Ian Buruma in Japan

MAY – JULY 2018 VOLUME 3, NUMBER 3

Laurel Fantauzzo Thomas A. Bass Anjan Sundaram Duterte’s The ghost of Writing Cambodia’s deadly war Vietnam genocide

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9 772016 012803 - VOLUME 3, NUMBER 3 MAY – JULY 2018 mekongreview.com

THE PHILIPPINES 3 Laurel Flores Fantauzzo The Rise of Duterte: A Populist Revolt against Elite Democracy by Richard Javad Heydarian

POETRY 5 Phung Khac Bac “The first day of peace”, “The leaning houses”

SOUTHEAST ASIA 6 Michael Vatikiotis Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asia: Local Cultures of Conflict within a Regional Context by Michael W. Charney and Kathryn Wellen (eds)

VIETNAM 7 Thomas A. Bass The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot

INTERVIEW 9 Norman Erikson Pasaribu Eka Kurniawan

SINGAPORE 12 Gareth Richards World War II Singapore: The Chōsabu Reports on Syonan by Gregg Huff and Shinobu Majima (translators and eds)

POETRY 13 Theophilus Kwek “Marginalia”

NOTEBOOK 14 Richard McGregor Leaving America

CAMBODIA 15 Anjan Sundaram Dogs at the Perimeter by Madeleine Thien

ASIA 16 Kishore Mahbubani The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World’s Most Dynamic Region by Michael Auslin

RELIGION 17 Camille Devries Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America’s Secret Strategy in Southeast Asia by Eugene Ford Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar by Matthew Walton

SOCIETY 19 Francis Wade Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia by Chih-Ming Wang & Daniel P.S. Goh (eds) Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, Colonial Migrations, National Rights by Michael Laffan (ed)

VIETNAM 21 Peter Zinoman Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World by Thomas Bass

WILDLIFE 22 Scott Ezell The Extinction Market: Wildlife Trafficking in Asia by Vanda Felbab-Brown

POETRY 23 Michael Freeman The Red Years by Bandi

MALAYSIA 24 Marc de Faoite A Stranger to Love by K.S. Maniam

FICTION 25 Pim Wangtechawat Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

JAPAN 26 Peter Tasker A Tokyo Romance by Ian Buruma

ARCHAEOLOGY 27 Aedeen Cremin Claude Jacques

PROFILE 28 Erin Handley Prumsodun Ok

MUSIC 30 Beth Yahp Rosalie and Other Love Songs by Saidah Rastam

CARTOONS 31 Michael L. Gray Thuong Nho Thoi Bao Cap (Memories of the Subsidised Era) by Nguyen Thanh Phong and Nguyen Khanh Duong

TRAVEL 32 Rupert Winchester Forgotten Naga

FOOD 33 Robert Carmack Eating amok

THE BOOKSELLER 34 Peter Guest Ibrahim Tahir

EDITORS Minh Bui Jones, Gwen Robinson CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Rupert Winchester (fiction), ko ko thett (poetry) SUB-EDITORS Allen Myers, Ben Wilson READERS Mina Bui Jones, Izzy Souster COVER Damien Chavanat ARTISTS Elsie Herberstein, Oslo Davis, Janelle Retka SUBSCRIPTION MANAGERS Siti Aishah Kamarudin, Helena Dodge-Wan Contact: PO Box 847, Leichhardt NSW 2040, Australia; [email protected] Mekong Review is published four times a year; next issue August 2018

2 THE PHILIPPINES Deadly populism Laurel Flores Fantauzzo

RICHARD JAVAD HEYDARIAN The Rise of Duterte: A Populist Revolt Against Elite Democracy Palgrave Pivot: 2018

he world knows his name now. Newsreaders mention him often — his latest joke about sexual violence, his latest curse at world leaders, his Tlatest injunctions to destroy part of the population of his country. But in the years before the world knew his name, I heard it murmured in the Philippines in different tones, with dread-tinged admiration. He was the mayor who cleaned up Davao City, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, giving it peaceful, orderly, smoke-free streets; the guy who took drug dealers up in helicopters and pushed them out over the ocean; the leader who used official lists to exterminate petty criminals, journalists and political opponents. The stories grew from unsubstantiated rumours and reports by human rights researchers. Yet such legends, factual or not, struck the hearts of long- suffering Filipino voters and their desires for safety, prosperity and security. I often heard that if he could force security on Davao Inquirer/Raffy Lerma City, he could do it for the country. I wasn’t sure about that. But when Rodrigo “Rody” Roa Duterte entered Jennelyn Olaires hugs partner Michael Siaron, 30, a pedicab driver and alleged drug pusher, who was killed by motorcycle-riding gunmen the Philippine presidential race in late 2015, I didn’t brush him aside as a showman or a madman. There was quite the passion Duterte has — and Filipinos are among Those Filipinos who did make fragile gains during something in his trajectory that gave Filipinos hope. I the most emotional citizens in the world, according to the Aquino years — small business owners and call was sure he would win. one study. centre agents, for example — were frightened of losing In the two years since Duterte’s victory, a new The Rise of Duterte divides its dispatch into three them, especially to petty criminals. They had little political order has ascended in the Philippines — parts, examining the grievances that led to voters’ choice reason to trust the glacial pace of the Philippine justice passionately disputed, intermittently mourned and of Duterte, unpacking the method behind the seeming system, which has one overburdened court for every often celebrated. Supporters call it a fresh age of swift madness of Duterte’s foreign policy decisions, and 50,000 citizens. Duterte’s violent rhetoric, promising change and economic opportunity; critics label it an exhorting readers not to reduce Duterte to any single instant death to criminals and drug addicts, spoke undemocratic era of horror and violence, harkening characteristic. The man is not simply his mouth. Or as to voters’ hopes and fears. “Duterte built his entire back to past dictatorships. Into this fraught rhetoric and the sociologist Nicole Curato puts it, “there is value in campaign,” Heydarian writes, “on the basic principle political tempest enters Richard Heydarian’s The Rise of observing the firebrand with the mute button on.” of going farther than any of his competitors in terms Duterte: A Populist Revolt Against Elite Democracy. Heydarian frames the book with Marxist philosopher of breaking orthodoxies in favor of a bolder and more As one of the most called-upon pundits of the Antonio Gramsci’s lament: “The old [order] is dying and audacious messaging, particularly on combatting Philippines, with no shortage of controversial flashpoints the new cannot be born … in this interregnum, a great corruption and crime.” to address, Heydarian regularly offers reflections on variety of morbid symptoms [begin to] appear.” Like Perhaps the most intriguing element of the book the president, revealing the hints of history and old other Filipino thinkers, Heydarian sees the country’s is its discussion of Duterte’s foreign policy, much of it grievances layered in Dutertisms that, to onlookers, may democracy as fragile, suffering an onslaught of fatigue gleaned from several of the author’s personal interviews seem like absurdities. The Rise of Duterte is Heydarian’s and aggressive, populist symptoms — a familiar plight with insiders in the present and past administrations. scholarly account of the leader’s ascendance. At just globally. “Similar to leaders of Turkey, Russia, India, As Heydarian says, foreign policy was not a key under 130 pages, the work reads like an urgent dispatch, and Indonesia,” he writes, “Duterte promised decisive, voting concern, but in Duterte’s apparent warmth and hastening to map an unstable landscape. single-minded leadership as a one-stop, swift solution to concessions towards China, he shook the Philippines’ This is not to say The Rise of Duterte was written in a all the maladies of emerging market democracies.” old paradigm of alliance to the US. “In 2016, Chinese careless rush. The book offers important, deep context to He follows with a convincing portrait of the ambassador to Manila, Zhao Jian, met Duterte more a man and his methods at a time when the volume and conditions that placed Filipinos in the thrall of than any other foreign dignitary,” he reports. speed of incendiary rhetoric render such deep research Duterte’s promises to eradicate crime and upend the old Heydarian places Duterte’s foreign policy shifts in and thinking all the more necessary. order. Many details are striking: though the previous context with past administrations’ choices regarding Heydarian conveys in the introduction the personal administration of Benigno Aquino III had placed the conflicts with Beijing, particularly with respect to risk any writer undergoes by default when writing country on an apparent upwards swing, making it the China’s usurpation of land and waters in the Philippines. critically about Duterte: “Some pages of this book were fourth fastest-growing economy in the world in 2015, Joseph Estrada neglected the Chinese relationship, not written while I came under a barrage of systematic the poverty level failed to move. In addition, “the forty wanting an armed conflict he knew the country would cyber-harassment — mostly from pro-Duterte trolls richest families swallowed up 76 per cent of newly lose; Gloria Macapagal Arroyo made a high-profile visit — including death threats and myriad of insults levied created growth” and the number of Filipinos who to China, securing several investments. against my loved ones and me … There were times when became overseas workers to escape low national wages The Aquino administration, on the other hand, I felt like the whole country was on the verge of crashing “more than doubled” during Aquino’s term. brought a case against China under the United Nations into a frenzy of anarchy, swallowed by a mindless orgy of In a country of over 100 million citizens, only 178 Convention on the Law of the Sea and won recognition violence, hatred, and intolerance.” entrenched political families rule seventy-three of its of Philippine sovereignty against Chinese encroachment. Here, Heydarian signals a grim facet of present eighty-one provinces. As Heydarian notes, Duterte also Duterte’s administration refused to celebrate the ruling, Philippine discourse: to write about the president with comes from a background of powerful political families though, and instead “reiterated the necessity for direct anything less than adulation seems to court the threat of but portrayed himself to voters as a humble, small-town engagement and dialogue with China”. Heydarian’s violent death. No leader in recent memory has provoked political outsider. patient explication of recent foreign policy history, with

3 regard to Duterte’s choices, makes for necessary and The deaths have proved difficult to count. According timely reading. to the government’s latest claims, the number of As other observers have done, Heydarian also killings by police operations stands at 4,075, from the addresses Duterte’s past successes in Davao. “To be fair, start of the campaign on 1 July 2016 to 20 March 2018. under Duterte’s watch, Davao experienced economic That number does not take into account murders by boom and improved safety conditions,” Heydarian plainclothes vigilantes, which stand at 2,467, with 1,752 writes. He cites one survey in mid-2016 which of those unsolved. reports that 99 per cent of Davao residents expressed But in February 2018, human rights groups put the satisfaction with Duterte’s performance. Their approval number of police and vigilante homicide victims at over came despite — or, more chillingly, because of — 20,000 — using the government’s own figures at that Duterte’s public inclination towards brutality. time. Such official variance suggests a governmental Duterte’s central and most infamous policy, the tactic of obfuscating numbers, perhaps to shield the anti-drug campaign, is based on the methods he first administration from further criticism. Journalists I espoused in Davao City. With that in mind, Heydarian’s interviewed say it’s more difficult, lately, to acquire omission of Davao City’s actual murder rate is a curious police reports at all. one. Between 2010 and 2015, Davao City recorded 1,032 In some of the most agonising instances, victims killings — the most in the country, according to the included scores of children and teenagers. Just as they Philippine National Police. did in Davao City, during Duterte’s long tenure. When Filipinos cite Duterte’s hometown as safe and Other countries in the region have tried extreme productive, the reality of the continuing violence measures against drugs and drug suspects, as Heydarian raises the following question: safe and prosperous for mentions. Indonesia’s Suharto launched a brutal whom, and at the expense of whose lives? If Davao crackdown in the 1980s. Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra City is Duterte’s often praised model of governance, instituted a police-led shoot-to-kill campaign that what do the homicides portend for the Philippines? slaughtered 2,274 individuals in three months in Economic prosperity, with improved infrastructure; 2003. Even the military junta ruling Thailand now smoke-free establishments; and constant, selective, list- acknowledges that crackdown as a failure. How long driven murders? will Filipinos accept the accumulative trauma of the body count? What narrative of progress and n the night of 9 May 2016, when Duterte’s accountability are Filipinos willing to believe, and at the victory was assured, I was in a friend’s expense of whose lives? apartment, listening to the radio. I felt as I had Oin 2013, when Typhoon Haiyan was heading towards his June, Duterte and his collaborators will have the Philippines and we were listening to alerts and been in power for two years. The brutal, fist- uncertain predictions. “These storms. They take people,” shaped “real change” they promised continues, someone had said to me then. As I listened to the radio Tsome changes rendering democracy even more fragile. announcers reporting the election results, I felt the With a majority of allies in the Senate and Congress, same, typhoon-sized sense of dread. I was sure: many Duterte has few checks on his power, and he seems bent individuals who were alive that day in May would die on crushing any critic who stands in his way. He has when Duterte’s leadership, like a cruel tempest, arrived. called for the impeachment of the independent-minded A few months after that, in December, I stood at head of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Maria Lourdes the mouth of a tunnel blocked off by yellow police tape, Sereno. He has forced Vice-President Leni Robredo out gazing with local and foreign journalists at the corpses of of cabinet meetings, and her close contender, Ferdinand three skinny men. I saw the fatigue of teenaged, funeral- “Bongbong” Marcos, the son of the former dictator, home workers, used to this by now, as they carried the still vies for her office. The Securities and Exchange weight of body after body into public utility vans. I Commission has moved to shut down Rappler, a news spoke to police officers who felt happy and triumphant outlet that critically fact-checks the administration. as they presided over the bloody scenes; for them, a new, Heydarian’s observations about Duterte’s courting safer day for the Philippines had arrived. of China have proved prescient. A protracted war with I went home after those moments feeling irrevocably insurgents in southern Philippines has left Marawi stained. Is there a word for the sense of horror that City in ruins; in the aftermath, the administration is saturates you after witnessing systemic, state-sponsored negotiating contracts with Chinese firms to rebuild murder? If there is such a word, I’ve yet to find it. the city, despite the anger of many Marawi residents. I don’t have the stamina of the nightshift journalists Elsewhere, on the famous resort island of Boracay, who document the murders with a near-religious sense which Duterte ordered closed for purportedly of duty. But in my glimpses of the devastation, I find environmental reasons, a Chinese magnate plans to myself longing for unequivocal, public condemnation of build a multibillion-peso casino. And Duterte has the campaign. proclaimed his love for Xi Jinping as he seeks Chinese For his part, Heydarian regards the drug war as a loans for his nine-trillion-peso economic project, Build, sign of the administration’s overbearing, single-minded Build, Build. focus on establishing a secure nation free of narcotics. And Duterte’s jokes about sexual violence have not But Heydarian, like many commentators, seems to ended; they have only grown more grotesque. interpret the crackdown as the government’s sincere According to the 1987 Constitution, each Philippine attempt to fulfil citizens’ desires to fight drug-fuelled president is meant to serve only six years, with no criminality. He mentions the trouble the brutal campaign chance of re-election. Duterte has ordered a committee has caused the administration, and the country. to look into changing the Constitution itself, a move Duterte, Heydarian contends, remains “in a critics say may lengthen his time in power. Still, most protracted showdown with key allies such as America, Filipinos remain loyal to Duterte, believing that he much of the local and international media, the liberal will continue to protect them, that he has made their intelligentsia, and human rights and civil society groups neighbourhoods safer, and that the country will thrive in over human rights concerns. The war on drugs, while his grasp. popular at home, proved a public relations nightmare The Philippines has an extreme political climate for the Philippines, with investors holding back, credit familiar to so many countries today: rancorous, fearful, rating agencies revisiting their assessments and business triumphant, dangerous and profoundly inequitable. confidence on the decline.” In the Philippines and beyond, the prizes of populist Here I winced. At the time of Heydarian’s completion leadership are unevenly distributed. However we of the book, he cited 1,000 homicides against suspects imagine our loyalty or resistance might protect us, the by police and vigilante groups. I wished for him to strongman’s torments will fall hardest on the weak. ☐ acknowledge, even briefly, the lives destroyed and families devastated by the campaign — effects more incalculable Laurel Flores Fantauzzo is the author of The and agonising than a scandal and a brake on business. First Impulse

4 POETRY Phung Khac Bac

The first day of peace A pair of sparrows fly upward in fright, dust as blinding as flying ashes. He returns to his house He returns to his house Longing and waiting ten years after the war. love, What if: life and death Mother greets him in the dusky dawn, the rain greets him in the twilit sunrise. of the mother enter the son, letting him live. The son simply returns, Rain. Rain. Rain. the small lane, the village house, becoming heaven’s gate, Rain outside becoming a palace in the eyes of the mother greeting him. everywhere, Early morning, Rain in the yard, slanting sunlight, but also in the house. he lies on his back, Following mother’s words is the rain singing. the roof has eyes, watching him The soldier The house leaks. Startled for the first time. The place to lie down is the length between the two posts, width, the size of a tank. Dust particles joyfully dancing, Roads brightening like the sun, Hanging up the hammock. and each person is a glittering fleck of dust. Again the hammock. Mother still goes into the house and down to the kitchen alone, The tree follows him from the jungle to be the post here. her victory is him The swinging hammock will get wet, her happiness is him. but a wood borer in the post makes the accompanying sound. His sadness is not in the war.

In the old days, Strands of sunlight piercing the house Mother slept in a wet spot, and after ten years becoming arrows she still stands in a rained-on spot. becoming bullets, Mother gives him the lamp and says shooting through him without cover. Don’t let the fire go out! He must Mother stacks boxes, basins, pots, pan, accept everything. The melody of rain in the leaking house plays on, He did not receive a bullet yesterday, lulling the hammock. but today he accepts the holes. The soldier lies still, Returning home without his gun, listening to the sound of war within him weapons now in the first night of peace. are his two hands.

II. Mother calls out: time to eat, son. Not a bomb fell on mother’s house, Peace is in the crab soup, spinach, pickled eggplants not a bullet penetrated its roof and only the son gone far away. the smell of hay. Only the heaviness of waiting dripped down, piercing through the roof, becoming different holes big and small The leaning houses Allowing sunshine and rain to come through, In that city, pour down. there are houses leaning, refusing to fall. Strands of sunlight, strands of rain, if connected can only be as long Three-storey houses as a fraction of waiting are telling stories about the war. and beads of sunshine, beads of rain if piled up can be higher than all mountains. Ten years, a brief flash of time, Those houses are like remains mother’s age is six, seven times that, being buried in mid air. mother often says my life is like the sun, the rain. Eye sockets — windows My thatched roof would not have so many holes mouths — decaying doors if you, my son, have only gone to the field, to the market iron skeletons, gaunt and solitary. and not to war. A pair of bird wings burst from an eye socket Is it the bullets, invisible in the mind, A rat wanders around a mouth, shot in the deep night into the young child, the house becomes nature. that have left the scattered holes in the colour of mother’s hair? Only the leaning frame Like beads of sunshine, of rain dropping in here, converses with the world of man. so all will have to look and then turn quickly away. Every night mother prays, trembling with faith, with hope of joy, If the house stands straight, but cruelly, the roof keeps leaking. eyelids open mouths moving, There is no napalm, no phosphorus. the house would be mute. Only rain and sunshine, distance and absence, decaying the roof, faded as hair turning silver. Translated by Kim N.B. Ninh More poems and background on the poet at our website, mekongreview.com

5 SOUTHEAST ASIA The local art of war Michael Vatikiotis

MICHAEL W. CHARNEY AND in Vientiane, Wat Phra That Luang, are treated to a “You should turn Cambodia into forest, only the land, KATHRYN WELLEN (EDS) pile of charred and broken Buddha images in a boxed the mountains, the rivers, and the canals are to be left,” Warring Societies of Pre-colonial Southeast Asia: display. Ask, and you will be told they are the King Rama III is quoted as telling his officials. “You Local Cultures of Conflict Within a Regional Context remnants of frequent invasions from the powerful are to carry off Khmer families to be resettled in Thai NIAS Press: 2017 Kingdom of Siam to the south. An understated memory territory, do not leave any behind.” of war. The idea of war as a tool of depopulation and It’s a point to ponder as Southeast Asia celebrates deportation finds resonance in the atrociously violent he outer walls of the northern Thai city of Chiang five decades without any wars between states. But that manner that the Myanmar military managed to expel Mai are a good place to contemplate the art of war doesn’t mean that violence is any less prevalent. For more than 650,000 Muslim Rohingya from northern in Southeast Asia. There’s not much left of them: while the last war between states was technically fought Rakhine State in the space of little more than four Ta few mounds of ochre-coloured mud along a quiet between Vietnam and Cambodia in 1979, violence months. Perhaps the nature of war in Southeast Asia side street. The remnants mostly serve as crumbling within these states — mostly between ethno-nationalist hasn’t changed much after all. perimeters for houses and shops that line the street. Yet, insurgents struggling for autonomy and intransigent Like the kingdoms of yesterday, modern Southeast the story goes that these walls were built with the bones governments — remains endemic and debilitating for Asian governments are aware of the limits of waging of invading Burmese soldiers. the sizeable areas affected. war directly. Instead, they tap into each other’s pools War in the modern period is mostly viewed through Reading this collection of scholarly essays on styles of grievance, either arming or sheltering disaffected the lens of invading colonial powers and, later, conflicting and approaches to warfare in the pre-colonial period, minorities and backing their insurgencies. As Michael ideologies. But as this collection of essays edited by it’s easy to be lulled into a state of nostalgia. For set Charney observes about Burma in the nineteenth Michael W. Charney and Kathryn Wellen shows, against the modern barbarism of the twentieth century century, “The state was reticent or unable to arm, train, Southeast Asia was more or less perpetually at war long Vietnam War, and the related Cambodian conflict — or transform most of the combatants fighting on its before the arrival of 10,000 English troops and Indian during which an estimated 7 million tons of bombs behalf. The Burmese army remained to the end a small sepoys at the mouth of Burma’s Irrawaddy river in 1824. were dropped on the two countries — the idea of a royal standing army in a sea of armed rural folk.” The objective of traditional warfare on mainland war between conflicting states settled by the removal Proxy wars, enlisting the aid of armed rural folk Southeast Asia was to kill as few people as possible; it of the losing state’s working population sounds today, help create buffers and shields that help maintain was “mainly about deportation and depopulation.” In positively humane. borders, often artificial as they were drawn by the the islands, raids were conducted to capture slaves, but Yet despite the absence of mass murder and colonial powers, which in turn keep an uneasy also to pursue personal grudges and establish personal genocide, these wars were debilitating. “The Siamese interstate peace — at the expense of the security of authority in a context where power was shaped by depopulation campaigns in the early nineteenth the people living in the buffer zones. In this regard, personality and a culture of display. “While warfare was century had remarkably diminished the size of understanding traditional forms of warfare in Southeast a regular feature of Bugis political life,” writes Kathryn Cambodia’s population,” writes Phuangthong Asia is instructive. Wellen about civil war in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, Pawakapan, one of the contributors. “The loss of the Back in Chiang Mai, along the old outer city mud “the small scale, even the personal level, on which it was enormous manpower reserves of the Cambodian and wall, I tug at a few objects. I pull out a brick of the kind sometimes fought, suggests that it fulfilled a cultural role Laotian kingdoms consequently weakened the power used to build temple stupas; elsewhere I find a sizeable a s w e l l .” of these two lesser states in all respects, for the basis to portion of a jar, the sort used to store pickled cabbage. Throughout the region, readers of this book will form an effective means to build economic and military But no bones. Nearby, a spirit house is festooned with sense, it was difficult to draw a clear line between war viability was destroyed.” flowers and a variety of offerings indicating a special and peace; violence, on different scales and in varying The social impact of these campaigns must have place — a place of lost souls. ☐ manners, tended to be endemic. been severe. The author cites documents filled with On mainland Southeast Asia there are a few descriptions of famine, and burnt or deserted villages, Michael Vatikiotis is the author of Blood and Silk, Power reminders of this. Visitors to the main Buddhist temple with people fleeing into the jungle to escape capture. and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia

6 VIETNAM Lansdale’s ghost Thomas A. Bass

MAX BOOT controlled the rice markets, the Catholic mandarins The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and who controlled the government and the landlords who the American Tragedy in Vietnam controlled the land. The US was promising democracy Liveright: 2018 and freedom, while engineering stolen elections, herding peasants into concentration camps, defoliating the countryside and killing everything that moved in he Vietnam War was a dog from day one. This free-fire zones. Boot takes 700 pages to explain how a was the scandal revealed by the Pentagon Papers, harmonica-playing adman from San Francisco could the forty-seven volumes documenting the lies have flipped this equation into a winning war. His Tand fakery that year after year racked up bodies like argument is no more convincing now than it was fifty cordwood. More than 3 million Vietnamese were years ago, when Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon bombed, shelled, gassed, tortured and otherwise killed Papers and exposed Lansdale as a CIA operative whose in a war that Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, WikiCommons black ops and terror teams had suffered one failure Nixon and Ford should have ended the day it began, after another. by acknowledging that the Vietnamese beat the French Edward Lansdale in 1963 at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and that colonialism in Asia mployed as a copywriter for Wells Fargo bank, was dead. warfare includes Andrew Krepinevich (The Army and Italian Swiss Colony wines and Levi Strauss blue “The word will have gone forth to friend and foe Vietnam), John Nagl (Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: jeans, Lansdale, at the age of thirty-five, in a fit of alike that the era of American bullshit is finished,” said Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam) Epatriotic fervour following the Japanese attack on Pearl Gore Vidal. and Petraeus and Mattis, whose field manual, FM 3-24, Harbor in 1941, joined the Office of Strategic Services, Unfortunately, Vidal was wrong. Not even their became a bestseller after receiving a laudatory review in precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. After defeat in Vietnam could keep the US military-industrial the New York Times. World War II, he began working undercover on agency pundit class from longing for “a better war”, a winning “The danger presented by either school is clear assignments in Asia. Here he did an excellent job of war, a triumphal return to world dominance. The enough in the twenty-first century,” says Sjursen. defending landlords and other reactionary forces that Vietnam War has produced the best of books and “Senior commanders, some now serving in key national had sided with the Japanese during the war. He helped the worst of books, but, as time goes on, the latter are security positions, fixated on Vietnam, have translated suppress the Hukbalahap movement in the Philippines, crowding out the former, and only the latter are read that conflict’s supposed lessons into what now passes which was fighting for land reform, by labelling them at West Point and other US military academies. “The for military strategy in Washington. The result has “communists” and financing the military forces that vast majority of senior American military officers … been an ever-expanding war on terror campaign waged tracked them into the countryside and killed them. The are still refighting the Vietnam War to a far cheerier ceaselessly from South Asia to West Africa, which has peasant farmers who had fought the Japanese now had outcome through the books they read, the scholarship essentially turned out to be perpetual war based on the to fight the Americans. they publish, and (most disturbingly) the policies they can-do belief that counterinsurgency and advise-and- It was here in the Philippines that Lansdale continue to pursue,” wrote US Army Major Danny assist missions should have worked in Vietnam and can perfected his tradecraft. By skimming 5 per cent of Sjursen in a 2018 posting to TomDispatch.com. work now.” the funds allotted for the post-World War II Marshall The revisionists refighting the war are divided into The latest addition to this bookshelf is a tome by Plan, the CIA had given itself US$200 million a year two camps, says Sjursen. The Clausewitzians — followers Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and for black ops (about US$2.5 billion in today’s money). of the Prussian military theorist — believe that the the American Tragedy in Vietnam. The author is a fellow Dipping liberally into these funds (one estimate says United States should have invaded North Vietnam. The at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York’s major his initial budget was US$5 million), Lansdale financed “hearts-and-minders” believe that the war should have think tank for the military-industrial complex, where paramilitary operations, bought elections, published been fought at the village level as a counterinsurgency. he writes popular military histories. What distinguishes newspapers, mounted propaganda campaigns and Leading Clausewitzians include Harry Summers, this and Boot’s three previous books is that he has engaged in psy-ops that skated into war crimes. In one whose 1982 book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of never met a US war he didn’t like. He beat the drums notorious instance, his men kidnapped a Huk guerrilla, the Vietnam War “became an instant classic within the for invading Afghanistan. He beat the drums for pierced his neck with what looked like the bite marks of military”, says Sjursen. Summers argues that a namby- invading Iraq and Syria. And now he’s beating the drums a vampire and hung him upside down in a tree to bleed pamby emphasis on civil affairs prevented a knockout for refighting the Vietnam War, this time with a winning to death. Both Lansdale and his biographer believe that invasion of North Vietnam. The war was lost, he says, by strategy. His nostalgia is telegraphed in the title of his this was an effective method for spooking Huks into “draft dodgers and war evaders who still struggle with book, where the “road” to avoiding military defeat in throwing down their arms and returning to toil on the their consciences”. Vietnam, according to Boot, would have been more estates of their landlords. Opposing the Clausewitzians are the hearts-and- civil affairs, psychological operations (psy-ops), PR, It was also in the Philippines that Lansdale acquired minders, who argue that the US lost the Vietnam War pacification teams and other strategies developed the long-suffering mistress, Patrocinio Yapcinco Kelly, by failing to adopt a small-unit pacification strategy, by former advertising man and master CIA spook who had to wait twenty-seven years — until the with soldiers following Mao’s advice “to move amongst Edward Lansdale. death of the first Mrs Lansdale and the end of anti- the people as a fish swims in the sea”. The leading This approach to fighting wars was already being miscegenation statutes in Virginia (invalidated by the advocate for this strategy is Lewis Sorley, who claimed skewered by Harold Pinter in the speech he gave on Supreme Court in 1967) — before she could become the in his book A Better War: The Unexamined Victories winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 2005. The second Mrs Lansdale. Boot quotes at length from their and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam United States “has preferred what it has described love letters, which reveal “Pat” to be the kind of native that the United States had already won the war by the as ‘low intensity conflict’,” said Pinter. “Low intensity informant that every anthropologist — not to mention spring of 1970, before this victory was squandered conflict means that thousands of people die but slower PR pitchman — hopes to find when operating in a by generals and civilians clamouring for a big-war than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. foreign culture. strategy. Other proponents of counterinsurgency It means that you infect the heart of the country, Lansdale was given another Asian assignment include generals David Petraeus and James Mattis, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the when the CIA sent him to Vietnam, beginning with who co-authored the 2006 US Army field manual on gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued an exploratory mission in 1953 and then for another counterinsurgency, before going on to command US — or beaten to death — the same thing — and your two-year stretch, starting in 1954. Again, he rallied the forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Caught sending mash own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit right into a neocolonial medley of landlords, Japanese notes to his mistress, Petraeus was later cashiered as CIA comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say collaborators, Legionnaires, Catholic mandarins and director, while Mattis currently serves as US Secretary that democracy has prevailed.” Chinese rice merchants, although even President of Defense.) The list of those arguing that the US should The communists in Vietnam were promising to Eisenhower admitted that communist leader Ho Chi have emphasised counterinsurgency over conventional break the stranglehold of the Chinese merchants who Minh would easily have won election as president over

7 a unified Vietnam, if such an election — as called for corner of the globe like milk filling up a bowl of cereal”. of neocon lightweights intent on burnishing the image in the Geneva Accords — had been held. “No military Is Boot saying that US power is the mother’s milk of the of Ngo Dinh Diem. On the next page, he displays the victory is possible in this theatre,” Eisenhower wrote in world? Are other countries nothing more than flakes of same bad judgement by attacking journalists for their his diary. cereal floating in this bowl of US benevolence? “sensationalistic media coverage” of the Buddhist crisis After the dissolution of French Indochina in 1954, While describing Lansdale as an expert in the (as if monks burning themselves alive on the streets Lansdale began creating a country called the Republic of “cutthroat business” of counterinsurgency, Boot also of Saigon was not “sensationalistic”). Boot invariably Vietnam. He took Cochinchina, France’s former colony wants us to believe that the man “would preach ideals relies on second-rate sources, dubious interpretations in the south, and installed Catholic mandarin Ngo Dinh of brotherly love”. He calls Lansdale a master “of the art and crowd-pleasing attacks on the press, which he holds Diem, first as prime minister and then as president. of propaganda that he would later practice in both its responsible for losing the Vietnam War. He is a tub- He bribed Diem’s opponents, financed his military, civilian guise of ‘advertising’ and its military version, thumper for the neocon trope that reporting the truth sabotaged Ho’s government in the north, encouraged ‘psychological war.’” Here Boot is actually skating about US brutality and incompetence aids the enemy. close to a million Catholics to resettle in the south, close to the truth by describing psy-war as the military Lansdale was smart enough to know that his drafted South Vietnam’s constitution and then sealed the version of PR. He admires the realpolitik involved in attempts at nation-building had run off the rails by the deal with a “democratic” election that Diem stole with black ops. For him and other members of the war party, time Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were assassinated 98.2 per cent of the vote. the end justifies the means. It is not with distaste that he in 1963. (Diem was “cut down in a blaze of bullets”, Lansdale was a master at surrounding himself with says the OSS, “like all intelligence agencies, existed to lie, writes Boot, incorrectly. He was actually stabbed to a fog of PR. He even managed to rewrite the script for cheat, and steal for its country”. death on the floor of an armoured personnel carrier with the original Hollywood version of The Quiet American, Lansdale had a “ruthless streak”, Boot admits, his hands tied behind his back.) Lansdale knew for sure turning Graham Greene’s bumbling CIA operative “even if it required murder for hire, but he was so that the game was up in 1968, after the Tet Offensive. into a celluloid crusader. Our first glimpse into the real eager to protect his image as an idealist that he was The war would last for another seven years, but by this nature of Lansdale’s activities came in 1971, when Daniel deeply reluctant to admit what he was up to, not least time the US had begun brutalising the Vietnamese Ellsberg released forty-three of the forty-seven volumes to himself”. The same might be said of Lansdale’s population with large-scale operations and committing of the top-secret History of United States Decisionmaking biographer, who has produced a schizophrenic atrocities such as the My Lai massacre, when more than on Vietnam, commonly known as the Pentagon Papers. narrative that tries to recommend black ops as a useful 500 women, children and other non-combatants were Ellsberg was actually a former member of Lansdale’s tool for winning hearts and minds. After claiming killed in a day-long blood-letting. “We lost the war at team. Between stints at the RAND Corporation, a him as the “godfather of counterinsurgency”, Boot the Tet Offensive,” said Lansdale, because US soldiers, military think tank in California, Ellsberg had served also credits Lansdale with the growth of US special thinking every Vietnamese a potential terrorist, could as Lansdale’s assistant in Vietnam for a year and a half, forces, the philosophy of “soft power” and the rise of no longer discriminate between friend and foe. “I don’t beginning in the summer of 1965. (This was during military contractors. One might add to this list the believe this is a government that can win the hearts and Lansdale’s second tour of duty in Vietnam, from 1965 to use of mercenary forces, secret armies, terror teams, minds of the people,” he added, before leaving Vietnam 1967 — an unsuccessful mission that followed another assassination squads and other ways of waging war while in June 1968. failed assignment, to kill Fidel Castro.) pretending to be at peace. The Pentagon Papers include a document entitled Boot likes to compare his book to Sheehan’s master his is a Council on Foreign Relations book,” “Lansdale Team’s Report on Covert Saigon Mission in work, but the claim is bogus, particularly when one Boot writes in the opening line of his 1954 and 1955”, which presents itself as “the condensed looks at their coverage of the same events. When acknowledgments. He is referring to the account of one year in the operation of a ‘cold war’ writing about the battle of Ap Bac in 1963, for example, Toutfit that pays him as a “senior fellow in national combat team”. Lansdale’s team “was to enter into instead of relying on Sheehan’s first-hand observations security studies”, but also to the kind of book this is. Vietnam quietly and assist the Vietnamese, rather than and meticulous research, Boot quotes from a couple The CFR provides the nabobs who appear nightly on the French, in unconventional warfare. The French the evening news to discourse on how the Empire is were to be kept as friendly allies in the process, as far faring in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere among the as possible. The broad mission for the team was to 177 countries where the United States currently has undertake paramilitary operations against the enemy military forces in operation. The CFR might quibble and to wage political-psychological warfare.” over tactics or parse strategies in the Hindu Kush, The report goes on to describe the covert acts of but US wars are invariably good wars. When it comes sabotage and terror that Lansdale launched against to counterinsurgencies, wars among the people and North Vietnam before his agents were evacuated from winning the hearts and minds of restive natives in far-off Hanoi in April 1954. The team “spent the last days lands, Boot is CFR’s cheerleader in residence. of Hanoi in contaminating the oil supply of the bus Boot is a Russian Jew born in Moscow, whose company for a gradual wreckage of engines in the buses, parents immigrated to the US when he was seven. He in taking actions for delayed sabotage of the railroad grew up in sunny Los Angeles, where he teethed on the (which required teamwork with a CIA special technical freedom-loving poppycock of Ronald Reagan. team in Japan who performed their part brilliantly), “I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a and in writing detailed notes of potential targets for Russian American. But until recently I haven’t focused future paramilitary operations”. These operations so much on those parts of my identity. I’ve always began the following year, when mercenaries trained thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated in the Philippines were landed on the shores of North American,” Boot wrote in an article published in the Vietnam. After most of these saboteurs had been Washington Post in September 2017, entitled “I came to arrested and put on trial in Hanoi, Lansdale turned to this country forty-one years ago. Now I feel like I don’t training the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, the force belong here.” that the United States put up against the communists, “Not even Trump and his nativist attorney general, before engaging 500,000 troops of its own. Jeff Sessions, have yet figured out a way to strip Lansdale created a country, began funnelling naturalized American citizens of their legal status,” millions and then billions of dollars into defending it, Boot wrote in his article, before asking — like a lot and laid the blueprint for pacification, psy-ops, black of Vietnamese immigrants and refugees currently ops and all the other military campaigns that would kill facing deportation — “What would I do now, at age Vietnamese by the millions and still not prevail. “South forty-eight, if I were deported to a country that I have Vietnam, it can truly be said, was the creation of Edward not seen in more than forty years and whose language I Lansdale,” Neil Sheehan wrote in A Bright Shining Lie. no longer speak?” For Sheehan this proved a tragic mistake, while for After his recent wake-up call, one wonders if Boot Boot it was a heroic struggle for truth, justice and the might start writing different kinds of books, less full of American way. Boot actually writes prose like this, patriotic gore. In the meantime, his Lansdale tome is without irony. When it comes to rounding up peasants a battle cry from the past. It is a history of neither the and throwing them into concentration camps, we learn Vietnam war nor Lansdale’s role in that debacle. It is from him that “strategic hamlets” are a “tried-and-true a love letter from the happier days when flag-draped pacification technique”. Sometimes his prose is so purple patriots and scoundrels ruled the roost, and no one had that it’s hard to understand. We learn, for example, to worry about the chickens coming home. ☐ that soon after Lansdale’s birth, in Detroit in 1908, the “child of the nascent American Century … would have Thomas A. Bass is the author of Vietnamerica, The imbibed, along with his Cream of Wheat and Grapenuts, Spy Who Loved Us and Censorship in Vietnam: Brave a sense that American power was spreading to every New World (reviewed on page 21)

8 INTERVIEW New Order child Norman Erikson Pasaribu

s I had predicted, that afternoon Eka Kurniawan was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a business shirt (or even Aa checked shirt, which has been common attire in Indonesia since the 2014 Jakarta gubernatorial election). He was sitting at a table in the crowded food court of Pondok Indah Mall, having Japanese hot plate for lunch. After that, for our interview he picked Regal Coffee Factory, a small cafe inside the shopping centre. Only two other people were there. “Sometimes I come here because nobody else does,” Eka said, in his typically relaxed manner. I first met Eka in 2014. We have a mutual editor, and she had asked me to come to one of his events. For a male Indonesian writer he’s really pleasant to talk to. We’ve often caught up over coffee and shared what we’re reading: César Aira, Jenny Erpenbeck, Sjón — the list keeps growing. He’s been blogging for almost eighteen years now, mostly posting short reviews of books he’s read. His blog’s archive is a trove of recommendations. I see him as a bit of a loner. In an email to me he once called himself a “shy, shy cat”. Yet he had writer friends around the world long before he became famous. “You young [Indonesian] writers shouldn’t travel in a pack,” he said to me once, at a dinner during the 2015 Supplied by author Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. “You should mix more and get to know writers from around the world.” Eka Kurniawan, 18 I’ll always remember that about him. Globally, he’s known for mixing things up in his fear. And I think fear was created to impose control Yogyakarta. They started dating after Eka moved to work. His novel Beauty Is a Wound employs horror, on others. When someone is afraid, they are easier Jakarta. Ratih mentioned to me once that in the early history and traditional folktales in examining toxic to control: “He lost his grip … He felt helpless and period of their relationship they had to move back and power relations between females and males, as well threatened.” Speaking of horror as a genre, as a forth between Solo and Jakarta. as between the colonised Nusantara and its Dutch matter of craft, it’s a powerful tool to control readers’ Around the early 2010s, Eka announced that he was and Japanese colonisers. Since a sample of Annie emotions. Good horror novels are dramaturgic, with quitting social media to focus on reading and writing. Tucker’s English translation was awarded a PEN/Heim flowing plots. I use horror on two levels: first, to He closed down his @ekakurniawan accounts on Twitter Translation Fund Grant in 2013, the book has been criticise the use of horror as tool of control and, second, and Facebook, which had approximately 5,000 followers. translated into more than thirty-five languages, to build drama. I also see horror as a way to see the “In the past, writers spoke for the silenced society, and more even than Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth “other”, something that’s different from us. People are now writers need to be silent when everyone can share of Mankind. scared of the unknown. And the other can be anything, their thoughts,” he writes in one of his blog posts, before Locally, Eka’s also known for Kumpulan Budak not only a ghost or a demon. In Beauty Is a Wound, it’s adding that writers need to step aside from the flood of Setan (The Devil’s Slaves Club), an anthology of horror an ideology. Horror is a way of showing our relation to tweets to read and contemplate. stories compiled in tribute to Abdullah Harahap and co- the other. published with Intan Paramaditha and Ugoran Prasad in Your earlier work is very rural, whereas your 2009. I was swept away by his story “The Otter Amulet”, The romance in your work is clearly influenced later work is more urban. Are you affected by where which mixes horror and sexuality and centres on an by the horror genre. Do you read many romance you live? occult amulet made from an otter’s tail. novels? Sure, both directly and indirectly. I like to challenge Honestly, I don’t know much about romance. The myself to do things I’ve never done before. But, in a way, You wrote the first draft of your novel Man Tiger, way I see it, it’s about two people longing for something the city is now a part of my daily life. If I write about which was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker despite hindrances. I think good romance should have rural areas again, I think I will have a different way of International Prize, in a food court in Sarinah in a happy ending; that’s the classic formula. People like it looking at rural lives. Central Jakarta. Do you often write in cafes and that way. I try to respond to this formula in my writing. shopping centres? I didn’t read many romance novels when I was young, What do you think of the rapid, chaotic changes Yes, sometimes, but I can write anywhere. The ideal but I read Barbara Cartland, in translation, in middle taking place in Jakarta right now? place is at home, at my own desk, where I can read books school. Perhaps she also influenced the way I write — Many big cities in third-world countries develop whenever I get bored or sleep when I’m tired. But when who knows? without a decent blueprint, including Jakarta. None I’m travelling I have to be able to write on a flight, on a of us can do anything about it, let alone the government. train or in a hotel. Writing in a cafe or a shopping centre once went to Eka’s house for a photoshoot with But on the other hand, in terms of mentality we in Jakarta is bread and butter, because contemporary his wife, Ratih Kumala, also a prolific writer. They Jakartans are still rural. We’re still orang kampung Jakartans, including me, use such locations for their live in a two-storey house in a quiet part of South (villagers), and I don’t mean that in a negative way. We weekday escapes. Sometimes I go to a shopping centre to ITangerang, an hour from Jakarta if the traffic’s light. An grow up with the idea that city people are individualists, see friends, and I prefer to spend time there afterwards unoccupied piece of land lies in front of their house, but this isn’t completely right. We still have that instead of battling the afternoon traffic home. I can work dotted with a few trees and some yellowing bushes. community bond wherever we go, even in this city. even when it’s noisy and people are coming and going, as Eka said that he recently started cycling with his only I once met a European journalist here, in a balcony long as nobody tries to talk to me. I need solitude. daughter, to keep himself healthy. lobby of a hotel, and he asked my opinion of Jakarta. I Before settling in Jakarta, he lived in his rural said to him: if I went down right now to the cigarette You once said that Beauty Is a Wound is a ghost hometown of Pangandaran, in West Java, and then stand across the road, I could immediately chat with the story. But what does horror mean for you? moved to Yogyakarta to study. Ratih herself studied for shopkeeper — and not just about the weather, but as if When we talk about horror, in general, we talk about her English degree in Solo (Surakarta), an hour from we’re old friends.

9 Muhammad Fadli

10 You wrote about the rise of religious radicalism in Is it related to Suharto’s New Order regime? capital power is behind them. Remember, this was a Indonesia, especially Jakarta, in the New York Times. I have this raw hypothesis, looking back at the era characteristic of the New Order, that people with capital But this happens the world over. contextually, that one of the reasons the New Order resources united with Suharto to rule. Radicalism has risen all around the world in recent lasted more than three decades was its neat cultural Third, political Islam. It was also oppressed by years, in America and Europe foremost. We can’t policies, which in short made everyone apolitical. For the New Order. Since reformasi began, political Islam examine it based on the religion involved. Instead, we instance, in the 1970s, after Suharto had succeeded in has been unshackled and has demanded that people should take this phenomenon as the rise of identity incarcerating all his political enemies, like Pramoedya celebrate its existence. Its proponents have the right to politics. In America, it’s white nationalism, neo-Nazism Ananta Toer, we had a visible cultural homogenisation. do that. But this freedom isn’t equal: there’s none for and the Protestant fundamentalism. In Indonesia, it’s The other reason, which might have escaped our leftists or LGBT people, for example. The people who Islam. People who belong to the majority think that they attention, was the boom in rich and diverse genre associate with political Islam are also pragmatic. They should be the norm, that they must be in control. In fiction in the 1970s. In a public lecture, I said that I was can easily forget the oppression they once endured. discussing this, we need to be very specific. The problem happy with that because I grew up with comics and A few days ago the politician Fahri Hamzah said that in America isn’t the same as that in Indonesia. genre novels. But recently I’ve become more suspicious today the situation is more oppressive, commenting on that the boom was a cultural trick. I started to think Yogyakarta State Islamic University banning its students There’s also much warning online of LGBT as a that those romance, horror and silat [Indonesian from wearing the burqa. He ignored that, under the New national threat. It’s as if the queers are monsters in martial arts] novels had something to do with us being Order, people often had problems if they wore a simple horror novels. apolitical. Again, this is just a raw hypothesis. Now we hijab. For power, some Islamic politicians are willing to There is a trend where we feel threatened by the complain about the government every day, but that forget everything. other, so we want to control and contain it. I think this is anxiety is rarely conveyed in the national literature. I If these three join, we might have something worse the real threat. think this needs to change. Isn’t it possible that we’re than the New Order. part of the problem? Literature lasts longer than a tweet How do you, as a writer, react to otherness? or a Facebook update. Why don’t we leave behind a Where do you see Indonesia a decade from now? I often speak of this, how horror is used to exploit more enduring record of our thoughts? I want to be optimistic. In the last legislative election, otherness and how it can also be used as a strategy of the Islamic parties lost seats. But, sadly, secular parties familiarisation. In classic horror novels, like Dracula How did you become politicised? are also pragmatic. For instance, in the 2015 presidential or Frankenstein, the “other” is presented as a threat, Watching the Gulf War on TV in 1991 opened my election, secular parties formed a coalition with Islamic a grotesque being. So we feel the need to conquer it. eyes to international politics. When I was growing up in parties and even with a radical religious group, despite Whereas in contemporary horror novels the other is so Pangandaran, I was no different from other teenagers. the contradicting ideologies. Even if this coalition had familiar that we don’t feel threatened at all. We can find a After watching TV, I would go to the cinema and play won they would have had internal problems in running coexistence. We might still feel threatened, but it’s more ding-dong [an arcade game]. the economy, for one, let alone in agreeing on the rights because of the tug of war over space to exist. Novels But several personal experiences made me aware of of Chinese-Indonesian and LGBT people. like those in the Twilight and Harry Potter series are the dictatorship. I also have used these in my novels. In ideologically progressive about this matter. The “other” our kampong, when people caught a thief they would Is there a role for writers in that future? is still there, but we can fall in love with them, live take them to Koramil [an Indonesian Army unit] instead I think writers have to reach beyond social media alongside them. An editor friend told me that if we want of the police station. After the thief was black and blue, and draw attention to unpopular and neglected issues. a wider acceptance of LGBT, we should publish more they’d be brought to the police. For the people in my Some media are more durable than others. ☐ progressive books about it. I did this with my novel O. kampong, it was just the way things were run. I found After we become more familiar, the fear will vanish. it odd, given the police were responsible for civil order Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a writer and translator There won’t be any control, hierarchically speaking. while the army’s duty was to maintain national security. There will only be horizontal control, which is more The army seemed so powerful and the police so helpless. balanced. The peak of horror for me is its ability to But like all the kids who grew up under the New erase itself. Order, I also lived under its privilege — by this I mean cheap access to higher education. Even though this Familiarisation goes hand in hand with political scheme was comparable to the ethical policy of the representation. Few Papuan voices are heard on Dutch, Suharto needed educated people to run the the national stage, for example, but many Javanese government. He also kept their numbers at a minimum. writers publish novels about Papua. Some even I have another experience. In my second year of high exoticise the island. school I moved to a smaller school. Practically, we had I believe exoticism amplifies rather than eliminates no rules. The teachers were so permissive it was almost otherness. In my opinion, the problem is writers anarchic. I asked my new friends there to help me themselves. We, too, are often unfamiliar with diversity. make a wall magazine. One time we ran a piece about a For example, if I were to write a novel about Papua, it’s teacher who dated a student, and our magazine was shut like me claiming to my readers, “You don’t know about down by the school. That’s when I realised we were not Papua. This is Papua.” That way I have made Papua as free as we thought. We were actually under a powerful merely an object, the other. I don’t like that mentality. authority. We could skip class as much as we wanted, but It makes the writer, the reader and the subject of the when it came to more essential things — like criticising writing three completely different things. I believe we a teacher — we were banned. I carried this memory have to learn to know each other in the most simple and to Yogyakarta. There I saw real problems, which we fundamental way. discussed on campus. After I joined a demonstration myself, I understood even more. Do you think Indonesian literature is already as diverse as Indonesia itself? This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Not yet — we still have a long way to go. Cultural the fall of the New Order. How do you see the diversity aside, sometimes we even overlook stories regime now? that urgently need to see the light of day. Not long ago It’s clear: the New Order is trying to return to the I went to Yogyakarta. Over coffee, I chatted with a stage. We all know that the New Order was built upon friend around the same age as me. We talked about our three foundations: Suharto, the bureaucratic tools that adolescence in the 1990s. I was in the first grade of high were the Golkar party and the government itself, and school in 1991. At the time we watched live coverage the military. They might return in different forms. First, of the Gulf War. We saw how the US bombed Iraq. the military. They are intervening in civil matters again. We witnessed an actual war on TV. We could see real For instance, how can an active general be chair of the missiles. And my friend then told me that he feels like Indonesian football association? They have violated he lost his adolescent years. While kids his age played one of reformasi’s mandates, that the army stays in the basketball, he thought about the Middle East over and barracks. It’s even more problematic when we see that over and became very political, even radicalised. He read the military can will and align with anyone today as long books about the Muslim Brotherhood and joined some as its interests are protected. exclusive religious organisations. Then I thought, why Second, the Cendana [shorthand for the Suharto can’t we find these stories in contemporary Indonesian residence in Jakarta]. We have seen that Suharto’s literature? Why doesn’t anybody write about their children are starting to join political parties. They experiences? My friend said he wasn’t alone. have the right to do that. More worrying is how much

11 SINGAPORE Unbowed Gareth Richards

GREG HUFF AND SHINOBU MAJIMA (EDS) World War II Singapore: The Chōsabu Reports on Syonan NUS Press: 2018

ome time in occupied Singapore in late 1943, an auxiliary nurse — a girl in her mid-teens — enters a hospital ward carrying a tray of medicines. A SJapanese sentry guarding the entrance to the ward barks out an order. She doesn’t understand or else responds too slowly. She barely registers the rifle butt before it cracks into her skull, the medicines scattering, followed by a momentary silence and then more shouting. She hadn’t bowed in the correct manner. She’d shown insolence. She was taught a lesson. In popular memories of the Japanese occupation of Singapore, that short but traumatic period from February 1942 to the end of the war in 1945, indiscriminate force and violence are commonplace. Stephen Wynn The oral testimonies gathered by Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Kamalini Ramdas vividly recall the matter-of-fact Japanese soldiers in Singapore after their victory in 1942 encounters between sentries and ordinary people: “You had to bow to a Japanese sentry otherwise you’ll Singapore in 1940 reported that “attack is possible paper and in pre-1945 handwritten Japanese — were get slapped, a couple of slaps on your face and then told only from the Johore Strait north of Singapore”. Once deciphered before going through several recensions in to bow again.” Sentries — working alongside spies Churchill, at a war cabinet meeting, ordained that order to arrive at an English equivalent “faithful to the and the secret police — were the most visible reminders no large-scale reinforcements would be available for meaning and spirit of the Japanese original”. Though of the system of constant surveillance, essential if the Malaya, the fate of Singapore was sealed. Yamashita clearly designed to buttress the war effort, the reports Japanese were to manage and control the daily compass Tomoyuki, the commander of the Japanese armada that were also intended to help the wider and longer-term of social life and work. The exercise of power required embarked for the Malay peninsula in December 1941 aims of governing Singapore society and enlarging the constant scrutiny, regulation and the ritual of public and who was later dubbed the “Tiger of Malaya”, wrote Japanese empire — melding the vision of a hierarchical, humiliation in order to effect compliance in the grind in a poem: “The arrow leaves the bow.” functioning community with that of a greater economic of everyday life. “This showed that they would not The events leading to Singapore being overrun sphere or kōiki keizai. tolerate any rebellion, that they were the masters and we by the Japanese have been described and interpreted The two long introductory chapters provide a the servants.” exhaustively. Chris Bayly and Tim Harper’s Forgotten necessary guide to the voluminous empirical detail The broad history of Japan’s struggle to become the Armies: The Fall of British Asia or Kevin Blackburn and contained in the ten reports, written between October master of Southeast Asia is well known, the scale of Karl Hack’s Did Singapore Have to Fall?, for example, 1943 and October 1944 and replete with statistical tables the literature enormous. Its antecedents lay in China’s offer definitive accounts of the British surrender and its and appendices on every imaginable facet of daily life. war with Japan. Though war was formally declared in implications for accelerating the end of empire as well The ten were selected from forty-eight surviving reports 1937, it was the culmination of decades of Japanese as the recriminations that followed the war. Meanwhile, out of an original eighty-four; many of the missing encroachment onto Chinese territory and the de historians such as Lee Geok Boi, Paul Kratoska and reports are from 1945. facto occupation of north-east China in 1931. The Cheah Boon Kheng have explored the political and As Gregg Huff makes clear in his overview, despite ruthlessness of Japan’s military offensive, generating social implications of the military occupation for local the evident value of Singapore to their imperial hideous casualties, devastated vast swathes of the populations, including the vexed and contested issues of ambitions, the Japanese faced three deep-seated country. At the same time, control over the coastal collaboration, inter-ethnic tensions and resistance. What structural problems in putting into place a viable system regions and most of the major cities emboldened has been far less easy to capture is the strategic thinking of governance. Singapore’s predominantly Chinese the Japanese military and bureaucratic leadership to of Japanese civilian planners as they sought to fashion population and its overwhelming identification with advance an ambitious imperialist project and to prepare and manage their newly conquered living spaces. China in its existential struggle with Japan were major for total war. On 1 August 1940, Foreign Minister Beyond the violent repression and “spiritual cleansing” impediments. “For occupied Singapore to function Matsuoka Yōsuke announced the government’s policy that immediately followed occupation, beyond the even partially, Japan had to achieve, through some to build a so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity draconian social control of sentries, spies and the secret combination of compulsion and incentives, at least tacit Sphere. In effect, the dictates of war and empire meant police, how was hegemony to be imposed on Singapore? cooperation from a substantial section of the Chinese that the primary focus of expansion would be directed World War II Singapore: The Chōsabu Reports on community.” This was never fully accomplished. to Southeast Asia. Syonan (the renamed city of Singapore) offers some Second, the city relied heavily on importing food The speed and scale of the Japanese sweep through compelling answers. Towards the end of 1942, a large from relatively distant areas. The everyday politics of the region were astonishing, even in retrospect. Seizing number of Japanese academics and civil servants were the belly — of how to ensure adequate supplies of basic the initiative, Japan launched coordinated assaults on sent to Southeast Asia as members of the Chōsabu foodstuffs — are a constant of many of the Chōsabu Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, the Philippines and the Malay (Department of Research), who were to report on the reports. The difficulties of securing rice imports from peninsula and gained control of the seas. For the British, economic and social conditions they found in order to Thailand, the exhortations to Singapore’s population to the defence of their colonies rested on the “fortress” give administrators a better understanding of the region. grow substitute crops like tapioca and sweet potatoes, in Singapore — a vital political symbol, a statement In addition to Singapore, there were branches of the widespread rationing, direct confiscation, printing of imperial intent in Asia, but ultimately undermined Chōsabu in Malaya, Java, Sumatra, North Borneo, the money, measures to control inflation in a black market by a strategic delusion. The central weakness of their Philippines and Burma, all supervised by the Singapore economy all spoke of the authorities’ desperation to “Singapore strategy” was all too evident: the outer directorate. Since most Japanese-language records on manage the unmanageable. defences stretched so far beyond the island as to make Southeast Asia were destroyed on the orders of Tokyo Third, weak industrialisation and a relatively the concept meaningless. near the end of the war or just after, the Singapore unskilled labour force prevented local production from The Japanese knew this all too well. Planners were reports are, quite simply, invaluable. The editors describe making any significant contribution either in support well briefed on British weaknesses. Officers who visited how the originals — often mimeographed on crumbling of the city or to the wider war effort. Concerns over

12 labour supply run through the reports. Hawkers and needed to unpack the troublesome question of wartime POETRY petty traders drew the particular ire of the authorities. academic collaboration. Nonetheless, her suggestion that They were accused of being unproductive and “at the a combination of fear and resentment underpinned their root of the problems concerning food rationing and relations with the military seems right. Marginalia price controls”. Moreover, pulled by the tow of vainglorious plans Taken together, the problems faced by Japanese for a New Order empire — all efficiency, rationality i. planners were “probably the most formidable of any and productivity — the Chōsabu members were not This is the façade of a two-storey building … of Southeast Asia’s cities”. If the British had been especially open or flexible in recommending solutions deluded about Singapore being their fortress, then to intractable problems. Japanese officials were tied to a someone has smuggled joss onto the grounds the Japanese would soon be disabused of the idea that strategy of rigid controls and close managerial oversight, a smell of worship through the window-slats it would contribute in any substantial way either to demanding that hawkers become factory workers, covers the desks the knife-bitten desks their immediate wartime needs or still less to their coolies become farmers. This badly misread the situation cabinet chairs all that in them is grand schemes of empire. It’s hard not to agree with on the ground in Singapore, where the combination Huff’s assessment: “The city was too globally oriented, of simmering resentment, free-market enterprise and they search our possessions such thin papers too Chinese, and too much a product of individual individualism was not easily tamed. For the Japanese, bearing nothing but the names of our gods enterprise for the Japanese approach of restriction, while many of their policies failed and they bowed to are hard to find recalcitrant regulation and self-sufficiency to work.” the inevitability of defeat, their true legacy lies in the they cloud the earth set the air alight While the minutiae of control offer up fascinating realisation of their ideas in the postwar managerial insights into how the occupation was felt in everyday, state. Akamatsu and his associates became architects of …, home of an Armenian billionaire, located disjointed lived experiences, including the collisions of another kind of miracle. For the ordinary population command and resistance, Shinobu Majima’s essay offers of Singapore, it was precisely the improvised informal ii. a broader perspective. Her focus is on the men of the economy, supported by the huge black market, that at Tanjong Balai near the mouth of Jurong … Chōsabu, their research interests, their place in Japanese averted complete disaster. economic and social thought, as well as their postwar The occupation of Singapore crucially (and seven thirty p.m. that which is silent is silent careers. These biographies and an outline history of inevitably) faced resistance, everywhere and at all times. we kneel by the path outside the house ideas are extremely valuable. They help trace the origins Everyday forms of resistance meant the difference wipe every broken part pass a thread and evolution of wartime planning, and the ideas and between life and death. Continuing everyday life through the barrel till it comes out white policies of its chief civilian architects forged in their despite the difficulties, the obstacles, the brutality also prewar institutional and personal networks. speaks of defiance. The young auxiliary nurse patched in the thick dusk it must seem as if The leading figures of the Chōsabu were part of herself up, desperate to keep her official post in the we are panning for gold our hands dipped a much broader group of civilian planners known as Japanese-run hospital and her priority rations that with grease all the pieces immaculate “reform bureaucrats”, technocratic leaders who first helped feed perhaps a dozen people. That evening the dry ground a stream of precious metal emerged to prominence in the 1930s and who operated she tended her tapioca and sweet potatoes. While at the heart of the wartime system. Majima situates remembering the darkness, she survived the war. That … River. It was a large ornamental bungalow the Chōsabu members within these wider intellectual nurse was my mother. ☐ currents. Many of the senior staff had studied abroad iii. and were well versed in debates around laissez-faire Gareth Richards is a writer, editor and bookseller based with Chinese style pavilions. [Used] to train … colonialism and a wartime controlled economy, in Penang, Malaysia quantitative economics and case study methodology. we exercise before dawn sometimes They were a part of a global trend of technocratic in the dead hours drills that will ready us modernity, though Majima does not explore their for what must be soon a kind of not-being linkages to reform-minded technocrats who had intent and yet without sight or trace already laid the foundations for a New Order state in China. lithe even in other words unknowable The most prominent Chōsabu researcher was its the wind picking up its feet a cracking Harvard-trained director, Akamatsu Kaname, whose of shells on the beach under sand prewar flying-geese model of catch-up industrialisation fishermen walking over last night’s hatch captured the imagination of some development economists in the 1960s. While the catch-up theory, … soldiers for anti-Japanese guerrilla work or even a modified version of it, was not central to the work of Akamatsu’s team, once the secret Chōsabu iv. research order had been received from the army, in Malaya. The site was later taken over … they saw an opportunity not only to write descriptive research reports but to be involved in actual policy we are being prepared for eventualities implementation, though it is not at all clear to what to hold down the rhythm of wanting extent this was the case. give ourselves apace to what comes If the problems faced by Japanese administrators who we will be cannot know this were formidable at the outset of the occupation, they only got worse over the course of the war. In the end, also a kind of being this strange alliance the Chōsabu failed even in its own terms. Its research this putting to sleep making new activities were terminated and the members reassigned by native men under European instructions † at the end of April 1945. Economic and social conditions still a surfeit yes a dreaming of a kind in Singapore deteriorated as the Japanese suffered military defeats in the region. By the end of 1943, the … by the Government during the development reports show, many people no longer ate rice, and food shortages became chronic the following year. Attempts v. at labour mobilisation also appear to have had minimal of Jurong Industrial Estate in the 1960s. impact. And the occupation was almost totally financed by the printing of valueless military scrip, derisively soon the month of ghosts a month also dismissed as “banana money”, which only created, of songs all the best places set aside during the last stages of the war, hyperinflation. a full harvest on empty thresholds Aside from battlefield setbacks, two other obvious surely now the old ways will abandon us shortcomings explain why the Japanese never had adequate resources to administer Singapore in the ways let the sealed earth remain now let its rafters military and civilian planners envisioned. Meeting the hold let the children play among the graves needs of the local population was always subsumed by let them know what this means let us the higher logic of maximising the war effort. Majima too make of this letting a letting go says that some Chōsabu members felt “quietly ashamed” of their association with the army during the occupation, - Theophilus Kwek though she rightly cautions that more research is

13 NOTEBOOK Leaving America Richard McGregor

ast December, after seven years in Washington, isn’t that it is divided, but that it ever managed to remain The state of the US is certainly not all Trump’s I loaded the family into a tank-like SUV and united in the first place. fault. He inherited his country’s many problems, and, headed west. Starting on the Pennsylvania during the election campaign, cannily highlighted LTurnpike, we were taking the long way home to s I write this article, I am sitting in a swank them. In that respect, Trump once could have been Australia, driving into Ohio, along the southern hotel room not in Los Angeles or Sydney, our seen as a symptom rather than a cause of the pent-up edge of Michigan, to Chicago, Illinois. With wild final destination, but in Shanghai. The previous fury in sections of the US electorate and as someone snow storms threatening to shut the highways, Aevening, I travelled down from Nanjing, the old who could cut through the logjam in Washington to we hopped on a plane for the leg to Utah, before Republic of China capital, on one of the country’s new fix problems. Alas, that has not proved to be the case. grabbing another vehicle for the trip past the salt fast trains. Getting onto the train still entails fighting In the White House, Trump has shown no interest in lakes, into Nevada and down the length of California your way through an unruly mob reminiscent of a pre- policy and has debased the office to such an extent to Los Angeles. modern Chinese bus station. But once aboard, the train that any disruptive value he might have had is gone. The book that acted as my companion on is a wonder, taking less than two hours for a trip that Likewise with Xi, who gets the credit for China’s the month-long journey, American Nations, by only a few years ago took more than six by rail, and even strength, but in fact inherited a country that had Colin Woodward, described our route differently. longer by road. been growing on average about 10 per cent a year According to Woodward’s map of the United States, The difference with travelling in the US is instructive since the early 1980s. Xi has been an assertive our drive started in Tidewater, snaked through the by itself. People don’t travel by fast trains in the US, and risk-taking leader, but many pundits forget Midlands and along the edges of Yankeedom and because there aren’t any. The same goes for Australia, that when his bland predecessor, Hu Jintao, came Greater Appalachia, into the Far West and then of course. Instead, Americans travel on often over- to office, China was a smaller, weaker country. south to El Norte. crowded, under-repaired highways that were mostly Hu wasn’t an assertive leader for good reason: he Woodward’s book provides an alternative built decades ago, during the initial postwar flush didn’t have the military capability to provide him imagining of the US. Instead of today’s conventional of wealth. with back-up. In any case, who is to say that Xi’s carving-up of the country, into red and blue But there’s another difference between the Chinese decision to keep himself in power indefinitely is (Republican and Democratic) states, Woodward and US journeys. The fast train from Nanjing to good for China? Trump might admire Xi’s dictatorial divides the country according to the patterns of Shanghai isn’t what you would call a scenic trip. tendencies, but few of the Chinese intelligentsia do. European settlement of different regions. Each of Running though some of the richest cities in the these areas, in Woodward’s virtuosic rendering, country, like Kunshan, Suzhou and Wuxi, the landscape t may seem strange in an article about the state retains much of the distinct character brought by is nonetheless grim, a mix of crammed-together high of the United States under Trump to benchmark the settlers. rises and belching power plants, criss-crossed by patches the country against China. After all, America’s Tidewater, our starting point, an area dominated of farm land pushed up against dirty industrial sites. The Ipolitical malaise is not all about the Republicans. The by Virginia, is authoritarian and traditional, roads inside the cities, too, are crammed with cars. Democrats’ decision under Barack Obama unsurprisingly so, as it was founded by English Big US cities along the route to the west coast, like to turbocharge identity politics rebounded on gentry. Yankeedom, too, reflects its Calvinists Philadelphia, Chicago and especially Detroit, bear the them once Hillary Clinton took over leadership of pioneers, still distinguished by a belief in education, rusty scars of decades of brutal competition from rising the party. self-improvement and an active citizenry. Asia. But generally, any drive across the US also displays But China is a useful benchmark for the US Greater Appalachia, settled by waves of bellicose the country’s wealthy endowment, of vast, productive for a simple reason. Any decline in US power Scots-Irish and covering states like West Virginia farmlands, plentiful (with notable exceptions) water and and cohesion matters much more if there is a and parts of Kentucky, retains its disdain for something else that China lacks: clean air. States like concomitant rise elsewhere, especially in China, an outsiders, whether northern intellectuals or southern Pennsylvania are also enjoying an energy boom, thanks ideological and geopolitical rival. In all likelihood, aristocrats. Likewise, the culture and politics of to fracking, just as China is having to import more and Trump has changed US politics for years to come, the Far West, with states like Utah, Wyoming and more of its oil and gas. even if he is not re-elected for a second term. Montana, are still marked by remoteness, a high, dry The US is still rich, and, if we take on board Whoever runs on either side in 2020 will target climate and a dislike of the federal government, even Woodward’s message, you might conclude that the voters in the old industrial states like Michigan and as many rely on its largesse. cultural and political divisions in the country are a Ohio. (They hate being called the Rust Belt, a term In departing the US, I wasn’t fleeing Donald feature, not a bug, of the system. Altogether, this shapes first applied in the 1970s, which tells how long the Trump’s America. The decision was personal. as a reassuring message. Most reassuringly, maybe we issue of de-industrialisation had gripped politics in Nonetheless, one of the best things about moving don’t need to worry too much about Donald Trump. the midwest.) No one will be running on free trade. home to Australia was leaving behind the toxic, Might he just be a transitory phenomenon, while this The so-called liberal international order will be mind-numbing partisanship of the country’s politics: wealthy nation sorts out its political system and gets taking a back seat. China will be front and centre, Democrat v. Republican, Liberal v. Conservative, back on its collective feet? and by extension, the rest of Asia. MSNBC v. Fox News and Trump v. just about Sadly, such rationalisations don’t do justice to Xi’s ascendency will only reinforce this trend. whomever he was targeting on any single day, the collapse of politics in the US and the stack of Like Trump, Xi has upended Chinese politics and all blasted out twenty-four hours a day on rival difficult, nearly intractable problems that have piled the calculus of all its top players. Xi doesn’t seem like cable channels. up, unaddressed, in the process. A backlog of neglected a leader for rash overseas adventures. Nonetheless, Never mind that in the age of Trump, many roads, rail and airports is one. The deepening rich–poor Chinese political leaders have few incentives to make of these labels have been drained of their original gap is another. There has never been any real effort to concessions to Washington. For all of China’s highly meaning. To take one example, there are no retrain workers thrown on the scrap heap by decades visible problems, the country’s economy continues to conservatives in the White House in the proper of rolling competition out of Asia. The opioid epidemic exhibit robust health. The pressure on the US from meaning of the word. But the labels are tattooed onto ravaging states like Ohio and Pennsylvania is so severe its nascent superpower rival will only rise. every political participant anyway, to allow their that the average life expectancy of white males in the US The drive, then, through the US will be stalled every utterance to be refracted through a narrow and has actually fallen in recent years. for years in its old manufacturing heartland. And the bitter partisan lens. Once again, the comparison with China is areas beyond the coasts — in other words, the rest of For me, Woodward’s book about America’s instructive. At a moment when the US has the most the world — will be neglected. China, increasingly, diverse nations had a positive message amidst this ill-disciplined president in living memory, and perhaps will have room to take America’s place. ☐ dire downswing. If the US appears more politically longer, Beijing has its most disciplined leader in decades, divided than it has been since the Civil War, in charge of a country that is more powerful than it has Woodward might be telling us something else. Put been for centuries. On top of that, Xi is a strong leader, Richard McGregor is a senior fellow for East Asia another way, the most striking thing about the US while Trump is a weak president. at the Lowy Institute

14 CAMBODIA Survivor stories Anjan Sundaram

MADELEINE THIEN creator and Thien did not know — directly — Janie’s Dogs at the Perimeter experience of the Khmer Rouge. W.W. Norton: 2017 In writing the story of another person or community, a writer can feel empathy for them and imagine their lives. This is possible, to a degree, from n the midst of suffering, the mind can have an the outside. But to transcend Janie’s memory of the intimation that the suffering is all the result of a Khmer Rouge, Thien would have to walk beside Janie dream. It can feel like a revelation — but all too often through that experience, through the frightening abyss. Ithis connection to what feels like a truth is suddenly lost. This requires a real authority with that experience: the The suffering returns, and the moment of insight authority of having lived it. Anything less than that is is elusive: only a receding memory of the possibility only imagination. It is to imagine that one’s dreams of liberation. are imaginary. The appeal of many religions lies in their promise Writing about others also presents political of a path out of suffering felt by the self, or the ego. They challenges, in part because the literary world — the offer a vision that material life — with its ideas, beliefs, global marketplace of stories — is skewed. The literary dreams and ambitions — can be transcended, and the and commercial value of a story is still mostly judged mind can be freed of its constructed identities to reach by a relatively small, mostly Western, community of a selfless state characterised by humility. In Buddhism, Netflix publishers, critics and prize juries. They naturally place this knowledge itself offers a key to the mind’s liberation. greater value on stories with Western connections, Buddhists call such liberation the attainment of nirvana. “First They Killed My Father” about subjects that resonate in the West, and that are Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime, which ruled told in forms familiar to Western audiences. Stories from 1975 to 1979, tried to dismantle all sense of self Janie at once knows and does not know. She by outsiders, such as Cambodians, are less likely to be for millions of Cambodians and recast the nation as constantly cites Buddhist texts as she struggles with her published, find an audience and earn commercial or one of peasant farmers. A communist movement, it memories of the past, of losing her family and identity. critical success. tried to return the country to an ancient identity built The memories haunt Janie in dream-like scenes thirty Book publishing contracts also generally allot around the powerful Angkor kingdom. The regime years after she escaped the Khmer Rouge, and they all money and credit from a story to the author, the also promised a kind of liberation — from the material manifest in Janie’s life in Canada in events that she says storyteller. By these legal contracts, a book’s proceeds desire that it felt was rooted in capitalism. It forced she feels as dreams, indicating sometimes that she knows — monetary, social and literary — become the property Cambodians out of cities, stripped them of their of their transience. She says, “Everything, the good and of its author, and it is up to the author to share any of possessions, separated families and sent them to work the selfish, the loved and the feared, had taken refuge these benefits with other contributors. This is perhaps in rural cooperatives. Intellectuals were killed. Some 2 inside me.” particularly relevant with regard to novels, where it million Cambodians died from overwork, starvation and Janie tells us she wants to transcend not only her seems taken for granted more often than not that the execution, before the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by suffering but her entire consciousness. As she narrates story is the author’s invention. a group of defectors supported by the Vietnamese army, a childhood experience hiding from the Khmer Rouge, Against this, Dogs at the Perimeter raises some of whom still rule the country. afraid that they might see her pain at the death of a uncomfortable questions about Thien’s relationship Cambodians today have an awkward and amnesiac friend, Janie asks, “Was this the emptiness at the centre with Cambodian survivors of the Khmer Rouge. In its relationship with this past. Many parents do not pass of creation, the nothingness to which I aspired? Was this rendering of Janie’s childhood experience of the Khmer stories of the Khmer Rouge to their children, who the highest truth of all?” And later, after she has followed Rouge, the origin of much of Janie’s trauma, Thien’s often learn about the tragedy as adults. This has led to Hiroji to Laos, where Hiroji finds his brother has made novel seems to appropriate survivors’ stories. a politically charged Cambodian youth, seemingly free himself a new life, Janie tells us that she tries to let Janie’s tale shares much with a memoir written by of this past trauma: the youth dare to challenge the her “terrible dreams” pass through her and “reach the a Khmer Rouge survivor, Loung Ung, First They Killed government in demonstrations unmoved by official ground”. She wants, at last, to be able to “decide on the My Father, made into a movie of the same name by warnings of a return to past violence. Some of the dreams that took root” in her. Angelina Jolie. Both stories are about girls who journey Cambodian diaspora who grew up in the West have also The Buddhist texts that Janie cites, and some from Phnom Penh to rural Khmer Rouge cooperatives. returned and speak of their desire to move the country’s incidents she narrates in the novel, are profound Both girls lose their family members and eventually join image past its Khmer Rouge history. The economy expressions of this possibility. If Janie were to realise Khmer Rouge children’s brigades. is growing rapidly, fuelled by Western and Chinese their truth, she would become aware that her tormenting Thien closely tracks historical accounts of the investment. The skyline of Phnom Penh changes each memories are illusory, ultimately meaningless against Khmer Rouge. Janie describes scenes in isolated rural year. And it can seem that outsiders see Cambodians the great “nothingness”. Janie recalls a lecture that Hiroji cooperatives where Khmer Rouge cadres wantonly killed through the lens of the Khmer Rouge more than gave two years before about human consciousness, Cambodians, who were then said to have “disappeared”. Cambodians see themselves in that way. suggesting that watching the mind is like watching Women had to cut their hair. Families had to give up Janie, the narrator of Madeleine Thien’s novel a hand cutting open another hand in an attempt to their possessions and build their homes by hand. Dogs at the Perimeter, cannot forget the violence she understand itself. This resembles a Zen koan — a They had to dye their clothes using dark berries to experienced under the Khmer Rouge. She is now a brain statement or riddle that Buddhists meditate upon to eliminate any colours. There is a scene in the novel, scientist in Canada. The novel — published for the first see through reality and reach insight. The image of the as in Jolie’s film, of children blown up as they try to cross time in the US last year after its initial publication in hands reveals that consciousness cannot understand a minefield. 2012 — begins with Janie telling us that her colleague itself in terms other than what it knows: consciousness In hewing so closely to history, Thien’s novel draws and mentor Hiroji disappeared three months before. She is limited. We can only know reality in the forms of the the reader to wonder about the Cambodians who lived no longer lives with her husband and son. Janie’s central dreams that consciousness conjures. these events. One of her more marginal characters works trauma is the loss of her family during Khmer Rouge Janie never escapes such dreams. She told Hiroji that at the Documentation Center of Cambodia — “DC- rule. We learn that Hiroji also pined for a brother he lost she believed “some ghosts could never be put to rest”. Cam” as it is known in Phnom Penh — an organisation during that period: James was a Red Cross doctor who And as she cites these deeper truths, she rarely knows that collects testimonies of life under the Khmer disappeared in Cambodia. them directly. It may be that Janie is limited by the force Rouge. But which testimonies did Thien read? Who Janie’s world, and the novel, from the beginning of her trauma, and this feeling of being imprisoned is are the people who lived the events that inspired her appear constructed to explore ideas rather than people. what Thien was moved to portray in this novel. But there narrative? The novel nowhere in its text mentions these This intellectual pursuit — which appears to be Thien’s is also another possibility: that Thien hoped Janie might Cambodians. There is no acknowledgments page where more than Janie’s — is embodied in characters who transcend her past and find lasting peace. And that Janie Thien recognises them. Dogs at the Perimeter makes choose to describe their realities in mystical terms. was unable to, in part, because she had Thien as her the author the face of those survivors’ stories and turns

15 her into something of a figure of authority regarding ASIA their history. The reader is distanced from the survivors, and does not know that there may be a Lor Chunty in Phnom Penh or Sith Sarath in Kratie who has lived the story they are reading. To know more about these survivors, the reader is forced to turn instead to Thien. Tunnel visions In this way, Dogs at the Perimeter reinforces literary, social and economic inequalities. Kishore Mahbubani The novel — and perhaps Thien — may not be aware that it is doing any of this, for such appropriation has long been an accepted way of working. Academics have noted how anthropologists conduct studies in distant countries and bring raw data back, often to MICHAEL AUSLIN a glass darkly. “To put it starkly,” he says, “what we Western universities, where the data is refined and The End of the Asian Century: War, Stagnation, are seeing today may be the beginning of the end exported to the world as valuable “theory”. Some and the Risks to the World’s Most Dynamic Region of the Asian century.” In the same preface, he says documentary film-makers use the term “extractive Yale University Press (reprint edition): 2018 that he wants to warn “prudent investors, managers, film-making”, referring to the archetypal colonial and diplomats and policymakers” of the risks in the neocolonial practice by which companies sell products Indo-Pacific region. globally — whether textiles, cars or jewellery — without s a child in Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s, Social scientists make a distinction between adequately compensating, monetarily or otherwise, the I had direct experience of the poverty the notion of risk (a condition where we can assign farmers and miners who sourced the raw material. that was prevalent throughout most of probabilities to the event happening/not happening) AAsia in the period. When I started primary school, I and uncertainty (a condition where we cannot assign ogs at the Perimeter ends with James and Hiroji was put on a special feeding program because I was such probabilities). If Auslin wants to use the term meeting in Laos, Janie still the novel’s narrator. undernourished. Our home had no flush toilet until I risk rigorously, he needs to go beyond just cherry- James’ history is a novella within this novel, its was thirteen. I also experienced ethnic riots in which picking where Asia could go wrong. He should say, Dtale almost self-sufficient. Taken prisoner by the Khmer my neighbours were beaten up. Singapore’s per capita for example, that there’s a 70 per cent chance of war Rouge, James struggles to let go of his attachment to income at its independence in 1965 was the same as by 2030, or something to that effect. This would his wife, who married him not long before. The Khmer Ghana’s: US$500 a year. make his thesis credible, but he didn’t do this. Rouge inform him that she has been killed. Thirty years Singapore was also a British colony until I turned later, Hiroji seeks out his brother to find him in Laos in fifteen. Most historians portray British colonial hen I lived in New York in the 1980s, a changed state, the brotherly relationship seemingly rule as relatively enlightened. In many ways, it was. both Harlem and the Bronx were in bad lost, and Hiroji lets go. The novel’s final sections contain However, the psychological consequences of colonial shape. If I had written a book then, saying poignant moments that bring us closer to the brothers. rule were devastating: it created a deep sense of Wthat we were seeing the end of New York, I would These short-lived emotional transformations inferiority. Most young people in my time saw little have been proven wrong. This is the mistake that nonetheless feel shallow against the Khmer Rouge’s hope for Singapore or for Asia. We thought that the Auslin makes. He sees only the dark side, ignoring devastation. With most of the novel proceeding only way to secure a better future for ourselves was the success stories. intellectually, in static scenes, these brief transformations to emigrate to Europe or the United States. Equally importantly, he fails to see the resilience are left to do too much work, and they overreach in As a young adult, as I travelled and lived in that the region has developed. He is right in pointing their emotional implications. James’ forgetting his wife different parts of Asia, I saw a lot of pain and grief. out that Asia still faces many challenges. However, apparently leads him to forget himself almost entirely As the chargé d’affaires of the Singaporean embassy the region has quietly developed a culture of and become a new person: a mute smuggler, with an in Phnom Penh in 1973-74, I lived in a city that was pragmatism to manage challenges. As a result, even identity a Khmer Rouge leader gave him called “Kwan”. shelled virtually every day by the Khmer Rouge. though many informed observers predicted conflict The Khmer Rouge seem here used for effect, much With each passing month, the siege of the city between China and Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku like World War II is sometimes used as a canvas against grew tighter and tighter. And when I visited the islands and between China and Southeast Asian which all loves and sorrows are more intense. A mother neighbouring countries of Laos and Vietnam, I also states over the South China Sea in 2014, no such doesn’t just lose her child, she loses the child to the saw conflict. Right into my late twenties, I saw little conflict occurred. This was not a consequence of Nazis. A lover is not merely killed, but killed brutally hope for Asia. luck, but of careful and patient diplomacy. by the Khmer Rouge. The character James leans on Against this backdrop, the economic and social If Auslin’s portrayal of the region were correct, the Khmer Rouge rather than illuminating the regime success stories of Asia have been nothing short we would have seen regular eruptions of conflict. Yet, through his experience. James’ loss, terrible as it is, of remarkable. Singapore’s per capita income has quite remarkably, the guns have been silent since the seems unfit for the implications the novel seeks for it. soared from US$500 to over US$50,000 per annum. end of the Cold War. His book fails to explain this We are then told — again, not shown — that James had a Singapore’s story is not exceptional, however. China’s period of peace and growth in the region. son who survived the Khmer Rouge, and that he stayed GDP has gone up more than ninety-one times, from Even more shocking than this flawed book are in Cambodia in pursuit of this child. US$89 to US$8,123, in the past fifty years. India’s the positive reviews it has received in the Western There must exist a freedom from even memories has grown sixteen times, from US$104 to US$1,709. press, including the Wall Street Journal, Financial of the overwhelming violence inflicted by the Khmer Even previously conflict-ridden countries have Times and National Interest. Their enthusiastic Rouge. Buddhism says this is true of the mind’s greatest experienced progress. Cambodia’s per capita GDP is endorsement only confirms the wishful thinking worry just as it is true of a small concern that flits away. now US$1,270, a thirteen-fold increase since the end among Western intellectuals that Asia’s rise is just a It tells us that the mind, to directly know this truth, must of the first phase of its civil war in 1975. No country blip. They would prefer to see the continuation of the embark on a journey of self-awareness. Janie, struggling has suffered as much conflict as Vietnam did from past two centuries of Western domination of world with her trauma from the Khmer Rouge, appears 1954 to 1990. But in 2016, World Bank President Jim history. Western scholars on Asia, it seems, need to condemned in these pages to her psychological trap. On Yong Kim said: “In just thirty years, Vietnam has begin some serious introspection. They need to ask the novel’s last page, she speaks to Hiroji in Laos about reduced extreme poverty from 50 per cent to roughly themselves: are they preparing their populations for a time when “everything is finished here”. Perhaps she 3 per cent — an astounding accomplishment.” not just an Asian century but an Asian millennium? refers to Hiroji’s lengthy hunt for James. Or perhaps she If you were searching for a metaphor to describe The biggest change that has occurred in much alludes to her own decades-long pursuit of peace, for her the success stories of Asia, what would you choose? of Asia has been the growth of cultural confidence. personal escape, which she will probably have to reach A dragon waking up after centuries of slumber? A When the West trampled all across Asia, Asians felt somewhere outside this novel’s pages. flock of geese flying in formation? Either of these inferior. Their performance, consequently, was also Janie may, one day, meet a writer who not only would capture the exceptional flight that the Asian sub par. But this inferiority complex has disappeared. knows the ideas about personal liberation but is also economies have taken. But what does Michael Asians today believe that they can perform as well intimate with her experience of the Khmer Rouge. That Auslin, author of The End of the Asian Century: as, if not better than many other societies. This writer must be willing to offer this knowledge to Janie, War, Stagnation, and the Risks to the World’s Most confidence will propel Asian societies to greater as her own experience to transcend. Such a writer then Dynamic Region, pick? He crawls into a tunnel dug heights in the decades ahead. The ability to feel walks beside Janie, the two of them moving seemingly by North Korea to penetrate into South Korea. This this pulse and appreciate its power is not evident in together, though each one becomes aware that they will tunnel, he says, “is a metaphor for all of Asia”. In Auslin’s book. ☐ find release only in isolation. ☐ his choice of metaphors, Auslin fails to understand or explain the remarkable transformation of Asia. Anjan Sundaram is the author of Stringer: A Reporter’s For an Asian like me, who has lived through this Kishore Mahbubani was the former dean of the Lee Journey in the Congo and Bad News: Last Journalists period, it is clear that the author sees Asia through Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in a Dictatorship

16 RELIGION Politics and religion Camille Devries

EUGENE FORD scholarship on Buddhism and the modern state offers an culmination of decades of Cold War paranoia: the clergy Cold War Monks: Buddhism and important corrective. feared communist subversion within its own ranks. America’s Secret Strategy in Southeast Asia While Cold War Monks weaves across Southeast By following the two individuals, the cosmopolitan Yale University Press: 2017 Asia, the central thread is Thai Buddhism, its gradual monk Phra Phimolatham and his anti-communist foil opening to the outside world and its relationship Kittivudho Bikkhu, Ford allows their lives as much as his MATTHEW WALTON with the Thai state. The narrative starts in Bangkok analysis to show the evolution of Thai Buddhist politics Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in 1945, meanders to Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, over three decades. in Myanmar Laos and Vietnam, before returning to Thailand for Cambridge University Press: 2016 the democratic opening in 1973. Ford brings to life the himolatham was born in 1903 in Isaan, Thailand’s dynamics inside the sangha, or Buddhist monastic order, poor northeast region. He rose to become abbot and lay organisations, within Thailand and around the of Bangkok’s Wat Mahathat by 1947, the year cholars of Southeast Asia are prone to worrying region. He shows how Buddhist politics intersected with Pbefore wartime, before strongman Phibun Songkhram that their region is a political fiction. Writing power struggles within the secular — often military — was reinstalled as prime minister after an earlier ousting. in 1995, academic Ruth McVey argued that the Thai government. Whether they wanted to be or not, Phimolatham and Phibun had once been allies; they Sdiscipline was a kind of Cold War relic. Research clerical and lay Buddhist leaders were inexorably drawn even worked together on a bill to democratise the about the region had been shaped by US interests — into the Cold War. administration of the monkhood in 1941. A decade and a and funding, she argued. It tended to reinforce The book argues that Thai Buddhist institutions did half later, they found themselves on opposing sides of the Washington’s twin priorities of nation-building and not just become more political over time, but aligned Cold War. By 1957, Phibun was presiding over an anti- modernisation. In turn, postcolonial elites — from themselves ever more closely with the state. In October leftist crackdown and outlawing suspected communists Indonesia to Laos — shared these preoccupations 1976, the country’s dalliance with democracy ended from being ordained as monks. Phimolatham objected, whether they were liberals or communists, in with the killing of student protesters at Thammasat but it was Phibun who found himself ousted in a government or in opposition. University. Thailand reverted to military rule, a cycle rightist purge first. In September that year, Phibun was Two decades later, scholarship on the region is no that has been repeated many times since. Ford’s story outmanoeuvred by his subordinate and former ally, longer hidebound in the way McVey described. But builds towards explaining why Buddhist clerical elites Field Marshal Sarit Thanarit. One military government Southeast Asia remains an awkward unit of analysis. It stood beside the Thai establishment in crushing the was replaced by another, even more repressive one. is too linguistically diverse, too politically varied, too democracy movement. In his telling, it was the logical Phimolatham would not emerge unscathed. religiously plural. Political scientists have played this By 1962, Phimolatham had been jailed and incoherence to their advantage, using the region to excommunicated. The allegations against him were a develop and test theories of oligarchy or elite support strange combination of Cold War moral panic (rumours for authoritarian rule. Polyglot scholars like the late of his reported homosexuality) and Thai Buddhism’s Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott have hopscotched orthodox impulses (which raised suspicion about his from country to country in writing their discipline- enthusiasm for Burmese Vipassana meditation). Ford’s defying books. For historians, turning Southeast Asia’s regional approach is particularly effective in recounting heterogeneity into cogent narrative has been more Phimolatham’s persecution. The monk’s close ties to difficult. The constraints imposed by their method — the Burma during the 1950s, when the popularity of Marxist painstaking excavation of primary sources, written or ideas meant that country was tilting left just as Thailand oral, in search of new facts or interpretations — are hard was tilting right, contributed to his undoing. to surmount. How else to explain why there are so few There was little space for open-minded monks like truly regional histories written? Phimolatham in Thailand again until the 1970s. After Historian Eugene Ford’s book is unusual for this students, allied with discontented farmers, forced the and other reasons. Cold War Monks: Buddhism and military government from power in 1973, a handful America’s Secret Strategy in Southeast Asia delves into of young monks took to the streets of Bangkok to join Buddhist politics in the aftermath of World War II and the democracy movement. There were few of them the colonial era. From the 1950s through the 1970s, among the protesters, but their political activism was Southeast Asia was an ideological pressure cooker. taken as proof of a leftist, fifth column within the Newly communist China lay to the north and the US sangha. As the anxieties of clerical leaders ratcheted was seeking to remain the regional hegemon. up, they tacitly backed the outspoken, virulently anti- In most histories of this period, secular nationalist communist monk Kittivudho. leaders are the stars. Ford has written a history of Born on the western outskirts of Bangkok in 1936, the supporting actors: the Buddhist clerical and lay Kittivudho arrived at Wat Mahathat in 1960, just as organisations for whom the political stakes of the Cold Phimolatham was removed as its abbot. Kittivudho War were just as high. used Buddhist doctrine to reinforce authoritarian rule By focusing on Buddhism and its relationship to and to justify peasant labour in support of capitalist state power, Cold War Monks fills an important gap in development of the countryside. Amid the deepening scholarship. Until recently, this topic was surprisingly right-left split of the mid-1970s, he aligned himself with under-studied (in contrast, for example, with research Navapol, or “new force”, an organisation spun off from on the politics of Islam in Southeast Asia). As Ford Thailand’s internal security apparatus that promoted the notes in his introduction, Buddhism is often (mis)- three pillars of Thai conservatism: religion, nation and perceived as being “above” the fray of politics. In the king. By mid-1976, Kittivudho was openly arguing for popular imagination, “Buddhism equals peace”. Yet the killing of leftists. “It is just like when we kill a fish to Buddhist politics — even Buddhist violence — is not an make a stew to place in the alms bowl for a monk. There oxymoron. “Why are we surprised when Buddhists are is certainly demerit in killing the fish, but we place it in violent?” ran a headline in the New York Times in early the alms bowl of a monk and gain much greater merit,” March. We shouldn’t be, argued the authors, as long as as Ford quotes him. Navapol members were among we do not conflate the history of Buddhist societies with those who massacred demonstrators on the campus of an ecumenical form of modern Buddhism characterised Thammasat University on 6 October. by “blandly nonreligious mindfulness meditation “Political monks” — across the spectrum but now becoming more ubiquitous even than yoga”. New especially on the left — were an anomaly in Thailand.

17 Elsewhere in Southeast Asia they were formidable (justice and fairness, or moral principles, or law) that activists and government opponents. After General populate the Buddhist moral universe. The second Ne Win seized power in Burma in 1962, the military half of the book looks at how Burmese clerical and government perceived the politically minded sangha lay thinkers have applied Buddhist ideas to political as a threat. At the same time in US-backed South concepts like order, freedom, participation, rights and Vietnam, run by the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem, clerical democracy. Buddhism — at least as understood and and lay Buddhist leaders were increasingly at odds practised by ethnic Burmans, an important caveat that with a government bent on discriminating against Walton makes — has been part of the warp and weft of them. In protest, the monk Thich Quang Duc burned nation-building from the outset. himself to death on the streets of Saigon in June 1963. Based on a doctoral dissertation completed in 2012, The photo of him, cross-legged, robes alight, is an iconic the book only briefly touches on the rise of Buddhist image of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Why was Thai nationalism in Myanmar. Walton draws a parallel Buddhism different? between recent events, such as the robust advocacy Ford offers a twofold explanation. He highlights of the Organization for the Protection of Race and a common starting point for many analyses of the Religion, better known as Ma Ba Tha, before the 2015 modern Thai state: the fact that the kingdom, unlike national elections and the passage of controversial race other Southeast Asian countries, was never colonised. and religion laws, and the 1950s when monks were Thailand’s exceptionalism — from the endurance of similarly directly engaged in politics. After decades of monarchy to the unique trajectory of Buddhist politics dictatorship, public debate — involving monks — has — can be explained by this historical anomaly. Ford’s resumed over Buddhism, nationalism and the state. other argument is more interesting and paradoxical: While the book does not directly address the plight of Thai Buddhist institutions became much less insular the Muslim-minority Rohingya, Buddhism is necessary during the Cold War, but looking outwards only reading for anyone seeking to understand why intolerant reinforced the clergy’s conservatism. Events in voices are drowning out others during the ongoing and Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and Burma were alarming. incomplete democratic transition. Exposure to the outside world convinced Thai clerical Read side by side, these books show that the elites that Buddhist political activism was destabilising. relationship between Buddhism and the state is These worries dovetailed with US interests, which historically contingent rather than doctrinally sought to use Thai Buddhism as a bulwark against the determined. Theravada Buddhism is the dominant advance of Asian communism. By 1957, Washington religion in Thailand and Myanmar, yet there are sharp had a regional Buddhist policy that operated covertly contrasts, from government oversight of the sangha to through private organisations. The strategy eschewed the involvement of monks in politics. Sri Lanka (also direct engagement with religious figures and dominated by Theravada Buddhism) offers an even institutions. The separation of church and state was one starker comparison: monks are elected officials and have part of the rationale. US policymakers also knew that formed political parties. These differences are the product Buddhist institutions and leaders would balk at clumsy of vastly different experiences during the twentieth attempts to manipulate them. Washington needed a century. They also show that Buddhism is politically trusted intermediary and turned to the Asia Foundation agnostic. It can limit absolute power and promote which already had links across the Buddhist world. elections, just as it can prop up dictators and curtail Funding came from the Central Intelligence Agency, individual rights. Ironically and tragically for Myanmar, and later from US Congress, after the CIA connection it was only by recasting politics as a moral activity, and was revealed in 1967. Ford draws on US government grounding Western theories — for example, Marxism documents and internal files from the Asia Foundation which gained sway from the late 1930s onwards — in to depict American perceptions of Buddhist politics and Buddhist concepts that modern forms of governance efforts to steer them. Cold War Monks often narrates could emerge, including, of course, military rule. events through the eyes of the foundation’s staff. Ford Both books emphasise fears of disunity and distrust shows that as well-informed and well-connected as of party politics. As modern states formed in Southeast they were, they were not omniscient and had limited Asia, Buddhist and secular leaders wrestled with the influence over Buddhist politics. concept of participation and who is entitled to be The book reveals surprisingly little about whether involved in politics. In Myanmar, according to Walton’s and how Buddhist beliefs justified the political stances analysis, proper moral conduct became linked to adopted by clerical leaders and individual monks. Near political rights of individual citizens and the fate of the the end, Ford quotes Jud Kongsook, a Thai monk who political community, a perspective which easily lends joined the democracy movement in the mid-1970s: itself to excluding perceived outsiders. Ford in fact “Taking an interest in politics, and becoming involved concludes his book on this note. He draws a comparison in them” are not the same thing, the monk argued. All between Thai Buddhist backing for state violence against he had wanted to do was to promote peace and calm. communists during the Cold War and the military Burmese monks who protested in the streets of Yangon response to the ongoing Malay Muslim insurgency in in 2007 invoked similar ideas, chanting the metta sutta the country’s deep south. — on loving kindness — as they marched with alms Western governments are again in a panic over the bowls symbolically inverted. How is direct political direction of political winds in Southeast Asia, much like action by monks compatible with Buddhist beliefs? during the Cold War era. Discrimination, hate speech, Matthew Walton’s Buddhism, Politics and Political and incitement by religious leaders, or the invoking of Thought in Myanmar answers this question and many religious ideas and identities, are undeniable problems. more. The book’s argument is contained in its title; In response, foreign aid labelled with bureaucratic Buddhism defines what is politics and what is political sobriquets such as “inter-faith dialogue” and “preventing in Myanmar. Walton takes the application of Buddhist violent extremism” is flooding the region. Often the concepts to political thought and speech seriously, (unspoken) focus of such funding is to counter hardline rather than as “the instrumental exploitation of Islamist beliefs; less frequently it targets militant religious symbolism”. What he calls a “moral universe” Buddhist nationalism. When Ford describes the policy is partly based on Buddhist cosmology as it existed debates in 1950s Washington over how best to use before British colonialism and partly on doctrinal contacts with religious groups to serve US interests, it is modifications and reinterpretations from the late hard not to draw parallels with today’s debates. nineteenth century to the present. Donors funding research on religion and politics As a work of comparative political theory, Walton’s in Southeast Asia would do well to remember Ruth analysis is remarkably clear and accessible. He first McVey’s advice. The best scholarship on the region — provides a potted history of Burma from the 1800s such as these two books — studies politics as they are, to the present, then a concise discussion of Buddhist not as Western governments might like them to be. ☐ principles such as kan (the logic of cause and effect); hpoun (merit, or power achieved through merit); taya Camille Devries is the pen name of an aid worker

18 SOCIETY Tyranny of borders Francis Wade

CHIH-MING WANG & DANIEL PS GOH (EDS) him with but one rationale for three decades of group or an entire league of nations — an in-group can Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in Asia autocratic rule. be better consolidated. Bowman & Littlefields: 2017 Political entrepreneurs can always find new targets Elsewhere the book analyses the new public square. towards whom they can direct popular ire. But the Essays on the role of social media in communicating MICHAEL LAFFAN (ED) mechanisms they use and the resources they draw chauvinistic sentiments take in the cases of Japan Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal: Religious Rites, on remain largely consistent across time. One quality and China. Within those is an examination of how Colonial Migrations, National Rights of Precarious Belongings lies in its analysis of those elites have ceded their monopoly on shaping and Bloomsbury: 2017 mechanisms — nationalism’s “affects”, as it calls them — disseminating nationalist discourses to grassroots and in particular the emotional drivers of majority-on- networks — sometimes allied to them, sometimes not — minority hostility. Several notable works aside, this field that use the likes of Facebook and Twitter to proliferate ow deep must we go to unearth the roots of of inquiry has received surprisingly little deep analysis. ideologies across different geographies and to “bypass Asia’s internecine battles over questions of Precarious Belongings thus becomes all the more traditional power institutions”. identity and belonging? Are today’s nationalist important in an age of increasing bewilderment at the In an essay exploring image-driven nationalism Hconflicts the result of age-old contestations that refuse seeming ease with which violent prejudices are sown, in China, Jack Linchuan takes off from Benedict to die, or are they driven by very modern dynamics in Asia and elsewhere. Are these prejudices innate, and Anderson’s lauded analysis of the use of the print form between newly antagonistic interest groups, and equally therefore always susceptible to activation, or are they to mobilise nationalist sentiment, both progressive modern incentives for those engineering them? cultivated by shrewd political entrepreneurs for self- and regressive, to argue that such media could “also The pendulum swing between democracy and serving gain? Myanmar, which is not included here, strengthen democracy if properly channelled”. Alas, authoritarianism in some Southeast Asian countries provides a compelling and current example of how the opposite is too often the case, with Facebook in has animated recent media coverage of the region, but political and religious figureheads can draw on the particular having become a powerful new platform for it has also confounded onlookers. In the Philippines, precarity of an evolving political system and exploit the xenophobic agitators. President Rodrigo Duterte has mobilised nationalist accompanying anxieties to make mass nationalist-driven opinion against foreign critics of his lethal war on violence in the name of safeguarding society an apparent he Asia of today, like the world around it, is a drugs to garner overwhelming popular support, while moral imperative. region of hard borders and, on a superficial level in Myanmar, a campaign of ethnic cleansing, if not In light of this, the evolution since 2012 of a at least, distinct identity groups. This socio- genocide, of Rohingya Muslims — depicted as an act of poisonous and majoritarian antipathy towards Tpolitical landscape makes it all the easier to clearly defence by virtuous Buddhists against a rapacious Islam Rohingyas in Myanmar would have made an essential demarcate an “us” from a “them”. Another collection — is cheered on by the majority. Similarly, it was only case study, making its absence from Precarious of essays, Belonging Across the Bay of Bengal, however, recently that support for Thailand’s junta, self-styled Belongings all the more glaring, particularly given puts the lie to the popular nationalist claim that today’s guarantors of stability and order in a politically fissured its emphasis on exploring how hatreds are nurtured political landscape evokes a “natural” state, and that we nation, began to wane. and transmitted across different regional contexts. can rightly define members and non-members of any Leaders in each case exhort citizens to help protect Nevertheless, broader questions along these lines do given territory. The book begins by charting the historic the borders and, thus, the delicate societies within them. come up in a searching essay by Kwai-Cheung Lo: is movement of peoples between the Indian subcontinent Foreign pressure is seen as conniving and corrosive, love of the nation “some kind of political manipulation and Southeast Asia. We learn how ideas and identities while “alien” — or newly alienated — communities … an instrument appropriated by the ruling elites were transmitted across the vast ocean dividing the two within are considered threats to supposedly long- to control and monitor the governed”?, he asks. Do land masses, borne by traders and holy men from India standing hierarchies. Majority populations in each activists draw on that love “to lend support to their who over centuries navigated across and through the case have done the seemingly incomprehensible and moral and political beliefs”? region’s maritime and riverine passages. embraced authoritarian, sometimes chauvinistic, Lo takes a compelling Lacanian approach to The reader having cut through what can at times governance as a countermeasure to the anxiety-inducing the “entanglement of love [patriotism] and hate be dense academic prose, the central line of the book alternative: participatory political systems in which [nationalism]”, riffing the French psychoanalyst’s maxim emerges. There is neither a historical nor contemporary all communities are enfranchised, and in which new that “one knows nothing of love without hate”. The underpinning for the claim that ethnic or national or ideas and cultures are embraced rather than rejected as juxtaposition of two seemingly polarising emotions religious communities are fixed, contiguous groupings pernicious. How has this come to be? neatly speaks to a key process involved in generating that have remained consistent across time. Likewise, Precarious Belongings: Affect and Nationalism in the divisive politics of exclusionary nationalism: that borders do not and have never served as natural dividers Asia, published late in 2017, when xenophobic agitators of separating a virtuous “in-group” from a despicable of supposedly different peoples. Where they have been seemed to be marching across the globe, seeks to explore “other”. An intensification of hatred for the “other” drawn, too often by colonial cartographers who revelled the modern-day drivers of exclusionary nationalism inevitably drives love for the “self”; communities in the art of creating and codifying hitherto non-existent across Asia. More than a dozen authors offer varying turn inwards, seeking solidarity among their kind, in boundaries, we see the “tyranny of the border” at work: takes on the contemporary ebb and flow of discourses response to fears of what lies beyond their community the artificial separation of once transient communities, in Japan, Indonesia, China and elsewhere that use bounds. The insular mental space they inhabit directly the sharpening of identities and the inevitable conflicts the spectre of a threatening “other” to rally otherwise lends itself to animating those hatreds. Without that result. disparate groups around a singular, supposedly interaction, there is nothing to correct whatever The nationalist project relies on peddling the fiction, common, cause. Some common themes run across narratives are being circulated. helped along by colonial powers, that certain peoples this collection of essays: that contemporary modes of We’ve seen this phenomenon manifest itself in rightfully belong to certain territories. In narrating communicating hateful prejudices, particularly via the multiple forms across the region. In some cases it has how the varying cultures and belief systems of south internet, have had a profound effect on their spread intensified in recent years. In multi-ethnic Myanmar, and Southeast Asia have forever been intertwined and and the degree of traction they receive; that the precise where myriad highly volatile and fluid nationalisms animated by one another, Belonging shows the pernicious object of revulsion is never static but evolves alongside have developed over the past century, political effect on communal harmony of the consolidation of the the society that nationalists seek to mould. figureheads have used fears of a democratic opening myth-laden modern Asian nation-state. Those fictions Adrian Vickers examines how, in the case of and played the time-worn ethno-nationalist card to underpin much of the resentment towards minority Indonesia, the “other” has metamorphosed over time, rally their ethnic constituencies. A broader nationalism communities and are used by elites to justify hard from the Westerner in post-colonial Indonesia who has developed in the Philippines, where a leader’s borders and hard policies. We see the political gains this cruelly reminded locals of their disgrace and proclaimed bid to “clean up” society is being attacked affords to national and local leaders. We also see, playing suffering at the hands of an imposing colonial power, as barbaric and anti-democratic by Western states. In out before us now, the devastation it brings. ☐ to the communist movement of Suharto’s era that, turn, this has fuelled resentments against the West’s in the eyes of the “Smiling General”, threatened the perceived self-righteousness. Wherever that “other” can Francis Wade is the author of Myanmar’s Enemy Within: delicate nation-rebuilding project and thereby provided be conjured, and whatever form it takes — a minority Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’

19 This November the Mekong Review will celebrate its third birthday — but we need your help to make it. As you know the Mekong Review is more than a journal; it is the region’s only independent source of literary and intellectual review in English, produced with no political, institutional or commercial affiliations. Help keep us going by making a donation, subscribing, or spreading the word. And keep an eye out for our ‘Now We Are Three’ crowdfunding campaign launching in June. mekongreview.com/nowwearethree

20 VIETNAM State censor Peter Zinoman

THOMAS A. BASS removed,” Bass reports. “So, too have any references Ly Doi, Bui Chat and Nguyen Quoc Chanh; and third, Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New World to reeducation camps, graft, corruption, and mistakes a larger and more diffuse group of dissident activists, University of Massachusetts Press: 2017 made by the Communist Party.” Several paragraphs later, bloggers and citizen journalists, including several Bass gives more details: high-profile figures within the global human rights Pham Xuan An is not allowed to “love” America or community: Nguyen Quang Lap, Pham Doan Trang, n terms of protecting free expression and political the time he spent studying journalism in California. He Pham Huy Son, Nguyen Cong Khe, Huynh Ngoc Chenh speech, Vietnam remains something of a global is only allowed to “understand” America. His quip that and Pham Chi Dung. basket case. In its World Press Freedom Index he never wanted to be a spy and considered it the “work While Bass does not recreate these interviews using Ifor 2017, Reporters Without Borders ranks Vietnam of hunting dogs” is gone. His claim that he was born Q&A transcripts, he presents much of them in the 175th out of 180 countries, ahead of only China, Syria, at a tragic time in Vietnamese history, with betrayal form of long block quotes, and they come across as a Turkmenistan, Eritrea and North Korea. According to in the air, is cut. The Gold Campaign organised by Ho lively, interesting and relatively unprocessed swathe of Freedom House’s 2018 assessment of the quality of Chi Minh in 1946, when he solicited contributions oral history. They exhibit an informal, easy-to-digest civil liberties and political rights in 210 countries, for a bribe large enough to induce the Chinese army style and feature important material on the tragic Vietnam ranks 177th, right between theocratic Iran to withdraw from northern Vietnam, is erased. Pham impact of state censorship (and more general forms and deeply authoritarian Belarus. Not exactly the finest Xuan An’s family is not allowed to have “migrated of persecution) on the lives and livelihoods of some of company. from north Vietnam to the south …” Praise for French of the country’s most talented writers and journalists. While human rights organisations have been literature is gone. An is not allowed to say that France Most of these stories have been circulating informally grousing about the dismal state of freedom of expression created the map of modern Vietnam. His description within Vietnamese intellectual circles for decades, but in Vietnam for some time, two obstacles have partially of communism as a utopian ideal, unattainable in Bass performs a service by documenting them in print, obscured the country’s abysmal record in this area from real life — cut. His praise of Edward Lansdale, as the enhancing the likelihood that they will end up in the the purview of outside observers. First is the persistence great spy from whom he learned his tradecraft — cut. broader historical record. Some episodes, like the effort of a dated understanding of the Vietnamese Communist Throughout the text, north Vietnamese aggression by the police to silence the female journalist Pham Doan Party-state derived from its role in the country’s major is played down, south Vietnamese barbarism played Trang by threatening to release on the internet intimate twentieth-century wars. Owing to the superiority in up. The communists are always in the vanguard, the pictures seized from her personal laptop computer are wealth and firepower of its French, US and Chinese people always happily following. Pham Xuan An’s genuinely shocking in their viciousness. adversaries, the party-state has long been portrayed attempt to distinguish between fighting for Vietnamese It is significant that many victims of censorship as a plucky, anti-imperialist “David” poised against a independence and fighting for communism — cut. interviewed in this section of the book are singled slew of lumbering, hegemonic “Goliaths”. This view has Two aspects of this episode, which goes on for out and punished for their writings on Facebook and engendered an enduring reservoir of sympathy for the several additional pages, are especially worthy of note. other online forums that fall outside the jurisdiction of party-state (especially among older Vietnam-watchers First is the exhaustive range of issues on which the state publishers. Here, we see how an older censorship who began their careers during the Vietnam War), party prohibits free discussion and demands the final strategy based on deep control over the publishing which has discouraged investigations into its chronic word. They include scores of episodes in the country’s industry has been supplemented by a new strategy human rights abuses, including its relentless persecution modern history, anything concerning the father of the that employs the spectacular persecution of select of domestic actors who dare to criticise it publicly. party-state, Ho Chi Minh, all questions regarding the dissident voices online to intimidate others who may A second obstacle to grasping Vietnam’s poor record country’s political system and many topics related to its be tempted to follow in their footsteps. Bass’s account on freedom of expression today is the complex and foreign relations, especially with China and the United implies that the machinery of censorship in Vietnam elusive character of the infrastructure of state repression. States. Bass’s experience here with the state censors today is dominated by the sinister co-presence of these From the outside, Vietnam’s internet appears much less indexes the enormous number of historical and political two strategies. controlled than China’s, with in-country users enjoying topics that remain either totally off-limits or extremely The overall power of Bass’s account is not really easy access to Facebook and Twitter as well as prominent difficult to discuss openly in works published inside diminished by numerous errors of fact that mar the foreign-language publications like the New York the country. text, but they are annoying nonetheless and deserve Times. Newsstands feature scores of locally produced A second significant aspect of this story is the fact some attention. The repression of Nhan Van Giai newspapers and magazines, while the work of many that the critical agents of censorship that Bass encounters Pham involving the non-capital punishment of scores allegedly “sensitive” writers can be found for sale in are editors and other publishing professionals; he of Vietnamese intellectuals was nothing like Mao’s city bookshops. never deals with the police. This oddity reflects the Cultural Revolution, in which millions perished. Van Given this apparently freewheeling environment, decentralised, professionalised and ultimately panoptic Cao’s national anthem lyrics were sung before 1986. what explains Vietnam’s dismal global rankings nature of censorship in the country. Bass’s deadpan Vietnamese do not generally “fudge” their birth dates. on freedom of expression and the protection of account of his (largely failed) struggles with members of More soldiers were not involved in the Battle of Saigon political speech? the publishing-house staff who censor his book captures (1955) than the Tet Offensive (1968). Bao Ninh may Thomas A. Bass’s Censorship in Vietnam: Brave New something of the Kafkaesque environment in which all not have been one in ten survivors of his unit (that World tries to answer this question through a thick Vietnamese intellectual discourse inside the country is would be Kien, the hero of his novel). No one in 1976 description of the landscape of Vietnamese censorship. policed. To the extent that the book has an overarching thought of unified Vietnam as an emerging Asian tiger. The author of several well-researched non-fiction books and critical “take-away”, it may be found in the odd style Nguyen Huy Thiep did not first visit the US in 1986, on Vietnam, including a biography of the US-trained of widely dispersed repressive power that Bass observes prior to renovation taking effect (his first visit happened South Vietnamese spy for the Communists, Pham Xuan and describes in this section of his book. a decade later). Bao Ninh had a column for Van Nghe An, Bass has cultivated a broad range of contacts in The second part of Bass’s study is a narrative Tre (Youth Literature) not Van Nghe (Literature). Truyen the country which he exploits to prepare a two-part account of over a dozen interviews that he conducts Kieu is not about a girl sold into prostitution in China ethnology of Vietnamese censorship. The first part with Vietnamese writers and journalists who have (the whole story takes place in China). Huy Duc’s book is Bass’s own story of his exhausting, slightly comical clashed with government censors since the onset of Ben Thang Cuoc (The Winning Side) is not a history of efforts to publish in Hanoi a Vietnamese translation of reforms in the late 1980s. They include figures from the Vietnam War (it covers the postwar era). his Pham Xuan An biography. Since Pham Xuan An’s three groupings: first, the famous quartet of northern Despite these errors, Censorship in Vietnam provides life touches many sensitive areas of communist history, writers — two men and two women — widely seen to a fascinating glimpse into a critically important but Bass’s Vietnamese editors confront him repeatedly have pioneered doi moi (renovation) literature in the poorly understood dimension of contemporary during the translation process, pressuring him to late 1980s: Nguyen Huy Thiep, Duong Thu Huong, Bao Vietnamese life. ☐ make changes and cuts. What follows is one of the Ninh and Pham Thi Hoai; second, members of a small most fascinating sections of the book, in which Bass band of irreverent southern poets who have spearheaded Peter Zinoman is Director of the Center for Southeast and eventually his readers learn what topics Vietnam’s a local samizdat culture during the last decade and are Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and censors fear most: “All criticism of China has been loosely known as the Open Mouth (Mo Mieng) Group: Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies

21 WILDLIFE Vanishing Scott Ezell

VANDA FELBAB-BROWN current extinction crisis has its roots in the past — tiger The Extinction Market: subspecies are disappearing today, but probably 100,000 Wildlife Trafficking and How to Counter It or more tigers were killed in India during the British Hurst & Company: 2017 Raj. The author acknowledges that there are few positive outcomes in policy responses to species destruction, and the major policies she has analysed “have failed far more n February 2016, I crossed the Mekong River from often than they have succeeded”. Thailand into Laos at the border town of Huay Xay It seems to me that policy as such is almost and hitchhiked north and west along the river. It was infinitely frangible, and in addition to more enlightened Ithe dry season: sand bars rose up along the Mekong like conservation and energy policy, we need a conceptual reptile skins, and the current ran sluggish and dull like expansion of how we relate to ourselves and our world, smelted tin. A balding Lao engineer pulled over and how we consume, how we complete our cycles. Could offered me a ride in his pick-up. I was heading to the we, for example, implement a system of reparations Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone (SEZ), a parcel like those paid by defeated aggressors in war, in which of land ceded to Chinese economic interests by the Laos Scott Ezell former colonial powers accept responsibility for government, ostensibly to stimulate local development, extractive policies, providing funds for current and but in practice functioning as a legal black hole for future conservation? In addition to providing necessary animal trafficking, prostitution and money laundering. I had never heard of tiger farms before, but in The financial support, this could help counter the sentiment The engineer dropped me at the turn-off from the Extinction Market Vanda Felbab-Brown documents that Western powers extracted everything they could two-lane highway and I walked up a broad, tree-lined their existence in Laos and China since the 1980s. The from colonial territories, and once the wealth was almost boulevard. At the centre of the SEZ, the Kings Romans book is a compendium of detailed information on gone, instituted bans that prevented local populations Casino (sic) rose like a golden, spray-painted bauble, endangered species and wildlife trafficking, and serves from exploiting their natural resources. As examples, the surrounded by hundreds of acres of banana plantations. as a handbook in the struggle to fight the trend of British could provide compensation for the decimation Chinese security guards in storm-trooper boots stood mass extinction. Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the of tigers, and the US government could accept moral around punching dully at mobile phones. Enormous Brookings Institution, told me via email that her book and financial responsibility for the use of Agent Orange faux-Greek statues loomed from alcoves in the casino is primarily aimed at professionals in the conservation in Vietnam, which caused large deforestation, leading to walls, and the parking lot was filled with luxury vehicles, community, such as government officials and law species loss, and which has created generations of birth including a row of four Rolls-Royces, their gleaming enforcement officers. She has an extensive background defects and genetic mutations. ostentation surreal in a tropical landscape where in illicit drug policy, and a key impetus for the book was A starting point to legislate such a program could many people still farm with oxen and live on a dollar her being asked by conservation biologists and NGOs be the premise that natural objects have rights, as a day. to brief them on lessons from drug-control policy that posited by Christopher D. Stone in his 1972 paper Between the casino and the river, a hand-painted would be “applicable and useful in countering poaching “Should Trees Have Legal Standing?” Such legal rights sign said “Zoo” in English and Chinese. The gate was and wildlife trafficking”. could be extended to flora and fauna, to tracts of earth, closed, but I cut past a barricade and followed a path to ecosystems, the biosphere as a whole and even to past a line of crudely welded cages holding Asian black bears. he largest proportion of wildlife trafficking is for individuals and species. Their round bellies and mouths that curved upwards Asian markets, especially for use in traditional into smiles make them seem amiable and bemused — Chinese medicine, like the 20 million seahorses he night after I arrived at the Golden Triangle but here these intelligent creatures appeared maddened Ttaken annually from the South China Sea and used SEZ, I took a stroll down the promenade leading by their captivity. Some were sunk in deep melancholy, for medicinal wine, but the causes and consequences to the highway. Just as I approached the “zoo”, a slumped and motionless. Others behaved neurotically, are global. The European Union is a poaching and Tcar full of men pulled over, and offered to take me to a like one that softly butted its head against the bars over smuggling centre for species including European eels, bar. I climbed in to see what would happen. Speeding and over, whining plaintively. Leftover rice spilled from and is a major market for illegal caviar. Up to 32 per cent through the dark, I felt a pang of fear, wondering if they metal bowls onto the concrete floor. of wild-caught seafood imported to the United States were mafia thugs working for Lo Hsing Han, the drug Opposite the bear cages was a large enclosure, in 2011 was likely either illegal or unreported. Remote lord rumoured to control the SEZ and launder money landscaped with boulders and elephant grass. I walked markets and resources are intertwined — the vaquita there. But instead of some grim interrogation room, over and saw a tiger pacing back and forth. It stretched of the northern Gulf of California is nearly extinct, they took me to a karaoke brothel strung with coloured up on its hind legs, reaching its front paws high against with only thirty remaining individuals, because it is lights. They bought a case of beer and proclaimed us the chain-link fence. Another tiger appeared and being snared in nets catching totoaba to provide swim friends forever, as teenage girls in miniskirts clinked ice sparred gently with the first, while others lay on the rock bladders to black markets in China. into my glass and poured. surfaces or moved through the vegetation. I was stunned The Extinction Market notes that in the creation of The men were chefs from southern China, down to encounter so many of these majestic animals, and US national parks, including Yellowstone and Death there to work in a restaurant. We sat around drinking walked slightly dazed along a wooden walkway curving Valley, indigenous populations were displaced to beer and screaming over the sound system for an hour, around the back of the fence. A series of individual cages provide recreation for “white tourists”. As an example until one of them peeled off with a girl and the rest of abutted the enclosure, each holding a single tiger. of successful conservation policy, Felbab-Brown us piled back into the car and returned to the casino. It I pulled my old Nikon from my pack and started describes Brian Heath’s work in the Masai Mara National was after midnight, but I followed the men inside and snapping photos, but after a few clicks a man came Reserve, which “has a long history of forced ecological watched them gamble, tossing money back and forth, charging towards me brandishing a club. He screamed conservation driven by white colonial powers, who before I headed to a room to sleep. in Chinese, “What are you doing here, get out, get brutally evicted and resettled local Masai”. Conservation The girls in the karaoke bar were as trafficked and out!” I speak Chinese but pretended not to understand. was seen to be “a project of rich, white, ex-colonial helpless as the animals in their cages in the “zoo”, as I backed away, then turned and continued back to lords catering to the luxury desires of white tourists, trapped as all of us, in our systems of extraction and the promenade. while the black local community sees itself as prohibited consumption. The Extinction Market makes it all too A few weeks later, wildlife photographer and from exploiting natural resources”. Heath managed to clear that in our current patterns we are gambling away conservationist Adam Oswell told me the two dozen turn the reserve around by “successfully exploiting the the heritage and possibility of life on earth. We have all or so tigers there were not wild animals, but were bred overlap between conservation imperatives and the local our money down, as we roll on down the road, carrying in captivity in southern Laos, then transported to the community’s outrage over other forms of criminality”. our bars and cages with us — whether to extinction or to SEZ by army helicopters. The thinly disguised “zoo” was Felbab-Brown does not venture far into historical a deeper, saner residence on earth, no one yet knows. ☐ actually a 3D menu, and the animals could be taken out territory, focusing instead on mitigating the current and butchered on the spot. crisis and saving biodiversity for the future. But the Scott Ezell is a writer and artist based in Taipei

22 POETRY Firefly Michael Freeman

BANDI interweave with one another. To an extent, the separate That said, some of these poems seem to lose The Red Years poems are best read as moments, variations in one confidence in the strategy; the effective movement of Zed (forthcoming) inclusive poetic structure. image and rhythm gets elbowed aside by an insistent Maybe a caveat should be entered here. The texts political shout. Not that there isn’t good reason for the emerging from a cultural tradition of Korean folk poetry content and urgency of the shout, and this isn’t a text, very so often, poetry come into its own, reaching are, in this translation, mediated through the very time or place for some purist aesthetic, but the integrity beyond ruminations on nuanced subjectivities. different tradition of the Anglo-American literature that of the literary form might be trusted to do its job. Every now and then, the short lyric form raises its Fenkl teaches at the State University of New York. As it The job — and these are poems with an evident job Estakes to wider horizons while remaining a lyric, without is, there’s further mediation of the urtext: the poems are to do — can be done within and through the form. becoming discursive or expository about those horizons. sandwiched between an introduction by Fenkl and an The opening poem, regrettably, is just about the least And from time to time, a translator evinces an authority afterword by Do Hee Yuh, described as “Representative compelling: more rhetoric than poem, framing a reader not just in the language of the original poems but also of the Citizens’ Coalition for Human Rights of response. We’re told the poet has “lived as a talking in the poet’s time and place, the hinterland from which Abducetees [sic] and North Korean Refugees”. He machine ... / but with fierce indignation ... / but with the poems grow. The Red Years with its North Korean ascribes to Bandi a status as North Korea’s Solzhenitsyn, bones dripped in blood and tears / this is what I have dissident lyrics gets pretty close to such a moment. clearly having in mind Bandi’s The Accusation, which written .... / Reader! / I beseech you — read my words.” The poems deploy the textures and structures of the reportedly was smuggled out of North Korea at the same Most of the individual poems rise well above such traditional lyric, folk song, children’s chant, their images time as these poems, but published four years earlier, insistent buttonholing, but there’s a recurring strain, a and expressive cadences, to construct poems suffused stories about the impact of the Kim Il-sung regime marked tension, between the evocation of the traditional with lamentation and poignancy but also amounting on the lives and attitudes of ordinary people and their forms and the pressure of the political angst. At the to a kind of resistance and intervention, an expression families. Fenkl and Do Hee Yuh both accept that Bandi same time, it’s this strain that gives the poems their of existential han (grief) but sharpened by defiance. is still in North Korea and so at imminent risk from his characteristic movement. Sharpened too by the text being grounded in irony: dissident writing. Fenkl’s introduction is particularly The poems don’t set out to describe the mechanisms the poetry is written by an accredited member of the helpful, indeed moving, as he situates these poems in of the regime or to represent the social consequences, [North] Korean Writers’ Alliance, the state-controlled the Korean folk and literary traditions with which he’s much less to propose routes for liberation. Rather, cultural production line, yet here writing against that familiar himself, having grown up in the oppressive they’re held at the level of a cri de coeur, a barometer of state’s regime. Even the title of the collection suggests South Korean ethos of the 1960s and 1970s. some little hope and much despair. Even when in the a sardonic irony, as does the cover illustration with That reference to Solzhenitsyn recalls the importance poem “A Dream” there’s the hope that “our mouths, the statutory revolutionary line-up of patriotic soldier, that accrues to imaginative literature in periods of a once packed with gravel, are open again”, it remains just miner, farmer in the best proletkult tradition. It’s the sort repressive political culture, when literature takes on an a dream, and its refrain “Mansae” — meaning literally of cover image as cover story that might be approved by importance that an easier ethos neglects. Sometimes it 10,000 years — is glossed (the glosses in this edition a state censor until he reads the poems themselves. surfaces in samizdat forms, or — as in this instance — in appear to be the translator’s) as an ironic “Viva!” for Yet there’s a grey area about this text’s provenance, a resurgence and reworking of popular and traditional some established leader or regime. Occasionally, what at least according to a report in the New Yorker. The genres such as folk song, folk lyrics, popular ballads. appears as a traditional love poem takes on an almost engaging tale that the poems were smuggled out of The traditional forms, deeply embedded in national allegorical overtone. So in the short lyric “My Love”, North Korea, hidden in — of all things — a copy of culture that predated the current political ethos, can take the woman “who smiles with painted lips” is glossed the selected writings of Kim Il-sung, has been offset on a re-invigorated dynamic, assuming a subversive, in this edition as a seduction to escape to the West (or by a suggestion that the poems weren’t written by a disruptive function. In one way this very re-assertion the “Western” South Korea) and “I have a love I must courageous dissident remaining in North Korea but of the popular tradition weighs in against the state- meet in death” is a pessimistic trope for an unlikely by a refugee from the North who arranged for their authorised aesthetic, pushing against the cultural unification of North and South Korea. This creates a publication in South Korea in January of this year. hegemony. Certainly, some such expectation looks to problem for the reader: whether the apparently non- Another suggestion is that there isn’t a sole author at all, be underpinning and shaping much of the poetry in political love lyrics in the collection are to be interpreted but rather a group of like-minded dissidents, North or this book. A child’s play-song becomes a vehicle for an in terms of that gloss; it’s hard not to. South, under the collective nom de plume — in effect adult’s protest. A lyric becomes a polemic. A refrain In his introduction, Fenkl proposes that these poems nom de guerre — of Bandi, the firefly. It’s for others to proclaims a refusal. are characteristic of a Korean tradition: “They are try to discern any stylistic differences among the poems, musical, sentimental, and express deeply felt emotion.” which might corroborate a collective authorship, but I This might be eliding the distinction between these have only the translations of the poems by just one hand, last two characteristics, but he goes on to highlight, POETRY that of Heinz Insu Fenkl. in the context of a tragic national history, the cultural The title poem “Bandi” itself typifies basic facets of syndrome of han. There’s a rich multi-disciplinary this collection. One is the presence of the writer as, in My Love literature on han, whether as historically determined or effect, a character in his (or their) own poems. Then, culturally ingrained, but the consensus identifies a state that presence takes on the form of an image, in this case Even from that distance, you flood me with feeling of mind, an existential condition, where profound grief the eponymous firefly who wishes to match the stars when you meet my eyes. has risen from a deep and inescapable sense of injustice that pinpoint his night sky, then seeks to fly in a world Please, woman, do not tempt me. and repression. This is not, though, to categorise of white, a flight that is, ambiguously, a rising up and an I have a love that awaits, these poems reductively as some ensemble of cultural escaping. Then again there’s an echo from one poem to true to me, pouring forth a fierce devotion. anthropology, some nationally embedded socio-cultural another. In the next poem in the sequence, “Landscape Beaming that smile with your painted lips, complex, flattening the poems’ singularities. The White with Snow”, the white skyscape and landscape are please, woman, do not tempt me. principal characteristics of han are at work here, not to revealed as a dream utopia where the poet’s ancestors I have a love that awaits, be read as some mystified and opaque acquiescence, themselves rise up in their traditional white garments. to whom I’ve trusted all my heart. but as a recognisable consequence of twentieth- In turn the poem “O Azaleas”, echoing a popular poem Love is two souls become eternally one — century colonisation and wars and twenty-first-century by the South Korean poet Kim Sowol, asks about the please, woman, do not tempt me. stalemate. These poems embody han movingly as the “blue swallows” flying already to the South, anticipating If in this life we cannot meet, sequence develops, but han shifting into political gear. the white swallows in other poems and then the iconic I have a love I must meet in death. And if some of these poems are being asked to carry white of the winter landscape and the ancestors. The more weight than they can reasonably bear, then that’s “twig-thin branches / enduring the knife-sharp wind” - Bandi also what they’re about. ☐ epitomise more than a landscape. It’s not that one poem “explains” another, but that they resonate, elaborate, Michael Freeman is Mekong Review’s poetry critic

23 MALAYSIA From the shadows Marc de Faoite

K.S. MANIAM recognise Almeida as a typically Portuguese name, and A Stranger to Love given Malaysia’s historic connections to Portugal, by way Maya Press: 2017 of Malacca and Goa, it is unlikely Maniam attributes it to Spain by error.) He receives visits from “Hispanic” men (always men) and grows facial hair in a style reminiscent .S. Maniam might be considered Malaysia’s grand of his “Hispanic” ancestors. The character adopts an old man of English-language literature. anachronistic and geographically inappropriate style of At seventy-six he is older than the dress and furthermore “encourages” his wife to dress in Kcountry he writes about, which gives him an over- a certain way too (she resists by changing her clothes arching perspective. once she gets to work). Like the room the character One of the first novels I read when I first arrived has built, complete with a fake and phallic mast, and a in Malaysia more than a decade ago was Maniam’s shifting floor meant to simulate a ship’s listing, this story bildungsroman The Return. Published in 1981, it has puts the reader off balance. But if we step back and tug long been a landmark on Malaysia’s literary landscape. a little on this “Spanish” thread to unravel things and During a road trip through rural Kedah I made a detour treat the term “Hispanic” euphemistically, other possible to the sleepy town of Bedong. An early scene in The interpretations reveal themselves, particularly when the Return depicts a young Ravi (Maniam’s alter ego) visiting reader takes into account the trend of many Malaysian Bedong with his father to buy his very first toothbrush, men growing beards and forgoing their traditional attire and some “tooth medicine”, since Miss Nancy, his new to adopt vestimentary codes more reminiscent of other schoolteacher in the English school in nearby Sungai countries and insisting that their womenfolk follow suit. Petani, disapproves of the traditional method of using Admittedly, this reading might be a little obtuse, but the a chewed twig and wood ash to clean teeth. Afterwards parallels are there, whether consciously placed by the father and son go to a coffee shop and sit at a marble- author or not. topped table, a rare treat. Other metaphors might be seen in the houses Bedong is little changed in the decades since that appear in several stories. Visitors and household Maniam’s description, if you peel away the plastic and members find themselves confined or restricted to neon shop signs. The town is not big; there are few different parts of the buildings, and architects have kopitiams, and I could find only one with marble-topped designed and redesigned these houses with precisely tables. I ordered a bowl of noodles and, while eating, fell these goals in mind. It’s not a stretch to say that into conversation with three elderly Chinese uncles at Zedeck Slew something analogous has been done with the creation the next table. of structural, social and legal divisions that separate, After training as a schoolteacher in England during K.S. Maniam isolate and insulate the different sections of Malaysia’s the early 1960s, Maniam returned to Kedah, where he heterogeneous population. Problematic marriages taught for several years. The medium of instruction Sreedhevi Iyer, a Malaysian writer and academic who and relationships are another common theme in in Malaysia at the time was English, a practice now also grew up in Kedah, says, “K.S. Maniam made me these stories, which again might be interpreted defunct. It’s a common local saw that Malaysia is the think of the world I lived in differently. He made me metaphorically, if the reader feels so inclined. only country in the world to have gone from having understand that my mundane environment was worthy Though many of these stories are told from an English as a second language to having English as a of great literature. It is a great gift to receive from ethnic Indian perspective, several feature characters foreign language in the space of one generation. As a another writer.” who are members of Malaysia’s Chinese population. result, the older generation in rural Malaysia generally “I don’t think any Malaysian writing in English can Interestingly, Malaysia’s ethnic majority is almost speak better English than their grandchildren. These deny K.S. Maniam’s influence on us all,” says Preeta entirely absent from any of these narratives, an inversion uncles were no exception. They expressed bemused Samarasan, author of Evening is the Whole Day, “but of the usual dynamics. But by its absence, its unspoken disbelief when I told them that my visit to Bedong was that he was writing about Malaysian Indians, and presence, and above all the power it wields, loom all inspired by Maniam’s book. that I was able to read him at the point when I was the larger. Elsewhere things are stated more overtly: “A book about Bedong? Where got? Nothing to write figuring out my own subject matter and voice, made him the organised, and even gleeful, destruction of squatter book about here,” said one uncle, poignantly underlining doubly important.” homes, the office politics and glass ceilings with people that, despite having penned short story collections, passed over for promotion because of their ethnicity, plays and novels, K.S. Maniam is almost unknown as a Stranger to Love is Maniam’s latest collection the near impossibility of obtaining scholarships despite writer in the place where he spent his formative years of short stories. Many of the stories featured outstanding grades, the young men beaten and killed and early career. in it have the encompassing span of a novel, by police, all issues very much relevant to Malaysia’s Maniam left Kedah to attend Kuala Lumpur’s Aoften with narratives stretched over years. He writes Indian minority. University of Malaya, graduating in 1973, and went on with attention and compassion, and favours languid As in any short story collection, there are stories that to become a lecturer and associate professor there until lyricism over the terse concision often found in modern work better than others. My favourite was the second- he retired. Despite his career at the heart of academia, short stories. last story, “Deep Rage”. “I am a shadow among shadows,” Maniam’s work has never been translated into the While the stories in A Stranger to Love can be taken writes a character who has gone to the city, describing national language, Bahasa Malaysia. He is in no way at face value, understanding the cultural and political the difficulties he faces there. “I float along like a unique in this sense; this fate befalls almost all Malaysian context in which they are written allows for, and indeed thrown-away piece of paper in the wind.” writers writing in English, including those who have may well demand, a more metaphorical reading. A There is no small amount of anger in these stories, won international acclaim and success, a situation publishing landscape long beleaguered by book banning and while they decry the hypocrisies and injustices symptomatic of the country’s cultural trajectory. and censorship, and increasingly threatened with ever of the still inchoate conglomeration that is Malaysia Themes of alienation and a search for a sense of more draconian limits on freedom of expression, has (despite being well advanced into its middle age) belonging are recurrent throughout Maniam’s work. encouraged, and even forced, Malaysian writers and where Maniam excels and shows his importance as Culturally, Maniam is marginalised by being a member readers to hone their skills in exploring the unwritten a Malaysian writer, as he has throughout his oeuvre, of Malaysia’s ethnic Indian minority. Arguably he is subtext between the lines. is in giving voices to the voiceless and speaking for doubly marginalised in his home country by writing in In the opening lines of the first story, “Sunlight the disenfranchised. ☐ what has become a de facto minority language. Dancing on the Waves”, we learn that the father But his legacy is not entirely unacknowledged, and character is an “Almeida” descended from Europeans, his work has inspired many other Malaysian writers. “probably Spanish”. (This jars, since many readers will Marc de Faoite is a writer based in Langkawi, Malaysia

24 FICTION Being Asian Pim Wangtechawat

KEVIN KWAN As a teenager, instances like these cemented it for Crazy Rich Asians me: I must leave Thailand. I must go somewhere more Anchor: 2018 “sophisticated”, more modern, where I could express myself freely without being considered annoying or freakish. There, in such a country, I was sure I would hen I was little, every Friday after school, my feel I belonged. As I wanted grandparents who weren’t parents would take me and my brother to Chinese, I wanted a life that was not Asian. visit our grandparents. Every week, almost But when I found myself living in London during Wwithout fail, we would take them out to the shopping my university years, I became acutely aware of how mall nearest to their house, eat dinner with them, maybe “other” I was. I looked different, I sounded different, walk around the mall for a bit, then take them home I even found myself looking at things differently from and say goodbye. The entire visit would take around two those around me. I discovered a loneliness in the West hours. My grandparents were Chinese, so of course we that is curiously absent from life in Thailand. I began would be efficient with our family time. missing certain things about my home country I never My grandfather immigrated to Bangkok from thought I would miss, like the sense of community, of mainland China when he was a young man, and sitting down for a giant meal with friends and family, although my grandmother was born in Thailand, she the laid-back nature of the people, where it’s all right to was more comfortable speaking in her native Chinese Oslo Davis show up thirty minutes late for something because the dialect than in Thai. Even though I saw them every other person will be late too. I missed just being. I did week, we did not talk much and we hardly knew not know if missing these things was what made me anything about each other’s lives. I only knew that they she is married and has children”, I am reminded of how Thai. I just knew that I felt more “Thai” in England than liked singing Chinese karaoke, that my grandmother obsessed we are as a society with not being single. What I had ever felt in Thailand. When I finished my studies, could cook, that my grandfather was a businessman is unique about Crazy Rich Asians is the identity that I decided to return to Thailand, feeling like I needed to and that he liked the Beatles. They did not know what comes with the wealth. Not many novels encompass return, but not quite knowing why. films I liked to watch, what music I listened to or how such a variant of Asian identities — from mainland At the end of Crazy Rich Asians, when Nick Young many friends I had at school. I recall how bored I was Chinese to Asian-Americans, to Singaporeans, to Hong (Singaporean) finally realises how “crazy” his family is sometimes by these weekly visits and the awkward Kongers, to British-Chinese. Wealth or the lack of it and begs Rachel Chu (Asian-American) to stay with him silences. As a child, I wanted, naively, what I saw in does define these characters. But what defines them and promises that they will return to live in New York, Hollywood films: grandparents I could joke with and even more — what separates them from other wealthy I found myself more engaged with the novel than I had confide in. I wanted, as shocking as it might sound, characters — is that they are Asian. ever been. “It’s not that simple, Nick”, Rachel tells her grandparents who weren’t Chinese. First, though, you need to get past the stereotypes. boyfriend. “You probably didn’t notice it yourself, but you Like many people I know in Thailand, I have more We have our female protagonist, a Chinese-American said ‘we live in New York now.’ But you won’t always be Chinese “blood” than Thai. Even though my mother’s woman named Rachel Chu, and her dashing boyfriend, living in New York. You’ll be returning here [Singapore] mother came from an old, prominent Thai family, Nick Young, travelling home to his native Singapore to someday, probably within the next few years. Don’t kid her father was born to Chinese immigrants, while my visit his very wealthy family. We have the meddling and yourself — your whole family is here, your legacy is here.” grandparents from my father’s side were also Chinese. protective mother of the boyfriend, the scheming friends Her words hit me like a gut punch. Is this why I But I have always had a tricky connection to my Chinese and ex-girlfriends. You need to peel back the layers of came back to Thailand, I ask myself? Because my side. I may have a Chinese name, but I cannot speak melodrama and uncover the satire at the heart of it. The family — my “legacy” — is here? Is family such a big my grandparents’ language. The few phrases I can say absurd wealth of these characters, the class snobbery, thing in Asian society that it keeps us rooted? For the are “Where’s the toilet?” in Cantonese and “Happy the dynamics between Asians from different countries first time in my life, I began to realise that being Thai has Chinese New Year” in Mandarin. Whenever China and backgrounds — these are issues that many Asians nothing to do with how I think or how I see the world, was brought up as a travel destination in our family, I have experienced, but they are infused with humour. but has everything to do with the people who raised me. always rejected it out of hand. In my mind the country As Kwan said, there is a dark, twisted parallel version of Like Nick, they are part of my identity in a way I can was associated with crowds, pollution, communism and this story; those who grew up in Asia have all heard of never shake. disgusting bathrooms. For me, being Chinese consisted the horrific things the extremely rich and privileged can of only a few things: those awkward dinners with my get away with. But in order to avoid “libels and lawsuits” ast year, my grandfather passed away — my grandparents, the red envelopes I used to get at and to “tell stories with more accuracy”, Kwan created grandfather who immigrated to Bangkok Chinese New Year and the smell of my grandmother’s a fantastical, opulent world where Pride and Prejudice from China. I have seen pictures of my great- cooking. I did not understand what it meant to be on steroids meets Asian soap opera. In short, it’s not an Lgrandmother at my parents’ wedding before she went Chinese, and I had no interest in finding out. Asian version of The Bling Ring. back to China, of my father with her when he went for When it comes to being Thai, it gets a little a visit, and of rolling hills and green fields that look as less complicated, but not a lot. Sure, I check all the n Thai we have the term hua-norg, which literally though they belong in an entirely different universe than stereotypical “Thai” boxes: I know the language; the means “outside head” or “head outside the box”. my own. I cannot help but wonder: if my family ties food (the best in the world); I celebrate Thai New Year; The term is used to describe people who are not me to Thailand, does it not tie me to China too? I find I respect my elders (most of the time). But I can’t help I“traditionally Thai”. These people don’t necessarily have myself crouching down in front of the little girl I used to thinking that these things are simply jewellery, like to be educated abroad, but they are deemed “‘different”’ be, directing her gaze to my grandfather during one of earrings, necklaces or other adornments you put on because of the way they do things: they are not shy to our dinners and helping her see the things that I failed to when you leave the house. What are we like inside the voice their opinions, they disregard traditional social notice: how he showed affection by buying me presents house? What truly makes me Thai? rules, and they question authority. In an educational when I brought him my report cards, by giving me a Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, a bestseller first system in which all you do is sit in class, copy what the fond little smile when I said goodbye after every visit; his published in 2013 and reissued recently to coincide with teacher writes on the blackboard and memorise it for the years and years of hard work in a foreign country; how the release of the film version later this year, provides exams, thinking independently is now being associated he came up with the Thai last name that our family now some partial answers. When an Asian female character with a Western mindset. A hua-norg is usually accused uses. I understand everything so clearly now as I look cautions her girlfriend, “You can’t afford to fall in love of “thinking too much” or trying to stir up things that back. Just as I am Thai because of my parents and my with Simon”, I am reminded of the jokes Thai women shouldn’t be stirred up. I remember being called hua- childhood, I am Chinese because he was Chinese. tell about finding a rich husband. When a bridesmaid norg after arguing with a professor because he took What’s so crazy about that? ☐ tells Rachel, “It doesn’t matter how successful a woman offence at the state of my university uniform (my shirt is professionally, she isn’t considered complete until was not tucked in). Pim Wangtechawat is a writer based in Bangkok

25 JAPAN Gaijin Peter Tasker

IAN BURUMA Many years ago, Buruma published a fine book of A Tokyo Romance essays called The Missionary and the Libertine. The title Penguin Press: 2018 refers to two contrasting tendencies in Western attitudes to Japan and other Asian countries. The missionary wants to “reform” the natives, to make them more like he past, as they say, is a foreign country. us. The libertine luxuriates in the difference. Buruma Certainly, Japan in the 1970s was a very different himself is a fascinating mixture of the two. Professionally place from Japan in 2018. I was there for the tail and intellectually, he is a missionary. Indeed, he was one Tend of the decade, a callow youth stuck in a non-air- of the 500 mainly US and British academics who signed conditioned, four-and-a-half-tatami mat (7.4 m²) room a letter in 2015 “rebuking” Japanese Prime Minister in the badlands between south Osaka and fume-spewing Shinzo Abe for holding politically incorrect views of Sakai City. Japanese history. Unlike Ian Buruma, I did not rub shoulders with Yet deep down, one suspects that Buruma is still world-famous movie directors, charismatic female emotionally a libertine. That comes through in the poets or highly cultivated gay expatriates in exile from vitality of the writing, the loving descriptions of middle- their puritanical homelands. The other occupants of the aged strippers and faded vaudevillians playing in dormitory were young Japanese salarymen who worked Courtesy of the author and Penguin Press theatres smelling of sweat and fried squid. As he admits, like demons but also drank, smoked and caroused like “I cannot imagine wanting to immerse myself in a demons too. Donald Richie culture without feeling a sensual pull.” I also was a beneficiary of white privilege. In Is it possible for a cosmopolitan to be authentic? recognition of my status as the sole foreigner in was every bit as hierarchical and exclusionary as a Presumably, the missionary in Buruma would believe so, residence, every day I was provided with a “western” Japanese company, hard to take. After one bust-up, Kara but, as he explains, his old friend Kara would disagree. breakfast of a cold fried egg perched on a mini Mount dismissed him with the stinging words: “So you’re just The icon of the 1970s underground couldn’t stand Fuji of chopped raw cabbage. an ordinary gaijin after all.” Japanese who spoke foreign languages too fluently. We shared a communal bath that could hold Shortly afterwards, Buruma moved to Hong Kong, Truly talented people, he maintained, stuck to their five bodies. The doors were closed at midnight — a then London and later, New York, reinventing himself own language. Buruma (who speaks more than a few restriction easily circumvented by clambering through a as a journalist, author of many highly praised books, European and Asian languages) explains Kara’s irritation first-floor window that was helpfully left open. lecturer in human rights and, as of last year, editor of as stemming from “the idea that a person speaking too The air pollution was as bad as in today’s China; the New York Review of Books. Yet his six years in Japan fluently in a language other than his native tongue is people burned their trash in the streets. Vacuum trucks changed him profoundly. As he writes, “Even though I inauthentic, without a clear identity, an impersonator — came and pumped the sewage out of septic tanks, decided to leave Japan, I knew that Japan would never ‘a spy’”. sometimes leaving behind a malodorous token of their leave me.” Language is a powerful force in creating identity, as work. On hot summer nights, older men strolled to A Tokyo Romance is the story of a society and we know from the numerous political battles that have the public bath in their long johns and vests. On local an individual, both in flux at a particular historical been fought over it. Japan’s strongest barrier against the trains with no air-conditioning, they sometimes took off moment. It is also a non-fictional bildungsroman, a rising tide of homogenising globalisation is linguistic. their trousers and folded them neatly in their laps. The portrait of a young man struggling to understand As a society, it refuses to learn to speak English and, neighbourhood cafe was frequented by bikers and surf himself and his place in the world. like Kara, is suspicious of the tiny minority who speak it bunnies who extended my vocabulary considerably. The scion of a well-off Anglo-Dutch family, Buruma with facility. One friendly chap, who wore a Hawaiian shirt and describes himself as a rebel against his privileged Yes, every Japanese child undergoes many years aviator sunglasses, offered to take me drinking several background with a strong dose of nostalgie de la boue — of compulsory education in the subject, but the way times a week on the sole condition that I would speak literally “a hankering after mud”, a fascination with the it is taught — like a convoluted series of bureaucratic English — needed, he explained, for the frequent seamy side of life. There was plenty of “mud” around in decrees, rather than a tool of communication — business trips he was making to Southeast Asia. After 1970s Japan. guarantees linguistic isolation. While that remains the the second drinking session, I was warned off by the A restless spirit and fascination with Japanese theatre case, Japan’s cultural specificity — the “otherness” that dorm supervisor: my new pal turned out to be a mid- and film landed him a scholarship to a Japanese film frustrates the missionaries and turns on the libertines — ranking officer of the area’s dominant yakuza syndicate. school. Buruma is sharply critical of his younger self, will remain intact. The “cool Japan” of Michelin-starred sushi shops uncommitted, directionless, “hovering on the fringes”. It “Never trust the teller, trust the tale” was the maxim and Pokémon Go interactive games lay far in the future. was the example of the uncompromising, driven figures of British novelist D.H. Lawrence, meaning that a This Japan was warm, wet, low-tech and chaotic. Like of the avant garde art world he encountered in Japan — work of art has a deeper reality than the ideas and Buruma, I was instantly smitten. Like him, I was warned and the transgressive Kara in particular — that shook intentions of its creator. Buruma’s book — beautifully by friends that foreigners in Japan would always be him out of his dilettantism and gave him purpose. written, funny and painfully self-critical — is not gaijin — literally, “outside people” — no matter how long There’s a larger theme here too, one especially just a colourful memoir of 1970s Japan. It is an open- they stayed or how fluent they became in the language. pertinent in today’s world of rapid globalisation and ended meditation on deracination, identity and the Donald Richie, the late writer and film critic who became the push back against it. Buruma is, by background and nature of culture, high and low. To put it another way, the young Buruma’s mentor, is quoted as follows: conviction, a cosmopolitan. Japan is deeply insular, in it is an argument between Buruma, the cosmopolitan “The great mistake was to think you could ever be absolute terms less now than in the 1970s, but relative to missionary, and the Japanese-to-his-fingertips monoglot, treated in the same way as a Japanese. People would be global trends probably more so. The cultural specificity Juro Kara. polite, even warm. Profound friendships with Japanese of Japan that so attracted Buruma is the result of the Following Lawrence, I think that Kara is the winner, were perfectly possible. But you would never become insularity that keeps immigration to a trickle and and Buruma knows it. Now seventy-eight years old, he one of them.” ensures that a gaijin will always be a gaijin. still features in phantasmagorical performances by This suited Richie fine; he reinvented himself in As a public intellectual of impeccably liberal his Red Tent theatre troupe in the grounds of the Japan, lived most of his life there after arriving in 1947 inclinations, Buruma deplores nativism and nationalism famed Hanazono Shrine in Shinjuku. The past may be and died there in 2013. It suited Buruma too, for a while and supports the intermingling of people and cultures. a foreign country, but so can the present be, if you put at least. He became friendly with avant garde theatre Yet it is the otherness of Japan that enchants him in a your mind to it. ☐ director and actor Juro Kara and eventually joined way that is more erotic than romantic; he yearns “to his Red Tent troupe for a tour of Japan. After a series plumb its mysteries, not just mentally, but physically”. Peter Tasker is an author and financial analyst who has of disturbing and hilarious episodes, Buruma found And indeed, in the 1970s he set out to do just that, with translated a book of essays by the late underground writer the internal dynamics of the theatre troupe, which numerous women and a few men. and cineaste Shuji Terayama

26 ARCHAEOLOGY Claude Jacques Aedeen Cremin

Elsie Herberstein

acques is the old French nickname for a peasant, despotism” of the hydraulic society imagined by Karl out not to have been a usurper at all. Irritating as this and a jacquerie is a peasant revolt. The late Wittfogel in 1957. must have been, Jacques was the first to publicise the Claude Jacques, urbane and erudite, hardly fit Jacques did not attempt an overarching model new information. Jthe profile, but he was a radical in his own way. This but chipped away at the inscribed stones that literally To me, his most interesting study was one he is most clearly expressed in his large-format book The underwrote the histories of Cambodia by Aymonier, researched for more than thirty years, the matter of the Khmer Empire (2007), with magnificent photographs Coedès and Briggs. He thought that too many scholars Sanskrit term devaraja — “King of the gods” — used by co-author Philippe Lafond. It works brilliantly as had from the start “uncritically accepted a priori in the inscription that informs us about the reign of a guidebook but is in fact Jacques’ clearest statement postulates of unknown origin” and that it was time to Jayavarman II (K 235 from Sdok Kak Thom). This had on Khmer history, shorn of the periphrases and decolonise. Like his fellow iconoclast Michael Vickery, been interpreted by Coedès in 1964 as referring to the allusions of his more scholarly articles. He knew well he rejected the Chinese-based descriptions of the unitary Hindu god Shiva, represented in all Khmer imperial that no statement on Khmer — or any — history can Khmer states of Funan and Chenla. He wrote that, if his temples, which implied that “royal power resided in be definitive, and positively delighted in new colleagues absolutely insisted on comparing Cambodia a miraculous linga of Shiva”, and, as a corollary, that discoveries, even when they contradicted his views. to France, they should compare it, not to the France Khmer kings were “god-kings”. This interpretation That flexibility is probably his greatest contribution of Louis XIV, but to that of the Merovingians, with “a was widely accepted and can be found in almost every to scholarship. myriad of probably quarrelsome neighbouring fiefdoms” account of Khmer kingship since then. Jacques was one of the foremost epigraphers of his — pointing out in an ironic aside that the start of Jacques knew Coedès’ work better than anyone time and therefore a historian, since Angkor’s history Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire (800 AD) coincided — having among other things re-indexed the seven is entirely constructed from temple inscriptions. The with that of Jayavarman II’s Angkorian empire in 802. volumes of his Inscriptions du Cambodge — and it must ambiguity of Sanskrit and the idiosyncracies of Old Between 2001 and 2017, I had the privilege of have cost him a real effort to demolish this now received Khmer make for considerable uncertainty, enjoyably working with the Greater Angkor Project (GAP). One idea, starting with a densely written article in 1985. endless debate and vertiginously circular argument. It of its objectives was to test archaeologically Bernard- In 2014 he finally spelt it out: Coedès was mistaken. amused Jacques to point out that a reference to “King Philippe Groslier’s hypotheses of the “demise of Angkor” Devaraja is a simple translation of the Khmer kamraten Jayavarman whose first queen was the younger sister in the 1450s. Jacques believed that this “demise” was far jagat na raja, in the same inscription, and refers not to of King Yashovarman” could equally well be translated from total, and his belief has now been vindicated by Shiva but to the “Khmer king of the Khmer gods”, the as “King Jayavarman whose younger sister was some of my former GAP colleagues in The Renaissance personal god of the reigning monarch. Yashovarman’s first queen”. Princess Lectures presented to HRH Princess Maha The implication of this, which is now widely French scholars are very respectful of their maîtres Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand in February this year. accepted, is that the Khmers continued to worship à penser, with good reason, but Jacques was able, Jacques wasn’t always correct, of course. He had their traditional gods, while also accepting the Hindu admittedly after many years in the field, to stand back elaborated a rather neat scenario in which the famous pantheon. That the evidence hinges on one word and ask, Do we actually know this? How do we know four-faced towers of the Bayon, Angkor Thom gates, perfectly summarises the challenge of writing “history” it? How much of our “knowledge” is in fact inference? Banteay Chhmar and elsewhere were created, not by from epigraphy alone. It’s a game of words, not a game These are not new questions, of course, but they were Jayavarman VII, but by his successors. Alas, a newly of thrones. ☐ rarely applied to Angkor, which in colonial eyes seemed discovered inscription shows that the design was more rather a passive entity, moulded by “Indianisation”, as likely invented by Jayavarman VII’s predecessor, the Aedeen Cremin was an archaeologist with the Greater described by George Coedès in 1948 or by the “oriental supposed “usurper” Tribhuvanadityavarman, who turns Angkor Project

27 PROFILE Coming out to dance Erin Handley

he had a dream about an earthquake. That’s how that dangled with tinsel in lieu of flower garlands. Prum into nectar,” he says. “If you are able to look at these Eng Hai knew she was pregnant. The son who was enchanted. myths, clearly, they can be a real source of guidance and came after that dream, Prumsodun Ok, sits in “It was a community that was working to rebuild strength in our lives.” Shis Phnom Penh apartment some thirty-one years with whatever it had,” he says of its thrown-together He didn’t plan to stay in Cambodia, despite the later. I first met the founder of Natyarasa, Cambodia’s quality. “The spirit of the dance, the beauty of the dance urging of fellow choreographers. first all-gay dance troupe, a year ago, after climbing was so powerful that it’s able to reveal itself, even when “I saw so much struggle and poverty and sadness,” the steep stairs to his studio apartment. His wrists it’s not done well.” he says. “To love the people and to love the country and wrapped in gold, he poured tumblers of red wine for He put on his sister’s red dress and mimicked the to feel like you can’t make any change in that is very the cluster of people who had come to see him perform, movements, much to the delight of his family, who heartbreaking.” But with the young men rehearsing in with a wide smile and the warmth of someone greeting caught some of his dance moves on camera. his living room starting to resemble a professional dance old friends. But some of his siblings and neighbours, when they company, he realised that in order to make the biggest Tea candles burned around the white-tiled saw this, started taunting him, calling him “gay”. He was impact on the art form, he had to do it from Cambodia. apartment, the windows closed so no breeze could too young to understand the nuances of sexuality, but There are times where Prum wonders if he is going snuff them out. The space was full of heat and an felt the sting, and stopped dancing. to make it, a spectre of failure that sharpens under other-earthly light as the men moved in a dance that But in high school, after watching his younger the weight he carries, of the men who have invested their conjured the flow of rivers and the tight precision sisters learn under the tutelage of famous choreographer time and talents in his project, and more broadly of a plant’s minuscule growth. It was both intimate Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, he worked up the courage to as a model of success in the LGBTQ community and transcendental. ask to join the class he had been observing. She said yes. in Cambodia. More than a year later, Prum sits with the undeniable “When I was sixteen and dancing very seriously, my It’s perhaps this, in part, that led him to write a brief elegance of a dancer, wearing a neat navy shirt. He’s parents did not want me to dance, because they were just history of Khmer classical dance, The Serpent’s Tail, swapped wine for water on this late March morning, really afraid of this life of poverty that I might get myself to shed light on the practice for young artists, and to which is overcast, with an unseasonable smatter of rain, into,” he says. “Because their life was so much about challenge the narrative of a “dark age” engulfing the art as he recounts his mother’s dream. survival, they could never see the value of something after the fall of Angkor, one that ignores oral and non- “My mum woke up in the middle of the night and like dance.” textual histories. there was this huge earthquake. And she’s horrified. She’s There were almost daily arguments with his mother. The idea of a “royal ballet” is a misconception of trying to grab onto anything in the darkness. And then His older brother, sick of hearing the fights, would beat what is an almost primal art that has its roots in village out of the corner of her eye, she sees a faint light, and so him up. His mother threatened to disown him. people, Prum says. Even under the murderous Khmer she turns towards that light, and then she sees that that “Many people from outside would see me dancing Rouge, people would sneak out to the fields to dance. light is coming from a young child,” Prum says. and they would say ‘Wow, your parents must be really For Prum, it’s crucial to connect the dots. So much The child was perhaps eight years old, with a proud of you, you’re taking care of the culture,’ but of the contemporary choreography he has seen takes topknot, a bow and a sling of arrows. actually I was fighting to dance, I was fighting to be who dance gestures that are laden with historical significance “Whose child are you? Go home, there’s an I was.” and decontextualises them, stripping them of meaning. earthquake, it’s dangerous,” Hai said. His sexuality was “an unspoken truth”, but eventually It feels hollowed out, he says, because the works lack a “But the child just stands there and the light is he did give words to it, after an argument with his sister deep understanding of what came before. getting brighter and brighter and brighter and he’s in his early twenties, in which she called him a “faggot”. In Khmer classical dance, Prum explains, there are smiling at her, and then all of a sudden, her head hurts He called his father, crying, and told him he was gay. four key gestures that form the building blocks of a so much that she closes her eyes,” Prum says. At that “Prum, no matter what, you’re my son. As long as you’re limitless, and at times, literal vocabulary. point, she sees herself lying on the bed, with the child a good person, that’s all that matters,” his father said. It With fingers curled and curved, he demonstrates a sitting cross-legged in a meditation pose above her. The wasn’t the last time he came out to his father. During tree, leaves, flower and fruit, all in one fluid movement. moment the meditation stops, she wakes up. an interview, a journalist asked Sem what he thought There’s the play between the literal and the symbolic, of Prum being gay. Sem, in his eighties, had forgotten. and, in abstraction, of infusing those meanings with orn in 1987 to Cambodian parents in America’s “You’re gay?” he asked. And so Prum came out to his fresh possibilities. Long Beach — the largest population of Khmer dad twice. “That’s the delicate balance of Khmer dance. In people living outside Cambodia — Prum is His father passed away not long after. But he left certain ways, it’s extremely literal, but in certain ways it’s Bone of ten children, and the first to be born in the some words Prum continues to live by. so stylised that it has this mystery to the gestures at the United States. “When Prum was young, I wanted him to be a same time,” he says. Prum’s parents fled the Khmer Rouge to the Thai teacher, a lawyer or a doctor, but now as an artist, I “It can be extremely strenuous on the body, but for border, before moving in 1982 to California, to a realise he’s all of those things and more,” Prum recalls me, I would describe it as a moving meditation.” place rife with gang violence and interracial mistrust. his father saying. The meditating child from his mother’s dream Prum was born five years later, in the heart of the “It is something that still inspires me today,” he says. led him to delve with her into ideas of reincarnation Cambodian diaspora. “A doctor is someone who heals; a teacher is someone and what the Buddha says about being gay, which he “My parents never spoke about the Khmer Rouge, who guides, is someone who inspires morality, is transformed into an artistic work, that, like many Khmer and also there was a language barrier,” he says. someone who illuminates; a lawyer is someone who traditional dances, speaks to higher planes. English became his primary language when he started instills justice, and equity: that is the role of an artist.” There have been times during dance — which serves kindergarten, and although he could still speak “kitchen as a bridge between the earth and the heavens — where Khmer,” he couldn’t communicate with his parents on a rum left Long Beach to study in San Francisco Prum has been struck by an awe-inspiring feeling: this deeper level. before he returned and became the associate isn’t me. Their son was a straight A-student with a passion artistic director at the Khmer Arts Academy where “But being able to recognise that ‘this is not me’ for the violin. But when Prum moved to high school, Phe had first learned to dance. He was preparing to move means that I’m still there,” he says, with a laugh. he found himself in a mostly white classroom, where to Mexico City when he received a grant that brought It’s a dichotomy of the art form, so physical as to students had private music lessons at home. Violin, with him to Cambodia in 2015, to work on “Beloved”, which become transcendental. its uptight, black-tie culture, didn’t quite fit any more. re-cast a love-making ritual between feminine and “This is another duality. When I’m choreographing He was drawn instead to film and photography, and masculine energies into the dancing bodies of gay men. in the traditional style, I don’t feel imprisoned by it,” he rediscovered his love of dance, long dormant since he During that time, he was threatened with violence says. “So with this language that is very precise, very first encountered the art form as a four-year-old. online. “I had so much anger at these people, frustration controlled, you find there’s a certain freedom. You find a His first glimpse of Khmer classical dance was a and confusion, and then I remembered this image of certain freedom within that limitation.” ☐ performance his father filmed at a local temple, Shiva, who drank the poison of the world, but instead where the women affixed sequins to cardboard crowns of swallowing it, he held it in his neck, until it turned Erin Handley is a reporter at the Phnom Penh Post

28 Hannah Hawkins

29 MUSIC A nation’s song Beth Yahp

SAIDAH RASTAM Rosalie and Other Love Songs SIRD: 2017

aidah Rastam’s meticulously researched cultural history of Malayan music and musicians, Rosalie and Other Love Songs, was originally published Sin 2014 in a small, private print run by Khazanah Nasional Berhad, the investment fund of the Malaysian government, which also funded its research. Such top-down initiatives often produce gorgeous volumes that tick boxes in terms of cultural recuperation or nationalist ambition and then disappear. But, luckily for us, Saidah’s work has been republished as a handsome book that is as much a groundbreaking ethno- musicological resource as it is an engrossing, often moving and as often heartbreaking story of the mostly forgotten music men and women of Malaya’s early years. Saidah’s book is also a history of a fantasy Malaya (unimaginable in the realities of contemporary Malaysia) that we may look upon with nostalgic yearning, as indeed Saidah does: a place and time in which intensely productive cross-cultural collaboration, re-invention and appreciation prevailed over state boundaries and the identity politics and racial chauvinism that now characterise any efforts at national representation. It is a story of heady artistic endeavour and also erasure. Saidah is a composer whose affinity with her topic is infectious. Rosalie takes us from the turn of the twentieth century to Malaya’s post-merdeka Merdeka procession in front of the Sultan Abdul Samad Building, 3 August 1957 (independence) years, tracing a story that is as beguiling as the melody of the song “Ma Rosalie” (also known tradition. This orchestra originated in the nightclubs as Rosalie is a work of nostalgia — a work that yearns in its keroncong or pop-yeah-yeah versions as “Terang Soliano’s bebop trio, painstakingly growing in number to acknowledge and pay tribute to the cosmopolitan Boelan”). This song purportedly travelled from the and learning, under his intrepid and tireless leadership, and transnational qualities of Malayan music that “like pen of a chansonnier in France to the court of an exiled to play symphonic music for a series of glittering Malaysian food … was an exhilarating mix of many sultan in the Seychelles, then on to stately pomp in showcase evenings of post-merdeka prowess and cultural cultures … the music of migrations, diverse influences London and Perak, as well as the popular bangsawan sophistication which immensely pleased Tunku Abdul and cross-fertilisations, resulting in hybrid forms”. music-hall stages of Singapore and the East Indies, Rahman, Malaya’s first prime minister. Eventually, The flute’s quality of “fluttering around” and before eventually becoming the national anthem of despite his achievements, Soliano would be ousted from “never landing” may equally be applied to Saidah’s Malaya in 1957. Radio Malaya, ostensibly because he was not Malay. own argument in Rosalie: her constant though subtle Around this story, Saidah weaves a rich tapestry Hardly an isolated outcome; this sidelining of talented privileging of the “in-between notes”, those “slight of Malayan music from the early years of Tok Pusi’s non-Malay musicians, composers and artistes would variations and ornamentations” of the un-Western- bangsawan coup in Penang (built upon his ingenious become the norm. trained Malayan musician “which imbue the music with wholesale purchase of props and musical instruments The undeniable significance that music carried in character and richness” and that have been scored out of from a wildly popular visiting Parsi troupe), to the Malaysia’s socio-political and cultural history is existence in Malaysia’s thrust towards modernity and a cabarets and ronggeng stages of the amusement worlds brought to vibrant life in Rosalie. Saidah leads us neatly delineated nation state. where joget moden was invented by Hamzah Dolmat through both the major and minor chords of this The book’s nostalgia, like the Fado-esque soldade and Ahmad C.B.; from the multi-talented P. Ramlee’s history, providing a comprehensive and previously of the keroncong, conjures an alternative and erased “voracious borrowings from many cultures and musical unseen overview while never losing sight of the past and the lost future it promised, one in which there styles” in the golden age of Malayan cinema to the complex personal threads of the lives of its musicians might be no need to ask, as Saidah does, tucked away drama of choosing a national anthem at the eleventh and their different music — each glimpse filled with in a footnote: “In the current landscape of officially hour before independence, after a two-year search. And moments of joy and yearning, ingenuity and resilience sanctioned Malaysian music, would a P. Ramlee [whose what an edge-of-the-seat drama it is as told by Saidah, in the face of war, discrimination and penury, as well as name, he claimed, was an amalgamation of the Hindu with the aid of photos, news articles and letters from good times, fame and success. Forgotten musical gems, name ‘Ram’ and the Chinese name ‘Lee’] even be concerned citizens as well as irate, rejected composers practitioners, spaces and eras are presented in every allowed to exist?” Rosalie is Saidah’s answer to her own like Benjamin Britten. chapter, making one wish for accompanying audio and question, her love song to the music and musicians Rosalie also takes us on a tour of the adventures a forthcoming documentary. who shaped a nation — many now sidelined, their of the stalwart Federation Police Band, conducted by Throughout, the music takes on a life of its own, achievements and legacies erased, as the priceless early Deputy Superintendent A.W. Crofts, which anthemised captured by some of Saidah’s most beautiful writing: field recordings of Radio Malaya were wilfully taped and recorded the chosen song over three days before “What happens when a keroncong song is played?” she over and its orchestra’s musical scores so heartbreakingly merdeka — perhaps not such an astounding feat given asks. “There’s a cello playing offbeats like the syncopated discarded as rubbish. Rosalie and Other Love Songs that “Terang Boelan” was already part of its repertoire. hits of a gendang [drum], creating a perky line. On top is a tugging against the hardening of that nation’s More astonishing is the story of the Orkes Radio of it there is the most delicate web of sound created heartstrings: a book that deserves to be read widely and Malaya, which second-generation Filipino musical by string instruments being plucked or strummed in attentively, with listening minds, hearts and ears. ☐ maestro Alfonso Soliano was tasked with forming from filigree patterns, like gamelan’s intricate interlocking scratch, despite a dearth of local musicians who could lines. Then there is a flute that never lands on the Beth Yahp is the author of Eat First, Talk Later and The sight-read, let alone had training in Western orchestral melody itself, but flutters around it, like a bird.” Red Pearl and Other Stories

30 CARTOONS Good old bad days Michael L. Gray

NGUYEN THANH PHONG AND NGUYEN KHANH DUONG Thuong Nho Thoi Bao Cap (Memories of the Subsidised Era) Nha Nam Books and Writers’ Association Publishing House: 2018

wo weeks before this year’s Lunar New Year in Hanoi, a book of cartoons about daily life during the wartime years of the 1970s and 1980s sold Tout within days of its launch. Memories of air raids, conscription and ration tickets hardly seem like subjects that would put a sentimental smile on people’s faces. But in Hanoi today, nostalgia for the subsidised era of “high communism” has crept into the popular imagination. The hipster socialist-realism decor of Cong Cafe heralded the beginnings of a rethink about the drab khaki palette of Vietnam’s martial past. The mavens of Hanoi’s digital generation are at least branching out from their fixation with the latest phones and brand-name fashions to learn more about the modest conditions under which their parents and grandparents came of age. “Too few seats, too many asses” Even so, the sell-out success of Memories of the Subsidised Era surprised everyone, including the in front of an artillery cannon. “Don’t marry an artillery to remember pre-doi moi times, before the country’s authors. After an initial print run of 5,000 copies was gunner,” one woman cautions. “Every night they shoot economic opening, and so has relied on interviews, snapped up, a second printing of another 5,000 copies is hard enough to shake the bed.” photographs and other research to fuel his imagination. set to sell out as well. Modern readers may be unfamiliar with ration Huu Khoa, born in 1973, is in his element. His work The book is not merely nostalgia. It took five years tickets, but will still recognise the fatalism of a cartoon dominates the book both in quantity and quality. All the to publish due to a long battle with state censors, who depicting people waiting in a food queue even as rockets examples in this review are Huu Khoa’s illustrations. pulled out some twenty cartoons before finally granting fire overhead. The caption reads: “Whoever goes to Huu Khoa’s caricatures have wonderfully expressive a printing licence. Memories deals directly with the heaven will go, I’m staying in line.” (It doesn’t take much faces, bringing great depth and emotion to his cartoons. politics of the day by illustrating the stock phrases, imagination to write a modern parallel: “Whoever dies The quality of the artwork, including Thanh Phong’s, idioms, slang and mannerisms of the subsidised era. in traffic will die, I still need to get from A to B.”) is outstanding. This is done in an unmistakeably satirical manner, with The book’s occasionally raucous humour seems to Nonetheless, a critical perspective on Memories is the authors walking readers through an alphabetically have drawn the ire of censors in equal measure to its that satire isn’t as effective when presented so long after arranged critique of the rampant bureaucracy, political content. On his Facebook page, author Thanh the fact. While many of the cartoons would have had nepotism and inefficiency of the times — topics that Phong posted a cartoon that was among those pulled the authors tossed into prison if published in the 1970s still resonate today. from the book by censors. It’s little more than a fart or 1980s, they’re harmless compared with much of To ensure the meaning isn’t lost on youthful joke, the humour lying in the fact that someone could the anti-state vitriol now available to anyone with an readers, the authors have included for each illustration smell meat in the fart’s particular odour (at a time when internet connection. a short explanatory paragraph that brings the long-lost the nation was so poor that meat was a luxury). The The official approval denoted by gaining a historical context or fuzzy linguistic references into cartoon emphasises the extreme poverty of the day, but publication licence means there’s nothing in the book sharp relief. So, the book is not only nostalgia and satire, is otherwise bland compared to the mocking tone of to shake the foundations of Vietnamese society. But but also education. several that made it through to the printing press. it would be too much to expect Vietnamese satirists, With proper satire, the laughter is not in the The censors don’t justify their decisions, and operate working under the gaze of an authoritarian regime, to punchline so much as in shining a light on the with a set of concerns not made public neither explained attempt the open mocking of contemporary leaders seen underlying ailment. While this discovery of the to the authors. in Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, or on “unvarnished truth” may be slowed somewhat for the Daily Show, the US news satire program. readers who need the help of the book’s guideline hanh Phong and Huu Khoa began the Memories Memories is an effective twist on the propaganda paragraphs, many of the political cartoons are simple project in 2012, when they were staff at Nha of nationalistic patriotism and sacrifice that dominates enough to understand at first glance. Nam, founded in 2005 as one of the first private- discussion of the wartime era. In one of the book’s The book is not all politics. Ribald humour begins Tsector book publishers in Vietnam. Nha Nam wanted cartoons, the phrase “worried about the country” is with the first cartoon, which shows two women speaking to introduce Vietnamese illustrations into a market transformed to mean “worried about water” — as the otherwise dominated by translated Japanese manga. This illustration shows neighbours queued to collect their effort started with Thanh Phong’s first book of cartoons, meagre daily bucket of water from the communal tap. Assassin with a Head of Festering Wounds, which was a Even today, government agencies blend propaganda huge success in terms of the critical and social media into media and entertainment productions in a manner attention it received. The book was a series of illustrated far less effective than they imagine. In its revisionist modern slang and idioms, broadly similar to Memories. look at the stock phrases and nation-building slogans Assassin gained notoriety when, two weeks after its of the recent past, the book exposes the anaemic core of release, all copies were withdrawn from bookstore much of the propaganda and entertainment produced in shelves and disappeared, only to reappear weeks later Vietnam. This is a type of critical education that youth with several pages cut out (most notably a cartoon of don’t receive in secondary-school classes. As a work two soldiers playing hacky-sack with a hand grenade). effectively combining nostalgia, satire and education, Thanh Phong is an artist willing to balance on the Memories of the Subsidised Era is a triple threat. ☐ edge of permissible content. But in Memories, it’s not “Eat like a monk, live like a prisoner, but speak like a leader” his work that stands out. Born in 1986, he’s too young Michael L. Gray is a writer based in Singapore

31 TRAVEL Forgotten Naga Rupert Winchester

arely ten minutes out of the airport at Dimapur, I Violence has a long history in Nagaland: the many had my first “land-of-contrasts” moment, that wars against the British in the nineteenth century gave hoary old travel writer’s standby. I was trying way to an entente cordiale and some measure of mutual Bto chat to a woman selling dead spiders from a plastic respect. Then the Indians took over as administrators bucket on the roadside when I looked up and noticed we with a ferocity that would trouble the world, if the world were outside a branch of KFC. knew about it. Conservative estimates put the number Dimapur is the gateway to Nagaland, a staggeringly of Nagas killed by Indian forces since the mid-1950s remote part of India, on the tangled eastern tail of at 200,000. the Himalayas, bordering Myanmar. For most of the The capital of Nagaland is Kohima, an untidy town twentieth century, the north-east of India was firmly Vikramjit Kakati scattered across steep hillsides, scruffy tin roofs rusting closed to both foreigners and Indians alike. quietly in the harsh sunlight. It was here that in 1944 When I lived in India years ago, I’d make my way Zeliang Naga tribesmen at the Hornbill Festival the British army and its Indian cohorts fought one of every few months to the Ministry of Home Affairs in the world’s great battles, a modern-day Thermopylae, a Delhi and optimistically submit an application to an they don’t speak Hindi, and they have been fighting for Stalingrad of the East. endlessly cheerful Sub-Assistant for Domestic Liaison, sovereignty from India since 1947. Japanese forces, who had stunned the world with Mr J.K. Chatterjee, for an Inner Line Permit, to allow me The thick woodland clinging to the hillsides is their swift capture of Singapore, Malaya, Hong Kong to travel to the “Seven Sisters” — the states of Arunachal interspersed with barren patches where the locals have and Burma, stood ready to pour through Nagaland and Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Megalaya, Tripura slashed and burned to grow potatoes and the fearsome into India, if they could make their way through the and Nagaland. And every few months, Mr Chatterjee local chillies, the hottest in the world. But the woods are pass at Kohima. Seven thousand Japanese and 5,000 would smile, shake his head, and tell me, over a cup curiously silent: it takes a little while to realise that there British and Indian soldiers died here, mainly around the of wincingly sweet chai, that the permit had again are no birds singing. A passing farmer explains why: assistant district commissioner’s tennis court, in fighting been denied. “They’ve all been eaten. Everything gone.” of unimaginable savagery, before the Japanese were But a few years ago the Indian government changed beaten back. its policy on the north-east and is now encouraging o one seems to know where the Nagas came Today, the tennis court is still marked out, in tourists, both Indian and foreign, to visit. I was from. One theory says that they arrived from stone, in the peaceful loveliness of the War Cemetery, invited to see the Hornbill Festival, an annual Indian Mongolia in the tenth century. Another scrupulously maintained by the Commonwealth War government confection in which the 16 Naga tribes Nposits that they’re from south-eastern Tibet. Others Graves Commission. Local office workers eat their spend a fortnight dancing and singing and flogging suggest that they came from Malaya and Borneo, and lunches and flirt respectfully between the tombstones; food, textiles and jewellery to culture-hungry tourists. anthropologists have found connections with tribes in occasionally groups of elderly British ex-servicemen in In a sand-floored amphitheatre in the thickly Indonesia and the Philippines. A more likely and more blazers and medals move slowly amongst the graves, wooded folds of the 3,048-metre peak of Mount Japfu, generally accepted scenario has them arriving from their minds far away in the past, still stunned by the the local tribes, on a goodly per diem rate, perform their China’s Yunnan province, via northern Myanmar. horror of it all. traditional dances, ritually bang huge log drums, sing The border between India and Myanmar could best The daughter of a veteran who fought at Kohima their village love stories and pose for packs of foreigners, be described as fluid. Despite being laid down originally told me that, until his death, he used to tell her he could bristling with Leicas and selfie sticks and generally being in 1834, following the signing of the wonderfully named recall the name of every man he had fought alongside. delighted by the tribal realism of the scenes concocted Treaty of Yandaboo, the Pemberton Johnstone Maxwell “But otherwise he would not, or could not, ever speak for them. There are stands of plastic trees, with plastic Line, as it became known, was ratified only in 1967. of it.” hornbills in their branches, looking down on the dancers The Nagas lived, and still live, on both sides of the Many of the graves simply have the words “Known and the crowds of wealthy tourists. invisible border, and pay it no attention as they go about Unto God”. On a huge stone is carved: Locally based anthropologist Dr Michael Heneise their daily lives. But activists say that the imaginary line When you go home is dismissive of Delhi’s Disneyfied version of Nagaland. that divides the Nagas today is the “mother of all cruelty Tell them of us and say “Tourists today come to Kisama village to see the and ruthlessness”. For your tomorrow traditional Naga cultural activities. But they could just Through a series of clandestine contacts, I managed We gave our today. walk across the road and see a real Naga village, where to engineer a meeting with a man known only as Zebu, Zebu was optimistic about the future of the struggle people share their dreams first thing in the morning, use who holds a senior position with the Naga National for independence. “We hope that Britain will support traditional medicine and sing traditional songs.” Council, an umbrella group representing Naga — and us when the time comes. And perhaps the United The tribes of Nagaland are certainly photogenic, anti-Indian — interests. We sat in the darkened corner States.” Sensing my scepticism, he suggested that Brexit with their heavy beaded necklaces, spears and machetes, of an empty restaurant while his driver kept a nervous showed that the UK understood a people’s desire for their headdresses and patterned shawls, tiger teeth, bear watch, and he told me about the struggle for sovereignty. independence. And he played down reports that their fur and antelope horns. All of them wear a black-slashed “We’re getting there”, he said. “We just need to sort fight for sovereignty was being funded by China, hornbill feather in their top-knots. But because all of the out the divisions that are causing our …,” he paused, Pakistan and the cross-border trade in drugs, weapons hornbills have been eaten by the locals, most of them searching for the right word, “disunity. We are a little and people. “It is true that we are a buffer region have had to resort to using counterfeit feathers made out fractured as opposition at the moment. But we will sort between India and China. And yes, some of our of construction paper. it out.” people have received training in China. But not so much The land-of-contrasts trope doesn’t really apply in Fractured is one way to put it. The number of any m ore .” Nagaland: it’s more a land of disassociation. Because different groups claiming to offer a government in The geopolitical reality is that no one cares about the although Nagaland is governed by Delhi, is on the hiding is difficult to calculate, and they hate each other Nagas: indeed, the fact that practically no one outside same time zone and uses the same money, it really just as fiercely as they hate the Indians. the region has even heard of the Nagas, and that no isn’t India. The mainland, as they call it up here, is the Zebu, as harmless as he seemed, had a dark agenda, one is going to upset trade with vast and wealthy India, Deccan Plateau, the Gangetic Plain: the dark, smoky and if he could ever engineer reconciliation between his seems lost on the nationalists. voluptuous heart of Bharat Mata. disparate groups. “We are non-violent,” he stressed, The recent discovery of oil, and sizeable deposits Nagaland, however, is rather like Switzerland, before warning that violence was inevitable if India of uranium, in the region have further complicated or Fairbanks, Alaska, with saw-toothed ranges of didn’t accede to their demands. “There could very well matters. Zebu told me that they would use guerrilla thickly forested blue-green hills ranging off into the be trouble. I can’t rule it out.” attacks if anyone aside from the Nagas tried to extract distance. The people have the golden skin tone and The Nagas don’t want much: sovereignty is the any of it. I had to admire his optimism. The potholed high cheekbones associated with the Tibeto-Burmans. only thing they ask for. The Nagas were promised their roads that twist sinuously through the hills have heavily Ninety-five per cent of them are Baptists: they love freedom by Mahatma Gandhi, but his offer was revoked, armed Indian soldiers at practically every junction, and singing and eating dogs, and, generally, hate Indians; brutally, by Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors. the soldiers do not love the Nagas. ☐

32 FOOD Eating amok Robert Carmack

hat exactly is Cambodian cuisine? In a Cambodia’s post-independence royals were true nation impoverished for over a generation gourmets. Princess Kanitha Norodom Rasmi Sobhana by warfare and divided geographically across authored The Cambodian Cookbook, published in Wits diaspora, it’s difficult to surmise even what it was, the 1960s in a bilingual English and French edition, let alone what it is. For example, there is still no formal in affiliation with the American Women’s Club. It is Cambodian culinary curriculum taught in the Kingdom. considered Cambodia’s first cookbook — despite Instead, ASEAN programs dominate hospitality training, the fact it has not been published in Khmer — and incorporating a vast swathe of Southeast Asia fusion, in many ways is the prototype for the sumptuous The while equally focusing on French technique and recipes. Cuisine of Cambodia by Nusara Thaitawat, published A country’s cuisine is usually characterised by its in 2000. trade and ethnic influences, but there’s scant of this The Cambodian Cookbook predominantly covers to show in Cambodia today: little evidence of spice Khmer dishes, although there is no call for prahok island trade from the former Dutch East Indies (today’s or any of Cambodia’s other pungent fish preserves Indonesia), or seasonings from subcontinental India. ubiquitous in local markets. Prahok is rotten-fish paste, The Khmer Rouge decimated Cambodia’s ethnic often a year or more old, fermented into a much-prized minorities as much as its majority Khmer population, and cherished condiment. Because of its odious smell, while the ensuing years of civil war encouraged the it’s referred to as “Khmer cheese”, and many a confused steady emigration of all ethnicities and impaired the tourist is taken to a fishing village instead of a dairy to restoration or development of culinary arts. try it. In kitchen usage, it is boiled in water (although Not surprisingly, inaccuracies and generalities many a local gastronome eschews this safety measure abound in descriptions of Cambodian cuisine, both Morrison Polkinghorne and only soaks the stuff), sieved through a special “then” and now. Expatriates, such as the author of The bamboo ladle. At its best, it’s a stand-alone kitchen Elephant Walk Cookbook, wax lyrical about a cuisine seasoning, or blended with cooked fresh fish and “less sweet than Thai” when, in actuality, savoury Despite beef’s popularity, to this day Cambodia’s seasoned variously with herbs, lime, pork or coconut Khmer fare is very sweet these days. Wikipedia blithely fresh meat markets are largely divided between Muslim milk. All versions accompany rice plus blanched and defines making the country’s yellow, green and red Cham ladies selling beef and ethnic Khmers hawking raw crudité vegetables and edible plants and flowers, pounded kroeung — the foundation of most dishes — pork, chicken and fish. Country markets peddle and are essential to any authentic Khmer meal. as “blending spices into a paste using many ingredients wild boar and myriad fowl, snakes both skinned and A few of the recipes use the fermented shrimp like cardamom, star anise, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, thrashing, field rats, frogs and occasionally dog and cat. paste, kapi, which some food writers today eschew as ginger and turmeric”. In fact, such dried spices are rare. Insects are also a popular source of protein, including inauthentic. Equally surprising, there’s no oyster, soya Unlike Thai cuisine, in Cambodia “curry” is a misnomer, skewered and grilled tarantula-sized spiders (apparently, or bean sauce in any of the recipes. Likewise, there’s a as this type of dish is rhizome-driven rather than spiced. they’re delicious with a pinch of salt). Flying insects are paucity of spice except for the occasional foreign dish. Rare exceptions, such as Khmer kari, its most popular gathered nightly in fields, attracted to lights set up with Indeed, chicken in curry sauce is spiced with a mere version made with pork, might contain a pinch or two of plastic tarpaulin traps. teaspoon of mild curry powder, nothing more. curry powder, but saraman contains no dried spice at all. As for influence from neighbouring cuisines, look Given the considerable changes since The Saraman is a corruption of Saracen, an archaic English no further than the national dish amok, a steamed fish Cambodian Cookbook was published, one wonders term for Muslim (sarrasin in French); it’s usually beef- custard (often stir-fried to expedite execution) that how competing markets will affect Cambodia’s classic based, with chicken and quail alternatives, but never has makes for a perfect trifecta along with Thailand’s hormok recipes, still awaiting codification, when there is no pork. Compared to Thailand’s spice-imbued massaman and Laos’ mok. Cambodian equivalent to Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire curry, influenced by that country’s southern spice trade, China’s early diaspora dominated Cambodia’s capital to hold sway. Contemporary Cambodian restaurateurs saraman is a faint facsimile. Phnom Penh, in accent as well as cooking. These days, catering to the well-heeled international set are feeding It may be easier to define Cambodia’s cuisine by Chinese flavours still permeate the land. Oyster sauce a demand for ever higher-end dining experiences, but what it’s not: not too hot, not too spicy; as Goldilocks and bean sauce are ubiquitous, while soya sauce is authenticity is more the exception than the rule. And would say, “just right”. It tastes distinctly different second only to the regional fave, teuk trei or fish sauce. in a poor country where money rules the roost, it’s a from Thai, because dishes here are rarely assertive or (Remarkably, commercial soy sauce brands across all of case of chefs cooking what clients want, not vice versa. spicy hot, while connections to former French colonial Indochina are usually cheap and nasty chemical brews, Alarmingly, there’s a slew of trendy new expat “Khmer” confederates Laos and Vietnam are legion, and culinary while fish sauces largely remain traditionally fermented.) restaurants openly promoting recipes adapted to foreign marriages abound. Metal woks and French skillets vie against traditional palates. In a modern world uncomfortable with cultural Evidence of this can be seen in how baguettes fired pottery, and stir-frying often delineates a dish’s appropriation, consider this the last redoubt. remain popular in even in the smallest villages, plus ethnic origins. Indeed, traditional Khmer, Lao and Thai There are some authenticists to the rescue in the mortadella-like patés of pounded meat brought dishes are cooked over a lower heat in pottery, using a restaurant scene, notably Johannes Rivière at Cuisine together in the popular sandwiches num paing sach in wooden spoon or spatula, as higher heat is wont to crack Wat Damnak in Siem Reap, and Ly San of Kraya Cambodia, banh mi paté in Vietnam and khao jee paa-te the pot. Metal woks, introduced by Chinese immigrants, Angkor in Phnom Penh. Both spent years scouring in Laos. The difference: the Khmer version is sweeter, withstand ultra-high temperatures, allowing vegetables authentic recipes from the countryside. Surprisingly, with a drizzle of syrupy mayonnaise and saccharine and meats to be cooked over searing flame, stirred and and perhaps contradictorily, for the most authentic chilli condiment, but the mortadella, cucumber, green tossed with metal spatulas. everyday Khmer fare today, look to Cambodia’s second papaya and carrot pickles are pretty much the same the Phnom Penh restaurateur Ly San contends there city of Battambang. Cambodia’s north-west was region over. are three Cambodian food categories: royal, elite colonised for nearly two centuries, first by the Thais and Then there’s the popularity of beef across all of and peasant. Foodies commonly think royal means then from the early twentieth century by the French, former French Indochina, a meat historically eschewed upmarket and refined, while other experts contend until independence in 1953. But while migration to in Buddhist and Hindu lands. Typical Cambodian beef there’s more to the story. Just across the border, Thai other parts of Cambodia ran rife, Battambang’s inland dishes include the ragout-like khor ko, a sweet stew culinary writer Mom Luang Sirichalerm Svasti (better position allowed local culture to flourish, and to this day usually served with bread and sometimes noodles, known as McDang), himself of noble lineage, describes it is considered the repository, incubator and harbinger but never rice, and the signature fried beef loc lac that royal cuisine there as simply a matter of “no bones”. The of the kingdom’s cultural arts, cuisine included. I know, miscegenates nations in both name and taste. Indeed, recipes are the same, albeit refined, he says, while the because it’s where I live and dine every day. ☐ loc lac is also known as bis stuck, which refers both to cardinal rule is not to pick a bone with royalty. Imagine a mispronunciation of the French bif stek and Khmer a grilled fish whole, painstakingly de-boned then re- Robert Carmack is author of The Burma Cookbook and “about to faint or die”, or idiomatically “to die for”. assembled to perfection, and you get the picture. proprietor of Bric-a-Brac in Battambang

33 THE BOOKSELLER Ibrahim Tahir Peter Guest

Janelle Retka

o much of Kampong Glam is fiction. Pivoting “This whole area is an important area for print grandfather was a jeweller at number eleven, a few doors around the golden dome of the Sultan Mosque, culture, and because of the importance of print in those down. His parents, he says, referred to the area using the district’s roads are named for distant cities — days it was important for the dissemination of ideas,” the old names — Kampung Jawi, Kampung Haji — and SMuscat, Baghdad, Bussorah — speaking of links to old Ibrahim says. That all ended when, in 1965, Singapore the Ramadan bazaars were still held on Bussorah Street, Arabia. On Muscat Street, an archway commemorates was severed from the Malay world. Overnight, Malays people selling food from their front rooms. the long historical ties between Singapore and Oman. went from being part of the majority in Malaysia to the It was only after his working as an editor on a book There was no Omani community to speak of. minority in Singapore, with all that that entailed. on Malay history and culture that it dawned: “I realised The street names were decided by a poll in the early Many Malay intellectuals left, and Kampong Glam, — oh wow. We are right in the middle of it. Wardah twentieth century; the area’s Malay residents chose the whose position had already been in decline, slid further. Books is right in the middle of it. It was completely by exotic settings of bangsawan operas. Even the mosque In 1989 the area was gazetted as a heritage zone, a accident,” he says. is an orientalist confection, designed by an Irishman for decision that still rankles with some, as it meant that The shop sells a mixture of religious texts and local the British colonial government. It is quite possibly the families who had lived there for generations were fiction and poetry, with an emphasis on local voices, of only such building in the world with an aisle down the pushed out. Today, it is mostly just the shells of the which there are precious few, save for a few breakout middle and space for an altar. buildings that speak to the area’s history; the shophouses Malay Singaporean writers like Alfian Sa’at, whose “So many things are mapped onto this canvas that is are now hipster cafes and bars, design shops and Middle provocative plays and short fiction portray the oddness Kampong Glam,” says Ibrahim Tahir, owner and founder Eastern restaurants. Tourists queue up to take selfies of being a kind of foreigner in the country of your birth. of Wardah Books. with lurid street art. What made the area Malay has been “Whoever comes to our store and demonstrates the Kampong Glam is the historic heart of Malay mostly washed away. slightest inkling of any interest in heritage, I’m going to Singapore, a cultural focal point for the various It is not hard to see Kampong Glam’s fate as symbolic give them an earful about the history of this place … For communities and identities that have been subsumed of that of Singapore Malays themselves, squeezed on one good or ill, the shopkeepers here, the people who are here under that label. After being assigned to the “Malays” — side by the dominance of the majority identity that has every single day, are the ambassadors for the heritage. then a catch-all term encompassing almost all Muslims, often conveniently overlooked its Malayan history; on Some may represent it less well — we have a Seven- whether Arab, north Indian, Malay or Bugis — by the the other by a growing “Arabisation” of Islam. Eleven. But since we are placed here, we do have some East India Company in the 1820s, it evolved into one of “Slowly it’s starting to come back,” Ibrahim says. knowledge of the place, so we share it with everyone who the great intellectual centres of Southeast Asian Islam. “Malay Muslims are starting to reclaim Kampong Glam. comes by. It’s the least we can do,” Ibrahim says. The streets around the old Sultan Mosque were packed Kampong Glam is still an important area in the minds “Just our existence here is an opportunity for with print shops that produced newspapers and religious of Malay Muslims in Singapore. Primarily because of the conversations about Malay Muslims here in Singapore. texts both original and in translation, to be disseminated mosque. The mosque is an important anchor, a symbol The fact that there is a bookstore, that books are being across the Malay-speaking world. of Singapore Malays.” sold and read, signals to other races that Malays and At its peak there were five bookshops just on Wardah is part of that renaissance. Ibrahim opened Muslims do care about the intellectual life.” ☐ Bussorah Street. Now there is one, Wardah, half hidden the store in 2002. At the time he was barely aware of between the perfume shops and Turkish cafes that crowd the area’s heritage, although his family has links to the onto the pavement. area going back several generations: his great, great Peter Guest is a journalist based in Singapore

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