An interview with Nathan Law

ASIAN LITERATURE AUGUST – OCTOBER 2021

Robert Templer Anjan Sundaram Terror in China Street 390 Jessie Lau Phil Thornton Losing Hong Kong The Tatmadaw

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9 772016 012803 VOLUME 6, NUMBER 4 AUGUST – OCTOBER 2021

CHINA 3 Robert Templer In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony by Darren Byler; The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

JOURNAL 4 Rian Thum The desecration of Uyghur mazars

POEM 5 Muyesser Abdul’ehed Hendan ‘A letter to the prison’

POETRY 6 Dipika Mukherjee ‘Monsoon, Delhi’, ‘Sleep’, ‘Aphorisms from the Malay Archipelago’, ‘Keeping the faith’

HISTORY 7 Yuan Zhu The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives by Timothy Cheek, Klaus Mühlhahn & Hans van de Ven (editors)

HONG KONG 8 Jessie Lau For the Love of Hong Kong: A Memoir From My City Under Siege by Hana Meihan Davis

INTERVIEW 9 Koey Lee Nathan Law

NOTEBOOK 12 Thomas Kean Myanmar on edge

MYANMAR 13 Phil Thornton The Tatmadaw

THE STRAITS 15 Sudhir Vadaketh Thomas Separation

POLITICS 16 Michael Reilly Made in China: Wuhan, Covid and the Quest for Biotech Supremacy by Jasper Becker

FIRST PERSON 17 Jim Weitz Shutdown in Wuhan

ENERGY 18 Tom Baxter The end of coal

VIETNAM 21 Hong Kong Nguyen Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu

MALAYSIA 22 Marco Farrarese Ghost Lives of the Pendatang: Informality and Cosmopolitan Contaminations in Urban Malaysia by Parthiban Muniandy

STREETFOOD Yishu Zhou Home sweet hawker

SHORT STORY 23 Shih-Li Kow Under the circumstance

FICTION 25 Patrick Allington Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So

SOUTH ASIA 26 Sudipto Sanyal Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories by India’s Best Writers by Nilanjana S. Roy (ed); Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir by Malik Sajad

TRANSLATION 27 Peter Zinoman Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the American War and Its Aftermath by Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock (translators and editors)

LITERATURE 28 James Yu In your face

POETRY 29 Michael Freeman A Gap in the Clouds by James Hadley and Nell Regan (translators)

ANTHOLOGY 30 Tse Wei Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet by Ann Ang, Daryl Lim Wei and Tse Hao Guang (editors)

NEIGHBOURHOOD 31 Anjan Sundaram Street 390, Phnom Penh

PROFILE 32 Louis Raymond Bao Vuong

FOOD 34 Mark Robinson Tokyo diners

PHOTOGRAPHY 35 Farah Abdessamad Welcome to Cambodia: From War Zone to Tourist Destination by Paul K. Cummings

TRAVEL 36 Emily Ding Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre by Tim Hannigan

POEM Ghojimuhemmed Muhemmed ‘Sometimes’

CULTURE 37 Marc de Faoite Good Morning Towel

BOOKSELLER 38 Sean Chadwell Café of Knowledge, Luang Prabang

PUBLISHER & EDITOR Minh Bui Jones CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ko ko thett (poetry), Preeta Samarasan (fiction), Pauline Fan (translation), Abby Seiff (newsletter) DESIGN Jess Barr WEBSITE Nicholas Lhoyd-Owen SUB-EDITOR Allen Myers PROOFREADER Izzy Souster COVER Elsie Herberstein ARTISTS Damien Chavanat, Gianluca Costantini, Erica Eng, Paul Orchard Mekong Review is published four times a year; next issue November 2021

2 CHINA Technology and terror Robert Templer

DARREN BYLER In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony Columbia Global Reports: 2021

GEOFFREY CAIN The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future PublicAffairs: 2021

n 6 February 2021, the full story of what is happening to minorities in Xinjiang was briefly available to a small number of people Oin China. The audio chat room Clubhouse held a discussion on the detention of Muslim minorities. Moderated by Uyghurs and eventually including about 4,000 people, the discussion centred on the question ‘Are there concentration camps in Xinjiang?’ With what one commentator described as ‘an absence of … “Hansplaining”: Chinese-language discussions of Xinjiang which privilege Han perspectives’, the group had a mostly open discussion of the abuses against fellow Chinese citizens. A number of Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang described the environment there, with one calling the prisons for Uyghurs ‘smaller concentration camps inside a larger concentration camp Gianluca Costantini that encompassed the entire province’. Other Chinese from across the country described their horror at what they learned from their compatriots. Two days later, China claims that it is providing education to attacks across China, but most of these occurred after Beijing blocked Clubhouse. Uyghurs, teaching them to speak Mandarin, learn job crackdowns by the government. As Sean Roberts has You can still access the site using a virtual private skills and shed any proclivity to religious extremism. The demonstrated in The War on the Uyghurs, most violence is network, but doing that in Xinjiang is enough for you reality is that the camps are places of dehumanisation in response to state terror, and little is driven by ideology to disappear into a high-tech gulag. Having an old- and injury: one witness told Byler that they were forced or religion. Even if it were, there is no reason to believe fashioned Nokia phone is sufficient for you to end up to sit for so long without moving that people suffered that Beijing’s approach is useful. Few credible links have there too. Unsmart phones are more difficult for the prolapsed intestines. They are bombarded with mindless been established with global Salafi jihadist organisations. state to monitor, and so they are now discouraged. Not propaganda: party songs and endless loops of Xi Jinping’s Even if Isis or al Qaeda had gained a foothold in this part submitting to the panopticon culture might mean you speeches and tours. What real training there is focuses on of the world, their reach would not extend to such a large end up in a camp; being off the grid is in itself a cause getting them ready to work in prison factories. proportion of the population. of suspicion. The Clubhouse episode showed how any The very peril of gathering information under the The Communist Party has viewed Xinjiang through emerging form of social media has only the briefest life scrutiny of the Chinese state and the risk of a ferocious a security lens since the People’s Liberation Army took before the government shuts it down. Anything that backlash make the books both astounding achievements control of the province in 1949. From the start, there exposes the brutality of the Chinese state against its and illustrate the courage of those who have spoken were efforts to promote the ideas of permanent Chinese Uyghur citizens is rapidly closed off or countered by up or leaked documents. By gathering the testimony of rule extending far back into history. The core policy the vast and dedicated propaganda force protecting the those Muslims of various ethnic backgrounds who have line was to promote economic growth by increasing the Chinese Communist Party. been imprisoned or worked in the growing gulag across population of Han Chinese. Development was driven by In what is the largest mass detention of people from western China, Byler and Cain explore the intersection a paramilitary state organisation known as the Xinjiang a religious or ethnic group since the Second World War, of physical and mental abuses with the worlds of Production and Construction Corps, or Bingtuan for the persecution of the Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs and the technology, global business and Chinese neocolonialism. short. This organisation still dominates the economy of Chinese Muslims known as Hui brings together four The stories are familiar but nevertheless devastating. Xinjiang and has been closely involved in the internment strands of contemporary life: the surveillance society Hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens with no system put in place since 2016. The high-tech genocide and its facilitation by smartphones; the use of big data; connection to crime or extremism have been rounded is as much about the colonial domination of the global supply chains; and the idea that governments can up on the most absurd pretences and subjected to region as anything else; it echoes the US destruction take any actions against what they define as extremism. months or years of torture, hunger and deprivation. of its indigenous people and the colonial genocides of US policies after the attacks of 9/11, including secret The entire force of the Chinese state and its growing European powers from the nineteenth century. prisons, disappearances and renditions without legal mastery of technology have been brought to bear on Rather like Native Americans in the nineteenth process, opened the door for governments like that in a tiny proportion of the population in an attempt to century, Muslims in Xinjiang are confined to Beijing to apply the same policies without restraint. erase them as a people: from compulsory birth control reservations, albeit enforced by the digital might Beijing Two new books, by the academic Darren Byler and to the removal of children to ‘kindness kindergartens’ can bring to bear on the region. Step outside your the journalist Geoffrey Cain on what Uyghurs call ‘the away from their parents; from the imprisonment of designated area and a checkpoint will pick up on it. situation’, tie together these threads, exposing practices intellectual figures to the elimination of mosques and Attend a mosque and a camera will identify you and log that will send a chill through any reader. Big data and other physical manifestations of culture. The digital your presence in an enormous database. Travel and you AI are facilitating the eradication of Uyghur culture and genocide does not require the actual killing of Uyghurs will be identified and checked. Any sign of resisting this life in a digital genocide. This time they are not being as long as their language, culture and religion disappear. can result in your detention. Various lists have circulated eliminated, but their culture is being erased and they Racism underlies the campaign, but to legitimise laying out suspicious behaviours: using WhatsApp, are being forced into factory work against their will. it at home and abroad, the government has spread the growing a beard, refusing to drink or smoke, using the Constant observation by a modern panopticon forces idea that Xinjiang is a hotbed of religious extremism, back door of your house, reading the Koran, listening to complete compliance, breaking the spirit as much as the terrorism and separatist violence. There has been violence Uyghur music, covering your head with a scarf, in fact abuses inside the new gulag. in the province, and Uyghurs have been involved in anything that might mark you out as a Muslim.

3 ncreasingly academics are describing what is JOURNAL happening in Xinjiang as a genocide, that is, ‘the destruction in whole or part of a people’. It has not Ifocused on the elimination of Uyghurs as individuals but their destruction as a culture and reducing the Desecration birth rate. A legal analysis by the New Lines Institute published in March this year said there was sufficient Rian Thum evidence to meet the legal standard of genocide. The report documents high-level statements of intent by Chinese officials as well as six key policies that show the aim is to destroy Uyghurs as a people: the imposition of Han cadres in Uyghur households along with coercive marriages; mass internment of more than a million ome time between 10 and 17 March 2018, on a high a particular mazar, in practice the word denotes the people; widespread efforts to prevent births that have sand dune seventy-five kilometres from the town of most immediate, tangible manifestation of the sacred in resulted in a sharp decline in rates; the forcible transfer Niya, a beloved historical monument disappeared. physical and geographical form. of children to state facilities; the eradication of cultural SFor at least 450 years, the site had drawn pilgrims from The miraculous power of a mazar’s substance is and religious life; and the targeting of intellectuals and across the expanse of Altishahr, the southern half of visible in the habits of pilgrims. Women who seek to get artists as a way to prevent the transmission of culture. what is now variously known as Eastern Turkestan pregnant will sometimes reach into a crack in a mazar’s Some 456 Uyghur intellectuals and artists are known or Xinjiang. Pilgrims came to be in the presence of walls or a hole in the earth on which the mazar sits, to have disappeared, although this probably represents Imam Je’firi Sadiq, a founding father and hero who grasp the first thing they touch, such as a small clod of a tiny proportion of those missing. In most cases, had died there a thousand years earlier while bringing dirt or mortar, and swallow it. their families have not been able to locate them. In Islam to their homeland. At his tomb they wept, Such faith in the power of the mazar’s physical many cases, these writers, poets, academics, artists and prayed and gained blessings from contact with the material has been prominent enough to earn the musicians had been acclaimed cultural figures in China, physical structure. condemnation of reform-minded Muslims in the region, even winning national awards. None was known for The white-painted tomb had the shape of an as in the case of the early twentieth century critic Abdu political activities. Many leading cultural and intellectual ordinary grave marker, but on the scale of a giant, like a Vali Akhon, who complained about ‘common’ pilgrims figures have been jailed for lengthy terms, and some grave for someone six metres tall, resting on a platform ‘rubbing their faces and eyes on shrines’ walls’. Another are believed to have died in prison. A nearly complete fifteen metres squared. Some pilgrims wrote graffiti in reformist of that era, visiting Kashgar from Ottoman lack of information surrounds these cases; most have a wooden, box-like prayer house erected in the sand lands, similarly complained about people ‘rubbing their just disappeared. Alongside punishments for engaging near by, recording their shared presence with the saint faces on sheep horns … and on cow tails’ kept at the in traditional cultural activities, these disappearances in the very location where their society and their history shrines. Especially devoted pilgrims, such as a man I have had the effect of inhibiting cultural expression and were born. All around, flags and strips of cloth whipped met at a tomb in Yarkand in 2007, will sometimes sleep transmission by Uyghurs. loudly in the wind, thousands of offerings tied to various inside a mazar structure itself, in the hope of receiving The facilitation of all of this by technology raises sacred structures, testifying to the crowds of fellow miraculous inspiration in their dreams. the fact that companies have become complicit in the Uyghurs who had come over the years to venerate this These properties of the mazar stand in some worst human rights abuses happening on the planet at point of historical origin and connection to the divine. contrast to attitudes towards mosques. I have not been this time. The China Tech Map project at the Australian In the early autumn, pilgrims came in especially large able to document any similar interactions with the Strategic Policy Institute comprehensively lays this out: numbers, cooking communal meals in a gigantic pot physical structure of a mosque, even where a mosque it shows the links that major Chinese firms have to the and sleeping near the site. All of this disappeared in the is attached to a mazar. This is not to say that mosques genocide in Xinjiang. Most of the large Western tech middle of March 2018, leaving an empty dune. are not sacred. They provide a space of purity where companies are associated in some way with Chinese In the ensuing two years, the Chinese state has worshippers can engage in devotions to God, and firms. Cain’s gripping book shows how the destruction destroyed and desecrated Uyghur historical and holy the collective acts of devotional prayer can generate of the Uyghurs begins as much in the tech companies places at a scale unprecedented in the history of Eastern miraculous effects. In Kashgar in the 2010s, women in Silicon Valley and Seattle as it does in Beijing. Turkestan as a Chinese-dominated region. Among would line up at the exits of the Id Kah mosque and hold He shows how Huawei, the flagship of Chinese tech the demolished places were mosques, and these have out food for departing worshippers to blow a puff of firms, is at the heart of the repression in Xinjiang and received the bulk of international media attention. But air upon, lending the food curative properties. But here is exporting the model around the world through its another kind of sacred site, less legible to outsiders, has the curative power was generated by the activities and Safe City—adopted by more than 700 cities in more arguably been a more significant desecration. This is the personal traits of other worshippers, not the physical than 100 countries, according to the company. Xi’s pet mazar, a point on the landscape that holds particularly substance of the mosque. project—One Belt One Road—depends on the colonial numinous authenticity, a connection to and presence Authorities in Xinjiang clearly share some awareness repression of western China and developing markets of the divine that surpasses the sacredness even of the of the power of mazars. The circumstances of Imam for Chinese technology in recipient countries. Cameras, mosque as a physical structure. Je’firi Sadiq’s destruction show that it was the mazar facial recognition and databases are best harnessed to For many Uyghurs in urban contexts, mazars have itself that attracted the authorities’ attention, not the artificial intelligence and in the sphere of security, China become peripheral, irrelevant or entirely forgotten. But economic value of the land. The remote and barren is now leading the world. Huge amounts of data, mostly most Uyghurs live in rural environments, where mazars dunes on which the mazar stood have no other use. provided by private consumer focused firms, and vast have commonly functioned as community resources, Elsewhere, some aspects of China’s assault on sacred amounts of government support and investment have historical archives, arenas of dispute and independent spaces have involved economic incentives. More than created a global industry leader. But it is a narrow and social actors. At a mazar one can seek fertility or 100 graveyards have been destroyed across Xinjiang sinister use of technology and one that many countries healing. The pilgrim can learn about the history of the in the past three years, in some cases making valuable are right to resist. shrine’s buried saints, and thus of her own land. Local urban land available to developers or the state. But Je’firi religious leaders can promote their understandings of Sadiq’s destruction paved the way for precisely nothing. ’m writing this on a MacBook Air, and I read these right behaviour against the claims of others. And the Destruction seems to have been the point. books during my commute on my iPhone. I’m shrine itself can intervene in the everyday lives of its For decades authorities have been nervous about wearing clothes made from cotton that may have constituencies by entering their dreams or bringing rain. the large festivals (seyla) that some mazars inspire. Ibeen harvested by forced labour. Almost everything Mazars are nearly always marked by some physical Officials across China tend to be wary of the potential in front of me was probably made in China. I have no construction, ranging from high domes with green, for independent gatherings to create alternative sources way of knowing how my own consumption drives the glazed tiles to nothing more than a few flags on of political power or develop into protests. Across destruction of Uyghur lives. By making so many people crooked twig poles. Most are graves, purported to those decades, however, the state demonstrated that complicit in their actions, China has ensured that hold the physical remains of an individual whose complete destruction of a mazar is not necessary to nobody will act. Punishing firms that do raise the ethics accomplishments in life—whether scholarly, heroic or prevent gatherings. of garment production in Xinjiang adds to the pressure miraculous—are thought to grant his or her immortal For more than twenty years, authorities have to remain silent. Byler lays out the ways in which one personage a closeness to God that can be shared with the prevented mass pilgrimage to the only site more revered firm deeply involved in the monitoring of Uyghurs is living. Mazars can also be other points of transcendent than even Je’firi Sadiq’s mazar: the Ordam Padishah connected to US institutions. It is a chilling indictment contact: sacred trees or springs, footprints or stopping mazar, located in the desert outside of Yengisar. The of the direction of global capitalism and its failure places of holy people or the locations where sacred occasional lucky or connected party slipped through to respond to the ethical wasteland promoted by the personages disappeared. Such non-burial sites represent the police net from time to time (I was arrested when Chinese state. ☐ a tiny minority of mazars, but they demonstrate I tried), but the famous festivals of Ordam Padishah, the capaciousness of the term and the potential for with their tens of thousands of attendees, were killed points on the landscape to become sacred by multiple off. Based on my own visits, I can confirm the same Robert Templer is the author of Shadows and Wind means. Whatever the physical and narrative form of for Chūje Padishahim mazar (near Yengisar), Ujme

4 Rian Thum MarcelTraveller/Tripadvisor

Pilgrims praying at the Imam Asim mazar, near Khotan, May 2010 The Imam Asim mazar in 2018 mazar (near Khotan) and, more recently, Imam Asim destruction and desecration in Xinjiang are far more Uyghur holy places have suffered. The wave of mazar mazar (also near Khotan). Even Je’firi Sadiq itself had likely than the kind of state-led effort at recovery, closures of the past three decades was already a already been closed to all pilgrimage some time after remediation and reparations one might expect in a form of destruction. Mazars are continually created my successful 2007 visit, and I was turned away when context like Paris. As at Je’firi Sadiq, the land around and recreated through pilgrimage. Their structures I returned in 2015. The destruction was not needed to Ordam Padishah is remote and barren, and the shrine accumulate mass as pilgrims bring flag poles, cloth prevent pilgrimage; destruction appears to have been an has been replaced with nothing; destruction of the lengths, sheep horns, oil lamps, animal skins and other end in itself. Uyghurs’ most sacred site seems to have been the goal, ephemeral offerings. The offerings pile up and the Even when locked behind a wall of police roadblocks part of the government’s broader efforts to define and accumulated flag poles sometimes reach ten metres into and roadside informants, mazars wield power. They control Uyghur material culture and history the sky. The slow deterioration of wood, cloth and skin enter people’s dreams and give them guidance. One can Full obliteration of the sort that Je’firi Sadiq and testifies to the age and continuity of pilgrimage. The petition them from a distance or send personal prayers Ordam Padishah endured is not the only attack that constant replenishing of the flags and skins manifests the (du’a) in their direction, as I witnessed a man do after continued power of the mazar over its constituencies, being turned away from Imam Je’firi Sadiq mazar in and reminds pilgrims that their devotion embeds them 2015. Simply knowing that the mazar is standing out POEM in a community larger and less knowable than the circles there between the Uyghur-inhabited oases maintains a of their home village. Shrine closure interrupts this community tie to history and the land. I met one of the continuous production of the sacred site. handful of lucky Uyghurs who managed to reach Ordam A letter to the prison At the mazar of Imam Asim, near Khotan, it almost Padishah long after it had been closed, and she told me looks like local authorities share this understanding what happened when she mentioned her good fortune, –for Perhat Tursun of continual incarnation through pilgrimage. Recent standing outside a village mosque, weeks later. The photos show that the mud brick structure of the men she was talking to began weeping and begged to In the busy footsteps of the night or day they tomb itself was unharmed as of 2018. But the site collect some of the dust of the mazar from her jacket. To took you is unrecognisable. The associated mosque has been judge from publicly available satellite imagery, Ordam perhaps I ran to the corner of your classroom demolished. The mazar proper has been denuded of its Padishah is now gone, too. to listen quietly for a couple hours flags, offerings and wooden railings. The grave marker, After the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris was partly and when my thoughts shone for a moment which sits atop a low mud brick building, was previously destroyed by fire in April 2019, the French government I saw your depths invisible behind a forest of pilgrims’ flags, their poles began a billion-dollar response that continues today. your face wrinkled too early affixed to the wood fence on the building’s roof. It now Fallen stones are cleaned with lasers. Previously and the light from your life that was refuge stands naked, motionless and monochrome, shorn inaccessible materials are examined for clues that from life of the colourful, flapping attire of sacred offerings. can shed new light upon the monument’s history. The authorities have stopped one step short of total Scientists analyse lead from the fallen spire and trace its Some said you were alone obliteration. But they have crossed the wooden fence environmental impact on the Seine River and beyond. but you were never lonely into a zone that is forbidden even for most believing And a team of anthropologists studies the emotional Loneliness is not for you pilgrims, and desecrated the mazar by denuding it of its trauma that the monument’s damage has inflicted on Within you are books no hunger can extinguish external display of community veneration. Parisians and visitors from around the world. For friends you have thoughts no thirst can For officials who came into close contact with The many Uyghurs whose relationship to Ordam dry out them before the closures, mazar activities and Padishah parallels the Parisian and global attachments Within you speaks a justice no blow can injure: pilgrimage festivals made otherwise hidden troubles to Notre Dame would surely welcome a similar effort. ‘What would loneliness be?’ visible. Particularly at times of mass pilgrimage, The rubble of Ordam’s destruction holds abundant clues Your desert eyes fill with the river Tarim shrines revealed themselves as alternative sources to its history. Archaeologists could undertake tree-ring of legitimacy and authenticity outside the control dating of the sort that scientists have planned for Notre You always got up early, of the state. The crowds of pilgrims in group prayer Dame’s fallen timbers. Ancient refuse and offerings left why do they now wake you before dawn? demonstrated—not just to observers, but also to by pilgrims could reveal changes in patterns of worship You’ve always known hard questions, pilgrims themselves—the emotional power of collective over the centuries. Because many of Xinjiang’s desert why do they now bind your limbs action. The mixing of devotees from far-flung regions shrines sit on or near older Buddhist sites, Ordam’s and stamp out your fire? circumvented the ubiquitous state control of long- destruction may have revealed traces of even earlier In life’s harshest hour you will never grow cold. distance communication. Even outside the large sacred monuments. It is unlikely that many Uyghurs pilgrimage festivals, daily, small-scale devotions revealed inside Xinjiang have learnt yet about the destruction of Those who see you in winter the state’s tenuous hold on lifecycle rituals, knowledge Ordam Padishah, but when they do, emotional trauma will learn that for you spring is every day, production and medical care. In a more general way, will be no less acute than in Paris after the cathedral fire. that you heal our homeland with the spring. the architectural, sonic and overall aesthetic qualities Of course, in the case of Ordam Padishah, the You do not look to us through iron bars, of the shrine made it immediately clear that it was a cultural destruction is not accidental. The shortest it is we who look to you for freedom. world entirely alien to the self-consciously modernist, distance from Ordam Padishah to cultivated land is We do not read the books you wrote, ‘harmonious’ and totalitarian society pursued by the fourteen kilometres, over soft sand and high dunes. they read us to ourselves, Chinese state. ☐ The expense and effort required to bring equipment they bring you to our eyes. capable of obliterating Ordam’s network of monuments, Rian Thun is the author of The Sacred Routes of Uyghur mosques, rest houses and mounds in the open desert Muyesser Abdul’ehed Hendan History. This is an edited extract of his article, ‘The Spatial must have been substantial. The recent pattern (translated by Joshua L. Freeman) Cleansing of Xinjiang: Mazar Desecration in Context’, of government activity thus suggests that further first published in Made in China

5 POETRY Dipika Mukherjee

Monsoon, Delhi Aphorisms from the This house I have rented Malay Archipelago is melancholic, lights lopsided in an alcoholic In the fifth decade of life mothers are grandmothers, matriarch line of wobbly forms. of clans. Men unshackle, like hermits seeking caves, The door squeaks: Nothing detach to higher Nothing fits. calling. As quietly as the sweet potato burgeons so quietly It is a house of men; does the iron rust. I, of the east-west, modern-ancient, one lone, the other lonely. wanted to glide

The guard is a young migrant, like flying squirrels, from areca to date frond, certain his voice a nightly lullaby I caused trees to sway, not the wind. Moored distilling pain into a mobile now, a pea as the wind shivers a damp breath of reined-in rain. expelled from shell with no husk to shelter under—what is gravy if it doesn’t fall on rice?—even the agile sunbird I guess at words in the dark touches ground hear the sad music of sibilants and fear this city of violent needs. or is an aphorism, a cautionary tale: no matter how you chop water, it doesn’t break. But uncontained, what is water, but This house is at a junction, positioned murky clay at a poisoned Vastu. Crystal chimes clinker in the yowling wind. Everywhere evanescent cloud diminished the smells of feeding, feasting. to vapour?

Sleep Keeping the faith

The floor is red cement, cool Dear Father, in Calcutta heat, the borders black Mcleodganj is hallowed; the Dalai Lama’s diamonds under bare feet. home in exile. Spirits of British soldiers A fierce grandfatherly snore roam bare churches while the Himalayan wind, and the newsprint whirs drizzles bereavement. to the floor, stirred by a fan. Up the steps, creeping past Death in exile. Terrible certainties dog the mezzanine, the women’s room Tibet’s faithful fleeing to India, leaving reveals itself by a hushed giggle. family, home and language for Dharamshala: Home of the faithful. They are four on the ancient teak bed in a disarray of muslin Temple bells chime in McLeodganj as prayers petticoats, unhooked blouses float heavenwards, spun by hands praying for lost and jasmine-scented hair spread lands, His Holiness. Mandalas centre hope, on white pillows, arranged as faith is lit by lamps. a tetris of female forms. Mashi stirs slightly, pats the empty space Bulbuls call, kites ride the breeze. Nothing festive to cuddle into bare midriff. sounds merrily in this place of acute loss. Momo sellers, wrapping snacks at the bazaar, My mother is not my mother; speak of dead children. she is happy. Cyclical eternal knots. Though boots and guns The room paan-infused, opiates circumnavigate Potala with pilgrims, stupefy the breeze. Chest curves people dream of holy lakes with ancestors rising and falling. Buzz of flies, merging with the fish. the murmur of summer somnolence.

I pry open traitorous eyes again and again, until a gentle rain pitches me into dreams.

Dipika Mukherjee is the author of The Palimpsest of Exile and The Third Glass of Wine. Her next poetry collection, The Home and the World, will be published by CavanKerry Press next year

6 HISTORY Life of the party Yuan Zhu

TIMOTHY CHEEK, KLAUS MÜHLHAHN unthinking, uncompromising worship of reason that & HANS VAN DE VEN (EDS) blinded them to more humane virtues such as tolerance The Chinese Communist Party: A Century in Ten Lives and moderation. Xu concludes thus: ‘On May 9, 2008, Cambridge University Press: 2021 Wang Yuanhua departed this life with dignity.’ That was as much as any Chinese intellectual of his generation could hope for. n 1 July, the Chinese Communist Party The book’s other subjects did not fare well either. celebrated its 100th anniversary. Though the There is the Chinese liberal lodestar Zhao Ziyang, customary military parade on Tiananmen Square purged in 1989 after he went to Tiananmen Square to Ohad been scrapped in deference to foreign sensitivities, beg the students to leave before the tanks arrived. The in every other respect the occasion was marked by the urbane Wang Guangmei, once China’s first lady, was an sort of ceremonials that the People’s Republic of China enthusiastic revolutionary and architect of class struggle, reserves for the most important dates on its political until she was persecuted as a counter-revolutionary calendar. Festivities ranged from the solemn—speeches herself during the Cultural Revolution. She at least was at Tiananmen Gate, followed by the mass release of live restored to her rank and had her honour cleared during pigeons and balloons into the Beijing sky—to non-stop her lifetime, a fate not shared by Shangguan Yunzhu. A cheesy musical numbers on television, to the faintly bourgeois actress turned Chinese revolutionary cinema’s ridiculous: Nanjing held a free mass wedding ceremony leading lady, even the fact that Chairman Mao had for 100 couples on the day (party membership preferred). received her in audience seven times did not save her The CCP leaders who presided over the anniversary Paul Orchard from the Red Guards’ depravity. had every reason to be smug about what they have The two concluding chapters, on Jiang Zemin and wrought. From comically modest beginnings in a rented the infamous Chinese internet personality Guo Meimei, house in Shanghai’s French Concession in 1921, which during the Second World War. In China today, he is are less about their ostensible subjects than extended was raided almost as soon as the first delegates had invariably portrayed as an arrogant Western know-it-all, laments about the CCP’s authoritarian turn after a arrived, the CCP has become one of the most powerful which has a certain truth to it. Wang’s political fortunes, period of relative freedom in the 1990s and early 2000s. political forces the world has ever seen. It has ruled over such as they were, collapsed with the failure of the Jiang seems to enjoy his retirement, though what he China for seven decades and counting, in the process second united front: attacked as a worthless dogmatist— thinks of his newfound, half-ironic cult status among outliving almost all of the world’s ruling Communist even ‘dog shit can be used as fertiliser’, but his dogma Chinese liberals—surely an admission of their routing— parties, not least its Soviet ‘big brother’, which had once had no use at all, as Mao Zedong charmingly put it—he is anyone’s guess. Guo has recently been arrested again, been so dismissive of the Chinese upstart. It yet hopes was purged along with others in the party who were after five years in prison, this time for selling dieting to outlive the era of US hegemony and decisively shape viewed as being too pro-Soviet. Appointed to harmless products that have been banned in China since 2010, a the twenty-first century. But most of all, its leaders, sinecures, he went to Moscow for medical treatment in strangely fitting crime for someone who will forever be many of them the literal heirs of that revolutionary 1956 and wisely never returned. He lived out his twilight associated with the Chinese internet of that time. tradition, are secure in their belief that the CCP, the years in Moscow, attacking Mao as a US stooge, a relic The editors acknowledge the book’s tilt towards the Chinese nation’s chosen instrument to lead it towards of an all but forgotten age of international communism. losers in the party’s history, writing in the introduction its great rejuvenation, is meant to triumph because A principle had been established: the CCP would not be that the ten lives featured ‘show that there were history, in obeisance to the immutable laws of dialectical dictated to by foreigners. important alternatives’ to the CCP of Xi, namely a materialism, has willed it this way and no other. Then there are the party’s intellectuals. Wang Shiwei ‘liberal Communist tradition’ and ‘a cosmopolitan’ The editors of this little volume take a different was a gifted, cosmopolitan writer who translated Colette tradition, though they admit these ‘have been silenced approach. Instead of sweeping impersonal narratives, and Thomas Hardy, and who believed that ‘the work of for now’. From this, they derive a mishmash of they have opted to invite ten academics and writers to the politician and the work of the artist are mutually prescriptions: the world’s liberal democracies should contribute biographical sketches of people whose lives supplementary and interdependent’. In 1942, putting ‘pursue their [China] policies informed by the whole of are intertwined with the history of the CCP, one person deeds to words, he wrote caustic essays mocking Mao’s the Party’s history’, ‘treat the Party as the irreducible fact for each decade of its existence. The goal is ‘to make womanising and the class privileges enjoyed by the of political life’ and collaborate with the CCP when its the life of the Party more vivid, more understandable, party’s top leadership. His reward was to be sentenced to leadership ‘embraces its own liberal and cosmopolitan and more varied than the grand master narratives on hard labour as a Trotskyite; in 1947, he was chopped to traditions’, while keeping in mind that ‘the Party is offer’. In this they succeed: taken individually, this pieces and thrown down a dry well. Though he has been dangerous to provoke’. results in ten attractively written pen portraits of figures since rehabilitated, it is Mao’s vision, in which the artist It is probably true that the Chinese Communist Party mostly unknown in the West, but who deserve to be serves the revolution under the guidance of the party, is not going anywhere anytime soon, and as one who better known. Taken collectively, however, something that has won out. When Xi Jinping exhorted artists grew up in the Jiang era, I am bound to feel wistful about interesting, and perhaps unintentionally telling, in 2014 to ‘persist in the fundamental orientation of the party’s liberal paths not taken. Yet one does not need emerges, for almost all of the authors have chosen to serving the people and serving socialism’ through their to be a dialectical materialist to realise that the CCP is so profile someone who was, in one way or another, a art, no one missed his drift. successful as a political force precisely because, at critical failure within the broader context of CCP history. The other, Wang Yuanhua, was a Chinese intellectual junctures in its history, when offered the opportunity The book opens with profiles of two figures of the old school, whose virtues as a class were so often to choose, it always opted for ruthless self-preservation associated with the Comintern—the Dutch used against them by Mao and his successors. The over the liberal, cosmopolitan alternatives on offer. revolutionary Henricus Sneevliet and the CCP leader chapter on Wang, by the Chinese academic Xu Jilin, is The CCP of Zhao Ziyang and of Wang Yuanhua would Wang Ming. The Comintern did not view the early CCP, written in an awkward, indirect style: it is also the book’s have been better for China, but their CCP would not with its ideological heresies and puny membership, most touching chapter, because of all that could not be be celebrating its 100th anniversary the way it is this with any great hope; instead, it encouraged the party to said except indirectly. Like most Chinese intellectuals of year. At best, it would share the fate of the KMT, which collaborate with the Kuomintang through the formation his generation (he was born in 1919, a year after the May constantly has to fight for its long-term political survival. of united fronts. Sneevliet and Wang were both sent Fourth Movement), Wang threw in his lot with the CCP, More likely, it would go the way of its Soviet brethren, from Moscow to enforce the party line and to make the then was badly burnt in one of the party’s innumerable whose collapse the CCP’s leaders are determined not rambunctious young revolutionaries behave. The results purges in the 1950s. After the 1989 crackdowns, he to imitate. The story of the Chinese Communist Party’s were two short-lived united fronts with the KMT, both moved to provincial Zhuhai and spent the rest of his liberals and cosmopolitans is worth telling, but they of which collapsed amid much acrimony and bloodshed. life pondering what went wrong with the revolutionary should not give us any illusions as to the party’s future. ☐ Sneevliet, who disliked the ragtag bunch he found in idealism of his youth, coming to the conclusion that his Shanghai, was recalled in 1924 and died fighting Nazis generation of radical intellectuals had succumbed to an Yuan Zhu is an academic based in the United Kingdom

7 HONG KONG The cursed generation Jessie Lau

HANA MEIHAN DAVIS and does little to grapple with Davis and her family’s For The Love of Hong Kong: positions within the pro-democracy space. But it does A Memoir From My City Under Siege movingly capture Davis’s political journey and her Global Dispatches: 2021 memory of this incredibly charged moment in our city’s history—one that all Hongkongers will always carry with them. Her narrative encapsulates our collective few days ago, I was texting a fellow Hong Kong sense of loss for a disappearing home that was never friend I’ll call ‘Grace’, watching the sun fade truly our own. Her sorrow reflects that of a generation from the window of my London apartment, cursed and chosen, forever changed. Awhen she told me she had made what we used to say was an impossible decision: never to return home to Hong s I write this, an exodus is unfolding. Many Kong. ‘I want to come to terms with being in self-exile,’ of the thousands who make up this emerging Grace said, messaging me from the United States, where diaspora aren’t prominent activists in exile; she has supported the city’s pro-democracy movement Athey’re ordinary Hongkongers who have varying degrees as an activist. ‘I’m done living under that cloud of not of engagement with the pro-democracy movement, but knowing whether I can or cannot go home.’ are nevertheless searching for a safer, freer future. My chest tightened as I read Grace’s messages, which I’ve interviewed many such Hong Kong arrivals here came in short bursts of rapid fire. She told me her last in the UK, from young asylum seekers to pensioners, relative in Hong Kong was dying, and while in ‘normal’ from bankers to warehouse workers. Most have taken times she would fly home, the uncertainty of whether advantage of a new pathway to citizenship offered by she could do so safely has become a weight too heavy the British government to those with British National to carry. She was tired of living in fear of the Chinese (Overseas) passports. The documents, not recognised by government and wanted to do things that felt right to Hana Meihan Davis at a rally in Hong Kong, 2004 the Chinese government, are a colonial legacy allowing her in the moment, instead of constantly self-censoring those born before 1997 and their dependants to migrate in a desperate attempt to stay safe. handover, Davis identifies as part of ‘Generation HK’, a and apply for citizenship after five years. Their journeys As I sat with Grace’s thoughts, exhaustion rolled over label coined by Benjamin Bland in a book of the same differ, but all irrevocably bear the pain of being uprooted me, and I felt my body sink with a familiar heaviness. name describing children ‘born in the blurry threshold from Hong Kong. ‘Michael’, a protester in his twenties, Since Beijing clamped down on large pro-democracy of pre-and-post 1997’, with no memories of colonial told me that the thing he misses most about Hong Kong protests and imposed a sweeping National Security Law Hong Kong and little attachment to China. I’m also is his cat, which he left behind in a split-second decision last year, criminalising various forms of dissent—from part of this floating generation of Hongkongers, who to flee before he was arrested. He’s now in ‘self-exile’ and participating in informal democratic primaries to came of age in a time when local identity was fluid and seeking asylum in London. His cat is with his family, and singing protest songs—our home has been in free fall. blossoming, and were powerfully galvanised by the he no longer contacts them for their own safety. ‘Rosa’, State authorities have arrested pro-democracy activists, political changes that took place. It’s a generation that a woman in her forties who migrated so that her two politicians, lawyers and supporters en masse, banned was wrenched from the illusion of a stable ‘One Country, primary school-aged children wouldn’t be ‘brainwashed’ protests, overhauled the electoral system, censored the Two Systems’, forced to wrestle with the complexity of by Hong Kong’s schools, has been agonising over how film industry and shut down one of the most outspoken Hong Kong identity—and fight for the right to actualise she and her husband can return in the coming years newspapers in the city. it before we even had a chance to create it. to care for their ageing parents. For now, though, she’ll Thousands have left to brave a new life as immigrants. Perhaps more darkly, Davis also stands on the try to put it out of her mind and focus on finding a job, Many of the millions remaining are constantly asking periphery of what Hongkongers call the ‘cursed’ or she said, forcing a smile. She and her husband have themselves whether they should stay or go, while those of ‘chosen’ generation—depending on who you ask— interviews at a local supermarket soon. us who are overseas but still have the luxury of going back which refers to those born in the year of the handover. When I envision Hongkongers as an imagined are asking: when, for how long and if we should return. To some, they’re ‘cursed’ because their childhood was community, I see a floating island of people with their In this era of constant crackdowns that has become marred by unfortunate developments, from illnesses like hearts cut into two. One half is red and alive, the other the new normal, the ‘red lines’ of the security law and who the Sars epidemic to political unrest. To others, they’re black and broken, carrying visions of a home that or what is ‘safe’ in the city seem to shift by the hour, by the ‘chosen’ generation, destined to ‘sacrifice’ themselves doesn’t exist. One carries the weight of the other, which the minute. It makes questions of whether to stay, leave or on the front lines of the pro-democracy movement. pulls at us like a phantom limb, forever shaping the way return impossible to answer definitively. Trying to do so is Either way, they’re a generation doomed by fate; and this we breathe and move through the world.We are a people like attempting to solve a moving puzzle; every time you unspoken sentiment creeps over her words like a silent, tied together by the story of a city with boundless shores find all the pieces and fit them together, something slides looming shadow. of grief and longing; by a baton of traumas and distant out of place. The game never ends, and everybody loses. While Davis’s place within the city’s inner pro- dreams that we will surely carry to our graves, before The finality of Grace’s decision is a noose around my neck: democracy circle makes her far from typical, her journey reluctantly passing it on to the generations to come. a reminder that time is running out for Hong Kong, and through Hong Kong’s fracturing, post-1997 political I used to think of diaspora communities as snapshots a tightening realisation that no matter what we decide, we landscape is one that I, and many others, have also made. of singular identities and cultures frozen in time: people may forever be split, and never feel whole. In 2012, when Beijing sought to implement a national telling stories of places that have long moved on without With the mass exodus come a growing number of patriotic education, Davis stood with a ‘sea of black- them. Now, I’m beginning to understand that time Hong Kong exiles settling across the world, writing the clad protesters’ demonstrating against the proposal. The leaves nothing behind, and that identities and cultures origin story of our nascent post-2019 social movement protest was led by Scholarism, a group of secondary have always been—and forever will be—fluid, contested diaspora, trying to answer questions of who we are and students that included Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow, and changing. where we go from here. For The Love of Hong Kong: A who have both since become pro-democracy icons. At the end of her memoir, Davis writes about Memoir From My City Under Siege by Hana Meihan Davis was sixeen when the Umbrella Revolution Hong Kong as a state of mind. She says: ‘Hong Kong Davis, a journalist and architect raised by a family of calling for universal suffrage took off, and a university lives as long as its story does, as long as we are here to pro-democracy elites, is one such undertaking. student when the 2019 social movement erupted. At the tell it.’ Hong Kong isn’t and can never be dead, only Davis’ parents—Hong Kong-born political scientist time of the national security law’s passing, Davis and changing. The city’s story, both past and present, shapes Victoria Tin-bor Hui and Michael C. Davis, former her family were in the US. They remain there now, us as a community, whenever and wherever we are. And professor of law at the University of Hong Kong—are locked in exile, still advocating for their dream of Hong we, its characters, shape it too. Together, we’ll shape prominent pro-democracy activists. Her godfather, Kong democracy. it forever. ☐ Martin Lee, is a veteran politician known as the city’s For The Love of Hong Kong is far from a critical ‘father of democracy’. Born seven months after the text on the social movement and Hong Kong identity, Jessie Lau is a writer, journalist and artist based in London

8 INTERVIEW Carrying on Koey Lee

n 4 June, hundreds of people stood in the rain outside the Chinese embassy in London to remember the Tiananmen Square massacre Othirty-two years ago. Among them was Nathan Law, masked but still recognisable as one of the faces of Hong Kong’s protest movement. Although the crowd was small compared to the candlelight vigils Law had been accustomed to in Hong Kong, this was one of the biggest ever commemorations of the event in the British capital. On the same day last year, Law was one of tens of thousands who assembled in Victoria Park for the traditional Tiananmen vigil, in defiance of the authorities’ banning of the event on pandemic health grounds. Afterwards, police charged prominent activists, including Law and his friend and colleague Joshua Wong, for participating in an unauthorised assembly and ‘inciting others to participate in an illegal assembly’. Law didn’t wait for his trial; by the end of that month, he had fled to the United Kingdom. In a poignant social media post announcing his exile, Law wrote: ‘So I [bid] my city farewell. As the plane took off the runway, I gazed down at the skyline I love so much for one last time. Should I have the fortune to ever return, I hope to still remain as I am: the same young man with these same beliefs. Glory to Hong Kong.’ Law said that his decision to flee was made in haste but was inevitable and necessary. In May, Wong was jailed for ten months, while others involved in the 2020 vigil—including many of Hong Kong’s most recognised Laurel Chor pro-democracy politicians and activists—received sentences of four to six months’ imprisonment. Wong Nathan Law at a 4 June candlelight vigil in London, 2021 and almost the entirety of the pro-democracy opposition in Hong Kong are also facing a raft of other charges no longer publicly or openly gather for the 4 June vigil There was less than a month between 4 June and under the National Security Law (NSL) and for public or carry out any form of protest, the responsibility has your departure from Hong Kong last year. Did you order offences. If Law had stayed, it’s almost certain he fallen on the shoulders of overseas Hongkongers to keep think at that time that you would choose exile? would be behind bars today. After he left, he was named the memory—and the ritual—of the event alive. When the National Security Law was first passed, as one of a number of Hong Kong activists overseas everyone was analysing how ‘hot’ the legislation was wanted by the Hong Kong police for ‘inciting secession, Did you ever imagine that you would participate going to be because it would directly determine the risk colluding with foreign countries, and endangering in a 4 June commemoration overseas? of immediate arrest for pro-democracy activists like national security’ under the new NSL. Responding to Naturally, it never occurred to me that this year I me. As a result, I immediately had some thoughts about these charges, Law said, ‘I don’t know what my “crime” would be at a 4 June commemoration in London. That leaving Hong Kong, but there was nothing that could be is, and I don’t think it matters any more—[it’s a case of] day has been observed in Hong Kong for thirty years, considered a concrete plan or idea. “give a dog a bad name, then hang him.”’ and last year was the first time the vigil was banned, but Then later, when we pretty much knew what the Since arriving in the UK in late June last year, Law there were no police there to stop anyone from entering contents of the legislation were, I had to decide whether says he seldom attends public rallies, avoids crowded Victoria Park. Compared with the vigils of previous or not to go into exile. The whole process didn’t take places and sticks ‘close to home’. It’s a change for years, though, it felt quite different. First of all, there long, but it’s difficult to say just how long it took me to someone who until just over a year ago was the founding wasn’t any ceremony, and second, entering the park felt go from thinking about it to making my final decision. I chair of Demosistō, the pro-democracy political party a bit like going into battle. Because it was an ‘illegal’ thought about it off and on for one or two weeks before that he led with Wong and Agnes Chow, until it was gathering, you didn’t know when the police would come making the formal decision to leave. [On 7 July, Law disbanded a day before the NSL took effect on 1 July last to clear the area, so there was some anxiety and you posted on social media sites, confirming that he had year. However, the event to mark the tragedy of 4 June is were always on edge. already departed Hong Kong.] an exceptional occasion for Law. After several guest speakers had taken the How do the 4 June vigils in London and Hong Why did you choose the UK? microphone, it was Law’s turn. He spoke in English and Kong differ? First of all, the pandemic meant there were many Cantonese. As he told me later, being in a country like Hong Kong has always been the place closest to the places I couldn’t get to directly. When news started England offers him ‘the luxury of liberty’, a luxury that site of the events of 4 June where it was still possible to to circulate that I had left Hong Kong, many people he wants to put to good use. Hong Kong’s story must be hold a public commemoration. Before the ban, Hong guessed I had gone to the United States because I had made international, he said, and Hong Kong’s voice must Kong’s 4 June commemoration ceremony and sense of studied there and also done a lot of advocacy work there. continue to be heard in the international community. history were intense, especially the way the Alliance However, my thinking at the time was that US political When he finished speaking, the street outside the [Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic circles had basically reached a consensus about China, embassy came alive with applause. Movements of China] organised the event and its namely that they hoped to put pressure on China and Earlier that same day in Hong Kong, the convener specific traditions. Here in London, things are definitely saw it as a threat. That kind of thinking didn’t exist at the of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic on a smaller scale, but friends tell me there are more time in Europe, especially in the UK. Democratic Movements of China, Chow Hang-tung, people at this year’s London rally than ever before … Looking back to the beginning of last year, the UK had been arrested for ‘publicising an unlawful assembly’ I think it’s a good sign because so many Hongkongers originally planned to let Huawei be part of the local after she called on Hongkongers to light candles have left the city but are still willing to pay attention [to 5G infrastructure. The Conservative government also wherever they were in the city to commemorate the what’s going on]. I think keeping the effort going here in gave people the feeling it was relatively pro-China, so event. At a time when the citizens of Hong Kong can the UK could have an even bigger impact. when I was thinking about where to go, if I wanted to do

9 Laurel Chor

10 international advocacy work, I thought I should go to with British political figures and visiting politicians, What sort of self-doubt? a country with relatively more room for improvement, including Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of It’s hard to explain. Especially with the things I’m where I could have a greater impact. So, I decided on state, in July last year. He has also been busy writing doing, having a path or plan completely worked out is the UK. a book on ‘freedom’. As Law sees it, the work of making quite difficult. Sometimes I might wonder, would it be Another consideration was that London is a media international connections is ‘broadly speaking, more effective to do something now, or to do something and political hub, whether we’re talking about the UK about raising awareness’, about ‘making sure that else at some other time? I would like to try so many or Europe. So I consider it to be an excellent stage for international discussions are no longer just talks about things, and I have tried many, many things, but they advocacy work. trade interests … but also address the Hong Kong might not feel terribly effective. This kind of feeling is democracy movement and the persecution [of Uyghurs] very difficult to describe, so you could call it being in a You were in touch with local people in politics, in Xinjiang’. constant state of self-doubt. such as [the former governor of Hong Kong] Chris Patten and Priti Patel [the home secretary], shortly What would you say has proven to be most difficult Do you feel as if you haven’t done enough? after your arrival in the UK. How does the whole moment for you this past year? Definitely. I’m constantly beating myself up about it. advocacy process work? I have had various difficulties. First, it was hard I have a background as both a political prisoner to make long-term plans for myself, especially as at Having seen so many people sent to prison, do you and former Legislative Council member. Thanks to a first my status [here] was very different. As an activist, feel guilty? reasonable base of popular support, I’m able to meet though, I can’t see all that far into the future because the I do. I think it’s a kind of survivor’s guilt. No matter directly with policymakers and politicians. It isn’t international situation changes so quickly. how much you do, or how worthy you are of freedom, difficult, and it really does have some effect. I have many Another area of difficulty is how to keep my finger as a conscientious person, you definitely feel something. friends in local political circles who are keeping an eye on Hong Kong’s political pulse. If I don’t have a sense So, what you can do is to keep it from dragging you on China issues. of that pulse, it could make things more difficult, down and turn it into motivation. I hope I can look at With Hong Kong more or less always in the news especially when I want to get involved in some of the the many people who have paid such a high price and and the media continuing to have some influence, my really local political discussions. Ultimately, it’s always find that I can do more, that I can make their situation profile and the present situation in Hong Kong don’t been about influencing Hong Kong politics for me. better, even if it’s only by a little bit. add up to the hardest part of the job. I think the hardest I need to be tuned in to all the different emotions part is how we should keep this topic of discussion and the atmosphere there. I’m not saying I’ve lost the Is there anything you’d like to say to the people going after the recent surge of interest so that it won’t connection completely, but that I can’t observe any who have stayed in Hong Kong? be forgotten and we will still see it shaping China of the finer details and facts. It’s like wanting to be an I think you should always be thinking about the policy. In the long term, this may be where we start to anthropologist, but you can’t do any field work. small things that can bring about change. Don’t stop have difficulty. thinking about those things out of fear. Don’t be afraid Even though you have been in the UK for the past to do things because there’s a red line. That’s what I athan Law was born in 1993 in the city of year, in a democratic society, have you been worried would say. Shenzhen in Guangdong, southern China. His about your safety? Have you been followed? father was from Hong Kong and his mother I do worry about that, so at present I stick close What about to Hongkongers living elsewhere? Nfrom mainland China. His family moved to Hong Kong to home and go out as little as possible. I don’t go to You must be worthy of your freedom. Don’t when he was six. It often comes as a surprise how many crowded places and don’t advertise my comings and think it’s all over after you’ve left Hong Kong. We’re a of Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy activists goings, to the extent that’s possible. I might attend a community. As long as we are part of this community, as have mainland roots. The former politician and activist rally, though, as long as it doesn’t affect my advocacy long as there are still people going to prison and being Edward Leung Tin-kei, who coined the slogan ‘Liberate work. There have also been several recent incidents that oppressed, it’s our responsibility to shoulder the burden, Hong Kong, Revolution of our Times’ and is serving involved authoritarian countries targeting and hurting to help them out whatever way we can. a six-year jail sentence for his role in the ‘Fishball people who have taken refuge abroad, so that’s going to Revolution’ of 2016, was also born in the mainland and give me more to worry about, but all I can do is to be as How did you feel when you heard that the pro- emigrated to Hong Kong as a child. careful as possible. democracy paper Apple Daily was coming to an end? Law attended Wong Cho Bau Secondary School For the time being I haven’t had the experience of Naturally, when I heard the news, I thought it was and Lingnan University, where he majored in cultural being followed because I rarely go to rallies or public ridiculous. It wouldn’t happen in a normal society. Apple studies. During the Umbrella Movement of 2014, while situations, but it’s hard to say about the future. Daily enjoyed popular support, plus it was the only still an undergraduate, Law rose to prominence as one newspaper in Hong Kong to support the pro-democracy of the movement’s student leaders, alongside Wong What is your book about? movement. I know many of the journalists there. They and Chow, and was one of five student representatives The book’s central idea is freedom. I want to use were very good at their jobs and committed to defending who participated in a televised debate with government Hong Kong’s story to talk about how quickly freedom the media’s mission to monitor the government. For the officials, led by Carrie Lam, the chief security at the can evaporate and to warn people living in democratic newspaper to be forced out of business like this is a loss time. He was later elected head of the Hong Kong societies not to take it for granted, to be vigilant about for Hong Kong and Hongkongers. Federation of Students, and in 2015 he became the safeguarding your rights. founding chair of Demosistō, a new political party that My original intention for writing the book was What do you think it means for Hong Kong? was born from the Scholarism activist group and was my desire to gain more support for the democratic It means that the pluralist values we believe in have one of a number of post-Umbrella Movement youth- movement in Hong Kong by sharing Hong Kong’s been decimated yet again, that the regime has crippled focused political parties. story with a greater number of people. For that reason I society’s watchdog and is becoming more and more In 2016, at twenty-three, Law became the youngest wanted to write something relatively easy to understand. centralised. A listed company being shut down within person to win a seat in the Hong Kong Legislative If it reaches a broader spectrum of readers, then more a few days by freezing its assets and arresting high-level Council. A year later he was one of six pro-democracy people will read about Hong Kong. executives is also proof that Hong Kong’s procedural legislators unseated by the government, after Beijing justice is gone. The ‘rule of law’ has become nothing ruled that they had improperly sworn their oaths of What is your state of mind as you watch former more than a political weapon that serves the Chinese office. Law had raised his pitch on the last word in the comrades, such as Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow, Communist Party. phrase ‘the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region being sent to prison? of the People’s Republic of China’, thus making his oath I think it’s a very jumbled state of mind. I feel a As every part of civil society faces gradual erosion, sound like a question. Others had engaged in other tremendous sense of frustration and loss as I watch what do you foresee for Hong Kong’s future? protest actions such as displaying banners, or adding them go to prison or face various hardships, and at the In future, there will definitely be a gradual obscenities into their oaths. same time I think how difficult it actually is to have a restriction of Hong Kong’s civil society. It won’t be just In 2017, Law was sentenced to eight months in clear path for my international advocacy. The outcome a suppression of industries the regime considers thorns prison for participating in the storming of Civic Square of anything I do is impossible to see. Things may happen in its side, like the media and education industries, but outside government headquarters at the beginning from time to time, but I can’t actually be sure if it had a large-scale suppression of social movements, such as of the Umbrella Movement protests. He and two anything to do with me or my work. for gender equality, as well. ‘The great unification’ and other student leaders, Wong and Alex Chow, were When I see so much happening to Hong Kong and a high degree of centralisation are the new Hong Kong charged with ‘inciting others to participate in an illegal all the hardships everyone is facing, I think, have I done politics, and this trend is bound to continue in the assembly’. He spent two months in prison on Lantau enough? Were the things I did worthwhile? Could I short term. Hongkongers can only do their best Island before he and Wong were released after an have done more? It’s a kind of self-reproach, but it’s also to hang on to their existing freedoms, live in truth and appeals court overturned their sentences on a mental quandary. There’s endless soul-searching and not be assimilated by the regime or try to get blood out a technicality. self-reflection, sometimes even tremendous self-doubt, of a stone. ☐ Since landing in London a year ago, Law has been so whenever I see that something has happened in Hong advocating for Hong Kong in high-profile meetings Kong, my emotions are all over the place. Koey Lee is a journalist based in London

11 NOTEBOOK Myanmar on edge Thomas Kean

oe Soe Lwin was sitting in her car in Tarmwe’s Depending on where you get your news, the death In the end, the regime gave up, and simply fired crowded Kyaukmyaung neighbourhood shortly toll was later confirmed as one or two police officers— hundreds of thousands of state employees, mostly before 10am on 8 June when the gunmen fired it certainly wasn’t six. But the bombing of the truck, teachers and medical professionals. Their loss Stwo bullets at almost point-blank range. Within parked outside a branch of the USDP in Tarmwe is likely to cripple the civil service, particularly minutes, photos of her lifeless body slumped over the township, represented the most serious attack yet against service delivery. wheel were spreading on social media, along with regime forces in Yangon. Given the trajectory, it will no The CDM also encompasses broader forms of comments like ‘Go to hell’. doubt soon be eclipsed. peaceful resistance. Most people are boycotting Soe Soe Lwin had been appointed to oversee On the streets of Myanmar’s largest city, there are military-owned products or refusing to pay their Kyar Kwet Thit ward shortly after the coup, when the now few traces of the mass protests that engulfed the electricity bills. When the junta reopened schools regime began replacing administrators elected under country in February and March after the Tatmadaw on 1 June, for the first time in more than a year after the National League for Democracy government. seized power. Hastily splashed paint hides anti-military closures due to Covid-19, something like 80 per Ward administrators—along with their rural graffiti and slogans (‘We want democracy’) on both cent of children stayed home—an incredibly high equivalent, the village tract administrators—are walls and roads. Discarded bamboo sheets are a number in a society that places such a high value the lowest rung of the Myanmar state. Under past distant reminder of barricades that residents in many on education. military regimes, they acted as the eyes and ears of neighbourhoods erected to protect themselves. All that’s The economy, meanwhile, is in precipitous the state, and were notoriously corrupt to boot. But left of the roadblocks that once brought Yangon to a decline. A banking crisis sparked by ordinary over the past decade, the role had been evolving standstill are small piles of rubble pushed to the side of depositors seeking to withdraw their savings into one of representation and service provision. the street. and convert them into safer assets, leaving banks Local administrators now resolved disputes within Traffic is returning to something like pre-coup levels, desperately short of cash, has crippled business their communities and took the lead on Covid-19 and shops, restaurants and bars are reopening. If it operations. The economy is expected to contract by prevention activities. weren’t for the 10pm curfew and the long lines at ATMs, anywhere from 10 to 20 per cent this year. A third Since 1 February, the junta has reset the role, it might even appear as though life was returning to a wave of Covid-19 cases has also emerged in the past appointing military supporters to the posts and kind of normal. month, with daily infections rising from a few dozen reintroducing rules that require homeowners to The military regime has undoubtedly crushed mass in late May to more than 700 in late June. Most register any overnight guests. Administrators have protests, which are now limited to occasional flash medical workers and volunteers who helped the NLD often been involved in rooting out protest leaders demonstrations. But its brutal crackdowns, which bring the first and second waves under control last in hiding—Soe Soe Lwin, for example, had been have left more than 850 civilians dead, have spawned year are refusing to work with the regime. accused of informing on local activists. something far more dangerous and volatile: guerrilla For the battle-hardened Tatmadaw, this array of Administrators have become soft targets for anti- warfare on a mass scale. threats, both new and old, violent and non-violent, military groups who view the ward and village tract Since the killing of peaceful protesters escalated in is unlikely to be existential. But at the very least, structure as a crucial battleground. Dozens have March, thousands of young protesters have undergone the seething rage at the military’s toppling of a been killed across the country over the past month, training with ethnic armed groups in the country’s border democratically elected government, its brutal killing along with alleged informants—known as dalan— regions. Many have filtered back into the cities and are of demonstrators and the show trials of NLD leaders and supporters of the military’s Union Solidarity and putting their newfound knowledge of explosives and like Aung San Suu Kyi, threatens to make large parts Development Party (USDP). Many have been shot small arms to work, forming underground cells—widely of Myanmar ungovernable. in broad daylight. This approach, while crude, has referred to as UG—with trusted friends and colleagues. worked: in some areas, ward offices can open only Around the same time as these protesters were yanmar is in the grip of a long, messy when armed security is present; in others, the junta heading for the ‘liberated areas’ of the ethnic armies, struggle between forces that are intent hasn’t even bothered trying to appoint anyone yet. rural and ethnic minority communities began setting on destroying each other. Some have These killings, along with regular bombings up civilian militias to fight back against regime forces. Mcompared the crisis to Syria, but if the past targeting everything from schools to banks, have Armed mostly with traditional, single-shot hunting five months have taught us anything, it’s that given Yangon both an edge and an exultation. The rifles known as tumi guns, they have used their outside intervention is likely to be minimal. reality is that, regardless of the intention of those knowledge of the terrain and numerical advantage to Myanmar’s conflicts, though, hardly need outside responsible, anyone could become an innocent stage devastating ambushes. encouragement; seven decades of unresolved victim: caught in the crossfire of a shoot-out, or The parallel National Unity Government, formed by political strife are fuel enough. passing by a planted bomb at the wrong moment. Yet ousted lawmakers and opposition activists, has sought That said, there are glimmers of hope. By exposing at the same time, many of these acts are celebrated, to bring some sort of leadership and organisation to this the majority Bamar to the Tatmadaw’s ruthlessness because they undermine the hated regime. spontaneous uprising. Discarding the National League and brutality, the coup has led to a dramatic shift The targets of these attacks, now isolated and for Democracy’s long-held policy of non-violence, it in their relations with ethnic minorities—a process vulnerable, have started banding together, forming announced the formation of the People’s Defence Force that otherwise might have taken decades. Views have a network called Pyusawhti, after a semi-mythical in early May, and many of the new urban and rural even softened towards the Rohingya, who only a few Burmese king. Pyusawhti groups have been accused forces have pledged at least nominal allegiance. years ago were widely decried as ‘terrorists’. When the of targeting opposition forces. Communal violence In the background, of course, are the decades-old NUG released its Rohingya policy recently, and said along political lines feels, if not an inevitability, ethnic insurgencies—in the case of the Karen National it would grant members of the group citizenship—a then at least very possible. The polarisation is Union, a revolution launched in 1949, a year after previously unimaginable statement—the response intense, with very little space for neutrality, let alone independence. Since March, the KNU and the Kachin was remarkably muted. dissenting views. Independence Organisation, which have both been With so many moving parts, predicting how relatively quiet in recent years, have staged major attacks events will unfold in the coming months and years ix bowls of mohinga.’ on Tatmadaw outposts, hoping to recapture lost ground. is difficult. What is clear is that a return to the status The gleeful Facebook post, accompanied by Other powerful groups, such as the Arakan Army and quo ante seems impossible; too much blood has a dramatic video of a military vehicle engulfed Ta’ang National Liberation Army, have largely stayed out been spilt, too much rage unleashed. In its ruthless Sin flames, was not a literal order for Myanmar’s of the fighting, but could re-enter the fray at any time. quest for power, the Tatmadaw has let loose forces national breakfast dish. But this is not just a violent revolution. Although that may take decades to contain. In the meantime, It was a headcount, in Burmese social media protests have largely disappeared, the first strand of the people of Myanmar will be the ones to suffer, slang: six members of the security forces were resistance to the military coup—strikes by government yet again. ☐ dead. A dish of fish soup and vermicelli, mohinga is workers—has not. Threats, coercion and arrests failed to traditionally served at funerals. break the ‘civil disobedience movement’, as it is known. Thomas Kean is the editor-in-chief of Frontier Myanmar

12 MYANMAR The Tatmadaw Phil Thornton

n 1 February, the Tatmadaw—Myanmar’s military—mounted a coup d’état. Elected members of the ruling National League for ODemocracy, including Win Myint, the president, and Aung San Suu Kyi, the state counsellor, were arrested and jailed. The Tatmadaw declared a year-long state of emergency and transferred power to the head of the army, General Min Aung Hlaing. In the days and months that followed, countless citizens took to the streets to protest. In response, the military opened fire on the demonstrators. Video footage of armed police and soldiers assaulting and shooting civilians flooded the internet. The military spared no one. Young children were killed by snipers, dead protesters were tossed aside by soldiers. On 27 March, 107 people were reportedly killed by the army. By mid-July the death toll was 906. If the violence unleashed by the military on unarmed civilians shocked the world, it wouldn’t have shocked those who were familiar with the Tatmadaw. Operating for decades from the shadows of various state apparatuses, the Tatmadaw has spent decades Nic Dunlop establishing a climate of fear, using a vast network of security agencies, militia, informers and neighbourhood Soldiers marching in front of their commanders to mark the founding of the Tatmadaw on Armed Forces Day in Naypyidaw, 27 March 2007 spies to instil a sense of paranoia. Soldiers are indoctrinated to hate civilians, especially ethnic cryptography, guerrilla warfare and mobilising fifth The Japanese attacks in Burma were quick, brutal villagers, and brutality is rewarded. Today, its military columnists among independence movements. After and decisive. After months of intense aerial bombing, officers, including its coup leader, General Min Aung turning up in Rangoon, today’s Yangon, as a newspaper Rangoon was taken on 8 March 1942, effectively cutting Hlaing, are protected under an immunity clause in the correspondent—a cover that allowed him to gather off the Burma Road supply route to China. By May, 2008 constitution that guarantees the military amnesty intelligence on potential recruits—Suzuki launched a Mandalay was reduced to a burnt shell; 500,000 refugees for all crimes, including genocide. training unit of his own. Around thirty Japanese officers tried to reach India, with tens of thousands dying on the With this constitutional protection, the military has formed the Minami Kikan (Southern Agency) to train way from malaria, starvation, dysentery and drowning. unleashed its campaigns of terror—killing and raping— recruits and run espionage operations in Burma. By June 1942, the Japanese occupation of Burma was first against ethnic Karen, Shan, Kachin and Rohingya In 1940, while Nazi Germany attacked Europe, a complete and the British were driven out. communities, now against the whole country. As the rising nationalist leader named Aung San was taken While the Japanese forces battled the British and former Karen National Union politician, soldier and by Minami Kikan operatives to Japan. There, Suzuki their Chinese allies, the BIA went about setting up local scholar David Tharckabaw said of the Tatmadaw, ‘They convinced him that the Japanese Imperial Army collaborators to head village administrations. Now in have the true character of a fascist’. would help him be the one to finally liberate Burma positions of power, Bamar nationalists started taking That character goes back to the Tatmadaw’s very from Britain’s colonial chains. He returned to Burma revenge on ethnic people loyal to Britain. With the origins as a brainchild of the Imperial Japanese Army four months later and recruited dissident Thakins British defeat, discharged Karen soldiers returned to during the Second World War. ‘The scorched-earth (a nationalist group) who became the fabled Thirty protect their villages in the Irrawaddy delta, but soon strategy used against the Karen is based on the Japanese Comrades. This cabal formed the core of the Burma became targets of pumped-up BIA recruits, eager to army’s sanko seisaku—“Kill all, burn all, destroy all”,’ Independence Army—lauded for liberating the country impress and out for revenge. Attacks on ethnic villagers said Tharckabaw. and restoring its national dignity. escalated into an orgy of killing, looting and burning. Many books and studies comment on wartime The six months of intense military training Despite their lack of military professionalism, the Japanese military influence on the modern character under Suzuki and Minami Kikan instructors laid the BIA were welcomed by enthusiastic Bamar populations of the Myanmar army—unconditional loyalty to groundwork for the Tatmadaw’s brutality. The wartime as Burma’s liberators. In Breakthrough in Burma, superiors, obeying orders without question, training Japanese army drilled into its recruits unconditional Memoirs of a Revolution, 1939-1946, Ba Maw, Burma’s that brutalises its soldiers and officers. In a conversation loyalty to superiors and its dehumanisation tactics. By prime minister under both British and Japanese rule, with me at a Karen army camp on the edges of the Moei the time the Thirty Comrades finished their training, described the impact: ‘Those first days were like a prayer River separating Thailand from Myanmar, Tharckabaw swore their allegiance to fascist Japan and left to hide fulfilled. They felt as though they were being swept said that stories of the cruelty of the Burma army out in Thailand, the seeds of today’s brutal army had forward upon a tide that had kept on steadily rising officers towards its soldiers were true. ‘They’ve always been planted. since the first Japanese victories in Burma.’ been brutal. They modelled themselves on the Japanese In 1941, in the months leading up to the Japanese The legend of a BIA victorious against Burma’s [army]. Officers beat new recruits. The one above attack on Pearl Harbor, Suzuki and the Thirty Comrades British overlord was a potent one. Ba Maw explained can even discipline the one below with death. They undertook a blood ritual and oath to cement their that BIA soldiers ‘brought back to our people for a brief don’t regard others [and] outsiders … as equals, as loyalty to the BIA—ta-pyi, ta than, ta-meint, (one blood, euphoric period past dreams and memories, of kings human beings.’ one voice, one command)—still used by Myanmar’s and conquerors who had once built great Burmese military today. As the inexperienced BIA made their empire and armies. The Burmese army symbolized all he history of the Tatmadaw stretches back to way into Burma in January 1942, they made contact this nostalgia for the past and dreams for the future, and the 1930s, when Japan’s spies in British Burma with underground nationalist groups. They quickly so the people rose to welcome it rapturously.’ began contacting and infiltrating underground added thousands of willing, but mainly undisciplined, The rapture had a dark side. Though the BIA no Tnationalist groups. A Japanese intelligence officer, Bamar recruits to their ranks and went about setting up longer had an enemy to fight, Suzuki ordered them to Colonel Keiji Suzuki, received orders in 1939 to recruit underground cells in preparation for the uprising. Hideki maintain troop strength, letting ‘loose upon the country Bamar nationalists to help him destroy supply routes to Tojo, the Japanese prime minister, added substance to a swarming horde … with no one to attack, except their China from Burma. Suzuki had studied at the Imperial Suzuki’s promise to Aung San when he announced in own people’, recounted Ba Maw. For Karen, Chinese and Japanese Army’s prestigious Nakano School. Graduates Tokyo, ‘The aim of the Japanese advance into Burma Indians who served and fought with the British, reprisals learnt the necessary skills for running covert operations is to liberate all Burmese people from exploitation and by the BIA—which now included thousands of released in enemy territory—foreign languages, espionage, suppression and to support their independence’. prisoners—were brutal. During an armed clash between

13 BIA and Karen former soldiers, a Japanese officer close the Thirty Comrades retained control of its battalions. of Burma, notes in his memoirs, The Shan of Burma, to Suzuki was killed. In retaliation, Suzuki ordered Many of the Thirty Comrades were members of the that the Panglong Agreement signed on 27 February the BIA to burn two Karen villages and kill all their ultranationalist Thakin group, and as Japan moved recognised ‘the right of self-government and autonomy inhabitants—men, women and children—by sword. ahead with its plans, talk began to focus on how to of the Shan states, and agreed to the autonomous status Kyaw Zaw, one of the Thirty Comrades and a achieve independence from Burma’s newest colonisers. for the Kachin and Chin in the approaching unification leader of two BIA platoons, accompanied Suzuki to In response to the growing pressure to deliver on of Burma’. Myaungmya to retrieve his friend’s body and avenge its promise of independence, Japan on 1 August 1943 But that autonomy was never to see the light of day. the killing. In a 1997 interview with the Irrawaddy, nominally declared the British colony the ‘State of On 19 July 1947, Aung San and eight cabinet members he described the attacks on Karen villages. Suzuki, he Burma’. It installed a puppet government led by Ba Maw were assassinated. A political rival, U Saw, a prime said, ‘directly ordered my officers to kill everyone in the as chief administrator, and named Aung San as war minister under British rule in 1940, was found guilty of villages if they resisted. I ordered my officers only to minister. The BDA was to be reorganised and renamed planning the murder and hanged. attack resisting villages, for other villages my orders were the Burma National Army. In an interview, Kyaw Zaw said he believed the just to disarm them. I didn’t think many were killed Building on its Japanese militarist foundation, British to be responsible and listed three reasons why then. Only when I got back to Rangoon … I realized too the BNA quickly began to heighten its own Bamar he believed Aung San was killed: ‘Firstly, Bogyoke Aung many Karen villagers were killed.’ nationalist identity. In his memoirs, Ba Maw recounted San was the leader who could organize and unite the Kyaw Zaw blamed his youth and lack of experience warning Aung San that his army was showing signs of whole country so they were afraid of the whole of Burma for carrying out Suzuki’s orders for the Myaungmya militarist paranoia and contempt for civilian authority. uniting. This was the main reason. Secondly, Bogyoke massacres. ‘I was just following his orders. But I was ‘Remember that the army belongs to the state and not Aung San could reunite with the Communist Party of responsible for what happened and if I had some the state to the army’, Ba Maw told him. Burma. They were worried about that too. And finally, political experience back then I could have avoided the By late 1943, relations between the Thakin Bamar-led they supposed that they could handle Burma more whole massacre. Instead of killing all the villagers who factions in the government and Japanese militarists were easily if they removed him. These were the reasons why resisted I should have handled the situation better by deteriorating. Aung San, nationalists, communists and he was killed.’ just burning only a few Karen villages.’ socialist factional leaders concluded that if they wanted Rangoon police reports noted that British officers Former Karen soldiers retaliated against the real independence from the Japanese, they would have had stolen hundreds of guns and thousands of rounds slaughter of their people by attacking and killing Bamar to fight for it, as Suzuki had urged them. of ammunition and sold them to U Saw. The weapons villagers. The BIA responded by arresting Karen villagers All the while, the tide of the war was slowly shifting. were later found submerged in a lake at his house, and and holding them hostage in Myaungmya’s jail. Each day In March 1944, the Japanese suffered morale-sapping the guns that killed Aung San and his ministers were twenty ethnic prisoners were taken out and executed defeats to the Allies at Imphal and Kohima. When the found to be British army issue. Adding to the intrigue by BIA soldiers. The official report by the Myaungmya fighting had stopped, more than 80,000 Japanese and are reports that U Saw sent letters from his prison cell district office—shared by Ba Maw in his memoirs— 17,000 Allied soldiers were dead. The ethnic Karen and to British diplomats and intelligence agents saying that estimated that the army destroyed 400 Karen villages Kachin soldiers fighting alongside the British began to if they didn’t help him, he would disclose all. His pleas and killed 1,800 villagers in the massacre. The killing run riot against the Japanese, with a kill ratio of one to went unanswered. stopped only when the Japanese Imperial Army moved twenty-five. On 4 January 1948, the new independent republic into the Myaungmya area and took control of the BIA. The war had now turned in the Allies’ favour, was named the Union of Burma. But the fledgling The Myaungmya massacre would influence Karen and as the Japanese army suffered growing defeats nation quickly faced the danger of disintegrating as memories and shape the destiny of future generations. by reinvigorated British Allied forces, Bamar loyalty communists, ethnic minorities and army regiments For the Burma Army, meanwhile, the Karen and ethnic began to dissipate. In August, senior members of the rebelled. Amid the fractures, Ne Win, one of the Thirty people would remain targets for generations to come. Communist Party of Burma, the socialist People’s Comrades, was appointed head of the armed forces a Revolutionary Party and nationalists in the Burmese year later. In 1958 he became prime minister. Four years ith the defeat of Britain in June 1942, the National Army met to form what would become the later, he launched the coup that would end Burma’s brief administrative structure also collapsed, Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL). period of democracy. leaving a governmental void. BIA leaders, In early March 1945, Aung San and his army took For the next twenty-six years, Ne Win would rule Wsupported by Suzuki, pushed the Japanese military the salute and paraded in front of Imperial Japanese Burma with an iron fist, demolishing protests and command to fulfil its promise of granting independence Army senior officers in Rangoon. It was to be the last killing, jailing and torturing his political opponents. and letting them form a government. Senior officers of the time they would do so. Later that month, the BNA, The groundwork laid during Ne Win’s time in power Imperial Japanese Army, however, regarded Suzuki as an while still wearing Japanese army-styled uniforms, persisted for decades. Even after Myanmar began a undisciplined maverick who could no longer be trusted. demonstrated their loyalty to the Allies and turned series of political reforms in 2011 aimed at opening the They claimed Suzuki had lost focus and his promise to the their guns on their Japanese sponsors. The day was first country, the nation remained divided and the Tatmadaw Thakin nationalists had now become an obsession. Sugii commemorated as Resistance Day. It is now an annual in control. Mitsuru, an officer in the Minami Kikan, reflected that public holiday known as Armed Forces Day. It is only now—as the coup has exposed the horror growing unease, describing Suzuki as a ‘ruffian with an It would take until 24 October before senior Japanese of the Tatmadaw to the nation and the world—that there extremely strong personality … an outlaw … a yakuza’. officers surrendered to the British. With the Burma army are signs of a possible cohesion. For the first time, ethnic By then it was too late for Myanmar. The nation joining the Allies, the puppet government collapsed, and groups persecuted for their differences and Bamar would reap what Suzuki had sowed for decades to Ba Maw fled to Japan. He was captured by US troops in civilians hunted down for daring to object to military come. By now, the BIA ranks had grown substantially. January 1946 and jailed until the end of the year. rule are starting to unite and seek a way to topple their Estimates of its size vary from 10,000 to more than In his memoirs Ba Maw is scathing of the Thakins’ common enemy. 50,000, and it was composed primarily of ethnic politics and their lack of commitment to broad political Bamars. The expanding BIA was undisciplined and out ideals like independence. He concluded that the he brutality of today’s Tatmadaw speaks to of control. Robbery and murder cases were twenty and political landscape in Burma was now in the hands of decades of successful imprinting. And the father seven times higher, respectively, than pre-war rates. militarists within the AFPFL, who changed sides to suit of it all, Suzuki, would not be forgotten by his Alarmed at the lawlessness and ruthless communal their interests. ‘A great many of them who were in the TThirty Comrades or Burma’s army. Fourteen years after violence sweeping parts of the country, the Imperial AFPFL soon confused the revolutionary goal with the Suzuki’s death, Ne Win honoured the late leader and Japanese Army command blamed Suzuki and his revolutionary gains, especially when those gains were for members of his Minami Kikan with the Order of Aung protégés. Determining that Suzuki had reached his use- themselves or their factional following.’ San at the presidential palace in Rangoon. At a trade by date, they sent him back to Japan in July 1942. conference in Yangon in 1998, General Khin Nyunt, the With Suzuki out of the way, the Japanese military fter the war, the British set up a military powerful former prime minister and head of military began dismantling the BIA, culling what it called a administration to run Burma and rebuild the intelligence, paid tribute to Japan for its wartime criminal element. By late July, it had been reduced to country’s infrastructure. Elements within the support when he told delegates, ‘We shall never forget 2,000 and was rebadged as the Burma Defence Army. ABritish government and among the Bamar nationalists the important role played by Japan in our struggle for Strict entrance exams were introduced to exclude many wanted Aung San tried for war crimes, but, fearful independence … we will remember that our Tatmadaw former BIA soldiers from joining the BDA. The Japanese of his political popularity, dropped the case. He was was born in Japan.’ also set up an Officers’ Training School near Rangoon, asked to join the executive council, where he continued More recently, in 2017, Japan hosted the first visit intending to instil loyalty to their own war plans. his campaign for independence. In January 1947, he from a Myanmar commander-in-chief since Ne Win’s Japanese army instructors and bureaucrats ran the OTS, led a delegation to London for talks to make Burma visit in the 1960s. The army leader and senior officers cadets wore Japanese uniforms and the harsh training an independent sovereign nation. It was agreed and made a pilgrimage to Suzuki’s former home and tomb went from morning to night, with instruction only in awarded under the Aung San-Atlee Agreement on 27 to pay their respects. Who was that leader? None other Japanese. The framework of the BDA was straight from January 1947. than Min Aung Hlaing, architect of the 2021 coup. ☐ the Imperial Japanese Army handbook. Days after his return from England, Aung San Japanese officers had overall authority over the BDA, attended the Panglong Conference in Shan state. Chao but Aung San remained its commander-in-chief, and Tzang Yawnghwe, son of the first president of the Union Phil Thornton is the author of Restless Souls

14 THE STRAITS Separation Sudhir Vadaketh Thomas

he wildest Covid-19 border story I’ve heard efore the pandemic, I had worried about a involves a Malaysian speeding in her car towards Thunbergian world in which I could no longer Singapore, only to find a huge jam at the border easily hop on a plane to visit loved ones far Tcrossing. Arriving at six in the evening, this friend of Baway. But I never once imagined not being able to a friend had given herself plenty of time to make the visit Malaysia, which I can walk to in half a day. To midnight cut-off, after which foreigners would no longer fully appreciate this emotional, social and economic be easily allowed into Singapore and the complications dislocation, remember geography. Malaysia-Singapore of modern travel would kick in: quarantines, swabs and is not quite like India-Pakistan or the two Koreas. stay-at-home notices. With her family and job waiting in Singapore may be a sovereign state, but it’s actually Singapore, she had to make it back. just a city. Imagine if New York City was closed off To be sure, there is always some traffic on the two from the rest of New York state. Or London from the bridges that connect the Malay peninsula to the island rest of England. of Singapore. Memang jam gao gao, surely there will be There are Malaysians who live in Singapore, a heavy jam, a Malaysian might quip, combining three and Singaporeans who live in Malaysia. Every day languages in the most delightful creole phrase. Memang Malaysians cross the border to work; and Singaporeans is Malay for surely. Gao is Hokkien for thick or heavy. cross the border to eat, shop, visit relatives (including And jam is, well, not the strawberry kind. Memang jam the elderly in their homes) and relak in hookah bars, gao gao, but nobody expected it to be like this. banned in our nanny state. When she could finally see the drive-through Before the pandemic, some 300,000 Malaysians immigration complex, I imagine the same questions travelled every day through the throbbing arteries would have circled endlessly in her head: Why aren’t all between Malaysia and Singapore, boosting our daytime the gantries open? Which lane has the fewest family vans A trip to Malaysia in the early 1980s from the author’s family album population by more than 5 per cent. Though trade has with oversized families with too many passports? Why long resumed—some Singaporeans might starve without is that guy’s back seat filled with rambutans and keropok They’d serve fabulous Kerala curries—made with their sage bundles from Cameron Highlands and (it’s going to hold up the security line)? Should I signal younger coconuts, fresher fish, more intoxicating durians from Raub—the flow of people has slowed to before I switch lanes, or will the blinking light trigger the spices and more patient hands than we could get in a trickle. Our universe has shrunk dramatically. People driver behind, causing him to jolt forward and prevent urban Singapore—and once I turned thirteen, the older on either side have been left in limbo. Malaysia is—or me from moving in? cousins would let me linger on the fringes of drinking was—our Jersey and our Upstate, imagined backwater Am I going to make it? circles, from where I’d eagerly top up scotch-and-sodas, and hinterland, rolled into one. At 11.30pm she decided that her car would not stealing sips and snatches of dirty jokes, chuckling even In the middle of last year, a Malaysian friend who be able to clear the gao gao in thirty minutes. So she when I didn’t get it. used to live in Malaysia and commute thirty minutes to gathered her essentials, stepped out of her car for the In the morning they’d take us for bak kut teh, Singapore every day for work found out that his wife was very last time, and ran. literally pork rib tea, a herbal tonic that most of Muslim- expecting their first child. Cause for celebration! And She made it. Her car didn’t. We don’t know what majority Malaysia doesn’t eat, or roti canai, a chewy heightened anxiety about work-life balance. Today he happened to it. flatbread that everybody does. lives in Singapore, separated from his wife and newborn For her, for me, for all of us ‘Malayans’ who have We would trade in the stereotypes of our national a few kilometres away. Every few months he travels back long traipsed gleefully between the two, Covid-19 has identities. You Singaporeans are entitled and kiasu, to see them, which now (at the time of writing) is at brought home a truth about sovereignty: Malaysia and scared to lose; you Malaysians are provincial and lazy. the cost of four weeks in quarantine: two in Malaysia, Singapore are different countries. Get used to your post- It was banter that dissolved quickly in a melange of two back in Singapore. Cari makan, look for food, our Covid life—in one or the other. English, Malay and Malayalam, to be replaced by a phrase for the hustle. In some ways this is a deepening of a process that much quieter mutual admiration for the flipsides As I have sifted through stories of the Malayan began on 9 August 1965, when Singapore separated of stereotypes. traveller’s pandemic woes—such as Malaysian Chinese from Malaysia. On that day, my nineteen-year-old father, Singapore is uber-developed because Singaporeans in Singapore missing Chinese New Year reunions with his parents and his siblings were given a new national are go-getting, with kiasu as the motivator. Malaysians ailing relatives for the first time in their lives—one identity, one that formally distinguished them from the perceive their own relative economic sluggishness common thread is a strange feeling of guilt. In the wider family in Malaysia. His grandfather (my great- through the exchange rate, the source of much angst. In pandemic’s hierarchy of suffering, not being able to see grandfather) had migrated from Kerala to Malaysia in those days, I’m often told, one ringgit used to get them ah kong and ah ma this year doesn’t even rank. Just be the 1920s, part of a wave of south Indians to have gone one Singapore dollar (today just thirty cents). They’d thankful you’re alive. in search of opportunity across the British Empire. Over see progress playing out in my child’s hands: this year Though there have been government blunders in the subsequent decades his relatives and descendants Western Bar, the next Nintendo Game Boy. both countries, pandemic life in Singapore is, by any spread across Malaya, numbering more than 200 today. Yet ‘modernity’ at what cost? Singaporeans who objective measure, better than in Malaysia. Incredibly, I remember travelling to Malaysia as a little boy in spend time in Malaysia pine for the locals’ connection for much of the past year, Singaporeans have had a wider the 1980s. It never felt like we were going to a different to the earth, to family, to non-material things (the locus of travel—our entire forty-two-by-twenty-six- country, more like just the next district. Packing was a flipside of ‘provincial’), and for their joie de vivre, their kilometre island—than most Malaysians, restricted to a breeze. Papa would put some Malaysian ringgit in his ability to live life, to let things go, tidak apa lah, it doesn’t ten-kilometre radius. wallet; Mummy would get the special blue passports matter (‘lazy’). Objectively better, but subjectively? Have the that allowed us entry into Malaysia and nowhere else. There was a reflexiveness in our experiences, born pandemic’s stressors, including lost income, work- I would pack an Archie comic book and a Western Bar of the vagaries of postcolonial decision making, that from-home requirements and home-based learning, handheld video game for those moments in the coming allowed us to make sense of this world. We would live psychologically and emotionally affected Singaporeans days when I would want to be antisocial; my sister would vicariously through each other. more than Malaysians? dream up new ways to irritate me during the six-hour All that is now gone. When the border first closed, Perhaps my lazy, provincial cousins are actually car ride; and we’d be off. causing the friend of a friend to lose her car, we all feeling happier right now than kiasu me. But I can’t Soon we’d be in Klang, surrounded by relatives. thought it might be temporary, as if the neighbour next really tell from WhatsApp and Zoom. The only way After they had stopped teasing me for forgetting their door had boarded up for a quick paint job. With each would be to look into their eyes. ☐ names and I had stopped feeling guilty, I sank graciously passing month, we have come to realise that every city is into the tribe, the kampung, which offered comfort in beating to the sound of its own coronavirus drum. Just numbers, a necessary reprieve from the navel gazing that when you are coming out of lockdown, family or friends Sudhir Vadaketh Thomas is the author of Floating on a nuclear families engage in. far away are going in. Malayan Breeze: Travels in Malaysia and Singapore

15 POLITICS Ground zero Michael Reilly

JASPER BECKER aims was to accelerate breakthroughs in biomedicine, Made in China: Wuhan, Covid and and another to ‘strengthen cutting edge scientific the Quest for Biotech Supremacy research on … the origin of life’. We are similarly told Hurst Publishers: 2021 of the plans by a Chinese bio-engineering company to produce miniature pigs to sell as pets—but not that the plans were soon dropped after a public uproar in China. ype the word ‘Wuhan’ into Google’s search No matter, ambition like this in Becker’s eyes engine, and it will generate almost 75 million led to lax regulation and corners being cut in the results. It is safe to assume that, before January biotechnology sector, ‘which may be deeply connected Tlast year, it would have yielded a small fraction of that to the emergence of Covid-19’. That the Chinese number. In Made in China, Jasper Becker admits that, government and scientists are highly ambitious and on his first visit in the 1980s, the city struck him as such competitive is surely not in question, nor that some of a dismal place he vowed never to return. Having passed them are willing to cut corners in their ambition for through myself earlier in the same decade, I would not results. But they are hardly unique in this; South Korea disagree, though Chinese doubtless judge it differently. has had its share of falsified research scandals, while In their eyes, it is probably little different to, say, Kansas the UK has been known to boast of its accommodating City or Coventry, roughly comparable cities in the US research regulations in ethically complex areas such and Britain, neither of which, however, could boast the WikiCommons as genetic engineering. Becker also shows how US same number of direct international flight connections scientists were more than willing to exploit a more (twenty-one) that Wuhan had in pre-Covid days, one Wuhan Second Ring Road, 29 January 2020 benign regulatory environment in China to undertake reason the virus spread so far so quickly. Dismal or not, potentially dangerous research there, not just with the Wuhan was certainly well connected. believes were, or could have been, responsible. Secret connivance of the US government but with generous Since then, of course, the city has risen to global germ warfare research, Xi Jinping’s ‘Made in China financial sponsorship from it too. It would certainly notoriety as the probable origin of the Covid-19 2025’ strategy, Communist Party secrecy, the lack of not be the first time a Western government or company pandemic, although the Chinese government hotly adequate regulations or proper training, corruption has outsourced activity offshore to evade scrutiny or contests this. Allegations, counter-allegations, and more are all aired. Even the efficacy of lockdowns responsibility. The example of Union Carbide in Bhopal obstruction and obfuscation abound, not helped by the is discredited as a relic from the Qing dynasty owing springs to mind. fact that, as Becker notes, many of those asked to help more to an authoritarian government’s desire to control None of this is intended as a defence of the Chinese find answers—by no means all of them Chinese—have its population than to effective containment. To be government. Its reluctance to cooperate with the WHO, strong vested interests in not doing so, or in supporting fair, Becker does go more widely, raising the dubious its removal of information from databases and its a particular conclusion. Even US intelligence agencies approach of some US scientists who were more than persistent efforts to point the finger at responsibility are not yet able to decide between two possible causes: happy to pursue ethically dubious research in their quest elsewhere are hardly the behaviour of a responsible what might be termed the ‘innocent’ one, that it mutated for advantage, but even here China is ultimately culpable government. Perhaps Becker captures the real problem naturally and was spread by wild animals on sale in a city for providing the facilities and cooperation. It is all a in his observation that at an early stage in the pandemic, food market, or the ‘nefarious’ one, that it leaked from an bit like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot expounding China’s key request to the WHO was for help ‘in accident in a virology research laboratory in the city. to the assembled passengers on the snowbound Orient communicating … to the public without causing panic’. With such firmly held differing views, and amid Express: everything the Chinese government did is A government so concerned about the public reaction, wider and growing mistrust between China and the responsible in some way, so what actually triggered the one that spends more on internal security than on West, we will probably never know for sure the real pandemic is incidental. national defence, as China does, a government that fears cause of the pandemic, let alone identify a ‘patient Becker’s style is hardly that of a detective whodunnit, its own people, is not a government at ease with itself. zero’. After all, many questions about the origins of the however. The narrative flows easily as he builds up his Becker is right to try to hold the Chinese government Sars epidemic in 2003 remain unanswered despite the case from a series of seemingly disconnected, almost to account. But in his determination to blame it, he enormous research effort since. random, building blocks, but, far from leaving us in seems too ready to overlook the shortcomings of others. Those searching for a clearly identified origin of the suspense until the end, the approach is more akin to The British government was woefully slow to react to the pandemic should therefore look elsewhere, for Becker bludgeoning the reader over the head: one way or pandemic, for example, notwithstanding his view, and eschews an almost fruitless attempt to do so, explaining another, the Communist Party, if not Chinese society, is continues to source protective equipment and testing instead just why this is so difficult. On the other hand, responsible. His analysis and conclusion can hardly be kits from China despite well-founded concerns about conspiracy theorists and ‘China-bashers’ will find plenty faulted, but so persistent is the finger pointing that one the poor quality of much of the material. Similarly, here to reinforce their convictions, the title of the book is tempted to cry ‘Yes, but’—a feeling only reinforced by his praise for the Taiwanese response in avoiding a leaving no room for doubt as to where the weight of his the lack of references for many of his claims. lockdown was premature as the country now scrabbles suspicions lies. The line between fact and opinion is too often to contain the virus after failing to vaccinate more than a blurred, and the reader is expected to take too much on tiny percentage of its population. ecker knows China well, having lived there for trust. We are told, for example, that Chinese ambitions The reality is that few governments or organisations eighteen years. He also displays an impressive in biotechnology display a ‘mixture of low cunning have emerged blameless from the pandemic, and knowledge of viruses and their history, and an and vaulting ambition, hubris and nemesis … China international trust and cooperation need to be rebuilt Bequally impressive ability to explain often complex is willing to gamble big on new technologies’, and that urgently to avoid a repeat. Sadly, not only is there little matters clearly and pithily. But he seems undecided in ‘Chinese biotechnology companies were given leeway to sign of that but, as Becker wryly concludes, some of his overall approach to his subject: whether to focus on carry out risky experiments if it could help them steal the individuals and organisations found wanting in the the search for a culprit or source of the virus, or whether a march on their overseas rivals’. All this is supposedly response are also those who stand to benefit most from instead to examine the broader environment—social, reflected in the 2016 five-year plan, which earmarked the follow-up. economic and political—in which it occurred. The result gene-editing as a priority industry. Forget any ethics Despite its faults, this is a compelling read, a is a somewhat uneven book. involved if it gave China global leadership. So Chinese fascinating and authoritative book that shines a light on On the one hand, we are given a brief but fascinating scientists are allowed to conduct research on human the contemporary Chinese government’s attitudes and history of plague epidemics and of pioneering research embryos up to fourteen days old; there is no mention its often uneasy interaction with the rest of the world. ☐ in China into viruses, together with coverage of the that scientists in the UK can do the same. My own, specific events in Wuhan in the aftermath of public doubtlessly clumsy and inaccurate, reading of the plan Michael Reilly is a former British diplomat and author confirmation of the existence of the virus. On the other suggests something altogether less sinister, with no of The Great Free Trade Myth: British Foreign Policy and hand, Becker also gives us a long list of factors that he mention of gene-editing. Rather, one among many of its East Asia since 1980

16 FIRST PERSON Shutdown in Wuhan James Weitz

risa, not her real name, is a friend and former My parents said we bought too much. But I think it February until the end of March, I didn’t even open the student of mine from when I taught in Shanghai was a good decision. Within one week, the lines at the apartment door. fifteen years ago. She is a woman in her thirties, supermarket had become very, very long, full of people ‘At the same time that the world outside our Eoriginally from Wuhan. In March, she agreed to an who might be infected. apartment was dangerous, things inside were actually online interview in English, describing what life was like ‘In those first couple weeks, only one designated quite good. In the past, my father had always gone for her and her family during the Covid-19 lockdown person per family could leave the apartment complex to outside to play mah-jong during Spring festival. He in her hometown more than eighteen months ago. buy food. And they had to wear a special suit. But we did and my mother would quarrel because she wanted him This is one in a collection of interviews with people not have this suit, at first, so my sister wore a raincoat, to stay inside and help prepare food. But in 2020, his who became stuck or stranded during the pandemic, swimming googles and gloves to the market. performance was very good! He cooked for us every usually in foreign countries. The interviews as a whole ‘From 13 February until the middle of March, one day and kept us company. We cherished this time. He document how people from around the world coped person from each family in our building could go to lamented that when we were young, he did not have with life in new and very unexpected circumstances. the supermarket, but only on our own street. My family enough time to spend with us. The most harmonious Erisa’s is the only interview with someone stuck in their didn’t use this permission because we were afraid to aspect of living together like that was that we developed own country. It details, from an individual perspective, go out. Fortunately, people with access to food created habits and routines without setting rules. We simply what life was like in Wuhan as Covid-19 spread in the a food-delivery app. Every time we bought food from understood what to do and what not to do to avoid city of 11 million people, and as the Chinese government them, we bought two weeks’ worth, because we were bothering each other, without saying anything. implemented the largest lockdown in human history. never sure whether there would be food in the future. ‘When I watched the news on the internet or This is her story, in her own words. In the north of the country, crops were being destroyed television, I cried easily. There was so much suffering ‘The date is imprinted in my memory: 21 January by locusts, and people were saying we might not have and so many doctors and nurses working to conquer 2020. It was the day I went back to Wuhan for the enough to eat. the disease. It moved me so much, I applied to volunteer annual Chinese spring festival holiday. My sister had ‘If you chose, you could walk around the courtyard as a psychological counsellor. But this required that given me a call and told me that the stores in Wuhan and garden of the apartment complex. But the gate I go outside to be trained, and once outside I could not had all sold out of masks. I told her I thought the talk to the street was sealed shut with twenty-four-hour come back home. So, I gave up this idea, though I still about a virus was just a rumour, but she said that there guards. Food deliveries were dropped off at the ground had the feeling that because I was young, I should help were news reports that Dr Zhong Nanshan had gone to floor, and they would call us on the phone to pick others. People even younger than myself were helping. Wuhan. Dr Zhong Nanshan is a highly respected doctor them up. That was the only time we went out. From 14 I felt ashamed. in China. In 2003 he led research into the Sars virus. So, ‘There were four rooms: my brother’s room, my I went to several pharmacies in Suzhou, and they had and my sister’s room, my parent’s room and a study also sold out of masks. That’s when I realised that the room. My siblings and I worked remotely during the situation must be very serious. day. My brother is a teacher, and he would prepare his ‘My train to Wuhan was scheduled to leave at 9pm lessons in his room. I worked in the study. My sister, an that evening. When I arrived at the station, it was not accountant, worked in her room, and my parents usually like previous spring festivals. The few people who were stayed in their bedroom. They didn’t want to bother us. there were not sitting inside waiting for the train; they To fight boredom, my mother and father started using were waiting around outside the station with their masks TikTok to create art, to make jokes and even to dance. on. Fortunately, I had one mask for myself. There was My father danced with my mother very dramatically— a government notice that said anyone with tickets to he is not a good dancer, which made it hilarious! Wuhan could cancel their trip and receive a refund. I ‘My sister was very disciplined about exercise. She called my father in Wuhan and told him this and asked walked 6,000 to 7,000 steps every day. She would even him about the situation. He didn’t think it was that work on her iPad while walking around the apartment. serious. As it turned out, the situation was more serious At the end of the quarantine, she lost weight, while the in the northern part of the city, and our house is in the rest of us gained. southern part. He was a little bit angry, because all of my family members except me had already returned home. y the end of March, they had gotten the situation I thought, whatever the situation might be, it would be under control, and products were allowed into best for me to be with my family. So, I got on the train Wuhan again. The Chinese government fought to go home. Bthe coronavirus very effectively, I think. We could ‘When I arrived on 22 January, there were purchase products online from Taobao and other announcements on television that person-to-person websites. Deliverymen passed us products over the top infection had been confirmed. And on 23 January at of the main gate to the apartment complex. 10am, the city announced that Wuhan was in lockdown. ‘Wuhan opened again on 8 April. But before my No one could leave or enter the city, and all public sister and brother and I could leave, we had to find out transportation was suspended. the different requirements that different cities had for ‘One of my uncles, who also lived in Wuhan, had returning Wuhanese. I telephoned Suzhou to find out advance notice of the lockdown and drove with his wife what their demands were. They told me the policies were and children to a relative’s house in another province. not very clear and asked me to stay in Wuhan for one to But by the time he arrived, everyone had heard the news two more weeks. That was hurtful, because on the TV and thought that Wuhanese might be dangerous. They everyone was talking about how the Wuhanese were said that he and his family should not have come. So, heroes, but this was the treatment we received. I thought they had to drive back. They were allowed to re-enter the it was a kind of discrimination. city because they were Wuhanese. ‘On 13 April, after eighty-two days, I left Wuhan. ‘That was a very hard time. I was very scared. The When I arrived in Suzhou, they had me quarantine for infection rates were climbing daily. There was news that another two weeks. They also gave me a Covid test. we should prepare to remain in Wuhan until 8 March. When I finally went back to work, my colleagues were The first thing my brother and sister and I did was go to very nice to me. They didn’t think I was a virus. That the store to buy food and vegetables. Whatever we could made me feel I was not different any more.’ ☐ buy we bought, because we didn’t know how much more time there would be before we could buy food again. James Weitz is the author of Stories of the Stranded

17 ENERGY End of the line Tom Baxter

ust before coronavirus struck Wuhan in late 2019, it was business as usual across Asia for the unstoppable expansion of coal, the most polluting of fossil Jfuels. The region had become a final refuge for the coal power industry, amid steady pressure elsewhere for governments to take action on pollution and carbon emissions and the shifting economics of power generation. ‘Coal is still king in Southeast Asia’s power market,’ according to an energy consultancy. A year later, that was no longer true. Although analysts have been predicting for years that coal’s position in South and Southeast Asian power markets was unsustainable, no one could have foreseen how quickly it would fall from grace. Announcements of coal power plant cancellations, delays and reviews came in thick and fast throughout the year, while unprecedented numbers of banks—the lifeline of any power plant project—proclaimed limitations on or a halt to financing new projects. The largely unexpected net zero announcements from East Asia’s three big economies—China, Japan and South Korea—which Damien Chavanat landed within the space of about a month between September and October last year, have also reset the dynamics of the power sector. can have a lifespan of at least forty years, meaning plants four of those countries, that is expected to shrink to Energy production contributes around 70 per cent of entering construction now could still be operating in 25 gigawatts this year, according to an analysis by the annual greenhouse gas emissions, of which the generation the second half of the century, putting paid to any hopes Global Energy Monitor. of electricity is of central and growing importance. of achieving the rapid transition away from fossil fuels It started with a surprise comment by Nasrul With demand on the rise, the question of how and required by Paris. Hamid, the Bangladeshi minister of power, energy from what sources electricity is generated has become A 2019 report from Tsinghua University outlined and mineral resources, on a webinar in June. ‘We are critical to the future of society. The issue is amplified in the situation. Analysing the economic trajectories of the keeping the three coal-fired power plants that are under Asia, where many countries are developing rapidly and 126 countries that are officially signed up to China’s Belt construction. At present, we are aiming for [40 to 41 increasing energy-intensive economic activities. Vietnam and Road Initiative—which includes all major South and gigawatts of total generation capacity], where only and Indonesia, for example, are both trying to position Southeast Asian economies, except India—the report 5 gigawatts is coal based,’ he said. ‘We are reviewing themselves to absorb some of the ‘manufacturer of the found that, unless development pathways change soon, how we can move from coal-based power plants.’ That world’ role that is starting to leak away from China. their emissions could account for 2.7 degrees Celsius of statement put in doubt the future of nearly 23 gigawatts The plan has been to meet this demand with global warming, even if all other countries align with worth of planned coal power plants. The review has coal, which is in ready supply in the region, Australia the Paris Agreement’s 2 degree target. That terrifying since been formalised and is reportedly waiting for and Indonesia being two of the largest producers. prospect underlines just how important it is to shift the prime minister’s approval, which will scrap up to Burning highly calorific coal for energy was, after all, power generation away from coal and other fossil fuels. twenty-six planned plants. central to how both Western countries and East Asian Second, the economic logic of coal power has shifted Next came Vietnam, a country that has pursued ‘dragons’ such as China and South Korea achieved radically, especially given the plummeting costs of carbon-intensive development for decades. Early drafts industrialisation and rapid economic growth, albeit solar power. It is more than just the climate community of its next Power Development Plan, due to come along with millions of premature deaths from air positing the benefits of clean, renewable energy. Wood into place later this year, became public in July last pollution and uncounted environmental costs. From Mackenzie, the consultancy that in 2019 opined that year, revealing that state planners intend to cancel or the perspective of GDP growth, though, coal-powered ‘coal is king’ in Southeast Asia, recently noted that by postpone almost half of their coal power plants. industrialisation is a proven model. 2030 renewables will be the most cost-efficient means In November the Philippines Department of Energy But the world changes, and past ideas cannot always for Asian economies to meet their growing power proposed a moratorium on new coal power plants. be copied and pasted into the twenty-first century. demands. Constructing coal power plants entails large and in December, on the fifth anniversary of the Paris The headwinds have started blowing for coal. First, investments and loans. The Nam Dinh and Duyen Hai Agreement, Pakistan’s Imran Khan announced at the burning coal is immensely polluting, releasing carbon power plants in Vietnam, for example, both sought UN that his country would not construct any new coal dioxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide and a host US$1.8 billion loans from China’s state banks. Once plants. Across Asia it is now only China and Indonesia of other harmful emissions. At a local level, this has operating, the plants have to purchase a steady stream that represent final bulwarks of coal power. caused pushback against coal power. Communities from of high-quality coal. In contrast, phase five of the The pillars of support were shaky on the ‘supply’ Vietnam to Pakistan to Indonesia to Bangladesh have world’s largest solar power plant near Dubai required side too last year. For the past few decades, finance and protested against coal plants. Coal power plants have led US$564 million to construct a similar amount of construction services for coal power plants in Asia have to toxic ash settling on their fields and homes, disrupted generating capacity. Its source for electricity generation been in ready, even enthusiastic, supply from Chinese, fishing grounds, depleted groundwater supplies and is of course both free and isolated from the vagaries of Japanese, South Korean and Singaporean investors. To formed inescapable and life-shortening smog. global markets. date, financing from the three big East Asian economies At a planetary level, the climate targets agreed on The pandemic and its economic impacts provided has supported more than 84 gigawatts worth of coal by the world six years ago in Paris, weak though they the pin that popped the coal bubble. Suddenly power power projects outside their borders. often seem, made it abundantly clear that coal must be demand forecasts looked less certain, the debts incurred That stream of money is drying up. Last year alone, the first fossil fuel to go if we are to stand any chance by expensive coal power projects less manageable and three Japanese banks, six South Korean financial of limiting warming. In fact, the UN secretary-general the efficiency of new technologies more appealing. institutions and insurers, including the state-led Korean spent much of last year calling for an immediate end to At the start of last year the total capacity of planned Ex-Im Bank and K-sure, and major investors such coal power—‘no new coal after 2020’ was his clear and coal-fired power plants in four of the biggest coal as Samsung all announced restrictions or an end to repeated message. proponents in the region—Bangladesh, Indonesia, the involvement in coal power projects overseas. In July the Asian economies still building coal power plants risk Philippines and Vietnam—stood at nearly 75 gigawatts. Japaneses environment minister said that the country what analysts call ‘carbon lock-in’. A coal power plant On the back of cancellation announcements in all would ‘in principle’ end its public financing of overseas

18 coal power plants. Despite resistance from the country’s The political economy of coal and other fossil fuels is powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry, intricately meshed with bureaucratic structures, political the new prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, confirmed the and corporate interest groups and theories of economic policy shift in his first bilateral meeting with President development. The coming decade will continue the Biden in March this year. One month later—and also tussle between fossil and clean, old and new. presumably under pressure from the US—the South In Southeast Asia, there are still a significant number Korean government followed suit. ‘To become carbon of coal power plants under development, particularly neutral, it is imperative for the world to scale down coal- in Indonesia, which has strong vested interests in coal, fired power plants,’ President Moon acknowledged. reserves of which it has in plenty. There, twenty-four coal power plants are still under construction and, ast year’s wave of commitments comes on the though the government has recently said it is aiming back of Singapore’s three biggest banks ending the for carbon neutrality by 2070, it shows no sign of financing of coal power plants in 2019. That leaves halting their construction. As a number of Indonesian LChina as the remaining ‘financier of last resort’ for coal investigative journalists and documentary makers have power. And open to business it is. As of 2018, China’s shown, the coal mining industry has a deep hold on the two major state-led banks are behind US$51.8 billion of state and government decision making. financing for coal-based energy projects outside China, Meanwhile, in Vietnam, where public pressure, according to statistics from Boston University. This year, inability to find financing and shifting economic realities it has been reported that Chinese companies will step in caused five coal power plants to be shelved last year, to complete a coal power plant in southern Vietnam that another seven are under much-delayed construction Mitsubishi recently pulled out of. and, according to the draft of the country’s long- But even Chinese investments may be changing. term power sector plan, even more will come into Last year Chinese companies investing in energy sectors construction after 2030—an unlikely, though worrying, along the Belt and Road Initiative for the first time put scenario. That draft plan has also done its best to cap more money into non-fossil than fossil fuel projects. the country’s rooftop solar boom by targeting next to Something more proactive may be afoot in China zero new installations over the next decade. Market too. In December the Chinese Ministry of Ecology forces may prove mightier than the pen of policymakers and Environment endorsed a ‘project classification here, however. Two of Asean’s smaller economies, mechanism’ developed by a coalition of analysts and Cambodia and Laos, are also driving against the regional think tanks which ‘red lighted’ overseas coal mining headwinds in an expansion of coal power. and coal power investments. If adopted, the mechanism A second major concern is that much of the region, would ban Chinese involvement in coal-related projects while shifting away from polluting coal power, is seeking along the Belt and Road. Whether it is adopted and in gas as an alternative. Though not particularly polluting what form is the big question now, however. To have in local vicinities, gas is horribly polluting where it is teeth, the classification mechanism would have to be extracted and a major emitter of methane, a highly endorsed and implemented by the most powerful of potent and under-acknowledged greenhouse gas, from ministries within the opaque Chinese bureaucracy. its extraction to transportation to end use. Without doubt there is also strong pushback from In China, the post-Covid economic rebound that the state-owned construction companies—and the government is so boastful of has been anything but their government backers—who stand to profit from green. Last year coal consumption increased and steel overseas projects. production, the country’s largest burner of coal, reached From 2017 to last year, 4.5 times as much China- record highs. If data wasn’t enough to tell the story, backed coal power capacity around the world was the thick grey air that hung over Beijing over Chinese cancelled or shelved as actually entered construction. new year and during the government’s Two Sessions As we wait for signs and signals on whether China will meetings made it clear that this is a carbon-intensive begin to take proactive measures to restrict overseas economic recovery, Xi’s ‘far-reaching transformation’ of coal investments, this trend of projects being axed the economy postponed to another day. will continue. That we are in a situation of two steps forward for Within the space of just over a month last year, the every one step back is better than most would have three major Asian economies—three of the biggest expected, and a glimmer of hope for the world in such a emitters of carbon in the world—declared that they dark time. But that the planet’s remaining carbon budget would decarbonise their economies, aiming to be carbon is close to zero while emissions continue to rise shows neutral by 2050 in the case of Japan and South Korea, how desperate the climate crisis is. and 2060 in the case of China. The order in which these announcements came was extraordinary too. First fter a year-long hiatus, the stage on which China, once an infamous ‘climate villain’, then Japan, global leaders can and must agree to scale up then South Korea—the opposite order most analysts their action on decarbonisation will be held in would have expected. AGlasgow in November. While the bulk of the negotiations These economies together accounting for more than will focus on the so-called Paris Rulebook—working one-third of total global emissions, the announcements out the technical details of how the agreement should are game changing. In all countries it will mean a rapid be implemented—global attention will be on countries scaling back and ultimately phasing out of coal power, upgrading their emission reduction commitments while wind and solar power are in for decades more and, critically, for regions such as South and Southeast of boom. As outlined at a recent high-level Chinese Asia, wealthy countries’ climate finance commitments. Communist Party meeting, the country should undergo Climate finance aims to transfer desperately needed a ‘far-reaching, systemic socioeconomic transformation funds from developed to developing countries for … [and build] a new generation power system with projects and initiatives related to decarbonisation, renewables at the centre’. mitigation of climate impacts on local populations The three countries’ extensive overseas investments and supporting adaptation to climate change. So far, will not remain isolated from this transformation. committed climate finance has fallen far short of the Pressure will increase for them to align their promised US$100 billion a year, and the growth rate domestic and overseas economic visions. A ‘letter of annual contributions has been slipping. As climate of recommendations on international coal power change begins to affect the world and decarbonisation of projects’ published on WeChat by an anonymous the economy finally becomes a global priority, renewed coal power plant engineer in March noted that ‘the commitments to meet this cost are critical. For Asia, such “boss” [President Xi] has made clear the grand goals of financial commitment could prove one more nail in the carbon peaking by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. coffin of coal. ☐ Moreover, this is one of very few areas where he is able to speak with Biden … At this critical moment, I urge Tom Baxter is co-editor of the Belt and Road blog, Panda investors in overseas coal power plants to reconsider.’ Paw Dragon Claw

19 Don’t just take our word for it.

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20 VIETNAM Save our skins Hong Kong Nguyen

THUY LINH NGUYEN TU Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam Duke University Press: 2021

he traumatic effects of the Vietnam War, which every Vietnamese learns in school as the Resistance War against America, are well Tdocumented in number. How many American planes were shot down, how many American soldiers were captured, how many people on both sides lost their lives and how much wreckage remains today physically and emotionally. As a Vietnamese born after the war, I remember memorising many such statistics in our history classes, only to forget them almost instantly upon the end of a test. The war, despite being drilled for the entirety of our general education and reprised in numerous films and documentaries, was not so alive in the collective memory of my generation. The Vietnam I grew up in was—and is—rapidly changing and shedding its skin from poor and war-torn to prosperous and modern. Yet, as it turns out, the skin of war cannot be wiped clean so easily.. Monia Lippi In Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu looks at Vietnamese woman on a morotbike in Ho Chi Minh City, 2015 human skin from both scientific and anthropological angles in the hope of better understanding the history be more impervious to pain than the delicate and of war have a deterministic effect on women’s skin of what is seen and hidden on the surface of our bodies. vulnerable white skin. Here, unpeeling the science of philosophy and beauty practices seems a bit of a stretch. Of the many books on Vietnam, particularly the skin and race has exposed not just the cruelty of US The construction of beauty narratives and practices Vietnam War, it is rare to find one that weaves together militarism, but also the entrenched desire to protect reflects the multitude of contexts in which they arise. seamlessly all of the following topics: a scientific and white supremacy—for whiteness is found to be weak In contemporary Vietnam, it is impossible to discount metaphysical inquiry into skin, race and the cosmetics and in need of protection. It is no wonder, Nguyen Tu the fact that the youth of its population and the rapid industry; a historical survey of US military activities argues, that this attitude also shaped the US deployment growth of private wealth have played significant roles in Vietnam and wartime biomedical research; and a of biopolitical powers in Vietnam, allowing it later to in shaping popular consumer culture, and within it, first-hand account of the flourishing beauty market in conduct wartime skin disease research on Vietnamese the skincare culture. Attention to skincare, especially contemporary Vietnam. soldiers, and even be guilt-free after spraying dangerous among Vietnamese women, is not necessarily driven ‘So visible, skin for centuries struggled to be seen insecticides and Agent Orange across the country. by concerns over chemical residues leftover from at all,’ Nguyen Tu writes. Skin was recognised as an With the historical background set, Nguyen Tu the war. Besides, the pursuit of and, to an extent, the organ only at the end of the eighteenth century, when turns to contemporary Vietnam to draw an unexpected obsession with porcelain white skin is not unique among Western physicians drew up maps and classifications parallel: Vietnamese women’s desire for good skin echoes Vietnamese, as can be observed in other Asian societies. of various skin diseases. Later, they developed ‘skin the American military scientists’ desire for an armour of Such a desire can grow organically, independent of literacy’ and made this a tool for colonial settlers impenetrable skin, and both are ‘experimenters in skin’ outside influences, and can even be unrelated to the during the nineteenth century to use to determine and find solutions in the cosmetics industry. While there black-white dynamics of race. Another explanation for signs of savagery or civilisation in New World bodies. is certainly a basis for this argument, the comparison falls this can be found in Vietnam’s idea of beauty, which has Human skin became not just the marker of racial short of narrative balance. long held fair skin as the epitome of grace. difference, whether black, white or yellow, but also the Perhaps this is because the first half of the book is Vietnamese consumption of cosmeceuticals, as indicator of health and beauty. Over centuries, as the heavy on facts and historical interpretations, while the invented by Kligman during the wartime medical field of dermatology developed in Europe, so did the latter half takes on a more anecdotal and metaphorical research, need not be taken to mean embracing medicalisation of skin, all of which contributed to the tone. Across these pages, one can see the local salon Kligman’s desires for skin protection. It might be an merging of the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries come alive and hear Vietnamese women’s conversations expression of self-enrichment and self-actualisation, into ‘cosmeceuticals’ in the US in the late 1960s. about skin treatments in all their genuine liveliness. At or even emancipation from the past as well as state- Nguyen Tu’s research was extensive and engrossing times these talks drip in the mystery of inexplicable skin promoted collective communist identity. as she traverses the nineteenth-century archives of the conditions, and at other times turn solemn at the mention ‘How do surfaces remember?’ the author asks in the British Royal Society on the skin colour of colonial of wartime chemical residues. Yet, there is one major epilogue. I venture to answer that surfaces remember so subjects and the American physician Albert Kligman’s weakness: the empirical observations for this section seem long as inquiries are undertaken into history and for the records on human experiments conducted over twenty to be drawn solely from a single spa in Ho Chi Minh City, sake of truth. The marks and blemishes of any surfaces years at Holmesburgh Prison in Pennsylvania. The even though the author claims to have conducted research are worth studying, micro-analysing and understanding US Army allowed Kligman to inject dioxin, or Agent and interviews at other malls and beauty salons. better. Nguyen Tu’s research champions the kind of Orange, into prisoners of its own country. Military Such a focus leads to generalisations about social truths that are too often deliberately overlooked in times scientists had stood there to watch and record their behaviours that may not be true elsewhere. As a young of war, such as that the pursuit of beauty was used as fellow citizens dehumanised, no more than lab rats with Vietnamese woman who is also keen on improving an excuse for acts of violence and brutality. Such truths their skins inflamed and their bodies burned, marred my skin, I find the author’s fixation on connecting have resurrected the skin memories of war. ☐ from chemical experiments. women’s skin conditions with the after-effects of Their insistence on locating race in biology chemical weapons to be rather heavy handed. While it is reinforced racial fantasies of the time. The inhumane indeed necessary to contextualise modern Vietnamese Hong Kong Nguyen is a researcher at the Centre experiments on people with dark skin, especially black, consumption, including of beauty products, beyond for Interdisciplinary Social Research, Phenikaa were rationalised by the notion that black skin might simply economic factors, to argue that the histories University, Hanoi

21 MALAYSIA STREETFOOD Home sweet Ghost labour hawker Marco Ferrarese Yishu Zhou

oming home to Singapore after a long PARTHIBAN MUNIANDY from the rubble between construction sites and period, you begin to question your own Ghost Lives of the Pendatang: Informality and skyscrapers in ever-developing Kuala Lumpur and memory. Did the clouds always sit so low Cosmopolitan Contaminations in Urban Malaysia George Town. Then we meet the individuals who live Cin the sky? Did the streets really shimmer and Palgrave Macmillan/Strategic Information in these quarters: people like Mariam, whose life in the tremble from the force of the summer heat? And and Research Development Centre: 2021 ‘Little Bangladesh’ of the Malaysian capital is better than when it rained, did the city really swell up like a in her village home near Sittwe, Myanmar, from which water balloon, letting out a sticky humid belch she was evicted by soldiers. that drummed against the back of your eyelids? efore the pandemic struck, Red Garden, like Travelling overland via Thailand with two brothers You even walk a little differently now, because any open-air eatery in George Town, was jam- and two sisters, Mariam relied on an uncle who you are home, and this is the city that has seen all packed with customers. Each night, a workforce had previously moved to Cheras in Kuala Lumpur. your walks, knows you from the inside out. The Bfrom Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Her parents resisted the military attacks longer, person you are from another place, packed up Vietnam, China and the Philippines would cook for and but ultimately had to flee and are now displaced in neatly in a suitcase, expectant but understanding. serve the locals, mostly Chinese Malaysians, because Bangladesh. For Mariam, selling her body to the And because you are coming home to they didn’t mind that few dishes were halal. Bangladeshi migrants who approach her at the vegetable Singapore, where the only mother tongue is It was here that a friend introduced me to Hasan, stall she runs during the day is not just another way food, you begin to worry if you’ve maybe gotten who was working at the food court. Hailing from a to earn income. Even if it’s against Islam, Mariam says slightly rusty. To be fluent in Singapore is to village near Comilla, Bangladesh, twenty-something that although she’s part of a ‘dirty and poor people’, speak the patois of mee kia extra chili extra Hasan wanted to enlarge his circle of friends outside the Bangladeshis treat women like her with respect. vinegar or kopi o siew dai and two kaya toast pendatang (Malay for ‘those who have arrived’, or Prostitution becomes a way for some Rohingya women or laksa don’t want hum or maggi goreng add immigrants). Hasan and I were two parts of a similar to earn a right to be appreciated, sometimes a ticket egg or fish soup don’t want milk and extra ikan whole: foreigners in Malaysia. I was the Italian gwei to a marriage. bilis. The more elaborate the order, the more lo, or ‘foreign devil’ in Cantonese slang, and he was As he sits with Bangladeshi workers who sleep on incontrovertible the evidence of your belonging. a migrant worker from Bangladesh, flipping fish and rug mats in ‘homes’ made of corrugated iron sheets, When you enter the coffee shop, a familiar sizzling vegetables in a food court. Our friendship lasted Muniandy discovers that some can’t leave because rush of sensory overload. The floor, always until Hasan’s work permit, after two years in Penang, their families back home have unknowingly borrowed slightly sticky, slapping against your flip flops, was not renewed and he had to go home. more money than they can repay to their unscrupulous berating you for the time that you’ve been gone. Since the 1980s, foreign workers have been the Dhaka-based ‘job agents’. They are the victims of The air—dense, humming, it would have been unsung heroes of Malaysia’s economic boom. At the end ruthless international human trafficking syndicates who oppressive if it didn’t smell so good—thick with of last year, even during the pandemic, 1.38 million legal feed on Malaysia’s insatiable appetite for cheap labour. the activity of preparing 100 different meals to migrants were still in the country, forming more than Muniandy takes the reader into the shiny tourist be brought home to 100 different families. The 30 per cent of the workforce in agriculture and 20 per areas of Kuala Lumpur’s Bukit Bintang, whose beer metallic clang of spatula scraping against wok, cent in both construction and manufacturing. That’s not bars and massage parlours don’t even try to hide the noodles loaded with seafood and laced with even counting undocumented migrants. These migrants, netherworld of international sex workers. From Filipino lard falling wetly in between. Dough sitting on instrumental in oiling the wheels of the country’s ladyboys to ageing Russian escorts, Muniandy lends the a griddle, gently puffing and growing layers like industry, are so ubiquitous that most Malaysians take non-judgmental ear that these abused, ghostly voices flaky flower petals. their contribution for granted. can rarely find in such places. Not to mention the most sacred ritual of Parthiban Muniandy, a Malaysian anthropologist Two quarters of Ghost Lives describe markets and them all—the one that is not only spoken but based in the United States, is one of few to have written food courts, the factory ground of the many pendatang also performed beside it. This takes place in front of the lives of this largely transitory army of foreign who, like Hasan, found easier ways to earn a living of the cai png stall, which tends to take pride of workers. As he writes in the introduction, the book by cooking for and serving Malaysians. The spaces of place in any hawker centre. Fluorescent lights is ‘about ghosts, the surplus populations who are, by food—Malaysia’s most multicultural crossroads—are illuminating dozens of options, from oozy curries sovereign fiat, subjected to the suspension of the rule of also where the pendatang mix, mingle, intermarry to glistening pork ribs flecked with black beans law, to be rendered exceptional, dangerous and excluded and form fluid relationships between races that most and vegetables sliding lazily in oil. Then begins from the body of regular citizens’. Built on the author’s frequently connect through Islam. Cultural differences the slow courtship. First, cocking your head this ethnographic observations and academic fieldwork in are set aside and find new meanings, as many become way and that to get a better look at the dishes. the ‘cosmopolitan contaminations’ of Kuala Lumpur and interethnic families. Then a series of pointings, with a spoken word George Town between 2011 and 2018, the slim book A whole chapter on Rohingya refugees brightens the accompaniment: ‘This one, no that one, no the makes a significant contribution to the literature on the book’s mood as Muniandy meets with people who feel one beside it’. The final flourish is the smooth subject. While writing ethnographic and anthropological that their existence in Malaysia, despite being bound to handling of the tray to which your heaping plate scholarship, Muniandy sounds much more comfortable remain in the shadows of society, at least gives them the will be delivered, where fork and spoon patiently when he walks with recorder in hand into the hidden chance of staying alive. The UNHCR cards they receive await. No sooner than when you pick up your core of interdependence between the foreign workers grant them protection from immigration raids and tray does another slide deftly into its place, and the Malaysian bosses who exploit them. It is much provide basic rights to health care they wouldn’t have changing partners as smoothly as a waltz. more than just ethnographic vignettes of Malaysia’s elsewhere. People like Encik Fairuz, who by now looks social division. and speaks like a Malay Muslim, perceive Kuala Lumpur hen you finally receive your food, a Muniandy interweaves his field notes with reflections as a much better place than the refugee camps of Cox’s slight thrill. This is proof that you on being a dark-skinned Tamil Indian researcher. In Bazaar, just across the Bangladeshi border from his haven’t forgotten everything, that you Malaysia, Tamils are stereotyped as being from the ravaged Rakhine state in Myanmar. Wdo have a place here. The relief when it all comes lowest ranks of the social pyramid. This works in Ghost Lives would stand up against any of the recent so easily to you. The realisation that a mother Muniandy’s favour, and he often manages to access fictional ‘noir’ volumes published on cities like Bangkok, tongue is not a language at all, but a muscle, one the sketchiest corners of his field thanks to his looks. Phnom Penh and Kuala Lumpur. These stories are that is tucked away at the very back of your throat Older than the average gangster guarding the kongsi or stranger than any fiction; but unfortunately for Malaysia, and flavours everything you taste. ☐ protecting the Indonesian and Myanmarese prostitutes, they are real. ☐ Muniandy is welcomed as an older thambi (brother) by local Indians, and with street respect by everyone else. Ghost Lives is a deep dive into a relatively unexplored Yishu Zhou is a writer based in London subject. First, we are introduced to the kongsi, the Marco Ferrarese is the author of Nazi Goreng, Banana temporary settlements that sprout like toxic mushrooms Punk Rock Trails

22 SHORT STORY Under the circumstance Shih-li Kow

oday is Voting Day, and you’re caught up in what talking heads have been calling a buoyant mood. Change is in the air. Let go of what does not serve Tyou, says your internet yoga guru. Make way for the new. As trite as it sounds, you have taken the advice to heart and started with that most fundamental document— your identity card. Your new IC carries a Bangsar address that lets you vote in the Lembah Pantai constituency. Gone is the old Bentong address. All it took to apply for the change was the rental contract for the Bangsar apartment and some bills as proof of your new domicile. As easy as changing a shirt. Gone too are the politely condescending ice- breaker questions about Bentong ginger and durians at job interviews. Small victories, that’s the way forward. You even like your apartment, a walk-up on the fourth floor of a seventies building which could have been retro-cool if not for the multiple layers of grime and flaky paint on the walls. Someone’s siphoning the Erica Eng maintenance fees, but no one complains, not seriously anyway; nobody wants to instigate an increase in the fees. You’re just renting until you can upgrade, so you find out. I have an appointment with Dato’s head of PR Ti Yen says, ‘Sneaky, but yeah. That works. Might as keep your mouth shut. today.’ You don’t ask who ‘they’ are and make a mental well use the privileges that come with my chromosomes.’ Still, you now live in Bangsar within shoulder- note not to bring up cronyism unless she does. ‘Meet back at the car when we’re done, okay? I’ll rubbing distance of old-money bungalows, new-money In the bowels of the mall, you look for a place to call you.’ condominiums and eateries that regularly feature in lists park. You cruise slowly, scanning for a green light You hop out of the car and make for the entrance. A of best places to eat. That’s how you know Ti Yen. Her that shows an empty bay. You drive past a group of commotion has started around the red Lamborghini. A family owns the place you’re renting. uniformed men slouching around a parked car. Men man in a green Proton is shouting through his window She lives in a shinier building a few streets away. in no hurry, shuffling two or three steps every now and and waving what looks like his driver’s licence at a young You’re going to drive over and pick her up this morning. then in one direction and then another. You recognise man in the orange work shirt of car park staff. The scene You clear out the clutter in the Honda: some empty the familiar body language, like that of a car mechanic is attracting a small crowd of spectators. Starbucks cups, a handful of parking fines that you don’t or plumber sizing up how ignorant you were about spark The Lamborghini is parked under a sign that says, intend to pay. Shake the dirt out of the floor mats, spritz plugs or P-traps. They are gathered around what appears in three languages and an icon of a wheelchair, that the Glade Ocean Escape generously, and you’re off to vote. to be the problem: a red sports car. space is reserved for a disabled driver. A symbol of a Ti Yen gets into your car with a lit cigarette. You don’t Quite naturally, the thought occurs to you that triangle over a circle warns that any able-bodied, non- like that, especially when you were enjoying the fake sea standing and looking will not solve whatever problem compliant driver using the space will be punished with scent, but you keep your mouth shut and try not to cough. it is they have. As if by looking hard and waiting long a tyre clamp and a 300 ringgit unclamping penalty. You You say, ‘It’s good that you came home to vote this enough, a solution will manifest itself. notice the OKU sticker with the wheelchair icon on the time. It’s going to be one interesting election.’ She now You say, ‘Don’t they have better things to do? Look Proton; the man wants the space. lives several months a year in Melbourne taking care of at them, standing around doing nothing. Did you notice ‘Look here, boy,’ he shouts, pointing at a sign on the family investments. the broken barrier gate when we came in? They could be wall. ‘If you don’t do as the sign says, I’ll report this to ‘Oh, I’m not voting. I’d rather leave that to people like fixing that, not taking selfies with some fancy car.’ Despite the Association for Disabled Persons, and we’ll call a you who actually live here.’ You don’t like that either but yourself, you lift your foot off the accelerator and slow press conference right here in your building. Right here you keep your mouth shut because you like being able down to see if anything interesting is happening. in this car park. Tell your management that. And I know to say you have a friend who lives several months a year Ti Yen says, ‘That’s the problem with this country. your name, Freddie J.’ Freddie’s name is printed in block in Melbourne. Plus, you think she fancies you a little. Be Nobody wants to fix things. Being responsible is too letters on his orange shirt. there if she breaks up with her Aussie boyfriend, catch her hard. It’s too much work but everyone wants a window ‘We don’t know where the owner went,’ says Freddie. on the rebound, and who knows what doors could open. seat on …’ She swivels her head and continues, ‘… the A woman is recording the argument with her phone on She says she wants to write an opinion piece about gravy train. That’s a Lamborghini. New model Diablo. video mode. the election. She once told you she interned as a stringer Zero to a hundred in four and a half seconds.’ You don’t The man in the Proton says, ‘That’s the problem with for the Star newspaper; she called it her working-class know whether she means miles or kilometres but you all of you. You don’t do anything. Even when you know phase. You think of Bentong now as one of your phases. keep your mouth shut. someone’s wrong, you don’t do anything. It’s people like ‘We’ve never voted in a mall before. The voting centre ‘The whole service industry sucks,’ you say, and you us who have to fight every step of the way for our rights. was always a school for me. This is a first,’ you say. All speed up when the car behind you honks. You talk about I’m going to post up pictures on Facebook. Let this go those objections on social media about neutral ground wait staff, restaurants and the lack of a service culture in viral and see what your management has to say.’ The and commercialisation of the democratic progress have the country. Talking about service standards is safe and woman taking the video sniggers. fizzled out. You thought that free air conditioning, free makes you feel worldly, like a true urbanite who knows ‘Please don’t do that, sir. We’re going to clamp the parking and a mall where four train lines converged was how things are supposed to work. You don’t talk about car,’ says Freddie. a great equaliser. the maintenance of your apartment block; you don’t ‘Well, clamp it then. Where do I park? I’m in a hurry, Ti Yen says, ‘Yeah, my mom’s friend owns that mall. know if her family has connections to the people who I need to go and vote.’ Dato pitched it to the election commission. Threw in run the place. A security guard waves him into a bay painted pink a whole bunch of goodies: 150 security guards, thirty Twenty minutes of going around the car park in and marked with an icon of a stick figure in a skirt. He auxiliary police officers, a fully equipped medical circles and you get impatient. Ten thousand car park helps the driver unfold his wheelchair and watches while emergency response team. And he had to build the bays, and not one can be found when you want it. the man lifts himself into it. He has a floppy left foot. voting rooms for free too.’ You say, ‘You know what? You drive, Ti Yen. I’m The man says, ‘Come on. Clamp the bugger.’ He ‘For free? I suppose he gets tax relief.’ going to get out of the car. You can make a loop and watches from his wheelchair, taking photographs while ‘Nothing’s really free when it’s free. I’m sure they park in the section reserved for ladies. It’s near the mall Freddie fastens the clamp carefully on one front wheel are getting some government concessions in return. I’ll entrance, next to where that sports car was parked.’ of the Lamborghini. When it is done, the man in the

23 wheelchair propels himself towards the lifts. The crowd People leaving the voting rooms hold up their inked tyres, sometimes there might be a scratch. Or worse, disperses. Show over. fingers. You give them an occasional thumbs-up. The they might give me fifty ringgit to release the clamp and Upstairs, the mood is festive. Upbeat music plays driver of the green Proton rolls past on his wheelchair. then they complain to my big boss the next day that I over the mall speakers with a recorded message at Your line is moving steadily and you are pleased took a bribe. My friend was fired like that.’ every three-song interval, ‘Welcome voters. Claim that you will be done soon while it’s still early in the ‘It’s difficult to make a living.’ You make friendly your exclusive tote bag and shopping vouchers at the day. Time enough for coffee with Ti Yen. There’s an conversation, just in case he decides to give you trouble information counter. Happy voting and please take care interesting hole-in-the-wall cafe in Chow Kit that about your Honda in the ladies’ section. You don’t want of your personal belongings. Thank you.’ A film crew serves single origin drip coffee and sourdough toast. any embarrassing moments with Ti Yen. and a gaggle of reporters surround a woman in a suit She’ll like that. The American franchises in the malls are ‘Ya. We do our best under the circumstances.’ talking and gesturing animatedly in front of a large so passé. ‘Have you voted, Freddie?’ backdrop of the mall’s logo. After you slip your ballot into the ballot box, you go ‘I’m from Sarawak. I can’t afford to fly home to vote.’ You join the queue for Room 6. Your phone beeps. to the end of the longest queue and take a photograph. You think of telling him about how you changed Ti Yen’s text message says she has parked in the ladies’ Send it to the boss with a message that the queues are the address on your IC and where you vote but you section near the Lamborghini. Thumbs up. very long. Say that you will be in line for a few more decide to keep your mouth shut. You can never tell with The man in front of you turns around and says, hours before you can make it to the office. The boss texts Sarawakians, some of them want their home state to be a ‘Good morning. Looks like many people have decided to back: ‘Same here at my voting centre’. Smiley face emoji different country. come out to vote. Fantastic turnout.’ with a drop of sweat. That is as good as an approval for The owner of the Lamborghini appears, holding a ‘Good morning. Yup, sure looks like it,’ you say, you to stretch breakfast to a long brunch. tote bag with the mall’s logo. It’s the same man who was not wanting to be rude to someone who smells of Back in the car park, you wait for Ti Yen and inspect in the voting queue with you. You catch his eye but he something expensive. the predatorial Lamborghini. It looks like it could doesn’t seem to recognise you. You tell yourself that you The two of you chat about the previous election gobble up your Honda and spit out the remains in must work on making unforgettable first impressions. and the close contest between the political parties in four and a half seconds. You imagine tailgating with it ‘Sir, this is a disabled driver parking bay,’ says Freddie. Lembah Pantai. on the highway. ‘There was no other spot near the entrance. I was in a He says, ‘Whatever happens, things must improve. There’s someone hanging around, the same hurry to get upstairs,’ he says. We need a good clean-up in the government, stop the Freddie of the orange uniform who was in the parking ‘Please use the parking valet next time.’ corruption before everything rots.’ drama earlier. ‘I don’t trust those gangsters with my car. Here.’ Out ‘Yes. Let go of what doesn’t serve us. Make room for You point a thumb at the Lamborghini and ask, comes the money clip and two twenty-ringgit notes. the new.’ ‘No problem?’ ‘Thanks for taking care of my car. I come here all the ‘Exactly! Young people like you can make things ‘No problem. Kaodim,’ Freddie grins. ‘That OKU time. You boys are doing a good job. I’d rather pay you happen. Who do you think will win this time?’ man came back very quickly. Luckily, there’s an express instead of the valet. Have you voted?’ ‘Hmm, hard to say.’ lane for people like him. After he left, I took off the ‘No sir,’ says Freddie. ‘I’m from …’ You decide to shut up. Best to speak only in clamp on that car.’ ‘That’s too bad. You young people should make generalities when it comes to political opinion, you ‘But why?’ an effort. We must clean up the government. Fix the never know what people’s connections are. ‘Must be royalty or VVIP. I don’t want to invite corruption. Get some honest people in power.’ Someone behind you says, ‘My friend told me can trouble.’ The single digit registration plate is as loud as You want to say something about the twenty-ringgit get free movie tickets after voting. One thousand tickets. the red paint. ‘These people are too rich to pay the fine. notes but when his car door lifts open like a raptor wing, First come first serve. Want or not?’ Ask them to walk to our car park office to fill the forms you keep your mouth shut. ☐ You turn around but the person is talking on the to release the clamp, wah, bising. Like we’re stealing their phone, not to you. She says, looking straight at you, money. Or they’ll say we vandalised their expensive Shih-li Kow is the author of Ripples and Other Stories ‘Who cares what movie. It’s free. Just grab first.’ tyres. You see our clamps? Not designed for those wide and Sum of Our Follies

24 FICTION So Cambodia Patrick Allington

ANTHONY VEASNA SO Area’. Unlike his friends, he does not work in tech. Afterparties Instead, he is prepping for his next term as the Frank Ecco: 2021 Chin Endowed Teaching Fellow for Diversity at an exclusive high school by reading Moby Dick. Anthony starts seeing an older Khmer man, forty-five-year- n Anthony Veasna So’s ‘Superking Son Scores Again’, old Ben, who hopes to develop an app that uses ‘the an adult narrator reflects on his high school years, technology of Grindr, Scruff, Growlr, for building when he and his Cambodian-Californian friends a new community, a new future’—an idea Anthony Ilive for badminton. As the narrator remembers—and is offended by. As is typical for this collection, the he seems reliable enough—they idolise their coach, ending is not really the point: the story, from start to Superking Son, even though he spends his time finish, is an extended reflection on sex, intimacy and consumed by his responsibilities at the grocery store and companionship, siblinghood, the weirdness (or worse) smells ‘of raw chicken, raw chicken feet, raw cow, raw of Silicon Valley, the importance of literature and what cow tongue, raw fish, raw squid, raw crab, raw pig, raw it means to be Khmer: at one point Ben suggests to a pig intestine, and raw—like really raw—pig blood’. In bemused Anthony, ‘Doesn’t it feel good to eat what we’re time, a new team member, Justin, calls everybody’s bluff supposed to be eating?’ by challenging Superking Son’s coaching and playing In ‘Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly’, a young nurse ways—and therefore his sense of self. Although the story called Serey, who works in a dementia ward, finds plays out predictably enough, So hyper-animates it. For herself caring for Ma Eng, the second cousin of her dead all the cutting humour, the effect is empathetic. grandmother. When Ma Eng looks at Serey but instead The dynamic in ‘Superking Son Scores Again’ sees her niece Somaly, killed during the Pol Pot years, is typical of the nine stories in Afterparties, a debut it’s not just the dementia. It’s also because Ma Eng had collection in which So forces the comic and the deeply many years earlier looked at the face of the newborn serious together. To read Afterparties is to endure jolts Chris Sackes Serey and seen Somaly, ‘and with the amniotic fluid still and shocks, to laugh and wince, to find stories within coating my skin, my Pous and Mings all agreed with her, stories and across stories, and—for this reader, at least— Anthony Veasna So at his home in San Francisco, December 2019 after which the monks, too, agreed, so unceasing was to finish reading and be unsure how to feel. Ma Eng’s vision’. Serey cares for Ma Eng in her last days Sadly, So died, aged twenty-eight, before the In ‘The Shop’, the narrator Toby, having graduated while grappling with Somaly’s spirit, a difficult work publication of this book. He deserves to have from college, hangs around his father’s failing car repair environment—management expects far too much of Afterparties considered on its own merits rather shop. A woman known only as Doctor Heng’s wife is the nurses for far too little—and an angry, unreasonable than, as it were, an afterparty to his own too-short a frequent, nearly caricatured presence in the shop, family member (the same Maly who, in the earlier time life. Unavoidably, though, his death adds a layer of despite not having a car in need of repair. One day, Toby and in an earlier story, has it ‘going on’). poignancy to the experience of reading the stories. finds himself driving the streets with Doctor Heng’s ‘Generational Differences’ is a story of considerable The stories are about ‘Cambos’ living in California— wife, looking for a car that has been stolen from the grace, consisting of a letter written by an elderly woman ‘not Silicon Valley, I should make clear, but the shop. Doctor Heng’s wife gives Toby unsolicited life to her son. The woman is a survivor not only of the Pol insufferably hot and arid one two hours east’—and advice, urging him to marry a girl from Cambodia—an Pot regime but also the 1989 mass shooting at Cleveland often in the context of economic downturn. Some exchange of citizenship for cash. When Toby tells Dr Elementary. She writes to her son, ‘I remember with people are rich, some get by, some are battling, but Heng’s wife that he is gay, she is unconcerned: ‘You can clear eyes, even in my old age, the first time you there is a persistent theme of debts, competition from be as gay as you want after your life is established. That is encountered tragedy.’ The episode she recounts occurs Costco and failing doughnut shops, grocery stores, the plan.’ Later, when the business is close to collapse, Dr a decade after the school shooting. The boy, aged nine, restaurants, mechanics. Heng’s wife rallies the community to retrieve the shop’s comes across a photograph of Michael Jackson visiting So writes about young gay men searching for sex, karma by bringing Buddhas to the shop. After that, she the school, talking to his mother’s ESL students. In the love, adulthood and ways to navigate the world and calls in the monks. letter, his mother recounts her decision to answer the find their place within it. He writes about mothers and Throughout Afterparties, the Pol Pot period serves as boy’s insistent questions about what the photograph aunts nursing dreadful memories of the Pol Pot period, a sort of drum beat that lays down an insistent rhythm means. Her revelations prompt the boy to demand that when more than 1.5 million people died because of in sometimes subtle, sometimes blunt, sometimes comic she take him to her classroom, where he undertakes an the Khmer Rouge’s policies, brutality and failings. He ways: ‘Green papayas as old as their concentration elaborate check of the room: ‘You were on the floor, on writes about their capacity to survive and endure, their camp-surviving eyes were decaying on the shelves of your hands and knees, looking under the desks speckled determined agendas for everybody’s future, their heroic the produce section’; ‘We’ve been exiled … ’Cause every with pale gum, under the crusty old rugs that were never and hilarious endurance. He writes about older men, Ma has been a psycho since the genocide’; ‘Ba, you gotta properly vacuumed, which covered sticky floors never who also harbour awful memories of Pol Pot. Some stop using the genocide to win arguments’; ‘I know properly mopped.’ His mother retreats outside, to endure of them are lost or dangerous, focused on debts or something about disorientation. I understand how it an excruciating exchange with a young colleague. second families, or devoted to alcohol or drugs (‘For feels to live with a past that defies logic’; and so on. Read in isolation, ‘Generational Differences’ is a while, I saw Dad only when he scored weed from So sometime uses or adapts stereotypes about devastating. Placed at the end of Afterparties, it is me’). But he also writes about men who work too hard, the Cambodian diaspora, and sometimes messes no less devastating. But it also anchors the book, who give their friends jobs in defiance of business with them—as do his self-knowing and world-weary accentuates recurring themes and, most importantly, sense or common sense, who deploy humour in the characters. He deploys multiple layers of historical, reaffirms So’s ability to create an atmosphere—a mood, face of memories of atrocities and who are gloriously political, philosophical and cultural context. He honours an emotional reverberation—that is at once furious, if sometimes erratically loyal to their wives, children, but sometimes disturbs the slow passage of time and melancholy, awkward, tense, nostalgic and, most of all, wider families, communities. the shift of place from 1970s Cambodia to twenty-first compassionate. The stories in Afterparties can be read The disconnect between generations is a recurring century California. in isolation, but they work best when taken as parts theme, though not necessarily a calamitous one. In of a single whole. Anthony Veasna So gives each story ‘Maly, Maly, Maly’, for example, a young man called Ves, hile there are no duds among the time to build and then to drift and shift. He has an soon to leave for college, reflects on the fact that his nine stories, the last three—‘Human emphatic understanding, but he offers no neat solutions, cousin Maly has ‘got it going on’ while the two of them Development’, ‘Somaly Serey, Serey Somaly’ to intergenerational trauma, to life, to anything, except sit outside in a pickup, their aunt having banished them Wand ‘Generational Differences’—stand out for their perhaps this: ‘Look, traditions don’t got to be logical.’ ☐ from preparations ‘to celebrate the rebirth of her dead depth and poise. In ‘Human Development’, the narrator mother’s spirit in the body of our second cousin’s body’. Anthony is a Stanford graduate, ‘clinging to the Bay Patrick Allington is the author of Rise & Shine

25 SOUTH ASIA Freedom for some Sudipto Sanyal

NILANJANA S. ROY (ED) purposely generic, as if he knows this is how the rest of Our Freedoms: Essays and Stories from India’s Best us view Kashmiris. One dead Kashmiri kid is the same Writers Juggernaut: 2021 as another. In the summer of 2016, Indian security forces killed MALIK SAJAD the charismatic young militant Burhan Wani in a remote Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir Kashmir village, which sparked large and spontaneous Fourth Estate: 2015 protests. In response, police and paramilitary forces unleashed bullets, tear gas and buckshot, killing at least ninety people and injuring thousands in what the n her foreword to Our Freedoms, Nilanjana S. Roy Guardian called ‘the world’s first mass blinding’. Caught traces the percolation of the word azadi (freedom) in the crossfire were homebound schoolchildren. in modern Indian political culture to a Noor Jehan In an op-art piece for the New York Times in 2019, Isong in the 1946 Bollywood film Humjoli. The chant Sajad drew eighteen-month-old Hiba, forlorn on a galloped to the roilings of independence the following hospital bed. When their house filled with pepper year, rebounded during the feminist movement of the and tear gas because of a neighbouring battle between eighties, and erupted once more in the winter of 2019 as From Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir militants and Indian forces, Hiba’s mother Marsala tried a cry of affirmation in nationwide protests against racist to take her children out to safety. Indian troops fired amendments to India’s citizenship laws. through the floorboards for millennia, and in ‘Freedom pellets at them and Hiba was hit. The pellet detached But freedom in India can be messy, like our traffic in a Different Key: The Bhuinyas of Bihar’, Gyan her retina—Sajad used an X-ray of Hiba’s eye to chilling and our curries. In August 1947, the euphoria of Prakash details the stigmatisation of Dalit bodies and effect—and Hiba is now blind in one eye. One blind independence came glued with the trauma of partition. the act of historicising and resisting through Dalit epic Kashmiri kid is the same as another. The departing British left us azadi, but if they smelt poetry—‘What is important is not the mythic character Kashmiris have been demanding azadi ever since the stench of corpses in the communal riots and mass of these traditions, but their remembrance as authentic Indian troops landed there on 27 October 1947, after displacements in its wake, they kept it to themselves. representations of their past. The oral epic interprets the Dogra maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir decided— A lawyer called Cyril Radcliffe who’d never been east the Bhuinyas’ Dalit status not as divinely ordained but without popular local support—that Kashmir would of Paris was charged with cleaving an ancient land in historically produced.’ accede to India. In a chapter called ‘Footnotes’, Sajad two, sketching a line through the state of Punjab and Prakash points to the air de famille that envelops presents snapshots of Kashmiri history with art that wrenching families and neighbours apart. ‘In seven Frantz Fanon and B. R. Ambedkar in their respective resembles embroidered pashmina and the intricate weeks it was done,’ W. H. Auden wrote, ‘the frontiers analyses of racism and casteism, both ‘yearning for an walnut wood carvings that local artisans like Munnu’s decided/ A continent for better or worse divided’. equality of bodies’: Dalit children without access to father are famous for—drawings of avaricious men Under a tropical sun, trauma bubbles on the asphalt toilets are routinely lynched for shitting in the open, and killing hanguls for land and treasure over the centuries; of freedom. ‘Anti-colonial secular nationalism,’ the in rural Uttar Pradesh last year, as the pandemic was a catalogue of power, Mughal, Afghan, Sikh, British, historian Romila Thapar says in one of the few truly barrelling through India, 200 men forcibly removed the Dogra and, finally, Indian and Pakistani, all in it for luminous essays in Our Freedoms, ‘was confronted by corpse of a Dalit woman from a funeral pyre because themselves while the hanguls gaze at their own history the two religious nationalisms … [that] fused territory it was on land meant for ‘higher’ castes. In the starkly in silence. Old art, new scars. with religion.’ It is hard to extricate this psychic twinning written ‘Crossing Over’, the Tamil novelist Perumal ‘On the streets,’ wrote Arundhati Roy in her 2020 from the strangely exclusionary idea of freedom in Murugan pours vitriol on such spatial violence: ‘In Clark Lecture in English Literature, ‘every one of us is independent India. In today’s high stage of steroidal Indian society, freedom is hostage to the caste system. painfully aware that even an atom of sympathy for the Hindutva (noun, lit. ‘Hindu-ness’), freedom has become The space that each caste can inhabit and traverse is Kashmiri cause expressed even by a single person, even restrictive and parcelled out from on high. clearly demarcated … To this day, there are no public accidentally, will be met by nationalist hellfire that will The philosopher Gilles Deleuze felt that reality spaces in our villages: only separate temples, separate incinerate not just the protests, but every last person needed to be apprehended as a fluid jumble of taps for drinking water and separate cremation grounds.’ standing.’ Roy was referring to the same but different relations, its workings unearthed, not by the Western Murugan’s essay is one of only two translated pieces chant of azadi that had recently become an anthem philosophical tradition of logic and being, but through here; in a volume promising ‘essays and stories from of the uprising against the discriminatory Citizenship what he called transcendental empiricism, that is, being India’s best writers’, where are the bhāsā writers who Amendment Act; these new revolutionaries made it attentive to the contingencies of lived experience and imagine freedom in any of the few hundred other clear that they were demanding azadi in India, not azadi the murky mutations of difference and affect. Maybe languages on these shores? The omission turns the from India. Some freedoms are more equal than others. this is why the pieces that work best in Our Freedoms central conceit of the volume into a lifeless abstraction In a democracy, it is prudent to be afraid. The are those that examine the idea of freedom incidentally, that only sometimes hints at what Michel Foucault Kashmiri desire for azadi is offensive to delicate glancing at it with eyes askew—a pensive tale by Roshan called history’s ‘jolts, its surprises, its unsteady victories mainland ears, conditioned as we are by a combination Ali that sublimates the Delhi pogroms of January 2020 and unpalatable defeats’. of nationalist education, hellish nightmares of into inescapable family dynamics; Snigdha Poonam’s balkanisation and the frenzied shrieking of a Foxified almost quotidian tracing of a Muslim entrepreneur’s n 2 August 2010, during a military curfew, media landscape—to say nothing of an ethno-nationalist efforts to rebuild the beauty parlour she has lost in the Sameer Rah stepped out to play with his friends government that enjoys throwing dissenters in jail. same pogroms; and Amitabha Bagchi’s comic story of in Batamaloo, a neighbourhood also home to The recurring Covid lockdowns have been hard on zoological and romantic confusion, which, by satirising OMunnu: A Boy from Kashmir’s eponymous protagonist, in everyone, but Kashmiris ‘have been living in a lockdown the way power lusts after history (and temples), starts to Jammu and Kashmir’s summer capital Srinagar. On the for three decades’, says a character in Sajad’s most recent echo the epistemic confusion at the heart of the idea of street, with the impetuousness of youth, Sameer started op-art in the New York Times. ‘Relentless violence and India today. shouting a slogan he’d heard his elders use—azadi! authoritarianism in Kashmir overshadow our fear of the ‘Anxiety,’ wrote Kierkegaard, ‘is the dizziness of But Kashmiris do not have the same rights as the rest virus,’ says another. freedom’—which is to say that freedom comes with of us. Indian paramilitaries overheard Sameer, shoved a ‘However sordid or sublime,’ the historian Matthew fainting spells and drunken trespasses. The Mountbatten bamboo stick down his throat, beat him to death with Karp reminds us in an essay in Harper’s, ‘our origins are Plan and the Radcliffe Line (and the first partition of canes and chucked him into a clump of poison ivy. not our destinies.’ The journalist Rana Ayyub, no stranger Bengal before that, in 1905, overseen by George Curzon, Sameer was eight. to the threat of violence, titles her contribution to Our a thin-lipped viceroy of India who slashed rations and In Munnu, Sameer’s death is one among a litany of Freedoms ‘Why I Choose Hope’. Ayyub’s existentialist relief during the famine of 1899 and so murdered a few despair, a generation of cartoon fawns not destined to conclusion is that it is the human thing to do. ☐ million people) are the originating geopolitical wounds grow into deer. Malik Sajad draws Kashmiris as hanguls in independent India. But rivulets of blood have soaked (the endangered Kashmir deer)—simple, elegant and Sudipto Sanyal is a writer based in Kolkata

26 TRANSLATION The missing half Peter Zinoman

ollections of translated short fiction by multiple QUAN MANH HA AND JOSEPH BABCOCK Perhaps the dominant theme of the collection— authors ought to be assessed in at least two ways. (TRANSLATORS AND EDITORS) barely touched upon in most general histories of the As with all translations, they must be evaluated Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of Vietnam War—is the war’s horrible consequences for Cbased on their linguistic and literary merits. But as a the American War and Its Aftermath northern Vietnamese women. Several powerful stories, set selected to illustrate a general literary phenomenon, Columbia University Press: 2020 such as Vo Thi Hao’s ‘Out of the Laughing Woods’, they should also be judged on their curation: what they Nguyen Trong Luan’s ‘The Corporal’, Suong Nguyet include and exclude. A careless approach to selection Minh’s ‘The Chau River Pier’ and Vuong Tam’s ‘Red can raise serious questions about a volume’s thematic efforts undertaken between 1995 and 2005—by groups Apples’, depict the difficult reintegration into civilian life coherence, ideological slant or subtextual agenda. For like the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War of physically disabled or psychologically damaged female an obvious example, imagine a beautifully translated and Social Consequences and liberal publishing veterans. Other stories, such as Hanh Le’s ‘Ms. Thoai’ book of ‘recent American short stories’ that features only houses such as Curbstone Press and the University of and Pham Ngoc Tien’s ‘They Became Men’, suggest that male writers or only white writers or only writers who Massachusetts Press—to promote political reconciliation wartime conditions at both the front and behind the lines live in Brooklyn. and cultural exchange between the US and Vietnam. encouraged sexual violence against women. Another Other Moons: Vietnamese Short Stories of the The global dissemination of writing produced under prominent gendered theme concerns damage to the American War and Its Aftermath is a collection of the Vietnamese Communist government received a institution of marriage. Several stories. including Thai Ba twenty translated stories by twenty different Vietnamese further boost during this period owing to the interest Tan’s ‘War’ and Ta Duy Anh’s ‘The Most Beautiful Girl writers published between 1967 and 2017. While its expressed by Western academics and trade presses in in the Village’, describe marriages being compromised, literary translations are uniformly well crafted, Other the four greatest writers of the Renovation era—Nguyen delayed, short-circuited or destroyed by cultural Moons is bedevilled by a fairly serious problem with Huy Thiep, Duong Thu Huong, Bao Ninh and Pham preoccupations with marital fidelity and infidelity that selection. In their introduction, its co-editors and co- Thi Hoai—each of whom now boasts a large corpus of intensified due to the long-term conjugal separations translators, Quan Manh Ha and Joseph Babcock, call translated work. In contrast, the only RVN literature of the war era. Another theme that carries implications immediate attention to this problem. ‘In our selection widely available in translation is a dozen short stories for Vietnamese gender relations is the enfeeblement of the stories collected in this anthology,’ they write, ‘we from omnibus collections, a small body of poetry and emasculation of men in the postwar period. The have tried to be as inclusive and diverse as possible in translated by the controversial Vietnamese American castrated main character in Mai Tien Nghi’s ‘Louse Crab terms of both the authors’ background and the content, writer Linh Dinh and Olga Dror’s translation of Nha Ca’s Season’ dramatically exemplifies this theme. style, and themes present in his or her work. Still some anti-war novel Mourning Headband for Hue. Finally, like most war fiction, some of the best stories readers may notice that only one perspective on the Ha and Babcock also contend that it was difficult highlight the jarring co-presence during military conflict conflict is represented here—that of the war’s victors, the for them to include RVN writers because their work of horrific violence and intense sentimental attachment. Vietnamese communists based in the northern capital remains the subject of persecution within the country; In the collection’s oldest story, Nguyen Minh Chau’s city of Hanoi.’ they refer to this as accepting a ‘practical reality’. But ‘A Crescent Moon in the Woods’, the object of Not only is this odd principle of selection easy to surely this tragic history of persecution provides a sentimental attachment is a young woman fixated notice, but its broader implications are also troubling. greater reason to feature RVN writing rather than upon by a soldier who knows her only through letters To draw another analogy, imagine a collection claiming marginalise it further. Appeals to practical reality also received from his sister. In Nguyen Van Tho’s ‘Unsung to present US stories about that country’s civil war that ring hollow because some once-banned RVN writers, Hero’, the object of attachment is a military dog, while in includes no writers from the defeated South. such as Duong Nghiem Mau, Nguyen Thi Thuy Vu, the collection’s most interesting and unexpected story, Perhaps to distract from the unconvincing claim Nguyen Thi Hoang and Vo Phien, have recently been Nguyen Thi Thu Tran’s ‘An American Service Hamlet’, it’s that a collection of short Vietnamese fiction about republished openly in Vietnam. If local publishers can a kind-hearted US GI. the Vietnam War can be ‘inclusive and diverse’ while bear the risk, the US-based editors of Other Moons While all the writers in the collection come from excluding stories by writers from the southern Republic should be able to do so. the Communist side, an interesting omission is stories of Vietnam (RVN), Ha and Babcock tout in their Perhaps most importantly, the collection’s one- written in the rigid socialist realist tradition that introduction a bizarre range of diversity benchmarks. sidedness diminishes an understanding of the dominated Vietnamese Communist literature from 1954 They explain that Other Moons showcases writers from Vietnam War as a civil war. This attenuation of the until the onset of Renovation in 1986. This omission is the three major regions of the country as well as one war’s fratricidal character dovetails with the official unfortunate both because it distorts the picture of what who lives abroad. They point out that it includes both interpretation favoured by the Hanoi government, Communist Vietnamese war writing was like during full-time and part-time authors. They mention that it which prefers to locate the crux of the conflict in the the first thirty years the party-state was in power and features writers from different generations and writers contest between an aggressive US imperialism and because it obscures what the writers in the collection, who are living and dead. They affirm that authors in the a unified Vietnamese people led by the Communist the vast majority of whom are from the post-Renovation volume include both members and non-members of party-state. Since 1975, this half-accurate view (half- era, are reacting against. Indeed, the exclusion from the the official Vietnamese Writers Association. And they accurate because the US intervention was imperialistic volume of socialist realist stories, RVN writers and the spotlight the volume’s gender diversity since five of its but the Vietnamese were anything but unified) has work of dissident writers from the North such as Duong twenty authors are women. been imposed throughout the country via school Thu Huong or Pham Thi Hoai means that the real focus These outsized affirmations of diversity and curricula and state-controlled media coupled with of the collection is that subset of moderately progressive inclusiveness ironically reveal, of course, the overarching strict censorship of alternate or dissenting views. Ha (politically) and middle-brow (aesthetically) Vietnamese homogeneity of the contributors to Other Moons: male and Babcock’s misguided reference to the conflict in literature produced under the ‘post-reform’ state marked writers mainly who have worked their whole lives in the their title as ‘The American War’—a name fashioned by a broad humanism, an unfocused social critique and Vietnamese Communist state. to conceal its fratricidal dynamics—buttresses Hanoi’s a tepid political opposition, sanctioned and, indeed, Ha and Babcock, moreover, offer a far from efforts to police the interpretation of the conflict’s rewarded and promoted by the Renovation policy. persuasive explanation for this unambiguously one- meaning and significance. Displaying an interesting range of literary styles and sided approach. They claim misleadingly that ‘voices Rather than address the selection problem by political orientations, the stories in Other Moons reveal from the losing side’ are ‘already widely available to translating more stories from the ‘losing side’, Ha and something of the richness of Communist Vietnamese English speaking audiences in the form of exile or Babcock could have tried renaming and reframing literature about the war and its local legacies. But diasporic literature published outside of Vietnam’. In the volume as a presentation of literary accounts from they paint only a partial and selective picture about fact, writers from the RVN (not postwar diasporic Communist Vietnam about the social impact of the how the broad community of Vietnamese writers writers, who represent a related but different pool of war. If this more modest objective is taken as a measure made sense of the horrors of the war and its terrible authors) are much less widely available in English than of the volume’s success, then I am happy to concede and tragic aftermath. ☐ writers from the North. that the stories assembled in Other Moons provide The disproportionate availability of translated real insight into the impact of the war on Communist Peter Zinoman is professor of history and Southeast writing from the Communist side owes much to Vietnamese society. Asian studies, University of California, Berkeley

27 LITERATURE In your face James Yu

he woman was of European extraction, tanned, his deceits, Osier confirms this. Later that night Song in her fifties or sixties, and was idling at the calls, her voice strange. ‘No more trouble,’ she says. periphery of the night market, her back against a The next morning, Osier learns that the colleague was Tclosed shopfront. She looked tired and was not carrying brutally attacked; a phone call to Song confirms this, any bags. though she blithely misunderstands ‘why’ for ‘how’: ‘Wiv Before I saw the woman, I took pictures of other my knife. Wiv my friend.’ shoppers. One had put his hand to block my shot, but Osier is shocked. Song tells him she loves him. ‘The others had ignored me. Yet after I took her picture, manly fury in her voice was dark, even the word “love” she shouted and in seconds she’d seized my wrist like a was bloody and hellish.’ When he denies her desire to shackle. She demanded I delete her image, and I scrolled see him, she erupts. The story concludes with the spectre through the images to the photo in question, shocked by of violence. Osier asks where Song is, and she answers: ‘I her aggression. James Yu downstairs. Waiting you.’ Not long after I returned from that trip, I became Violence is the ultimate trump card; while Osier is aware of the US writer Jeanine Cummins and the ‘One had put his hand to block my shot ...’ no saint, the revelation of Song’s rage definitively tips criticism she’d received for American Dirt, her novel the scales of our sympathy. His own culpability be concerning a mother and son’s journey fleeing violence intimating that her remark is racist, she clarifies that damned, Osier still reads as a victim, or one in waiting. in Mexico for a new life in the United States. Several she is referring to Joo’s hair. She’s not only talking The subtext—to the would-be traveller to Thailand—is commentators wondered whether Cummins—who is about his looks, of course, but also the quality of his to be careful. not Mexican—had the right to tell such a story, or to character. It’s understandable why she feels the way Violence is also present in Osborne’s novel, but there profit as handsomely as she had on a lucrative advance. she does. seems, by the conclusion, the sense that the author is The New York Times critic Parul Sehgal pointed out the Reading the story, it’s hard to cry foul in the way one winking at us, letting us know that the expatriate women disconnect between the narrative attempting to take can in American Dirt, which unconvincingly adopts an at the centre of the drama, particularly a young US on an insider perspective while feeling ‘conspicuously insider frame. A certain leeway, by contrast, is baked grifter named Sarah Mullins, are fools, deserving like the work of an outsider’, citing as one example her into a narrative that hangs back and maintains a foreign of swindle. ‘strange, excited fascination in commenting on gradients perspective. Alice is surely prejudiced, but the prejudice It’s a neat trick, made possible by Osborne’s refusal of brown skin’. is characterising. It tells us something about who she to stay tethered to Sarah’s point of view. We gain access The drama swirling around Cummins, reflective of is and what she believes in. We don’t mistake her for to the private thoughts of the other expatriate women a literary culture increasingly sceptical towards authors anybody but a foreigner. she befriends. Everyone is watching and everyone has writing from the perspective of individuals and cultures Whatever prejudice is evident in ‘The Orphan’ is a private agenda. None of the expatriates are likeable, to whom they have no relation, made me curious mild compared with the bigotry in Lily Tuck’s historical which seems to be Osborne’s point. about fiction involving foreigners abroad in Thailand. novel, Siam or the Woman Who Shot a Man, which Eventually we slip into the minds of two Thais I wondered whether there was something problematic is rife with insensitive depictions of local foods and working in the building that Sarah and her non-friends about such work, and was it simply that no one had customs. Yet here too, filtered as the narrative is through live in: Goi, a housemaid, and Pop, a security guard. cried foul yet? Claire, a naive American housewife, and placed in We understand that they’re not only aware of the the late 1960s, when slurs rolled out as easily as ums foreigners’ wealth but are also working to avail bad pun launches the start of ‘The Orphan’ and ahs, the same logic applies. It does so even in the themselves of it. There’s something admirable about by Nell Freudenberger, contained in her 2004 central climax alluded to in the title, which concerns ‘the Goi and Pop’s savvy, the way they observe and sell collection, Lucky Girls. Alice, the protagonist, woman’, Claire, shooting her Thai servant in the middle information to their own advantage. The expatriates they Areceives a phone call from her daughter Mandy, of the night, occasioned by the paranoic belief that he is work for, after all, are patronising and spoiled, and in who is living in Bangkok. She’s been raped by a Jew. a robber. Sarah’s case (having arrived in the country with $200,000 Her daughter corrects Alice, explaining that ‘Joo’ is the She dissociates herself from blame, and her husband of stolen money), undeserving. boy’s name. and expatriate confidantes assure her it was an accident, After political protests and spotty electricity cause When Alice arrives in Bangkok with her husband and and that their servant must have been drunk. Why else many residents to decamp for the provinces or hotels their college-aged son, her daughter recants her story. would he ride a horse into their pool? She’s advised with backup generators, Goi steals her employer’s She says the ‘rape’ was a cultural misunderstanding. to flee Thailand, and the novel concludes with Claire, expensive silverware and disappears; Pop drugs Sarah Joo eventually makes an appearance midway through guiltless, on a plane home. It’s a slippery task, pinning and flees to the south with her cash. The novel concludes the story, when the family is touring the Jim Thompson Tuck’s intentions, whether we’re supposed to believe with a flush and triumphant Pop, dancing with the House. Alice’s coolness towards Joo is picked up by Claire to be a victim of a dangerous place or a naive fool serving girls at a beachfront restaurant. He thinks ‘that Mandy, who confronts her when they are alone. who has committed a heinous act and, exercising her this was life and nothing else, and like karma life itself ‘You’re saying you don’t like him.’ privilege, escapes scot-free. always went on, unending and unfair in equal measure’. ‘I find him unappealing, yes.’ In The Glass Kingdom and his other novels, it’s clear ‘Physically.’ he connecting thread I find in expatriate that Osborne holds a sceptical view of human behaviour, ‘Not physically,’ Alice says, although, of course, she literature set in Thailand is its insistence on one transcending nationality and class. Approached with does. ‘Or yes, because I know what he did to you. I find portraying Thailand and its people with illegality critique, one imagines him shrugging his shoulders, him repulsive, because of that.’ Tand menace. The foreigner arrives in a strange and saying it’s not personal. Trust and loyalty are for fools; It’s easy to empathise with the mother. We’re in entrancing place, and bad shit happens to him or her; one owes nothing except to oneself. There’s a tidy som her perspective, after all, and Mandy’s explanation, this is a repeated trope, as more recent examples— nam na (serves you right) in the way that Sarah’s ill- that maybe she ‘wanted to get fucked like that’, is ‘Siamese Nights’ by Paul Theroux from 2010 and gotten gains are taken from her and redistributed. unconvincing. The well is poisoned, and Joo’s cool and The Glass Kingdom by Lawrence Osborne from last Yet if you line up all the key characters in his haughty demeanour, his remarks about work and family year—attest. novel and place them as victims and perpetrators, suggesting immense privilege and corrupt politics, In the former, Boyd Osier, an ageing and married they part neatly across racial lines, foreigners in the calcify our suspicions. So does his appearance. He’s not American auditor, falls in love with Song, a ladyboy, former category and locals in the latter. Pointedly, both conventionally attractive, ‘square jawed, and his face while on business in Bangkok. What begins as a Natalie and Sarah’s stories end in unconscious or semi- is puffy around the eyes, like a fighter … he is wearing surprisingly tender and nuanced relationship crumbles conscious terror; each has visions of being underwater, some kind of gel in his hair, which falls in a heavy fringe as Osier, lying about his wife, blames his deceptions on swallowed by the surging depths, Bangkok coming to eat over his forehead, like Elvis.’ his boss. When they happen to spot one of his colleagues them alive. ☐ Later, during dinner, Alice asks her husband if he passing through a lobby, Song asks if he is the boss. also thought he was greasy. When he demurs, perhaps From convenience, the language barrier and to keep up James Yu is a writer based in Oakland

28 POETRY The Ogura hundred Michael Freeman

he Ogura Hyakunin Isshu is a corpus of 100 short JAMES HADLEY AND NELL REGAN Dawn and river mist lyrics written by 100 different poets across four (TRANSLATORS) on the Uji starts to clear. centuries, compiled in about 1285 by Fujirawa no A Gap in the Clouds Now, from the shallows, TTeika and with a legendary status in Japanese culture. The Dedalus Press: 2021 row after row A Gap in the Clouds is the latest attempt to render these of fish traps appear. tanka into English. There are formidable problems in We’re given an intriguing note about the ajirogi translating Japanese poetry, not least its canonical texts, 5, 7, 5, 7, 7 form, the translations settled for the five type of fish traps common on the Uji river, but the even without entering the hermeneutic theory of what lines that the translators felt would still allow what they non-Japanese reader can’t know whether the original we’ve learned to call ‘cultural alterity’. identified as the tensions and open-endedness of the poem has any approximation to the rhyme and Each page in A Gap in the Clouds reveals a original to emerge. The overall structure is of an image assonances that stitch this translated version together. considered engagement with these problems and triggering a rueful epiphany or reluctant recognition of The translators point out that the ‘vowel music’ in these possibilities, first presenting the visual dynamic of the how things are. It’s often a sort of suppressed emotional poems, which were performed or even intoned, may brush strokes flowing and edging down the page, and syllogism: a) I’m very aware of one sensory condition; occasionally be brought out in these versions, but ‘only then crafting a translation: interpreting, recreating the then b) I’m aware of some attendant feature or event; to the extent that it works in English’, a qualification integrity of the poem, allowing an artefact conditioned ergo c) I must draw my barely stoical conclusion, damn that invites a whole tome in itself. And in another by historical cultural formations to speak to a modern it. Readers in the tradition, the editors’ notes tell us, will poem, with the lines ‘ignite like yellow mugwort/ on international culture. have focused on the kimono sleeve: each other’s kimono Mount Ibuki’, you wonder whether the acoustics of This edition is a pocket-sized but lapidary, sleeves were traditionally used by lovers instead of the string of hard consonants represent a texture in multifaceted, luminous rendering. Of course there have pillows, so having to sleep on your own sleeve embodies the original. But that’s to begin pushing hard at the been others, such as the versions by Sagnik Bhattacharya sexual loss, as the chill mat and the frosty night are then interface between the two languages, between the and Frank Watson, but this new translation gets its ‘back-read’ as a variant on the ‘pathetic fallacy’. The formalities of their poetic traditions, and the measure authority and literary quality from a cooperation between kimono sleeves, with such connotations, are a recurring of elbow room that a translator needs to get beyond a two Irish writers: one an established scholar in translation image in several of the poems. wooden literalism. theory and the history of Japanese translations into Many of these straightforwardly lyrical poems The translators’ introduction makes a point about English, the other with no knowledge of Japanese but a have quietly textured ripples or shifts; there’s a deftness topicality: poems such as these, ‘all about paying close translator of Irish-language poems and herself a widely within the simplicity. Isi no Taifu, a lady in waiting to an attention to the detail of one’s surroundings, often from published poet. Their combined theory and practice, their eleventh century empress, writes: a place of isolation … rediscovering the beauty and collaborative praxis, are worn lightly: as the articulate I view cherry blossoms melancholy of the natural world’ may seem all the more energy of the calligraphy moves down the page, the in the ancient palace of Nara— relevant in a time of pandemic. The poems have come five-line English texts offer versions that lift off the page, exquisite! into their own again. But not as comfort zones. In many lucid and limpid. Moreover, the brush strokes offer to Each double layer reveals of these poems, a response to the landscape, the flora, non-Japanese readers a Zen-like visual image, followed another inner sanctum. the season is the trigger and an objective correlative for through with the poetic subscript. The explanatory and A modern reader, and perhaps its contemporary an acute sense of loss, disappointment, despair—faced at biographical apparatus, valuable for teasing out the reader too, might wonder whether the layers are those best with a rueful or stoical resignation, an inconclusive allusive and symbolic resonances of many of the poems, is of the foliation structure of the blossoms or the double- residue of a backstory we’re left to construe for ourselves. succinct and tucked away page-referenced at the end. roofing of the palace; the inner sanctum of the centre It’s only occasionally the poet manages a cooler, relaxed Another striking facet of the poems is, on the one of the blossom or of the palace or of the poet’s feelings. tone: the imperial court’s mid-tenth century middle hand, the formal and stylistic continuity across the Occasionally there’s a topographic reference that carries counsellor Fujiwara no Asatada pondered a broken poems and across their centuries within their generic an extra associative edge to the overt statement: the relationship: ‘Is it circumstance or plain/ apathy? … tradition, and on the other the sheer range of the poet’s tenth century koto musician Fujiwara no Okikaze’s poem Still, neither you/ nor I will take umbrage’. Not taking roles in their cultural history: court poets and state about loneliness ends ‘I can’t even/ count on Takasago’s/ umbrage sounds a bit like a brush-off, or just putting a councillors, empresses and emperors, Buddhist masters steadfast pines’. The contemporary reader would know brave face on things. and abbots, hermits and high priests, chancellors and that the shrine in Takasago had a pair of pine trees that But then, the ‘stories’ and tone in these poems are ladies in waiting. But the continuity stems from the were a mythological symbol of love and even marriage. largely determined by the subgenre’s conventions, so centrality of poetry in the culture of the period, a social The editorial notes in this edition are essential for we shouldn’t read them as necessarily addressing real and quasi-hierarchical as well as artistic productivity, picking up the allusiveness of so many of these poems. relationships; besides, being good at writing these and even today the Ogura retains its canonical classic An instance is this by the female Heian author of The poems was good for your career in the social culture that status, not just in the curriculum but also as an allusive Pillow Book: Ogura Hyakunin Isshu reflects. The collection proposes source for other literature, art and cinema. So, that ruse might have a literary continuity: like most anthologies, it’s staking An early thirteenth century poem by Fujiwara no worked in the classics, but a claim, though literary historians can assess whether Yoshitsune, simple as it is, will illustrate many of the crowing like a cock this claim of a continuity is just one anthologist’s common characteristics of these pieces. as night wraps up won’t conservation strategy. But this thirteenth century I lie on my chill mat, open these gates for you. compilation from poems of up to 400 years earlier still crickets call to the frosty night— The conversational brush-off tone leaves the sexual has traction in its national culture and attraction for my only pillow the sleeve image clear enough, but is given a further nudge as ‘ruse international translations. Kinto, an eleventh century of my own kimono. It seems might have/ worked in the classics’ alludes to a Chinese senior counsellor who went on to be a Buddhist priest I sleep alone tonight. story in which a soldier imitated a cock crowing to get and produce his own critical anthology, wrote—as the Actually it’s not so simple as all that: why does it only city gates opened that would be opened only at dawn. In present translation has it: seem he sleeps alone? Is it an ‘Oh well, so be it’ shrug? one poem the lines ‘Add/ wind to mountain—/ it seems The waterfall’s sound Or he has a partner but it doesn’t feel like that: there’s you have a tempest’ draw upon the Japanese character died down long ago. someone there but she or he may as well not be? The for tempest, which is an amalgam of those for mountain Even so, when its renown assonances and alliterations, the night/tonight rhyme and wind. In another the word for sanegazura vine has is invoked, I can hear it— and the sleeve/seems near-rhyme wouldn’t be in the the element sane, meaning sleep together. It would be in full spate. original; the preposition to rather than in the frosty hard to represent these ambiguities in a non-Japanese You’re bound to think it’s Kinto’s sound and renown night opens up an extra edge. It’s a porous simplicity: rendering without an ingenuity that would probably that are at stake. At any rate, the spate of this collection nuances and ambiguities seep out. disrupt integrity and tone. is poem after poem reading like a discrete moment, The stated policy for these versions is that, whereas Just occasionally you’re left to wonder about the hinting at a larger episode but catching a stand-alone in the Japanese the poems had the thirty-one syllable closeness of the version when a literary feature stands out. wedge of time. ☐

29 ANTHOLOGY Potato eater Tse Wei

ANN ANG, DARYL LIM WEI JIE AND TSE HAO GUANG (EDS) Food Republic: A Singapore Literary Banquet Landmark Books: 2020

hanks in part to Singapore’s colonial past, have passed some unwritten, collectively administered English is the language of power, business test of belonging. The Fabergé egg restaurants that cater and the globalised elite. This is doubly true of to the global rich do not appear, nor do the beachheads Tgrammatically correct, flawless English, of the sort of Taiwanese bubble tea shops, or the lonely hulks you’ll find in the pages of Food Republic: A Singapore of American chain restaurants marooned here three Literary Banquet, an anthology of writing about food in decades ago. Hawker food is inescapable, but reading Singapore. Most Singaporeans are conversant in English, Food Republic gives little or no inkling of the existence many are fluent, but almost none of us uses the queen’s of the kopitiam chains, brew pubs or the legions of English unless the occasion is uncomfortably formal. restaurants serving local food in shopping malls set- Food, on the other hand, has always been vernacular dressed with the latest Instagram fashions. in Singapore. The food we are known for is that of the Perhaps Singapore’s writers don’t eat in places like street and of the home. It is these landscapes of the these. Perhaps these places are just airspace, called into senses that homesick Singaporeans miss—the landscape being by nothing more than the need to feed 6 million of hawker food, durians and wet markets. The language people daily in a wealthy city, and should not be deemed of the hawker centre isn’t exactly Singlish, but a babel food culture at all, but culture of another sort, and saved of every tongue spoken on the island, in varying states for an anthology about capitalism in Singapore. Perhaps of bastardisation. these are eateries with no meaning, or at least none we The oldest piece in the book was first published want to embrace or remember. But if you know the in 1958. The decades up until the 1990s are sparsely physical Singapore, the Singapore of the imagination in represented, and much of that work is poems about Food Republic might feel surreal. night-time hawkers, pig’s offal soup and hawker hygiene, Much of the time, the food is a backdrop, or a like ‘on offal’ by Arthur Yap: nucleation point for emotions. Food Republic captures If you look at the glass windows, how thoroughly food saturates every aspect of grey snakes glide in quick-heavy motion. Singaporean life. People flirt, break up, mourn and attain and, from the bowels of these machines nirvana while hungering, eating, drinking, cooking, to the boiling cauldron, it is a duplicitous movement. shopping for, dreaming of or becoming food—though The poets were Singaporean, but writing poetry in never, strangely, while arguing about where to eat, or English certainly qualifies one as a kentang, a potato- whether the place where they just ate is any good. eater, a person born in Singapore but not Singaporean in Food Republic is invasively intimate, like a glimpse of spirit. Several poems in the volume address this question the contents of someone’s fridge. Many of the characters of belonging head on. in these pages would never appear on a travel channel Sometimes Singapore is barely recognisable. There show: domestic helpers, low-income householders, is poetry about apples and aubergines, fried chicken recent immigrants and women demonstrating kitchen or frying eggs, that could have come from anywhere. gadgets in shopping malls. Ruth Tang sets the scene in But this feels entirely apt, since Singapore has been ‘Crabs to Slow Cooking’: struggling to define itself as long as I’ve been alive. I’m Everyone in this house is sleeping reasonably close in age to a number of the authors and or grown. In forty years you have not poets featured in Food Republic, and when we were done either, only the dishes. Which growing up in the eighties and nineties, there was themselves, like broiling meat, are never endless public angst about Singapore’s ‘Western values’. done, either. It took considerable mental agility both to fret about the There are pieces about keeping ants out of the corruption they represented and also to maintain that kitchen, family visits to army camps, the choreography the West remained the pinnacle of culture, but somehow of a Chinese birthday dinner. These people and we managed it, and a generation of highly skilled, lightly moments are known only to those who have grown rooted, permanently conflicted anglophone writers was up on the island, or grown old there. Theophilus Kwek the result. captures this preoccupation in ‘As if They’d Been This group of writers is old enough to remember the Waiting’: ‘We had her dressed, then driven to the debates in the nineties about whether we should allow swimming-club, where fifth uncle had booked a table. Singlish on television. In ‘Microwave Cooking Class’, I left you to make apologies while I led grandma to her Leong Liew Geok turned Singlish into poetry by adding seat; she began to spin the revolving dais as if looking for line breaks: something.’ Donno how to cook; first time: This feels like a deliberate choice that the editors I press 1 minute 1 minute 1 minute 1 minute; made—to de-emphasise the food itself, and foreground I press cooking power—HIGH—and START; instead the interactions and emotions it inspires. To look Big potato five minutes; small potato, also five. at the who and where and when of food in Singapore, But food was always safe, and always ours. It separated rather than the what. To take a culture long defined by the Singaporean from the foreigner, but it also food, and to remind us that it is actually we who matter, encapsulated everything that was good about the and that we give food its meaning. ☐ country and proffered it to the world on a banana leaf. So the food in these pages is almost always ‘Singaporean food’—dishes, ingredients and rituals that Tse Wei is a chef and author

30 NEIGHBOURHOOD My home canal Anjan Sundaram

Jeremiah Overman

The author by the ‘shit canal’

ei roy kau sep. I learnt these Khmer words soon In my apartment I heard my neighbours smash up old Cambodia late, gaining traction only in February, at after I arrived in Phnom Penh, in 2017. They tiles and cut new ones with power saws. a super-spreader party a ten-minute drive from my mean 390, my street number, and over the past They worked on their balconies or sometimes home. Public health experts said it was a confluence Bfour and a half years, I have uttered them to every tuk out in the open street. Their saws’ screeches travelled of lucky factors that had until then spared Cambodia: tuk driver who has driven me home. hundreds of metres, from streets all around me, coming the country’s demographic was young, its people My apartment was situated just off the city centre, together as a metallic cacophony. At home, I wore a pair used to an outdoor life and its population density in an area called Boeng Keng Kang Bai, near an old of protective ear muffs like those used by construction low. The government had also implemented strict school that was turned into an interrogation prison workers. And I wore earplugs at night, against the airport quarantines. during the Khmer Rouge reign and more recently a morning renovations, which began at 7am I was often Now apartments on my street lie empty. Entire genocide memorial. But these details were unnecessary woken earlier: at 5.30am the corner shop at 105 and 390 buildings are unoccupied, or with only a couple of for the tuk tuk driver; the street number was sufficient received ice deliveries. The shopkeeper woke me as he tenants, though many of these buildings are brand new. to navigate Phnom Penh’s grid street system, a Cartesian cut and hacked the large ice block into pieces. These high-rises have been built, I’m told, with illicit system designed by the French. Streets running east- Construction stopped between noon and 2pm— money, foreign and local, laundered through the real west were even numbered, and those running north- lunchtime for the workers. During this time, I heard men estate. Empty apartments are reported as occupied by south were odd numbered. A pair of even and odd on my street play chess, their wooden pieces knocking tenants, whose fictitious rental receipts are gradually numbered streets denoted an intersection. hard on the wood boards and the men crying out when presented as legal revenues. The numbers increased as one drove south and west they made a winning move. Street carts brought them An urban planning professor told me Phnom Penh from the city centre, to arrive at Street muy roy pram food. A cart’s speakers blared numpang (bread), and was sinking under the weight of all the new skyscrapers. (105), known colloquially as the ‘shit canal’, for the the others announced noodles and fried dough. Green The city was built on the site of a former swamp, at the open sewer that ran along it and into a southern coconut sellers shouted dong! since they lacked speakers. intersection of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers. The lake. My apartment was situated about twenty metres Construction also stopped when it rained. All my land here was still wet and soft. Floods have become from this canal, where it intersected Street 390. street’s sounds were drowned out by the rain’s din on more frequent. Excess waters during the rainy season On some nights, especially when it rained and the my neighbours’ tin roofs. After the rains, on Saturdays, I used to drain into the city’s canals, which emptied into canal’s waters were stirred, its odour wafted down heard men sing karaoke. The voices on the speakers were lakes. But real estate has become so valuable that the my street. drunk and off tune, and I recognised them as belonging wealthy have filled in many lakes to make new land for I knew my street through its soundscapes. When to my tuk tuk drivers. They manned the tuk tuk stop at sale. The canals’ waters now have nowhere to go. A few I first arrived in the city, the sounds were mostly of the intersection of Streets 105 and 390, on the shit canal. blocks down from my apartment, around Street buon roy construction and renovation. Cambodia was on the If they saw me, they offered me beers. Every second hok sep (460), the annual rains now swell the shit canal rise. New high-rises blocked the city’s horizon and the sip was a celebration, calling for us to clink our cans of whose sewage spills over. ☐ final moments of the sunset from my balcony. Many Cambodia and loudly cheer. of my neighbours, and my landlady, practised home For several months now, Street 390 has turned improvement as a hobby, a way to spend their profits. silent, like much of the city. The coronavirus got to Anjan Sundaram is the author of Bad News

31 PROFILE Coming through Louis Raymond

arrived at Vitry-sur-Seine, a commune in the mourning, but the authorities did not understand. Quite suburbs of the southern end of greater Paris. At the disheartened by it at first, he nevertheless kept exploring bar next to the train station, African migrants were and eventually found the inspiration for The Crossing. Idrinking beer on the terrace while listening to music. Bao pauses to take a breath. His eyes blink behind Vitry-sur-Seine is like many cities of today’s France: his large glasses. ‘It’s something I’ve discussed with multicultural. A large part of the population arrived in my therapist. I think I’ve suffered from the syndrome the country in the past few decades, settling in the outer of abandonment. Toddlers, when not taken care of, semi-industrial parts of the capital. Vitry-sur-Seine is when the parents don’t pay enough attention to them, the home of the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de- will often wonder: Is it my fault? What have I done? Marne, a regional museum dedicated to contemporary Psychologically, these marks remain.’ French art. It’s here, in an alley five minutes’ walk from What can you do when you’ve got that kind of legacy? the train station, that Bao Vuong’s studio is situated. ‘I think my family lived in a kind of darkness I knock on the rusty gate and Bao opens. An Asian in which all of this was unsaid. Darkness can be man in his early forties, he’s wearing a black shirt with unexpressed pain, the silence over past traumatic events a mandarin collar that looks tight on him. ‘Come in! I’ll that devour someone from the inside, just like in the show you the studio!’ The Crossing XXI, 2020 case of my father, whose psychological war wounds were It’s late afternoon. Most of the artists working here, never healed. But not only. I like to think of my work as as well as Bao’s two interns, have left the workshop to robbing them, raping the women, leaving devastation an allegory about overcoming darkness in general.’ head home. Here and there, however, I can still see behind. They reached the shores of Malaysia but were There is a beautiful paradox about landscape the remains of a fruitful day: sketches sticking out of a rejected and sent back out to sea by the coastguards painting, which the ancient Chinese painters like drawing board, woodchips on the floor, tins of paint in without either supplies or water. It was only thanks Dong Yuan understood very well: while contemplating the sink. to rain they survived before being rescued by another scenery, you look at your interiority. It reveals an inner Bao shares this place with sixteen other artists from ship. Then, from Indonesia, they applied to go to France emotion that will influence how the viewer perceives the all over the world. Bao moved in here two years ago, as refugees. work before their eyes. In front of the same painting, two just after he returned from Vietnam, where he had s Bao doesn’t remember any of this, as he was only one different people will either tell Bao it’s very luminous or pent eight years. ‘At first, I didn’t plan to settle back in at the time. When he first heard about it, it was from it’s very dark. Although his work—figurative—is very France. I remember I told my friends I would fly back his mother. He was twenty-three; the family was back different from that of Soulages, he recognises he took to Ho Chi Minh City after a month or so.’ But he didn’t. in Vietnam for a holiday. Among the things she related, something from Soulages’ meditation on the concept of Things got in the way. First, he found this studio. Later, there was this detail: all through the trip, she and Bao ‘Outrenoir’. Black is the colour that best reflects the light, he signed a contract with A2Z Art Gallery in Saint- were in the boat’s hold, next to the motor. The smell was found Soulages. In his own ways, Bao perpetuates the Germain-des-Prés. Then Covid struck and travelling so strong that Bao has been haunted by it. As he was dialectics of light and darkness. became impossible. rediscovering Vietnam as an adult, he became obsessed ‘The fact that I’m working on those seas again and We are seated in the garden next to the collective with the idea of representing the refugees’ story while again, on something that is literally endless, repeating workshop. Dusk is falling. He explains to me in his reclaiming that smell of tar and gasoline. the same gesture, it makes me progressively slip into soft-spoken and native-speaker-level French how he In 2017 he embarked upon The Crossing. With black a contemplative state. It’s a bit like a mantra that I’m started the series The Crossing, which was the name paintings that look like monochromes from afar— reciting. I feel how small we are in front of the immensity.’ and the subject of his first solo exhibition in Paris in although they are not—the artist aims to represent the Bao says painting brings him humility, but it’s also December last year. This series of figurative works, using journey at sea of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’. After a release. ‘At times, I start carving the paint gently with many shades of black, aims to represent the journey— 1975, it is estimated that close to 800,000 Vietnamese the palette knife, and then it becomes like a scream. It’s a crossing on a boat from Vietnam to the West—he took left the country by boat and survived the journey. very enjoyable feeling!’ Until the end, he’ll maintain this with his parents in the late 1970s. The thick layers of Hundreds of thousands more didn’t make it. As a fellow very passionate relationship with the material; then, at paint he applies on the canvas are slashed with a knife to Frenchman of Vietnamese origin, I’ve been interested in some point, it cools down. ‘It leaves me, as if something recreate the restlessness of the sea and the skies. There Bao’s art, especially his exploration of the memory of the is all of a sudden pacified between us. are no people in these paintings. By keeping them out Vietnamese diaspora. ‘I’ve learnt to talk about my paintings as art objects of the frame, he makes the sea universal. It’s the ocean A graduate from the art schools of Toulon and that are independent from me. I don’t want to force of darkness every migrant crosses, whether in the Gulf Avignon, Bao moved to Paris after he got his national interpretation on to the viewers. The story of the of Thailand four decades ago or in the Mediterranean diploma of visual arts. In Paris, he worked as a Vietnamese boat people comes second. People may today. Often compared to the French painter Pierre community worker for ten years before picking up his understand it when they read my biography, but it’s Soulages for its use of black, Bao’s art is more inspired by paintbrush. ‘I really enjoyed the Parisian life,’ he says not the most important thing to me. I’d prefer them to Christian Boltanski and his works about the Holocaust. today, ‘but I was a bit frustrated. I’d often tell my friends see their own dreams, their own inner demons, their According to his own words, he is halfway between that some day I’d go to Vietnam and become an artist.’ anguishes, whatever they want.’ ‘artivism’ and ‘memory’. He did so in 2012, but he had to work to earn a living— As it’s turned out, those censors did Bao a favour by The exhibition at A2Z Art Gallery was a huge from teaching at the French International School in forcing him to reconsider his work and prompting him success, with acclaim by critics and numerous paintings Ho Chi Minh City to directing video clips—so it took to avoid showing any images of human beings. His art sold. ‘A breathtaking show,’ wrote the art critic several years before he was able to commit to his art. is therefore not directly about exposing traumas. It’s not Stéphanie Dulout. The weekly magazine Arts Hebdo When he arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, he brought about telling an untold story. It’s about resilience and, Medias declared it ‘A very personal exhibition with a with him a self-portrait, the only painting he made furthermore, about transcending what one inherits. universal significance’. during his decade in Paris. ‘I was half naked, only Although he’s got other projects also related to wearing white trunks,’ he explains. ‘I’d hidden my eyes Vietnam in the pipeline, Bao plans to keep going ao Vuong was born in the Mekong Delta in the with my hand, as if I were dazzled or I wanted to conceal with The Crossing. ‘Perhaps I’ll stop when I have done late 1970s. His father had served in the army of the horrors I could see. It represented me as an adult, hundreds, but so far I still feel inspired.’ the Republic of Vietnam. Like many southern but basically, it was the small child getting out of the The day we meet, there are thirty-three canvases in BVietnamese veterans at the time, he feared being sent boat’s hold for the first time.’ After experimenting with this series, with a few more in preparation at the studio. ‘I to a re-education camp and wanted to flee the country. many aspects of practice—from photographs of refugees feel this can resonate with today’s tragedies of migration, Bao’s mother was reluctant at first, but eventually stained with tar to installation and performance—Bao which are likely to multiply in the near future.’ ☐ decided to go with her husband. The family hid for six worked on an exhibition that included paintings of months and then, one night, set sail on a journey off the Vietnamese women with headbands covering their coast of southern Vietnam. Pirates attacked three times, eyes, but the show was censored. It was an evocation of Louis Raymond is a writer based in France

32 Mehdi Chebil

33 FOOD Tokyo diners Mark Robinson

ately I’m going for the ‘morning service’ at Betty, the spacious, decades-old café I call the horse racing place, with two TV screens and on Lweekends the crowd of older men with their betting guides. They watch their races and sometimes shout, ignoring the government’s infection warnings and advice to stay home. Though I’m hardly one to talk, as I am there too. Three of the staff appear to be family: an elderly man who sometimes drinks alcohol from the morning, the mama who is always well made up and efficient and a younger man who seems to be their son. He is tall and wears loud shirts and his hair in a small bun. He’s a man of few words but a fast cook like his mother, turning out rice and omelettes, spaghetti, grilled fish—the standards, all within minutes. Betty looks shabby, but it’s a professional outfit: paper napkins are folded in careful triangles, the tables are cleared the instant you finish. Dad in his slippers with his shock of white hair and black puffy jacket moves around the floor from the tobacco counter at the front. He might seem hungover, but he is always present, at the till, picking up glasses and plates, laughing with his customers. Sometimes he naps, stretching out on the banquette seats. No one is particularly friendly, but they are not unfriendly; families don’t need to be polite (the older women who work part-time are sweet). Betty is less a leisure venue than a place for work: people hold meetings, relatives discuss things, the punters Mark Robinson are serious. If you are not betting and sitting near the screens, you may be asked to move. Hanaya, Tawaramachi. The 70-year history of this yaki-soba fried noodle shop ended in late June after word went out on Twitter that the husband The other regulars are mostly old people who greet and wife were giving up. Maintenance costs caught up with them. The old man stood in the window all day over a hotplate, wordlessly stirring each other with boasts about their hospital trips and noodles with cabbage. You added sauce from the bottle, as you liked. The wife was very energetic and appeared to know everything about illnesses. A tiny hunched woman often appears and everyone. I queued for an hour but didn’t get a final bite. speaks firmly and brightly; Dad calls her ‘Mother’. Many customers are addressed like relatives: Older Sister, Big where we sat on two large stones like toadstools. When old lady who ran the shop said it was fine. After a few Brother, Uncle; the old man will sit with Mother when the man came out I was surprised how small he was. I minutes she came out and asked him where it hurt and she comes in, and once I saw her pass him the remains had met him once and had forgotten he only came up to told us she had the same pain; then she went into the of her fried rice to finish. Betty is not cheap, which I my chest even with his big trucker’s cap. We asked him shop and came back with a heat pad, the sort you stick guess limits customers to a level that suits the family. how was the comedy. ‘Beats me,’ he said. ‘I’m deaf.’ on your skin, and got down on her knees and put it on The morning set is thick toast spread with margarine, The homeless man is not really homeless any more. while commiserating with him. a boiled egg and coffee for 600 yen. From 11.30am, the He was homeless in Los Angeles for thirty years, I started thinking about his personality and how lunch specials include fish, hamburger, spaghetti with collecting cans and bottles and sleeping under a bridge. it must have been affected by his experiences on the miso soup and so on, plus coffee, for 1000. His name is Murata. My ex met him through some streets, things he learnt about surviving without losing Almost everything on the menu is in 100-yen American friends and learnt he had gone there to work his mind, after losing his job and wife and daughter. increments. Simple: no tens, no fifties. The exception as a carpenter for a Japanese boss who never paid him; A couple of days later my ex-wife sent me a message. is cigarettes. The other day my check for coffee and then he lost his home. No money, no language. He had She has a talent for spotting people’s quirks. She doesn’t cigarettes came to 1,070; I handed over 1,100 and waited left his wife in Tokyo and a daughter he never saw again. judge people on the surface and barely remembers what for my 30 yen change. Dad slowly wrote down the Well, my ex-wife liked Murata, who told her he missed you might think are their most obvious traits—instead amount on his daily piece of paper and, with shaking Tokyo, and she got him a passport and helped arrange she will describe a characteristic that seems to explain hands, picked through the till and handed me two for him to move back, into a subsidised apartment. them in a different way. brown coins. Twenty yen, that should do, shouldn’t it, It took her a lot of effort, and I was impressed she She said, ‘You know something about Murata? He he said. He smiled slyly. I laughed, I thought he was got that far. Something about him made her want to never apologises.’ I asked her what she meant and she joking. But he made no move to give me the other help him. After the show we went to lunch because said, ‘That’s all. He never says sorry.’ I tried thinking ten yen. It was audacious, I’ve never experienced such it was his eighty-eighth birthday—that’s why she had what this involved. At lunch and afterward there was behaviour in a shop. I wasn’t going to ask for that ten brought him to the theatre. nothing to apologise for. Then again, there are many yen. I figured: If you think that’s funny, well, fine. Ten She said he could choose any restaurant and he times we say sorry, such as, ‘Sorry for putting you to the yen for your performance! He watched me as I left, chose sukiyaki, he said for old times’ sake, when he used trouble’, when we don’t really mean it. I realised how smirking like a fox. to live it up. It was expensive but I covered it; I felt like often I use the word. helping. For the whole meal he ate only the meat, none So I thought, what if, instead of saying, ‘Sorry’, we y ex-wife was taking a homeless man to a of the vegetables or side dishes. He didn’t drink, he never said, ‘Thank you’. When somebody moves their seat comedy show at the Engei Hall in Asakusa drinks. He made us laugh about collecting cans on the for you, for example. I tried to stop saying sorry for Rokku, and as she rarely comes to the same route every day, how he became friendly with the imposing, and instead began saying thanks. Because in Mneighbourhood and I wanted to meet her to tell her US couple who introduced him to my ex-wife. truth, who knows if you are imposing; the person might sorry about something that had happened a long time As we returned to the car along the main road of even want to move, so why pretend you’re causing them ago, but which had been bothering me, I made an Kokusai-dori, he needed to stop and rest his painful legs. trouble? Just show gratitude. It felt uncomfortable at arrangement with her and she stepped out of the theatre We asked at a ramen shop if he could sit on their bench first. But it changed how I saw these fleeting encounters. while the man stayed, and met me in the pedestrian mall outside while my ex-wife went to get the car, and the Saying thank you acknowledges the person has acted

34 PHOTOGRAPHY In transit Farah Abdessamad

on their free will to give you something, that they have tapped into the currents of kindness that are always floating around the universe. I think that’s what Murata taught me. I don’t know if it will help me survive like him, or if when I reach eighty-eight, a stranger will shout me sukiyaki.

plump old woman stands at the crossing of Kokusai-dori and Kototoi-dori, scrutinising a flyer in her hand. She seems lost. ‘Do you want Ahelp?’ I ask. She looks at me with her mouth open. Finally she speaks. ‘I am here to eat delicious pasta,’ she says. Her tone is determined. ‘Here.’ She shakes the flyer. ‘See this map with the X on it. It was on the TV.’ I tell her there is a restaurant a couple of blocks up that serves spaghetti. ‘I am walking that way too,’ I say. ‘I haven’t eaten since yesterday,’ she says. I ask, ‘Are you a local?’ ‘No, I am a complete country bumpkin. I came to Tokyo to see the doctor and I want to eat this spaghetti. This Courtesy of Paul K. Cummings and Bophana Center place has been on TV. They have a way of making it. They cook it and let it rest overnight!’ Road from Pochentong International Airport,1984 She hurries ahead of me as the lights change. The photographer’, documented with an acute eye for place on the map is called Carbo, three blocks away in a PAUL K. CUMMINGS quotidian details a life slowly re-emerging from rundown building that once looked minimal and sleek. Welcome to Cambodia: horror, a cautious exhale. He found the capital city to Now it looks like a popular spot for B-grade gourmet From War Zone to Tourist Destination be a site where people from the provinces returned TV. A large white sign above the awning shows a boldly Bophana Center (online exhibition) to search for loved ones and to resurrect an erased painted fist gripping a fork horizontally, lifting a pillar of past. His photos recall the political economy of yellow spaghetti. ‘Why don’t you join me?’ she says, a bit the time—from the imported Russian cars used cautiously, but cheerfully. Her talk of pasta has made me t doesn’t feel so long ago that I visited Anlong by government officials to hotel guests and charity hungry, so I agree. She keeps chatting as we walk. Veng on my way to Preah Vihear temple. En projects. Bartering was still common, with rice People who look good for their years will always route, in a humble roadside wooden shack, I had valued as much as cash. In the photos, a collective tell you their age. ‘I am seventy-eight’, she says as we Ieaten a breakfast I still think about often: rice and a motion animates Phnom Penh—schools, factories, cross the next side street. She looks more like in her perfectly fried egg with a generous, runny yolk and street life and markets are alive with those seeking to mid-sixties. ‘What’s your name?’ she says, so I tell her. a bit of glutamate sprinkled over it for flavour. I also heal years of unfathomable pain. When I interviewed ‘What’s yours?’ She doesn’t answer. She is very fidgety. remember the Cambodian friend who was travelling him on Zoom last June, Cummings recalled a feeling At the restaurant, she looks at my camera. ‘You won’t with me didn’t much like it there. The place was still of optimism. ‘There were no international phone photograph me, will you?’ she says. ‘That could be tainted with the memories of Pol Pot’s last days, and lines any more, we were cut off in many ways,’ he said trouble.’ She says she is from Chiba prefecture, and we were outsiders. I was the only foreign tourist we of his first trip during the early 1980s, yet life and works at a pachinko parlour. Has twelve grandchildren would see all day until we went back to our hostel in Cambodians ‘carried on’. but lives alone. She takes from her bag a small envelope Siem Reap, nearly 130 kilometres away. The photos show familiar faces and scenes. of bubble wrap. ‘I wear this when I eat ramen,’ she says, Fifteen years ago, we wanted to see things we’d Schoolchildren walk through city streets. Students and carefully unfolds a colourful plastic bib, which she never seen before and set off on an adventure our attend a lecture theatre. Workers repair a car in a ties tightly around her neck almost up to her chin. friends and families could only dream of. I suspect garage. Tourists pose in front of Angkor Wat. Locals ‘I came to see the doctor but they don’t know what’s that the same feeling animated Paul K. Cummings crowd at Wat Phnom during the Khmer new year wrong. I was getting pins and needles in my arms. And when he first arrived in Phnom Penh in 1983 and, a festival. Training the eyes to spot differences, one they said if I have sore teeth it could mean something year later, travelled to Angkor Wat, leading the first notices pharmaceuticals being sold at the Tuol is wrong with my heart. I might get a stress test. I don’t group of tourists in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia Tompoung market rather than souvenirs that are know. But they’ll be expecting me back at work.’ The with his travel company Obitours. common today; the image of a much-younger food comes. She has ordered the large serving, three In an online exhibition, the Phnom Penh- Sihanouk celebrating his return to the country in times the size of my small one, but when it comes she based Bophana Center has curated a selection 1991 after the Paris Peace Accords; and the absence says there is too much of it, and the cream sauce is ‘not of Cummings’s photographs taken over a decade of traffic. The road from Pochentong International nutritious’. ‘I won’t come here again,’ she announces. through to the early 1990s. Welcome to Cambodia: Airport is empty, while jams and pollution are She stops eating less than halfway through. I tell her From War Zone to Tourist Destination charts the common occurrences today. about Fuji Ramen up the street. The soup is very good first stage of transition and transformation in the Cummings’s photos, which end with the peace there, made from chicken feet and pork. Now she wants country’s past fifty years. agreement, witness a changing society. From to eat it, Fuji Ramen. So we leave together and walk Though the Khmer Rouge regime had fallen, one crossroad to another, an observer from the back up Kokusai-dori, the way I have come. I might as driven out of power in January 1979 by the 2020s may now turn to before and after photos of well show her where to go. She tells me how she didn’t Vietnamese, Cummings’s tour groups were visiting at Sihanoukville or pre- and post-NagaWorld (a giant get home till midnight two nights ago, and then she ate a turbulent time. Vietnamese soldiers still occupied casino complex in Phnom Penh) for echoes of recent, gyoza and sashimi and drank beer, and that’s why she Cambodia, and guerrilla warfare continued between hurried changes. didn’t eat all yesterday. Suddenly she says, ‘I think I am People’s Republic of Kampuchea forces and Khmer But Welcome to Cambodia doesn’t evoke cheap full. Goodbye. I will eat Fuji Ramen next time.’ ☐ Rouge loyalists. The countryside was littered with nostalgia. It rather provides an important archive landmines. In Phnom Penh, there was a strict 9pm for Cambodia’s present and future generations. And Mark Robinson is a photographer and writer based in curfew. Even as late as the mid-1990s, Khmer Rouge sometimes an outsider’s gaze can contribute to what Tokyo. These essays are taken from the catalogue of his soldiers roamed the north-western provinces. is and what was, lost, close and cherished. ☐ exhibition Tokyo Shores: 36 Views from the Other Side, Cummings, an intrepid Greek-Australian a personal take on the neighbourhoods of the east Tokyo traveller who was ‘neither journalist nor Farah Abdessamad is a writer based in New York riverside around Asakusa, where he lives

35 TRAVEL Ways of writing Emily Ding

im Hannigan, a British author of several narrative TIM HANNIGAN diary entries decades after a trip, to Bruce Chatwin’s histories on Indonesia, is on a meta quest in Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre outright lie about an interaction with his Australian Travel Writing Tribe. As a bookish teenage surfer Hurst Publishers: 2021 bush guides to cast himself in a better light. All this leads Tin the 1990s in Cornwall, England, he had gravitated Hannigan to conclude, convincingly, that ‘the simplest, to the writings of the towering figures of his fellow least ethically fraught approach for a travel writer was countrymen similarly ‘scholarly’ and ‘intrepid’—Eric Hannigan also attends academic conferences and to keep a firm anchor in the actuality. Not in some Newby, Paul Theroux, Nick Danziger—and continued picks the brains of Carl Thompson, an academic, and nebulous “truth” or “greater truth”, whatever that meant.’ his love affair with such adventurers into adulthood, Barnaby Rogerson, the publisher of the famed Eland A number of the writers Hannigan meets are also largely free of inner conflicts. That is, until he stumbled Books. They talk about what value there is in writing as journalists, and lessons could be drawn from them on upon the academic field of travel writing studies, which outsiders to a place, what techniques could be employed how to represent a place and its people more accurately. owes much of its existence to the influence of Edward to alleviate ethical concerns about orientalising and what Barkham reveals that he sometimes sends relevant Said’s Orientalism. travel writing of the future might look like. For them, passages to the people he writes about to make sure As critical theories of post-colonialism have spilt the conclusion seemed foregone: it’s not travel writing he has things right, and that he has generally found it over into popular consciousness and social awareness that’s the problem, but the power imbalances that shape improved his work. But it’s easy to see the danger. If of racial discrimination has surged to the fore, many the author-subject relationship, and that’s something you were writing a biography, would you show as-yet- of travel writing’s long-existing problems have been that can be tempered. unpublished chapters to the person it concerns? Even laid bare: the predominance of white male authors, In a kind of tongue-in-cheek meta commentary, as outsiders may miss important nuances about us, the favouring of a romanticised past over modern- Hannigan signposts his own journey with travel we don’t always see ourselves the most clearly. I prefer day realities, the speaking for ‘subjects’ in developing narrative conventions. There is the obligatory quest. Samanth Subramaniam’s approach: letting his ‘subjects’ countries who can’t talk back. Critics say they stem The possibility of obscuring the existence of a travel talk back to him within the text itself, so the readers can from travel writing’s historical origins as a vehicle that companion (his girlfriend) during one of his house calls. weigh differing perspectives. Perhaps for that reason, gave European colonialism its legs, which continues to The requisite self-deprecation that he had found could Hannigan found that some writers were stepping back shape how we see the world in ways taken for granted. be an authorial strategy ‘to dodge ethical culpability from their narrative personas to portray places and their This has given travel writing, and travel itself, a faintly in all manner of issues’—the limits of one’s authority communities more than their own journeys. disreputable air, complicit in reinforcing the terrible or the lack of justifiable motivation, perhaps, or some As the purely informational functions of classic inequities of the world. Can travel writing survive kind of bias. The last seems especially endemic in our travel writing have fallen away, travel writers have to ethically? Or is it already too tainted to be redeemed? hyperconnected world, where ‘subjects’ can now talk go further than ever to take readers where they can’t That’s what Hannigan sets out to discover. To begin, back, raining hashtagged damnations on a writer’s head. go themselves: not just to pass on histories from books he searches for a workable definition of travel writing. That’s not to say that one should never write outside and follow in the footsteps of past travel writers, which It’s no small feat considering its amorphous forms, one’s own culture. For Rogerson, being ‘sufficiently creates an echo chamber stuck in an imagined past, but capaciously borrowing from memoir, reportage, history, an outsider’ is an inherent feature of travel writing, to open one’s eyes to the modern present and to speak even fiction—‘a notoriously raffish open house’, Jonathan which, at its very heart, is all to do with exploring what’s to the man and woman on the street, who could reveal Raban has called it. Taking cues from the genre’s unfamiliar. Patrick Barkham also makes a case for the something of a place’s contemporary life. In this way, history, Hannigan settles on ‘predominantly factual, ‘clarity and vividness’ of first impressions, especially in too, writers can debunk the myth that they’ve come too first-person prose accounts’ of a journey, and then noting how they change over time. And he goes a step late to the party and every place worth exploring has limits his scope to modern travel writing in English. further, arguing that the value lies not just in describing, already been done. The world is constantly evolving, and Drawing on the scholarship of Mary Baine Campbell, say, your community to fellow outsiders, but also in so should travel writing. he traces its provenance to Sir John Mandeville, who describing it to you—it can be instructive to know how In Hannigan’s consideration of journalism’s role in left St Albans, England, in 1322 for an odyssey around others might see you. travel writing, there seems a missed opportunity in not the world that lasted more than three decades. It later To be fair, travel writing’s history of playing fast considering the blurred boundaries between the latter turned out that Mandeville the narrator was not an and loose with the facts, committed by some of its and ‘foreign’ correspondence, which occupies a place actual person, and that the published manuscript had most famous stars, has sullied its reputation somewhat that has similarly come under scrutiny. There is an been heavily plagiarised and imagined, including ‘dog- in this regard. While the writers Hannigan spoke to important distinction in travel writing that is central to headed men’ and ‘fish-guzzling cyclopes’. Nevertheless, were broadly in agreement on other issues, they varied its survival as a separate genre: travel writers have the this Mandeville would eventually give rise to a particular significantly in their views on where the boundaries lay licence to be more imaginative, which does not include British literary tradition: unlike his predecessors, between fact and fiction: from Dervla Murphy never making things up. To paraphrase an essay of Thomas Mandeville travelled not as pilgrim or missionary or taking notes, to Rory MacLean reimagining the lives of Swick’s, they can be interpreters of landscape: two trader. He travelled simply for travel’s sake, and wrote historical characters in intimate detail and liberal use writers can observe the same set of facts but come to about it. of composite characters, to Fermor’s reconstruction of completely different conclusions. That’s where the magic As a lifelong aficionado of travel writing, Hannigan of travel writing lies. And that’s why it’s so important isn’t a dispassionate investigator, nor are the travel that travel writers come from diverse backgrounds. writers he interviews. Sometimes the book feels like POEM Subramaniam hopes that, one day, we’ll have more a justification for, rather than an interrogation of, travellers from the ‘third world’ writing about the ‘first travel writing—and I say this without disparagement. world’, not just the other way around. Travel Writing Tribe feels like a timely book amid this Sometimes I think of how, whenever I return from my travels, I pandemic, which has exacerbated the inequities between spend several days, even weeks, enveloped in the pages those who can move and those who can’t. It appears Sometimes of books about where I’ve been. Like the readers in to be the first of its kind aimed at the general reader, you are an enemy Hannigan’s book, I prefer reading deeply after my trip, and does a comprehensive job of collecting the myriad and I call your name in rage. not before, so I can see things with fresh eyes and arrive perspectives already percolating on the subject. You are a shackle at my own observations on the road, before coming In a journey spanning England, Scotland, Ireland and I think of breaking free. home to test my assumptions against those who have and Greece, Hannigan dives deep into the archives You are a homeland gone before. None of the books exist in isolation. As I to commune with the spirits of Wilfred Thesiger and and even in your arms read them, they are also talking to each other, across Patrick Leigh Fermor, and meets with living British I weep in longing for you. years and decades and perhaps centuries, adding to our travel writers with at least two books published, of understanding of our common humanity. ☐ different generations, gender, race and specialities, and Ghojimuhemmed Muhemmed closes with Kapka Kassabova, whom he touts as paving a (translated by Joshua L. Freeman) new way forward. Emily Ding is a writer based in Kuala Lumpur

36 CULTURE A local icon Marc de Faoite

lie flat on my back, melting, feet apart, arms by my sides, palms facing upwards, feeling the feeble breeze as the ceiling fan stirs the torpid air. Beneath Ime the thin yoga mat sponges up the pooling sweat. I slow my breath, methodically, counting, lengthening each exhalation, aware of the trembling droplets of perspiration that have gathered in my eyebrows, threatening to drip into my closed eyes. I reach out. My fingers find the familiar soft cotton cloth. I mop my face, my neck. There are 1,000 uses for a Good Morning Towel, at least half a dozen of them now an integral part of my yoga practice. Besides mopping sweat, a Good Morning Towel lengthens my reach, allowing me to hold positions longer and more comfortably, poses I once slipped into Minh Bui Jones easily without any external help, but which are no longer as accessible for this body well entrenched in middle age. A Good Morning Towel hangs next to a poster of Audrey Hepburn in a restaurant in Hong Kong But age isn’t the only thing to restrict my movements. There are roadblocks and travel bans and a deadly virus It is as essential and ubiquitous to Manila’s jeepney others are unstitched and so loosely woven that they floating through the air. The government-mandated drivers as it is to Singapore’s traditional kopitiams and quickly become threadbare and fall apart. app on my phone alerts me that my neighbourhood is Bangkok’s massage parlours. I have a little stock of Good Morning Towels in use still in the red zone. Even without the app, the sirens I Mentions of Good Morning Towels crop up in the at home, in varying degrees of repair. Some are tired and hear almost daily tell the same tale. In the past year and pages of Malaysia’s noir genre. Old-school Pinoy action worn, stained with the yellow of turmeric or the unlikely a half, whole weeks and even months have passed in film villains wrap Good Morning Towels around their and indelible mucky brown of mangosteens. When they which I haven’t stepped outside my apartment. fists in preparation for fights. The towels repeatedly get too threadbare for the kitchen, I use them to dust my Sometime in the mid-seventeenth, Blaise Pascal feature as props in Singapore’s historical drama desk and bookshelves. wrote that the single source of humanity’s misfortunes series Samsui Women, detailing the lives of Chinese I always have at least one Good Morning Towel on was an inability to sit quietly in a room. More than immigrants who worked in the construction industry, my kitchen counter, and if I am cooking, I generally a century later, his compatriot Xavier de Maistre, and if you know when and where to look, they can even have another slung over my shoulder. Folded, I take one finding himself confined in the wake of a duel, penned be glimpsed in the work of the Hong Kong cineastes in each hand and open the oven, carefully extracting the a humorous psychogeographical exploration of Wong Kar Wai and Stephen Chow. The blogosphere home-baked sourdough bread that has become such a mundanity entitled Journey Around My Room. In my is replete with sentimental reminiscences about these comforting staple for me during this long lockdown. The own confinement I let my eye and mind wander, each simple cloths. heat of the oven added to the ambient temperature has item a springboard for reflection and memory, though me reaching for yet another Good Morning Towel to few quite as imbued with resonances and recollections ood Morning Towels are bilingual. Produced mop my face. as this unassuming household cloth that has somehow by Shanghai’s Sanyou Industrial Company, they A hand towel might make for an unusual ideological enmeshed itself in my life. feature the red-inked slogan ‘Good Morning’ battlefield, but Malaysia has at least two types of ‘Selamat The Baader-Meinhof effect describes the Gjuxtaposed with four Chinese characters 祝君早安 (zhù Pagi’ (Good Morning in Malay) towels, one dyed in phenomenon of seeing something everywhere. Linked jūn zao ān) which roughly translates as an honorific, an Islamic-friendly hue of green. While embracing the to pattern recognition, it is a very useful human skill, ‘Wishing You Good Morning’ or ‘Good Morning convenience and general aesthetics of the original, both but also a neurological shortcut that can all too easily Wishes for a Gentleman’. The company’s name, Sanyou, Selamat Pagi towels pointedly bear no equivalent slogan reinforce our biases and give us a false sense of reality. translates as ‘Three Friends’, these friends being the written in Chinese, preferring to ignore, or even erase, After my first sweaty encounters with the Good Morning co-founders Chen Wanyun, Shen Jiucheng and Shen this perpetual reminder of the contentious reach and Towel, I started to see them everywhere. Cognitive Qiyong. Though Sanyou was founded in 1912, it wasn’t impact of the Chinese diaspora. aberrations aside, Good Morning Towels aren’t difficult until after the First World War that it began marketing During the 2019 Hong Kong riots, Good Morning to find, often cropping up in the most unexpected places. its products under the ‘Good Morning’ brand. The war Towels dangled from the necks of glass bottles filled On my last appointment, before she probed inside my had interrupted supplies from Europe, and Japanese with flammable substances, fuses for improvised mouth and tinkered with my teeth, the dentist carefully merchants used this scarcity to raise prices. Sanyou incendiary devices launched against police and their placed a Good Morning Towel across my upper chest. invested in the latest technology to produce a premium subsequently burning vehicles. But more usually the Steeped and soaped, and sometimes bleached or product destined both for the domestic market and for emblematic Good Morning Towel is not a symbol boiled, these banners hang from wire washing lines, export to the wider Southeast Asia. During the Second of revolt or ideology, but rather a reassuring reminder lethargically drying in humid back alleys, or slipped over World War, Japanese artillery destroyed Sanyou’s main of domesticity. the slats of louvred windows. At construction sites the factory, and the company was able to resume production towels cling to chain-link fences, while outside the cities only in 1945, when it actively and defiantly marketed he fan weakly stirs the hot and humid air, the mat and in the suburbs they dry draped on bushes, or lie flat the Good Morning Towel as an anti-Japanese, patriotic beneath me soaked in sweat. I lie on the floor, on sunny car porches absorbing the thermal inertia of towel, a xenophobic campaign that, coupled with the breathing, sweating, thinking of the treks I’ve sun-soaked concrete. towel’s quality, won it wide popularity, which in turn led Tplanned and cancelled, imagining the cool freshness The Good Morning Towel is an essential and nearly to its ubiquity today. of mountain air still waiting somewhere, the seductive indispensable element of Southeast Asian life. Like The Good Morning Towel is honoured with many crunch of frost or snow underfoot. I picture the trips chuckling house lizards, they can be found in almost competitors and imitators. Good Luck, White Towel, and hikes I’ve had the good luck to make, rendered more every home. But this white cotton rectangle leads a very Good Friend and Good Day are just a few of the names precious by their current impossibility, many of them public existence too, making cameo appearances in the given to these imitations, all with vaguely similar made with a lightweight Good Morning Towel tucked daily drama of life all across the region. Whether it is dimensions and typography, as well as the familiar thin into my backpack, the ideal travel towel. I conjure up the an improvised headband for a street hawker labouring blue borders along the edges. I’ve started to collect some faces of friends and family I see only on screens now, not over a smoking wok in Penang, or placed neatly around of these variants. As far as hobbies go, it is both cheap knowing when, or if, we’ll ever meet again. I slow my a customer’s neck by an Indian barber in Kuala Lumpur, and harmless, and I reassure myself that, if needed, they breath and bring my wandering mind back to the present or cleaning the food-flecked faces of babies learning to can always be pressed into service. In some cases, the moment, back to my room, and let my fingers grip the eat in Jakarta, the Good Morning Towel is a stalwart. ‘fake’ towels are of better quality than the originals, while familiar cotton anchor of the Good Morning Towel. ☐

37 THE BOOKSELLER Marking time Sean Chadwell

Erica Eng

hen the novices across the street at Wat Nong Unesco office; unused and empty for years, the structure the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich begin the afternoon drumming, I glance was rebuilt using traditional techniques involving, for and social sciences at the University of Konstanz in furtively at my watch to discover that I have example, buffalo urine. We sit facing the street, looking Germany. A few of the volumes in his shop—some of Walready been lost in conversation with Klaus Seeland across at Wat Nong, and it might be 1925, 1945 or 1987, them antiques and others studies on forestry across Asia for more than an hour. He had in fact pointed out that, the model year of the immaculate grey 2CV parked in with, I now see, Seeland’s name on the spines—have among the reasons he opened the Café for Knowledge, front of the shop whenever Seeland is there. come from his own home library a little way upriver where we sat among a curated selection of books in To turn around and face the shelves occupying from the bookshop. French, German, English, Italian, Spanish and Dutch, the side and rear walls of the structure, however, is was ‘good conversation’ with the kinds of people who to dispense with this illusion, in a good way: a few n my first visit to the Café for Knowledge six drop in to places like this. thousand volumes, most of them new pocket editions, months earlier, I couldn’t resist taking home a In Luang Prabang, with its Unesco World Heritage beckon, in genres as varied as their print languages 1946 edition of Irma S. Rombauer’s classic Joy of chops, Seeland might reasonably have expected to (more than a few of these are translations, as well). OCooking. More than once, Seeland points out that ‘when see a lot more of such people by now. Now in his late The only obvious taxonomy is linguistic, the Romantic it’s gone, it’s gone’. He is ostensibly referring to letting sixties, he worked on the shop long before its opening gradually ceding space to the Germanic. Beyond that, it books go when people buy them. But when he says this, in November last year, during a pandemic that had is not clear what guides the arrangement of the volumes he could also be talking about the old house in which already sealed Laos borders to visitors for months. From on offer, but the juxtapositions between one spine and we sit; he won’t recoup the considerable investment in the start conceived as a bookshop-café, it sits in an old the next often enough feel playful, resonant, intentional. its restoration, after all. Or perhaps he means the tourist neighbourhood of the city centre, on the peninsula Presently, on one English language shelf, Dervla economy that has shaped Luang Prabang for the past formed by the confluence of the Khan and Mekong Murphy’s South from the Limpopo is followed by a quarter-century. Or Luang Prabang itself? In any case, rivers. The double doors of the Café for Knowledge pair of translations from the Chinese—Wolf Totem, the point seems to be that you appreciate these things open to a quiet stretch of street that, pre-Covid, would by Jian Rong and Beijing Coma, by Ma Jian. Next? Ian while they’re here in front of you. have had hundreds of international visitors strolling by Stevenson’s Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. ‘I like people who like books,’ Seeland says; it is the each day. I find myself thinking as much about the relationships capsule version of our entire conversation. He points out Instead, Luang Prabang now feels in some ways like among the books as anything else. that it’s difficult, now, to imagine post-pandemic Luang the town it was a century ago, when the house in which When I ask him about this, Seeland nods at Prabang, this quiet gradually giving way to fresh waves we sit talking was first built. Today, the neighbourhood my suggestion that some logic seems to guide the of visitors and residents. Among them, though, will be tranquillity is interrupted by the temple drumming arrangement before telling me that there ‘is no system’. people who like books, and we’re both glad for that. ☐ and little else as Seeland, who is Swiss and has lived Apart, that is, from the intuitive sensibility of a lifelong in Laos for a decade, describes the challenges in the bibliophile who started collecting books at the age restoration of the building. This effort was undertaken of sixteen and has spent his time among them as an Sean Chadwell is the executive director of the Luang in close consultation with advisers from Luang Prabang’s avid reader and academic who taught forest policy at Prabang Film Festival

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