iran, where I learned to cook in the kitchen at The world waits for the pandemic to end. And we never travelled on my own before. I had almost run out a stone factory. Then one day I was caught by Iranian wait for a country that might open its heart to us. ☐ of money. At that time, the IOM provided no support for police and deported back to Afghanistan, where I again asylum seekers unless they were in a detention centre. faced the Taliban’s threats.’ Bashar escaped, hoping to Eventually, I had no choice but to surrender myself find a peaceful life, only to find himself in this shelter. to Manado Immigration, in the Indonesian province of He has no idea when he will leave. ‘It’s frustrating. I have Erfan Dana is an Afghan refugee living in an North Sulawesi, where I was held for sixteen months. great skills, but my abilities are being wasted because I’m International Organisation for Migration shelter in During that time, I experienced worse conditions than I not allowed to work.’ Batam, Indonesia

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