Female journalists in Vietnam returned, like the soldiers, nursing wounds that their countries would refuse to acknowledge.
Tag: Southeast Asia
Islamic Alternatives to Global Finance
Across the Muslim world today ambitious experiments are underway to create an Islamic alternative to conventional finance. These initiatives are inspired by the ...
The Afterlife of Agent Orange
“All wars are fought twice,” writes Viet Thanh Nguyen in Nothing Ever Dies, “the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Even decades after the first war ends, the second war can ...
How To Catch a Philippine Serial Killer
F. H. Batacan’s Smaller and Smaller Circles, a gripping crime thriller, winner of the prestigious Philippine National Book Award and until now available only in the Philippines, begins with the ...
O My Swineherd!
The last century may have ushered in an epoch of wars that have no end, but Homer’s Odyssey continues to inspire. You do not have to be James Joyce or Derek Walcott to find the story of a man’s ...
Double Dirty Work: Sex Research and Symbolic Contamination
“Your skin is very dark,” a hostess in a Ho Chi Minh City bar complains to sociologist Kimberly Hoang. The woman has taken Hoang under her wing to help her become desirable to the bar’s Vietnamese ...
Prajwal Parajuly and the Responsibilities of Fiction
“The Chaurasi is a curious event,” writes Prajwal Parajuly in the author’s note to his new novel, Land Where I Flee, “not many Nepali-speaking Hindus in India, especially people of my generation ...
The Stranger’s Voice
The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s riveting debut novel, is a chronicle of war wrapped in a spy thriller and tucked inside a confession. It is also a political satire, a send-up of Hollywood, and a ...
On Pansodan Road: The Second-Hand Books of Yangon
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Some names in this piece have been changed to protect privacy. It’s a Sunday morning ...
Kim Thúy: A Way with Words
Over the past five years, Kim Thúy has become one of the best known and most celebrated francophone writers of the Vietnamese diaspora. Born in 1968, Thúy fled Vietnam by boat at the age of 10. After ...
Caught in the Game
The Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh devotes just over a minute of his documentary, The Missing Picture (released in the US in March), to the work of Ang Saroeung, a Khmer Rouge cameraman who filmed ...
Megalopolis Now
It is no surprise that New York City, immodestly known as “the capital of the world,” figures so strongly in the popular imagination of apocalypse: think of the submerged Statue of Liberty in the ...
Up From the Shadows
“Aren’t archives supposed to be forever? Well, forever’s a meaningless concept in Asia. Here, only the present is eternal.” So we read early on in Sandi Tan’s debut novel, The Black Isle, a ...
Revolution Amnesia
Philippine National Book Award–recipient Gina Apostol is a novelist with a penchant for unlikely heroes. Gun Dealers’ Daughter, her American debut, is no exception. The bulk of the novel offers the ...