Anthony Veasna So remembered

FEBRUARY–APRIL 2021ASIAN LITERATURE

9 772016 012803

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Holmes ChanHong Kong spirit

Richard HeydarianAsian revolutionaries

Anthony TaoHutong secrets

Tse Wei LimHawker culture

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PUBLISHER & EDITOR Minh Bui Jones CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ko ko thett (poetry), Preeta Samarasan (fiction), Pauline Fan (translation)

DESIGN Jess Barr WEBSITE Nicholas Lhoyd-Owen DISTRIBUTION Shu Wen Chye

SUB-EDITORS Allen Myers, Mina Bui Jones, Abby Seiff PROOFREADER Izzy SousterCOVER ILLUSTRATOR Elsie Herberstein

ARTISTS Damien Chavanat, Charis Loke, Gianluca Costantini, Erica Eng, Paul Orchard, Badiucao PO Box 417, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia; editor@mekongreview.com

Mekong Review is published four times a year; next issue May 2021

VOLUME 6, NUMBER 2 FEBRUARY–APRIL 2021

H I S T O R Y 3 Thomas A. Bass Kissinger and Ellsberg in Vietnam

T A I W A N 7 Michael Reilly Between two whales

P O E T R Y 8 Maw Shein Win ‘Phone booth’, ‘Shops’, ‘Restaurant’, ‘Factory’, ‘Eggs’, ‘Huts’

I N T E R V I E W 9 Andrew Quilty Mullah Abdul Rahman, Taliban commander

N O T E B O O K 12 Yuen Chan In China’s grip

A S I A 13 Richard Heydarian Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire by Tim Harper

M Y A N M A R 14 David Scott Mathieson The Burmese Labyrinth: A History of the Rohingya Tragedy by Carlos Sardina Galache

H O N G K O N G 15 Holmes Chan Defiance: Photographic Documentary of Hong Kong’s Awakening; Voices

J O U R N A L I S M 16 Martin Stuart-Fox You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War by Elizabeth Becker

C H I N A 18 Anne Stevenson-Yang Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy by Li Zhang

A U S T R A L I A 19 Jeff Sparrow The Carbon Club: How a Network of Influential Climate Sceptics, Politicians and Business Leaders Fought to Control Australia’s Climate Policy by Marian Wilkinson

M A L A Y S I A 20 Charles Brophy Automation and the Future of Work by Aaron Benanav; Work in an Evolving Malaysia: The State of Households 2020, Part II by Khazanah Research Institute

R E L I G I O N 21 Christopher G. Moore Finding the Heart Sutra; Guided by a Magician, an Art Collector and Buddhist Sages from Tibet to Japan by Alex Kerr

H E R I T A G E 22 Farah Abdessamad Returning Southeast Asia’s Past: Objects, Museums, and Restitution by Louise Tythacott and Panggah Ardiyansyah (eds)

H I S T O R Y 23 Carl Vadivella Belle Life Under the Palms: The Sublime World of the Anti-Colonialist Jacob Haafner by Paul van der Velde (translated by Liesbeth Bennink)

S H O R T S T O R Y 24 Ken Kwek Teochew opera

P O E M 27 S Rupsha Mitra ‘Winter wanderings’, ‘Gestalt of memories’, ‘During the war’

T R I B U T E 28 Sunisa Manning Anthony Veasna So

T H A I L A N D 29 Tyrell Haberkorn A Good True Thai by Sunisa Manning

I N D O N E S I A 30 Jennifer Lindsay The Book of Jakarta by Maesy Ang and Teddy W. Kusuma (eds)

P O E T R Y 31 Michael Freeman Magnolia, 木蘭 by Nina Mingya Powles; chengyu chinoiserie by Leung Rachel Ka Yin

P O E M Nha Thuyen ‘Where are the wings beating from’ (translated by Kaitlin Rees)

T R A N S L A T I O N 32 Violet Cho Language is power

N E I G H B O U R H O O D 33 Anthony Tao In my hutong

P R O F I L E 34 Abby Seiff Anup Kaphle

P U B L I S H I N G 36 Marc de Faoite Dropping English

P O E M Rory Harris ‘Change’

F O O D 37 Tse Wei Lim Childhood snacks

B O O K S E L L E R 38 Siddharth Dasgupta Radhika Timbadia

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Atomic warfare was Kissinger’s other area of expertise. In Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy—a book admired by Nixon when it was published in 1957—Kissinger argued that America’s post-war military strategy was based on old-fashioned ideas about nukes. They were not just big bombs that flattened every building within a mile of where they exploded. They could also be shaped into handier little devices, known as tactical nuclear weapons, and used in a much wider variety of military confrontations. Kissinger’s book got him hired as a professor at Harvard (over the opposition of colleagues who found his scholarship feeble and most of his ideas borrowed from other, unacknowledged, sources.) The book also launched Kissinger into the world of military consultants—the same world that Ellsberg, seven years his junior, would occupy when he too became a specialist in nuclear weapons.

Kissinger was looking for a presidential candidate to advise and perhaps accompany into the White House. He favoured Republicans but offered his services to Democrats and Republicans alike, and it was this equal-opportunity approach to foreign policy that got him his big break. In 1968, Nixon won a razor-thin victory over Hubert Humphrey, his Democratic opponent, by violating the Logan Act, which forbids unauthorised citizens from interfering in the foreign affairs of the United States. Nixon had secretly promised the president of South Vietnam that if he failed to sign a peace treaty ending the war in 1968, he would get a better deal the following year from the newly elected President Nixon. Guiding Nixon’s hand—with leaks from the negotiations in Paris, while at the same time serving as an adviser to Nixon’s opponent—was Kissinger.

Ellsberg is a divided man. The first split came over the 4 July holiday in 1946, when he was fifteen. Driving across country from their home in Michigan to a family reunion in Colorado, Ellsberg’s father fell asleep at the wheel and hit a bridge abutment, shearing the car in half and killing Ellsberg’s mother and sister. Ellsberg was in a coma for thirty-six hours. His parents had abandoned

Kissinger and Ellsberg in VietnamThomas A. Bass

H I S T O R Y

Before Henry Kissinger was secretary of state in the Nixon administration and Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York

Times in 1971, they met in Saigon in July 1966 to swap views on Vietnam and discuss how the war was going. Then a Harvard professor looking to make his move into politics, Kissinger was visiting Vietnam as a consultant to Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a fellow Harvardian and former senator who was serving as US ambassador. Ellsberg, a military analyst who had been in Vietnam for ten months as an assistant to the CIA agent Edward Lansdale, gave Kissinger two important pieces of advice: never talk to someone in the presence of their boss, and do not go to official briefings. Rarely for an American in Vietnam, he also suggested that Kissinger interview some Vietnamese.

Ellsberg was studying pacification for Lansdale, which meant he was looking for ways to subdue the rural population. This was Lansdale’s second tour of duty in Vietnam. He had become famous in the 1950s when he helped to establish the former French colony of Cochinchina as an independent state, eventually called the Republic of Vietnam. After France’s defeat at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the United States had plucked Ngo Dinh Diem, the country’s first leader (1954-63), out of a Belgian monastery and equipped him with an army. Aided by lots of money from the CIA, Lansdale managed to create South Vietnam as a client state led by a corrupt but reliable group of Catholic refugees from North Vietnam.

Having already performed a similar miracle in the Philippines, Lansdale was a favourite of President Kennedy. Unfortunately, after Lansdale’s return to the Department of Defense, where he worked under cover as a colonel in the US Air Force, Kennedy gave the former advertising man an assignment that he described as his biggest failure. Lansdale was supposed to arrange the assassination of Fidel Castro. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was the Soviet Union’s response to Lansdale’s larger assignment—to invade Cuba, for a makeover of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion the previous year. By 1965, with Castro still alive and Cuba still communist, Lansdale got turfed back to Vietnam. Travelling with him was an odd assortment of assassins and bagmen, and one newcomer to his team, Dr Daniel Ellsberg, a civilian adviser whose own career in the Pentagon had hit a dead end.

Ellsberg and Kissinger had crossed paths at Harvard in the 1950s, when Kissinger was a young assistant professor of history and Ellsberg was a graduate

student in economics, specialising in game theory. If Ellsberg was working for a spy, Kissinger was actually a spy. For all the books written about him, few dwell on the act of treachery during the election of 1968 that got him his job as President Nixon’s national security adviser. Always willing to trade inside information for political power, Kissinger was an FBI snitch on his colleagues at Harvard, but he was so successful in his next act of betrayal that Nixon thought he owed his election as president to Kissinger’s dark hand.

A courtier liberal with his praise, Kissinger on several occasions would describe Ellsberg as the person from whom he had learned the most about Vietnam. Ellsberg had spent a year in the Pentagon studying the war as an assistant to John McNaughton, right-hand man to Robert McNamara, the secretary of defence. Now as part of Lansdale’s team, Ellsberg was travelling deep into the

countryside. For his part, Ellsberg was impressed that Kissinger followed his advice. ‘McNamara never did any of these things,’ he said. ‘He always talked to district advisers in the presence of the general in charge and never seemed to realize how much he was being fooled.’

Kissinger and Ellsberg were advisers to men of power, whom they hoped to succeed by themselves becoming powerful men. Kissinger accomplished this task. Ellsberg failed. His military service had been honourable but undistinguished. His first marriage had collapsed. He had worked in the Pentagon for a year before being edged out to Vietnam. Nonetheless, Ellsberg was a government employee at a higher rank and with more security clearances than anything Kissinger, a private citizen, had yet to obtain. He was a good storyteller and quick learner. He knew the lie of the land and was, indeed, Kissinger’s best informant. From that point on, as their lives intersected, Vietnam was the fulcrum on which Kissinger and Ellsberg balanced their careers.

A Jewish refugee whose family fled Germany in 1938 when he was fifteen, Heinz Kissinger—renamed Henry on his arrival in Manhattan—was working in a shaving brush factory and studying accounting at City College when he was launched on his diplomatic career. Drafted in 1942, Private Kissinger marched across Europe with the 84th Infantry Division, where this fluent German speaker was soon administering captured towns and working in military intelligence. After the war, the GI Bill sent Kissinger to Harvard, where this son of a former school teacher in Bavaria devoted himself to studying history. As an undergraduate, graduate student and then—after three years of seasoning at the Council on Foreign Relations—as a professor at Harvard, Kissinger specialised in studying the aftermath of revolutions. Putting the world back together after the Napoleonic wars was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. The topic might seem obscure, except when one notices that the first paragraph mentions nuclear weapons.

Janice Cheong

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Judaism for Christian Science, which calls for healing through faith. Ellsberg today would be crippled, with one leg shorter than the other, if his Jewish relatives had not insisted on having his broken bones set by a doctor.

Ellsberg’s father was a structural engineer who worked on large projects, including America’s first nuclear reactor for producing plutonium in Hanford, Washington state. He knew the risks he was taking while driving after a sleepless night, but Ellsberg’s mother demanded they press on. Analysing risk and uncertainty became Ellsberg’s academic speciality. But his life has been equally marked by anger at authority figures who make bad decisions.

He graduated from Harvard in 1952 with a degree in economics, which at the time included the new science of game theory. The games he studied involved decision making under uncertain circumstances. The biggest of these games was trying to figure out which nuclear power, the Soviet Union or the United States, could gain an advantage over the other. Was there some opening move that allowed you to wipe out your opponent before the missiles began raining back on you? Otherwise, you had to accept mutually assured destruction—the MAD balance of terror that still dominates world affairs.

Ellsberg was offered a junior fellowship at Harvard. He chose instead to go to Cambridge University for a year, and then he did something even more surprising. He joined the Marine Corps. By this point in his life, Ellsberg had made other surprising moves. As an undergraduate, he had married a nineteen-year-old Radcliffe student, Carol Cummings, with whom he had two children before they divorced in 1964. After nearly flunking out of officer training due to a bad case of asthma, Ellsberg got to lead a rifle corps, but the closest he came to combat was floating in the Mediterranean on a boat full of seasick soldiers during the Suez crisis.

Finally back at Harvard for that delayed fellowship, the former Marine and now graduate student Ellsberg met the assistant professor Kissinger. Nixon’s White House tapes record Kissinger describing Ellsberg as the smartest student he ever had, although Ellsberg was never Kissinger’s student. Their relationship was more one of peers, and what most impressed Kissinger was a series of lectures Ellsberg delivered for Kissinger’s Harvard International seminar, a summer programme for government officials from around the world. (These were some of the people Kissinger spied on for the FBI.)

Ellsberg’s lectures on ‘The Art of Coercion’, including lectures on ‘The Theory and Practice of Blackmail’ and ‘The Political Use of Madness’, impressed Kissinger, who would use these ideas throughout his diplomatic career. Blackmail and madness were also key components in what Nixon later described as his madman theory. Hitler had gobbled up half of Europe without firing a shot. ‘The artist’, as Ellsberg calls him, was a master bluffer. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger would ever attain this degree of artistry, but not for want of trying.

Ellsberg left Harvard in 1958, at the age of twenty-eight, to work for the RAND Corporation, a military think tank near the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles. (RAND stands for research and development.) Harvard fellows usually leave with a PhD, but Ellsberg, who always had trouble meeting deadlines, took another four years to finish his doctorate. In Risk, Ambiguity and Decision, he applied game theory to understanding why people, when faced with uncertain odds, often act against their own self-interest. Economists today might not know that the Ellsberg paradox is named after the world’s most famous leaker.

RAND was started after the Second World War as an Air Force think tank for planning thermonuclear war, and this was Ellsberg’s first job. He toured US military bases in the Pacific, where he was surprised to learn about the precarity of the US nuclear arsenal. It was on hair-trigger alert, with authority to launch a nuclear attack delegated not just to military commanders, but all the way down to base commanders. This was done on the premise that a surprise attack from the Soviet Union demanded retaliation, even in the absence of an

order from the president. These facts were confirmed when Ellsberg and a colleague snuck out of the Pentagon one day to watch Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s film about nuclear weapons, which features dialogue lifted directly from some of Ellsberg’s colleagues at RAND. Ellsberg realised that this madcap farce was actually a fair description of US nuclear policy. ‘That was a documentary!’ he told his companion afterwards.

Ellsberg quit his career as a nuclear strategist at RAND in the autumn of 1964 and went to work full time in the Pentagon as an assistant to

McNaughton and McNamara. In a small office next to McNaughton’s, Ellsberg was given the assignment of reading all the cable traffic on Vietnam. As voluminous streams of material crossed his desk, he started reading only the secret stuff and then only the top-secret stuff and then the specialised, compartmentalised stuff that was even more secret. Visitors found Ellsberg’s desk covered with towering piles of red-bordered documents, which were supposed to be locked in the safe in his office, but that McNaughton, and later Lansdale, would chastise him for leaving unsecured.

As Ellsberg told Studs Terkel in an interview published in 1972 under the title ‘Paper Pushers’:

I was in the Pentagon working for men who were addicted to the flow of secret information that passed their desks. It was like electricity coursing through their veins. In fact, the speed of decision-making, flickering from one part of the world to another—a weapons system to be decided on, or one set of decisions about force levels, or big wars or little wars—from moment to moment, almost a kaleidoscopic kind of effect, gave their lives an electric excitement to which they were clearly addicted and which they could not imagine living without. They were nervous men, constantly flipping pencils, constantly drumming on tables, cracking

their knuckles, as they moved from one decision to another with this hypnotic fascination. The course of power, however, could only be theirs if they toed the mark. They could lose access to that flow of information in minutes if they made the wrong move. They would not be invited to the next White House meeting. They would no longer be in it, be part of it.Ellsberg was never cut out to be a paper pusher.

There was always more to learn as he uncovered paradoxes and anomalies. His best thinking was strategic, not the kind of snap decision making required of military managers. I caught a glimpse of this when I visited Ellsberg for a couple of days at his house in the Berkeley hills overlooking San Francisco Bay. Ellsberg is a man who is perpetually distracted by adding new facts to what he knows or what he thought he knew or could have known but didn’t. On our first morning together, we passed through the kitchen and stepped out back to the combination studio, guest house and storage building where Ellsberg works.

We began with a tour of the premises. First there was Ellsberg’s office, with a big computer monitor and telephone on a desk lit with clip lamps. On the wall facing the desk was a towering stack of books and overstuffed cardboard boxes filled with files marked ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’, ‘Nuclear War Planning’ and other subjects he was pondering while writing The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, which was published in 2017. We pushed from Ellsberg’s office into another large room filled with files and on from there—after walking through the apartment of the tenant who shares Ellsberg’s property—into another room filled with files. Ellsberg was talking nonstop on our tour, picking up folders, riffling through them, reading comments written on the margins and barely restraining himself from scribbling a fresh thought, as he kept getting tugged to update, clarify, correct or strengthen whatever argument he was making the last time he looked into these folders. The same thing happened when Ellsberg went to work in the Pentagon. Facing the flood of information crossing his desk, he fell into the kind of funk that overcomes a man who wants to know everything in a world where there is too much to know.

McNaughton nudged Ellsberg out of the ring of Pentagon offices with outside views over the Potomac and sent him down to an inner ring to work on long-range planning. Knowing it was time to go, Ellsberg switched his Pentagon position to a similar rank in the State Department and attached his star to Edward Lansdale, who would be returning to Vietnam in September 1965. Vietnam offered Ellsberg a chance to redo everything that so far had been a disappointment in his life. Recently divorced, he could play around with as many women as he wanted—an interest he shared with his best friend in Vietnam, John Paul Vann. The subject of Neil Sheehan’s book A Bright Shining Lie, Vann had been cashiered from the military for statutory rape, but he was now back in Vietnam as a civilian, acting like a military commander. Vann had not one but two Vietnamese wives and loved roaring at high speed over the back roads of Vietnam, racing from one sexual conquest to the next, often with Ellsberg at his side, while they pointed their machine guns out the window and prepared to pop off grenades at roadside ambushes.

Vietnam was also a makeover for Ellsberg’s military career. He loved toting a Swedish ‘K’ machinegun into the countryside on weekends, walking point on military patrols and sneaking up on enemy machine gun nests to ‘take them out’ from behind—the kind of thing that would have won him a silver star, if he had been in the military. Lansdale’s team consisted of operatives experienced in organising coups, assassinating officials behind enemy lines, mounting disinformation campaigns and other skills developed for psychological warfare. Since Ellsberg knew none of this stuff, Lansdale assigned Lucien ‘Lou’ Conein—his liaison to the Corsican mafia and paymaster who had arranged for the

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assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese president—to watch over Ellsberg. He needed a lot of watching. Apart from spending weekends ducking for cover on military patrols, he began an affair with the Eurasian mistress of a Corsican mobster who threatened to kill him. It was only Conein’s threat of massive retaliation that saved his life.

Ellsberg was a warrior in Vietnam, shooting at enemies in the field and helping the US military prevail—facts that are hard to square with his

later work as an anti-war protester. At one point he recommended firing all forty of Vietnam’s provincial governors and replacing them with hand-picked officials supposedly free of corruption—in other words, making Vietnam an American colony. The switch from warrior to peacemaker came later than Ellsberg likes to acknowledge and is more morally ambiguous. He says he had a red line for his actions in Vietnam: he would not engage in torture. But in a memo written in May 1967, right before his return to the US, he called for ‘A much more serious effort to destroy, attrite, demoralize or neutralize the VC [communist] provincial forces’, which was ‘crucial to widespread or lasting expansion of government control’.

During the evenings he spent chatting with Lansdale, Ellsberg heard many tales from the early days, when this master spy had organised Cao Dai and other ‘third-force’ militias to fight the French revanchists who were trying to hold on to their former colony. What surprised Ellsberg later was how closely Lansdale guarded his secrets. Even when deep into his cups, he never mentioned Operation Mongoose, his attempt to assassinate Castro. On the other hand, Ellsberg quickly realised that Lansdale was a spent force. His counter-insurgency strategy for ‘winning hearts and minds’ had been surpassed by a full-scale war that included everything except nuclear weapons, and Ellsberg expected that even these would soon be used in Vietnam.

In November 1966, Ellsberg jumped ship. He went to work as an assistant to the US deputy ambassador William Porter, who ran the pacification programmes and other civilian affairs in Vietnam. Once again, at age thirty-six, Ellsberg found himself a poor fit for a line position on someone else’s staff. He spent more time in the field, going out on patrol week after week and then daily, almost around the clock, while dreaming about a heroic death. ‘I had decided to die in a glorious way in Vietnam,’ Ellsberg said, before he finally woke up to the fact that he was more likely to get maimed than killed and that he was fighting some kind of depression, which he later identified as a ‘death wish’. As Ellsberg told biographer Tom Wells, ‘I suppose I have never been so frustrated and depressed in my life.’

It was this death wish that led Ellsberg, on his return to America the following spring, to seek the services of Dr Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist practising in Beverly Hills. Ellsberg reported four days a week for two and a half years of psychoanalysis. Those familiar with the story of the Pentagon Papers know the importance of these sessions, not just for Ellsberg, but also for Nixon. Nixon’s Watergate cover-up would unravel when it was learned that the CIA operatives known as the plumbers, who had broken into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, had actually begun their work earlier, when they broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, looking for secrets they could use to smear Ellsberg’s reputation.

Ellsberg was working again at RAND in 1967 when McNamara tapped him as one of the thirty-six scholars and policy analysts who would compile the Pentagon Papers. This top-secret history of American policy making in Vietnam, from 1945 to 1967, revealed a cascading pile of lies as one US president after another pursued a losing war while pretending to be seeking peace. Although he had been privy to some of the correspondence and worked in Vietnam, Ellsberg was dumbfounded when he sat down to read all forty-seven volumes of the report in the summer of 1968. The

Vietnam War gave rise to what was called the credibility gap—the growing belief that the US government was lying to people about the reasons for fighting the war and its progress. Ellsberg held in his hands the smoking gun, proof that the credibility gap was actually a torrent of official lies flowing throughout the thirty years that France and then the United States tried to reimpose colonial rule over Vietnam.

Ellsberg and Kissinger crossed paths at various conferences, where Kissinger at the time was advancing the idea of a ‘decent interval’—a face-saving period of negotiated withdrawal before Vietnam fell out of the news and into the hands of the communists. When Kissinger came to give one of these talks at RAND in the fall of 1968, he began his remarks with what one witness described as a ‘love fest’ of praise for Ellsberg, whom he again described as the person from whom he had learned the most about Vietnam. Kissinger also made unflattering remarks about the newly elected president, calling Nixon ‘unfit for the job’. This did not prevent Kissinger from accepting the position of national security adviser when Nixon offered it to him a few weeks later.

To prepare for his initial White House briefing, Kissinger hired RAND to analyse US options in Vietnam. Ellsberg and a colleague flew to New York on Christmas Day of 1968, and spent two days briefing Kissinger at the Hotel Pierre, which he and Nixon were using as their post-election office. Ellsberg calculated the odds and teased out all the possible strategies Kissinger might recommend. Actually, not all the strategies. Kissinger vetoed any plans for unilateral withdrawal. Then he asked Ellsberg to provide what he thought was impossible—a ‘winning’ strategy for the war in Vietnam.

Kissinger hired Ellsberg again the following March, when he spent a month in Washington working on a national security memorandum, NSSM-1. This work involved querying all the US agencies involved in the war and compiling a 500-page report on their activities. Again, Ellsberg would discover later that he had been kept in the dark about what was actually happening. March was the month in which Nixon and Kissinger began the secret bombing of Cambodia and started to prepare the nuclear threats they presumed would win the war.

For the next six years, Nixon and Kissinger would threaten to nuke Vietnam, nuke Russia, nuke China. In November 1969, they actually scrambled bombers loaded with nuclear weapons and flew them for two weeks along Soviet borders. Nixon believed that the Korean War had been ended by Eisenhower threatening a nuclear attack on China. Now he was trying his own version of the madman theory, as he and Kissinger drew up a list of targets to be bombed, including rail lines along the Chinese border. What foiled their ultimatum were the large anti-war mobilisations of October and November that year, in effect general strikes, which filled the streets with millions of protesters. The Movement and the Madman, a film being made by Stephen Talbot, will document how Nixon and Kissinger, fearing chaos on the home front, were forced to retreat. As Nixon later admitted, ‘[t]he only chance for my ultimatum to succeed was to convince the Communists that I could depend on solid support at home if they decided to call my bluff.’

Ellsberg was beginning to speak out against the war. At one of these events, a meeting of the War Resisters League in Philadelphia, he again faced a

turning point in his life. After listening to Randy Kehler, a young Harvard graduate, describe how he would soon be going to prison as a draft resister, Ellsberg found himself weeping uncontrollably for an hour in the men’s room. ‘It was as though an ax had split my head, and my heart broke open,’ he wrote in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, published in 2002. ‘But what had really happened was that my life had split in two.’ Appalled by the waste of this young man’s life, Ellsberg kept hearing the phrase run through his head: ‘We are eating our young’.

In October 1969, with the aid of his RAND colleague Anthony Russo, Ellsberg began spiriting the 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers out of his office safe and photocopying them. Also helping on nights when Ellsberg was supposed to be babysitting were his thirteen-year-old son, Robert, who ran the photocopy machine, and ten-year-old daughter, Mary, who was excited about cutting the words ‘TOP SECRET’ off the top and bottom of each photocopied page.

Ellsberg and Kissinger would meet again in the summer of 1970 at what was known as the Western White House, Nixon’s estate in San Clemente, south of Los Angeles. At the first of these meetings, Ellsberg tagged along as the uninvited guest of their mutual friend Lloyd Shearer, celebrity gossip columnist for Parade magazine. Kissinger, who, like Ellsberg, had divorced his first wife in 1964, was beginning to date Hollywood actresses, and he wanted Shearer’s advice on how to leak stories about his amorous conquests. Shearer, one of the few people who knew Kissinger well enough to play practical jokes on him, would begin sending him ‘autographed’ portraits from starlets saying things like ‘Thanks for the wonderful night in Oxnard’.

Kissinger began their lunch with a courteous flourish. He told Shearer that Ellsberg was the man who had taught him the most—not about Vietnam, as Ellsberg expected him to say—but about ‘bargaining’. Kissinger was referring to Ellsberg’s lectures at Harvard on ‘The Art of Coercion’.

‘When I rethought that incident later, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up,’ Ellsberg said in an interview with Rolling Stone. ‘The lectures I had given had to do with Hitler’s blackmail of Austria and Czechoslovakia in the late Thirties, which had allowed him to take over those countries just by threatening their destruction.

‘Kissinger had revealed a major motive of the invasion [of Cambodia] was to convince the Russians and the Chinese that our decision-making was unpredictable … It was a commitment to madness. To realize—not that Kissinger had learned this tactic from me, which is very doubtful, but that such a thought truly was in his mind, enough so that he remembered the analogous thesis that I had presented ten years earlier—this was chilling. It confirmed the nature of his policy and where it might go.’

Wanting to talk to Shearer privately, Kissinger arranged for Ellsberg to dine separately, at the other end of the house, with his assistant, General Al Haig. In August Ellsberg married Patricia Marx, but he cut his Hawaiian honeymoon in half to return to California for another meeting with Kissinger. The meeting was cancelled. Ellsberg drove to San Clemente for another aborted meeting. Then, on a third try, he was let through the gates and ushered into Kissinger’s presence. Ellsberg described this meeting as an attempt to leak information into the government. He wanted Kissinger to know that Nixon’s duplicitous statements about wanting to end the war were known to be false, and that his lying to the public was a strategy that had already been tried and failed.

Ellsberg handed Kissinger a piece of paper—a single page—outlining in game theoretical terms what he foresaw: ‘the slow reduction of forces, threats, demonstrative actions like Cambodia, the likelihood of future invasions, the ultimate mining of Haiphong harbour, and the deliberate deception of the public.

‘As I recited the policy, he looked at me with very narrowed eyes, in a way that assured me I was not on the wrong track, but he made no response. He drummed his fingers on the table and said, “I do not want to discuss our policy; let us turn to another subject.”’

They began discussing the Pentagon Papers. Unknown to Ellsberg, Kissinger had consulted on the project during its first month, and he had a copy in his White House safe.

‘Have you read it?’‘No, should I?’ Kissinger asked. ‘Do we really have

anything to learn from this study?’

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‘My heart sank,’ Ellsberg told Rolling Stone. ‘The major lesson of the study was that each person repeated the same patterns in decision-making and pretty much the same policy as his predecessor, without even knowing it.’

‘After all, we make decisions very differently now,’ Kissinger assured him, while dismissing the twenty years of history described in the papers.

Ellsberg reminded him that the secret bombing of Cambodia was not all that different from what previous administrations had tried to do in Southeast Asia.

‘You must understand, Cambodia was undertaken for very complicated reasons.’

‘Henry, there hasn’t been a rotten decision in this area for twenty years which was not undertaken for very complicated reasons. And they were usually the same complicated reasons.’

Kissinger ended the discussion, saying he wanted to see Ellsberg the following week in Washington. That meeting and one after it and then a third were all cancelled at the last minute. Ellsberg stopped calling.

Their final encounter came in January 1971, at a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Ellsberg had moved the previous autumn to take up a research position and write a book, which was never finished. As the guest of honour, Kissinger had assured the audience that the administration was doing everything possible to end the war in Vietnam. ‘I had decided on a very careful phrasing of one question to ask him,’ Ellsberg told Rolling Stone. ‘I figured it was the last time I would be speaking to him.’

The question was couched in the game theoretical terms that Kissinger and Ellsberg knew so well. ‘What is your best estimate of the number of Indochinese that we will kill, pursuing your policy in the next twelve months?’

After a long silence, Kissinger asked Ellsberg to propose alternatives. Refusing to take the bait, he repeated his question. There was another long silence, and then the student leading the meeting stood up and brought it to an end. Instead of overseeing the war ‘trending down’, as Kissinger had assured his audience it was doing, he returned to Washington that night to direct the pre-invasion bombardment of Laos.

On 13 June 1971, the New York Times began running the first excerpts from the Pentagon Papers. Nixon was hardly concerned by these

revelations from earlier, Democratic, administrations. Kissinger was apoplectic. This was a major diplomatic leak, making the United States look unreliable as a negotiator, he said, but it was particularly damaging to Kissinger, who had worked so closely with Ellsberg, whom he now described as ‘the most dangerous man in America’, who had ‘to be stopped at all costs’.

At Kissinger’s urging, Nixon set the wheels in motion to charge Ellsberg with espionage and break into his psychiatrist’s office. Kissinger was sure they would find lots of dirt on someone whom he described to Nixon as a sex-crazed pervert who enjoyed shooting Vietnamese peasants from helicopters. Nixon quickly came to believe that he had a problem with two Jews—Ellsberg and Kissinger. As he said to Robert Haldeman, his chief of staff, referring to his enemies, ‘Henry must be torn on the Jewish business. Every one of them is a Jew. The government is full of Jews … most Jews are disloyal … There are exceptions, but, Bob, generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.’

The New York Times was enjoined from publishing more excerpts from the Pentagon Papers—a case Nixon lost in the Supreme Court—but to hide his illegal meddling in the Paris peace talks and nuclear threats, Nixon ordered his men to stage a fire at the Brookings Institute and get CIA ‘firemen’ to grab the secret documents from their safe. Brookings was never bombed. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist kept no notes. The CIA operatives brought up from Miami to ‘neutralise’ Ellsberg at an anti-war rally in Washington were detained by the police and aborted their mission.

The plumbers got caught breaking into the Watergate Hotel, and Nixon spun through one cover-up after another until he resigned on 8 August 1974. While forty government officials in his administration were either indicted or went to jail, Nixon was pardoned by Gerald Ford, his successor.

Kissinger survived the scandal. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for finalising the Paris Peace Accords, although the war would not actually end until Saigon fell in April 1975. He remained secretary of state until Ford lost the presidential election in 1976 to Jimmy Carter. Kissinger penned his memoirs and entered the ranks of elder statesmen, summoned from time to time to arrange one of the backchannel deals for which he was famous. Over the years, as scholars found his fingerprints on the murderous coup in Chile, arming Pakistan during its war with India, the Cambodian genocide and 3 million civilian deaths in Southeast Asia, opinion divided on whether Kissinger was a masterful diplomat or murderous criminal.

While Ellsberg has spent his life apologising for what he did in Vietnam and earlier at RAND, Kissinger has apologised for nothing, except on the rare occasion when an embarrassing fact came to light. A 2016 article in the Atlantic was headlined, ‘Henry Kissinger Will Not Apologize’.

Ellsberg regrets not releasing the Pentagon Papers earlier than he did. He has become the patron saint of leakers, penning editorials and appearing as an expert witness at the trials of Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and dozens of other whistleblowers. Ellsberg has also apologised for his work as a nuclear war planner. He thought he was adding safeguards to America’s MAD strategy and refining targets, but in the end, this did nothing to keep the warheads from multiplying. Even before releasing the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was thinking about another leak of nuclear war planning documents. Buried in a landfill to keep them from being seized by the FBI, these papers were lost in a tropical storm—another of Ellsberg’s regrets. Soon after the Vietnam War ended, Ellsberg began getting arrested at nuclear bomb-making facilities in Colorado and California. Rumpled but always dressed in a suit, he has been hauled off to jail a few dozen times.

As for Kissinger, his few begrudging apologies have been forced from a man who continued to profit from his political connections well into his nineties. After being photographed in the White House with Donald Trump, Kissinger was later spotted in Beijing chatting with Xi Jinping. Kissinger’s apologies mainly fall into the realm of non-apologies or blaming the people around him. ‘You have to understand the Cold War context,’ he says. The White House tapes got Kissinger in trouble for calling Indira Gandhi, the Indian president, ‘a witch’ or sharing antisemitic remarks with President Nixon. ‘The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy,’ Kissinger told Nixon in 1973. ‘And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern.’

It was only after losing a nineteen-year lawsuit that Kissinger was forced to apologise for illegally wiretapping the telephone of Morton Halperin, his colleague on the National Security Council. In 2001, while visiting Paris, Kissinger was served with a summons from the criminal brigade of the French police. They wanted to examine his role in the disappearance of five French citizens during the rule of General Pinochet in Chile. Instead of appearing the following day at the Palais de Justice, Kissinger checked out of the Ritz Hotel and fled town.

In 2007, people were surprised to see Kissinger’s name on an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal, where he was one of five cold warriors calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. As former defence secretary Richard Perry, one of the letter’s authors, later explained, ‘Henry likes to be front and center of big policy issues of the day, and this put him in that position, even though he didn’t fully agree with all the conclusions’.

Ellsberg thinks of the whistleblowers who have stepped forward since he leaked the Pentagon Papers as his spiritual descendants, and often they

cite him as an inspiring model. Because of these leaks, we know about war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, warrantless wiretaps, mass surveillance, financial crimes. The list of leakers is growing, but nowhere near as fast as Ellsberg had hoped. In 2012 he helped to found the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which defends whistleblowers and includes a secure drop box for documents. Beyond well-known leakers such as Assange and Edward Snowden, another important figure for Ellsberg is Mordechai Vanunu. In 2006, when Ellsberg won the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize, his acceptance speech in Stockholm focused on this Israeli technician. After revealing that Israel was a nuclear power with more than a hundred atomic bombs, Vanunu was kidnapped on the streets of Rome and spent eighteen years in prison, eleven of those in solitary confinement.

The young acolyte with whom Ellsberg feels closest is Snowden, the national security analyst who in 2013 revealed details about the United States’ global surveillance programme. Ellsberg stood in for Snowden when he won the Right Livelihood Award in 2014. The day after the ceremony, Ellsberg flew to Moscow, where Snowden has been living in exile. Accompanying Ellsberg were John Cusack, the American actor who arranged the trip, Ole von Uexküll, executive director of the Right Livelihood Foundation, who would deliver Snowden’s award in person, and Arundhati Roy, the Indian author and activist. The group spent two days together in Cusack’s room at the Ritz Carlton Hotel overlooking Red Square and the Kremlin.

Ellsberg and Snowden were deep into exchanging information about the technical details of US surveillance when Roy interrupted to ask the moral question. Why had these men loaned their talents to a state that so casually killed civilians in Vietnam and other countries around the world? Snowden was a libertarian from a military family, a gullible young man when he began working for the CIA in 2006, at the age of twenty-three. She found Ellsberg more interesting: a deeper, almost tragic figure.

As Roy wrote later in an article she published about their meeting, Ellsberg possesses ‘a disquieting combination of guilt and pride … This makes Dan a complicated, conflicted man—half-hero, half haunted spectre—a man who has tried to do penance for his past deeds by speaking, writing, protesting and getting arrested in acts of civil disobedience for decades.’

After Snowden had slipped out the door and headed back into exile, ‘The memory that flashes up first in my mind is an image of Daniel Ellsberg,’ Roy wrote. ‘Dan, after all those hours of talking, [was] lying back on the bed, Christlike, with his arms flung open, weeping for what the United States has turned into—a country whose “best people” must either go to prison or into exile.’

In 2018 Ellsberg won the Olaf Palme Prize, a humanitarian award of US$75,000 from the Swedish labour movement. He got another financial break the following year when he sold his archives to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for US$2.2 million, of which US$1.35 million was provided by an anonymous donor. As Ellsberg explained in a lecture at the university, he had never invested in a retirement plan because he never expected to be alive in his eighty-eighth year. Surely the world would have ended by then in a nuclear holocaust. ‘I’ve been saying for years that my retirement plan is prison,’ he said. ‘Thanks to the archive, our son will be able to keep our house, which did not appear to be in the cards.’ For an expert in calculating the odds, Ellsberg keeps getting surprised. ☐

Thomas A. Bass, an investigative reporter who teaches journalism at the State University of New York at Albany, is the author of seven books, including The Spy Who Loved Us and Censorship in Vietnam

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T A I W A N

Between two whalesMichael Reilly

On Saturday, 9 January 2021, with ten days left of President Donald Trump’s term of office, Mike Pompeo, the outgoing US Secretary of State,

announced that all the ‘self-imposed restrictions’ on US official contacts with Taiwan were henceforward ‘null and void’. In the polarised world of American politics the rhetoric was as grand as reactions were predictable, with one former Obama official who handled relations with East Asia dismissing it as a ‘public relations stunt of the first order’. Perhaps more surprising was the relatively low-key Chinese response, a commentator in the state-run Global Times tabloid saying ‘we can completely ignore clowns like Pompeo … US policy on Taiwan is relatively consistent’.

So, was this indeed just a last PR stunt, or is there substance in the announcement?

If the very idea of self-imposed restrictions sounds odd, it reflects the bizarre environment in which most countries conduct their relations with Taiwan, a country with a population and economy roughly the size of Australia’s but which formally they refuse to recognise as such for fear of offending China.

In this looking-glass world, foreign embassies in Taipei are ‘offices’ or ‘institutes’, the diplomats working in them doing so ‘on secondment’, without diplomatic status. Overseas meetings between senior Taiwanese and foreign officials take place not in government buildings but as ‘accidental’ encounters in hotels or elsewhere, if they happen at all. It is all something of a pretence, which simply adds cost and inconvenience to the conduct of bilateral relations. But just as Taiwan tries hard, sometimes by subterfuge, to add an element of official status to these contacts, so China employs armies of junior diplomats to monitor them and is usually quick to protest at any change. Self-imposed the US restrictions may be, but they have been in place since it established relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1979 and have largely stood the test of time.

To unilaterally scrap them on the eve of leaving office may seem controversial, provocative even, but the decision was of a piece with Trump administration policy on Taiwan generally. Even before he took office, he broke with procedure to hold a phone conversation with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen—the first time a US president or president-elect had had any direct contact with a president of Taiwan since 1979. As US-China bilateral relations soured under Trump, so those between the US and Taiwan warmed in reaction.

Like the proverbial shrimp caught in a fight between two whales, Taiwan is frequently the collateral damage in the US-China relationship, in which the views of the people of Taiwan receive little consideration. As Nancy Berkopf Tucker and others have shown, so desperate were Kissinger and Nixon to build a relationship with China that they offered Mao more than was necessary to achieve it, including major concessions over US support for Taiwan. Admittedly, Taiwan in 1972, still under the dictatorial rule of Chiang Kai-shek, was a very different country to the democratic Taiwan of today, but there are still lobbyists and analysts in America (albeit few in Congress) who argue that Taiwan is an unnecessary irritant in the relationship with China and should be abandoned.

So, it should have been no surprise that Tsai’s government moved to thicken its relations with the Trump administration after that December 2016 phone call. Tsai was facing growing pressure from China, which had arbitrarily cut all contacts between the two sides

after her inauguration earlier in 2016, insisting that she must first affirm her support for the ‘1992 Consensus’ (a one-China policy by any other name) and barred Taiwan from participating at the World Health Assembly, even as an observer. American support to counter this was vital.

The effort paid off handsomely. Some major arms sales were agreed, sharp rebukes were issued by the US to countries such as El Salvador that switched diplomatic recognition and warnings made to others that might be considering doing the same, and both the number and level of official visits increased. Although as major investors in China, Taiwanese companies stood to suffer from Trump’s trade war with China, to date they have been beneficiaries, successfully relocating important parts of their investments back home or to third countries.

If there were surprises, one might be that this warming survived the idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump’s foreign policy, Taiwan being one of the few countries not to be on the receiving end of abuse on the Trump Twitter feed. Another might be that this happened under a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration in Taipei. The DPP’s economic and social policies have more in common with those of the Democrats than Republicans, while the years from 2000 to 2008, for most

of which a DPP administration in Taipei coincided with the Republican one of George W. Bush, were marked by high levels of mistrust and irritation on both sides. By contrast, and uniquely in Asia, popular opinion in Taiwan would have welcomed seeing Trump win a second term in office.

What happens now? The early reactions in China suggest the government in Beijing is content to sit back, confident of resurrecting

a more constructive relationship with the Biden administration. Just as predictably, given the frequent zero-sum nature of the trilateral relationship, the Tsai administration is now working hard to persuade the Biden team not to change tack, although the strong bipartisan support for Taiwan in Washington means a radical change is unlikely.

But while some in Washington may criticise Pompeo for angering Beijing unnecessarily, the US-China relationship has long proceeded on a cyclical trajectory, varying between periods of relative warmth and cooperation and ones of hostility and confrontation, irrespective of the governing party in Washington.

Twenty-five years ago, as relations thawed after the Taiwan Strait missile crisis, Warren Christopher, the secretary of state under Bill Clinton, wrote of the difficulties in dealing with Chinese officials, to whom he ascribed a combination of ‘Middle Kingdom smugness’ and ‘prickly nationalism’. Few diplomats would disagree that since then the sense of both smugness and prickly nationalism in Beijing have grown, not diminished. The two countries came dangerously close to war in 1996, yet within two years were talking of a ‘strategic partnership’. China consistently blames the US for such swings, choosing to overlook its own behaviour, such as its abrogation of treaty obligations in respect of Hong Kong or its rejection of an international ruling on its claims to the South China Sea. In the case of Taiwan, it has airbrushed out of the history books Mao’s statement to the American journalist Edgar Snow in the 1930s that the island should be independent.

Furthermore, whether by accident or design, China has something of a track record in providing early foreign policy challenges for incoming US presidents. In April 2001, ten weeks into the administration of George W. Bush, a US reconnaissance plane collided with a Chinese fighter aircraft and was forced to land on Hainan island; in March 2009, Chinese naval harassment of the US Navy’s Impeccable in the South China Sea almost caused a collision which would have provided at least as big a test for the newly inaugurated Obama. There was no comparable incident in 2017 after Trump took office, but arguably because he was not paying attention, for the large-scale militarisation of reefs in the South China Sea that year proceeded unchecked.

Given this track record, it would be naive to discount the risk of China taking action against Taiwan in some form, deliberately to test the resolve of the Biden administration. Worryingly, China’s very success in isolating Taiwan has been so successful that lower-risk options for doing so have been largely exhausted. As China’s military incursions into Taiwanese airspace and waters continue to grow, cool nerves and calm heads will be needed in the coming months. Rarely has the need for preventive diplomacy been greater. ☐

Michael Reilly is the author of The Great Free Trade Myth: British Foreign Policy and East Asia since 1980

8

P O E T R Y

Maw Shein Win is a Burmese-American poet. From her latest collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House

Phone bootha Brownie camera slung around her sweaty neck

telephone wires crisscross

you didn’t hear that did you? you did now didn’t you?

child in a burlap cape leaps through the garden

three wild hogs & a mild cat

black & white self-portraits in bathroom mirrors & bakery windows

sun burns skin off foreheads

history has had its way

Shopsphytomineral etudes at the paw quilt shop nocturnal haloes mind feverssmelling saltsair guitar & filigree why the rapidly moving notes? why the boxing mentors in July?

the reverie of mobs as the architects listen for their Ganesh ringtones

Restaurant I recognise her voice because it’s my voiceI don’t know that name because it’s his nameI think your voice has a name but it’s my nameshe met herself in a restaurant

it wasn’t her restaurant but it was a place she had been beforeshe had eaten eggs there, Potatoes Anna the dishes had no namesthe waiter had a high voice

how could you not remember me? we were married last May

the cakes were baked by professionals

one of them looked like a marvellous dress

what will you bring to the table? what is your sir, name? what are the camels doing here?

please, change, for, me

are those your wind chimes?

Factory blindfold wound around a bleeding headsepia timecards & combination locks

sound of coworkers arguing in the bathroomor the other way around

crows captured in dim lightmurder mystery for a limited audience

pupils of soft brazen greenlacquerware box in an abandoned mall

factory workers assembling cell phones & wheelchairsa scorpion in the break room

Eggs rabbits filled the boulevardspink hue to the air rose flush to the cheekschocolate eggs in abundance

plants need light to growrooms need light to thinkcakes think best in roomspotatoes stir underground

the cement heat came through her sandalsshe ate chocolate eggs by the handfullacking passionlight she took for granted

the floor is rusty reda woman slicing potatoes has sliced the earth openat the center a tulip made of dark chocolateshe peers inside

Huts the first fall brings salty figsbrisk flowersimaginary hutscows hide treasuresunder their tongues& the butcherswill find gold hayin their bellies

I have no breastsbut two dark drops of hillsideI can never tell when it’s fallthe other night at the laundromatthe stars were huts& I wanted to move therebecome a hut & a tulip

Maw Shein Win

9

Sher Toghi is a village of homes scattered either side of a cultivated valley floor and at the feet of the mountains that feed the narrow river and irrigation

canals that flow through it and make it inhabitable. It is no more than 100 kilometres from the Afghan capital Kabul, but to drive there, even before the winter snows begin to fall, takes about five hours.

The village, and most of Daymirdad district—or Jilgah, as it’s also known—has been under the control of the Taliban for several years. The nearest sign of the Afghan government or its security forces is in neighbouring Chak district, two hours from Sher Toghi by road, where the government maintains control over a small island of territory that can be reached only by helicopter.

I’d been trying to get to Sher Toghi since May 2020. A year prior to that, I’d met for the first time the survivors of a family whose home had been bombed and raided by a CIA-backed Afghan paramilitary unit. Four members of the family—a mother, two girls under the age of ten and a fifteen-year-old son—were killed by US air strikes that presaged the raid. I’d wanted to meet another son, who was working in Iran at the time and who joined the Taliban after returning to Sher Toghi, his family half the size it had been when he left.

The local Taliban commander, who asked to be referred to as Mullah Abdul Rahman, arranged my visit and hosted us upon arrival. I was travelling with a journalist from the district, now based in Kabul, a translator and a taxi driver who does the circuit several times each week. It was only my second sanctioned visit into Taliban territory after nearly seven years living in Afghanistan. Since the US curtailed its use of air power after signing an agreement with the Taliban in the Qatari capital of Doha in February 2020, the group, citing their newfound ability to guarantee safety, had become more permissive towards journalists visiting their areas.

Abdul Rahman, who is from Jaghato, another Wardak district, commands about fifty fighters. Flanked by a couple of bodyguards with AK-47s slung casually over their shoulders, he greeted us on a bend in the road, welcomed me, as is common among ethnic Pashtuns, by placing his hand on my heart. We weren’t patted down or searched. Aside from an occasional white Taliban flag flapping above a compound, their presence was difficult to discern. The main difference between Kabul and Wardak’s government-controlled provincial capital, through which we’d driven to reach Sher Toghi, was the dearth of military hardware and personnel. With the nearest front line hours away by road, and the likelihood, nowadays, of any kind of ground incursion by enemy forces non-existent, there’s little need.

Do you remember the time of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan [the title the Taliban uses to refer to its government]?

Yes, my father was a farmer. He was a fighter at the time the Russians were fighting here, but not now. When the Taliban [controlled the country] I was just a small child and wasn’t able to join them. But after that, when the Americans came here, about two years into the presidency of Hamid Karzai, I joined the Taliban and started fighting. I’ve been fighting [ever since then].

Tell me about your memories of the time the Americans first came.

I remember the time when the Americans first came. They destroyed many houses and mosques and killed many people, ordinary people.

Was there a time when the Americans were present but things were peaceful, before people picked up weapons?

Yes, when they came, for three years there was no fighting. They were just taking people’s guns. It was peaceful, everything was relaxed. They were just moving through—three to five armoured vehicles would come to the village. We were just living our simple, normal lives. But after three years, the number of Taliban increased and started fighting against them.

I, myself, and my friends, we started organising, and after three years, in which time the Americans had started doing the wrong thing—destroying things and killing people—so, as Muslims, we say that they’re our enemies, that we should force them out. They should not be here, they should not control our areas.

You say that after a while the Americans started doing the wrong thing. Was this during fighting or were they behaving this way even when there wasn’t fighting?

First they came to take our commanders, to kill them. We thought, before they kill us, we’ll start to fight against them. That was the time they had started air strikes, killing people, even people celebrating at a wedding party; they killed many people there in an air strike. That was the time we decided we should fight against them.

Did the Americans bring any development or opportunities? Did they build infrastructure or roads in Jaghato district, where you were born and raised?

No. At first they were just coming, passing through. Then they made a base in the district centre of Jaghato. The base was there for five years. In that time they made no roads, no schools, nothing.

Was it that base you started attacking or would you wait until they were conducting patrols and missions outside the base?

When they were leaving their base. This was a time we were always fighting them, but sometimes we’d attack the base as well. I don’t know the specific name for the base; it was a small one with the [Afghan] National Army and Americans all together.

Tell me how you became a member of the Taliban.At first I was a student in a madrassa in Jaghato,

studying there. When I understood that fighting against the Americans was my duty and that I shouldn’t allow them to be here, I contacted one of the commanders and told him that I wanted to join him in the fight.

Was this an Islamic duty or an Afghan duty?It’s an Islamic duty. It’s written in our Islamic book, the

Quran, that jihad is an obligation, something you should conduct against non-Muslims who are occupying your country, who are harming you—not all non-Muslims.

When did you first have fighters under your control?After one year of fighting, I had fifteen men under

my command. Now it’s fifty.

Which were the years of the heaviest fighting for you?

The worst and hardest years were the first years, after the Americans first arrived. They tried their best to weaken us, to destroy us. They were using all kinds of weapons, helicopters, other kinds of air strikes, everything. They wanted to weaken us and show themselves as strong. But they weren’t able to do so and, in time, we became stronger and defeated them and they withdrew from Jaghato.

To what extent was the killing of civilians and fighters responsible for assisting Taliban recruitment—growing the strength of the Taliban and the numbers of fighters?

When the Americans started killing civilians, this was a catalyst for the people to support us, giving us bullets, giving us places to stay, giving us food and everything. For example, if they killed a member of a family, a brother or a father would join us because they’d say, ‘They’re killing the wrong people, so we should force them out of here before they kill us’. So, for example, at first there were ten people supporting us in a village, then they’d kill one person from that village and the support from that village was growing by 50 per cent. They were either supporting us or joining us, giving us whatever they could.

Back in forceAndrew Quilty

I N T E R V I E W

Andrew Quilty

Mullah Abdul Rahman, left, inside the mosque where the interview took place

10

Andrew Quilty

11

And at this time, the government in Kabul was being given a lot of money and a lot of support. They were starting to grow institutions and infrastructure, ministries and a defence force. How did you feel about the government during this time, during the time of President Karzai?

We didn’t care about that. We knew how much money they spent, but most of the support of the population was with us. We knew that they had many guns and things, but the number of people supporting them was less than [it was for] us. And the people who were working with the government, their numbers were small and we didn’t care about it. We didn’t care about the money they used on these men.

I think you’re right that people in areas controlled by the Taliban are supporting them more, but when you go to Kabul, while the people have complaints about the government, of course, they support the idea of the government. People have different ideas depending on where they’re born.

Most people live in villages—places where they’re under the control of the Taliban. In the cities, most people support the government, but they only say this with their mouths. In their hearts they support the Taliban. In Kabul now, we have attacks, you know about this, so the people are giving their homes and food to our fighters there. More than 80 per cent of the people in Afghanistan support the Taliban. That’s gone from zero to eighty. At first there was no support for the Taliban, but now about 80 per cent of the people support the Taliban. And one day, those people who are against us will support us—they will change. Even if they’re in the cities. You know, in the cities there are people who support the government, but, in fact, maybe it’s just the fear of the government. In their hearts they support us. There is evidence of this in the people who support us by providing their homes and food for our attackers.

Tell me about the past three years, when air strikes and night raids increased as the peace negotiations were under way in Doha.

Before the peace negotiations, the Americans used all their power to kill the Taliban. Whatever they could do, they did it. But they still couldn’t weaken the Taliban, and the Taliban were getting stronger fighting against them. They used all their power, like drones and air strikes, everything to kill us, but nothing has changed. With all the power they used, it only made us stronger.

With all these air strikes and raids, did the Taliban suffer? Did they lose a lot of men?

As the Americans escalated, the Taliban escalated even more. We started fighting with them with different groups, in different provinces, different attacks, and showed them that if you try to show us you’re strong, we will show you that we’re stronger still. We did our best to show that we were stronger than the Americans.

Can you give me an example?For example, if they conducted an air strike, we

would target them in their offices, in their bases. We even shot their helicopters—we shot one [down] in Logar [province]. We also found better weaponry which we could use in the night.

How did you feel when the Doha agreement was signed?

I was really happy at that time. It was a time we felt we’re a free country again. It was like independence day for us …

Did the order from your commanders change after the signing of the Doha agreement?

The only change was that for the first seven days there was a ceasefire, which we adhered to, and after that we were ordered not to attack big cities. These were the only changes that happened. Aside from that, every moment we’re looking to the commanders, waiting for their orders.

A big change from your perspective must be that the Americans are no longer doing air strikes, no longer doing night raids. How has this changed life, not only for you as a Taliban commander but for people living in Taliban areas?

We were really happy with this, though it was no problem for us before because we were familiar with air strikes and everything, but we were happy because we thought no civilians will be killed [or] injured. That was the only thing we were happy for: that no civilians would be killed in air strikes.

Now, also, the Afghan National Army aren’t doing so many operations. How has the Doha agreement changed the fighting against the Afghan government?

Without the Americans, the Afghan government can do nothing. There are no operations, nothing. They’re just in their bases, in their checkpoints, and they can’t come out from them.

There have been a lot of targeted killings in Kabul and the government-controlled capitals like the one inside Kabul University [on 2 November 2020, which resulted in thirty-two deaths], but no one seems to be claiming responsibility for them. To what extent are the Taliban responsible for these kind of attacks recently?

When we do something, we say, ‘We did it’. Our spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, will say directly that we did it. But the attacks against Islam and humanity, we think they’re the work of the Afghan government and the Americans themselves. We are not responsible for them.

Are you familiar with Zarifa Ghafari [the female mayor of Wardak’s capital Maidan Shahr]?

[Laughs] Those who are working with the government are our enemies. She’s a part of it, so she’s our enemy. The worst thing was that she was taken to America and, as an Afghan [woman] she’s not allowed to go there alone. They gave her medals and everything. She’s our enemy. If we catch her, surely we will kill her.

There are no women in high positions within the Taliban. Does the fact she’s a woman in a high position have any impact on the way you feel towards her?

There are women who work with the government—doctors, teachers. We have no problem with them, and we’re not going to kill them. But she is the kind of woman who started doing things we don’t approve of, like going to America. She’s in a position that makes her one of the real enemies of the Taliban. She has announced her enmity with the Taliban and claims that we are the enemy. Because of that she is also our enemy.

What about some of the issues people in Kabul and outside Afghanistan are worried about if the Taliban come back into some form of power? Like women’s rights. What are your beliefs when it comes to women’s rights? Could they work in the government or in the armed forces? Could they work outside the health and education sectors?

We believe we should give them rights as prescribed by Islam. Like, for sure, they can be a doctor or a teacher. But under Islamic rules, they should have a hijab. With that, they can work, no problem. We can’t give them more than that. Surely, they have rights under Islam, and those rights don’t exist in any other religion. But they should observe Islamic rules.

What about in Kabul? In Jilgah, you have very strict rules and you believe that people should abide by them, but in Kabul, people feel similarly strongly about the freedoms they’ve gained in the past twenty years. Is it possible to compromise?

Here, if we take a woman without a hijab outside, they feel ashamed. This is Afghan culture. So when we go to Kabul it will [become] the culture there [as well], and day by day they will become familiar with it and day

by day they will accept it. And we will teach this Afghan culture to them: ‘This is our culture, these are our rules, this is Islam and this is what Islam says’. So, day by day, they will change their mind and accept and do the same thing that people do here right now. What they do there now is not Islamic culture. It is against Islam, against the culture of Afghanistan. It’s copied from other countries, western countries, and it’s the wrong idea.

How does education work in Jilgah? Is the government paying teachers’ salaries?

Yes. After the Taliban approves the teachers, then the government pays them.

And the Taliban also has to approve the curriculum?

They suggest the books they want to teach with, and we control whether or not they should be used. We check all the books. If we approve them they can teach with them, but without our permission they can’t teach any subject.

Up to which grade are girls being taught in Jilgah?Just up to sixth grade.

How do you feel about demands from Kabul that girls be allowed to study up until twelfth grade?

The situation here isn’t the best for girls going to school beyond grade six. In Kabul we don’t have any power to control them or take them out. But here, the situation isn’t good. According to Islam, girls and boys should be separated, but here we don’t have enough teachers. Men are not allowed to teach females—maybe they’ll face some sexual problems.

Is that just an excuse? I wonder whether the Taliban don’t actually want girls to study.

No, we’re not against the education of girls, but the families don’t want such a thing. After the sixth grade, they may have tutors or private teachers at their homes, but they don’t allow their daughters to go to school after that. According to our culture, it’s bad if your young daughter should sit with a man, so when they teach them, maybe their father or brother is home at the time.

A note on the interview. At first, Mullah Abdul Rahman was reluctant to speak on the record. After speaking with one of his superiors by

phone, however, he agreed, with a few conditions. First, I would not use his real name. Second, I wouldn’t record his voice. Instead, an audio recorder was paused each time he spoke, leaving my voice and that of the translator on the recording. I also took notes during the interview, which was conducted in a small mosque, the floor of which was heated by a traditional wood-fire system beneath, in Sher Toghi on 18 November 2020. Abdul Rahman left the room several times during the interview to consult with his superior by phone and, in contravention of a Taliban rule forbidding weapons in some mosques and madrassas, he had his Kalashnikov inside with him.

At the end of the interview, by which time night had fallen, Abdul Rahman spoke privately with the journalist who’d arranged our trip, and suggested we leave Sher Toghi and spend the night in another village. Spending too long in the same village, he suggested, wasn’t wise. He was concerned that informants for the government intelligence service would probably already have reported the presence of a foreigner and that leaving from a different location, before dawn the following morning, would be the best way of avoiding detection and possible detention and questioning when we arrived back in government-controlled territory.

Abdul Rahman arranged our accommodation in the home of a resident of another village and spent the night with us there. We woke at 3am to begin our drive back to Kabul. ☐

Andrew Quilty is a freelance journalist based in Kabul

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In China’s gripYuen Chan

N O T E B O O K

In Hong Kong the distance between 2019 and 2021 cannot be measured in conventional time. It is a distance marked by loss—of freedoms,

of trust, of security, of a sense of normality. Since mass protests began in 2019, the slow hollowing out of Hong Kong’s imperfect but largely rules-based systems and institutions has been superseded by a ruthless hammering from a local authority eager to please a central government that brooks no dissent.

The assault on the city’s freedoms accelerated in 2020, while the world was preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic. The Hong Kong government cited public health as grounds to ban protests, limit public gatherings and postpone an election in which pro-democracy candidates were expected to make big gains in the legislature.

But the biggest blow was the unilateral imposition of a sweeping but vague national security law (NSL) by the powers in Beijing that has the effect of criminalising dissent. WhatsApp groups went dark, and Hong Kongers hurried to deactivate or scrub their social media accounts.

Hong Kong has never been a democracy. It is executive-led by design, and its representative politics is rigged to benefit big business and government loyalists. But the city prided itself on its independent judiciary and free press; its people freely exercised their rights to organise, to protest, to speak their minds and express themselves.

It has a long tradition of a vocal and vibrant press, often described as freewheeling, especially when compared with the heavily censored media in mainland China.

In the spring of 2014, in what now feels like a bygone Hong Kong, I attended a course on Chinese media taught by a renowned veteran journalist. I was set an assignment to compare mainland Chinese and Hong Kong newspapers from November 1968. The front-page headlines on the mainland were dominated by two themes: platitudes for the great friendship between the People’s Republic of China and Albania and calls to uphold Chairman Mao Zedong’s line in the ‘two-line struggle’ against the former president Liu Shaoqi. The retelling of a political struggle in a drama troupe dressing room passed for a human interest story in one newspaper. Otherwise, content and style were identical across publications.

On the same day, newspapers in colonial Hong Kong ran front-page articles about developments in the Paris peace talks on the Vietnam War, a campaign to free a British journalist under house arrest in Beijing and a local armed robbery. International stories from wire agencies were printed alongside local news reports with eye-catching headlines written in Cantonese vernacular. Sing Tao, one of the leading dailies of the time, had a page devoted to China news, much of it critical of the Chinese Communist Party.

It may seem unfair to base a comparison of Hong Kong and mainland media on a few newspapers published during China’s Cultural Revolution. After all, enterprising Chinese journalists have made creative use of the space that emerged after China’s opening up in the 1980s to produce some outstanding journalism. But this has been in spite of the party-state’s prescribed role for journalists and the media.

The role of the media in China was made clear when Xi Jinping, the party chief, visited state media organisations in 2016, exhorting them to love and serve the party and reminding them their job was to protect and guide public opinion for the party.

In Hong Kong, press freedom after the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China in 1997 was guaranteed by the Basic Law. For the most part, Hong Kong’s journalists adopt a liberal model of journalism and see holding power to account as one of the key parts of their job. But its media has always been vulnerable to capture. Ownership is concentrated in the hands of tycoons with extensive business interests in the mainland, and increasingly those of mainland figures with party links. For years, press freedom has been threatened by political and economic pressures, and self-censorship has gradually increased.

The city’s journalists are not sanguine about how much longer it can last. Things took a dramatic turn for the worse after the anti-extradition protests. Journalists covering the protests have been obstructed, kettled, arrested, pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed and shot at with ‘non-lethal’ weapons. The Hong Kong Journalists Association mounted a legal challenge (which it subsequently lost) against the police for ‘ill treatment’. But the impact of this physical battering cannot compare with the shadow cast by the NSL and the events that have happened since it came into force on 30 June last year.

In August, 200 police descended on the offices of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily. Officers were live-streamed rifling through papers in the newsroom. The paper’s owner, Jimmy Lai, and senior executives were arrested. Lai was subsequently charged with fraud and also with colluding with foreign forces, under the NSL.

The following month, police unilaterally redefined who would be considered a journalist when reporting on the front line of protests, excluding freelancers and student journalists. As journalists fretted about how they could protect their sources under the NSL, many sources stopped talking altogether. Television reporters made sure that protest slogans that were newly declared illegal didn’t appear in shots; editors became more cautious to avoid continually shifting red lines.

The moment that many feared but hoped would never come arrived early on the morning of 3 November, with the high-profile arrest of the journalist Bao Choy. Choy helped to produce an award-winning documentary investigating the slow police response to an incident in which violent gangs attacked unarmed protesters and passers-by in July. She wasn’t charged with an NSL offence but for allegedly ‘making false statements’ while searching for publicly available drivers’ information on a government database as part of the investigation, a common journalistic practice in Hong Kong.

The year ended with more bad news. As redundancies and lay-offs hit several news organisations, a political earthquake hit Hong Kong i-Cable, which had run Hong Kong’s best regarded television news operation. Key staff were fired in an apparent cost-cutting exercise, their departures overseen by recently appointed and compliant new managers. Dozens of journalists, including the entire China reporting team, resigned in protest of what they saw as the end of editorial independence. These are just some of the items from a long and growing inventory of misery that has seriously hit morale among Hong Kong journalists.

My friend Jacqueline spends her days in the courts, documenting protest-related trials, reporting on the stories of the defendants, witnesses and the people who show up to support the protesters. At night, she feverishly transcribes her interviews in a race to tell these stories while she still can.

‘We are in a tunnel. We used to think there was a light at the end of that tunnel and that light was hope for the future, but what if it isn’t?’ says Jacqueline. ‘That light may be nothing more than the small things we can do for Hong Kong in the moment.’

Acts of journalism make up the one small thing she can do for Hong Kong. Practising journalism has become a modest and essential expression of survival.

Back in August, another journalist, Selene (not her real name), told me that press freedom was still alive in Hong Kong because journalists were fighting for it every day. Her mood is a lot darker now.

‘I never thought that journalists would have to be prepared to be jailed,’ she says. ‘I feel like I’m counting down the days of my life as a journalist. I may not have a job soon. But I will still do as much as I can.’

Hong Kong’s journalists, like much of the populace, are exhausted and traumatised, drawing upon reserves they didn’t know they had. Officialdom barely hides its hostility, the pandemic has further battered media company finances, and opposing camps in a deeply polarised community are keen to find bias in reports that don’t back up their political views.

The signs are that circumstances aren’t going to improve any time soon. Hong Kong’s plight is a reminder to journalists and citizens everywhere of how fragile our rights and freedoms are, and of the need to protect our own spaces for truth-telling. My hope is that the world doesn’t look away. It is tempting to write eulogies for Hong Kong and its press, but more urgent to walk the distance with those witnessing and documenting Hong Kong’s stories while they still can, one day at a time. ☐

Badiucao

13

Like the violent lashes of a dying beast, the Spanish Empire of the late nineteenth century adopted extreme brutality in its last remaining colonial jewels, namely Cuba and the Philippines. Ruthless men such as General Valeriano Weyler, who oversaw the crushing of rebellions in both colonies, were the pioneers of scorched-earth counter-insurgency tactics, which would characterise French savagery in Algeria and US barbarity in Vietnam in the mid-twentieth century.

This was also the Victorian era, the age of the march of Western empires, both old, as in Britain, and new, as in post-Civil War United States and Bismarckian Germany. Rizal and fellow illustrados (the nationalist intelligentsia) took inspiration from their Latin American contemporaries and embraced the life of a filibustero. In the words of Rizal, filibustero refers to ‘a dangerous patriot who will soon be on the gallows, or else a conceited fellow’. The publication of El filibusterismo would eventually land Rizal in front of a firing squad, as his disciplines and admirers—from Bonifacio to Emilio Aguinaldo—embraced the path of armed revolution against Spanish authorities.

Despite his opposition to armed revolution at the eleventh hour, Rizal’s martyrdom sparked Asia’s first modern nationalist revolution, which jolted the Western empires and inspired countless nationalists in Asia. Yet the struggle of the Philippines was inextricably linked to Latin America. As Benedict Anderson notes, Rizal and his Katipuneros were the ‘visionary forerunners of all the other anticolonial movements in the [Asian] region. If [s]een from Latin America’, however, the Philippine anticolonial revolution was, along with Cuba’s, ‘the last of the Spanish imperial possessions to have thrown off the yoke, seventy-five years after the rest’. Rizal was, in many ways, an heir to Simón Bolívar’s revolutionary spirit, but he also became a pioneer in his own right in the Malayan world and broader Asian continent.

In Underground Asia, Tim Harper meticulously traces the remarkable lives of filibusteros across Asia, from Rizal and Vietnam’s Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh) to less known but equally remarkable figures such as Indonesia’s Tan Malaka and India’s M.N. Roy, who took up the cudgels of anticolonial struggle only a few years after the execution of Rizal and the final defeat of the Philippine revolution.

While Rizal’s struggle took place at the halcyon hour of Western imperium, Harper’s protagonists struck at the heart of empire during the high noon of interwar years. Some of them would end up as figures of history and icons of twentieth-century anticolonial struggle, while others were relegated to its footnotes. But their collective impact, moral conviction and revolutionary zeal were unquestionably singular and world historical.

Here were men and women who lived in the shadows and undergrounds, but also witnessed the wealth and splendour of the metropoles. They grappled with what Rizal described as the demonio de las comparaciones (the demon of comparison) as they discovered the wretchedness of their exploited homelands in the untold riches of Paris, Amsterdam, New York and London. They saw the development of underdevelopment in once

A S I A

Rizal’s revolutionariesRichard Heydarian

I walked along those wide, clean streets, macadamized as in Manila, crowded with people, attracting the attention of everyone,’ wrote José Rizal, the so-

called first Filipino, upon his arrival in Barcelona in the early 1880s.

Fresh off the boat, he took immense delight in the reassuring familiarity of the Spanish milieu; and as a polymath, who would soon learn to write eloquent letters in half a dozen languages, Rizal felt at home in all major cities, if not the whole world.

Nonetheless, he was shocked at the humiliating anonymity of his homeland, the Philippines islands, with people in Barcelona ‘call[ing] me Chinese, Japanese, American [i.e. Latin American], etc., but no one Filipino! Unfortunate country—no one knows a thing about you!’

As his contemporary and (undeclared) rival Isabelo de los Reyes would put it, the Philippines was largely seen as a ‘remote Spanish colony on which the light of civilization shines only tenuously’.

Over the next two decades, before his perfunctory execution by besieged Spanish authorities, Rizal would not only place the Philippines on the global map, but, in his selfless struggle for dignity and national independence, he would also transform into one of the foremost heroes of the postcolonial world.

It’s hard to pin down Rizal’s political views, and his overall ideological predisposition remains a mystery to most historians and compatriots. But the evolution of Rizal’s outlook, and the burning fire that fuelled his heroic struggles, can be traced in his two novels, Noli Me Tángere (1887) and El filibusterismo (1891).

The titles of his books escape easy translation, but their artistic sensibilities and ideological undertones are more evident. One can trace the artistic influence of Eugène Sue, Alexandre Dumas, Joris-Karl Huysmans and Stéphane Mallarmé, but also, especially in Rizal’s second novel, the ideological impact of anarchism.

Rizal’s birth year coincided with Mikhail Bakunin’s fateful escape from Siberia to western Europe, where the Russian agitator turned anarchism into a pre-eminent revolutionary struggle. Rizal’s novels not only reflect his creative genius, but, more importantly, also expose the bankruptcy of the European imperial project. This was especially the case for Spain, which, by the late nineteenth century, had lost close to 90 per cent of its imperial possessions.

Rizal was often portrayed as the Asian Giuseppe Mazzini, a revolutionary patriot who believed in the fundamental tenets of liberal democracy, namely parliamentary politics, pluralism and rational discourse. Among the leftist intelligentsia, the urbane and dapper Rizal was sneeringly juxtaposed with his admirer-turned-critic Andrés Bonifacio, who launched one of the first proletarian revolts outside Europe.

Yet, for those who have read Rizal’s second and less appreciated novel, El filibusterismo, it’s pretty clear that the Filipino thinker was drenched in anarchist and radical literature. He constantly wrestled with the temptation of what Walter Benjamin would later describe as divine violence, which marks a decisive rupture in the status quo and overturns the ‘mythic violence’ of the ruling establishment.

Through the transmogrification of his tragic protagonist, from the initial romantic idealism of Crisostomo Ibarra to the dark nihilism of Simoun, Rizal clearly acknowledged the limits of peaceful reform and parliamentary gradualism under a crumbling empire.

glorious civilisations in Asia as the upshot of imperial exploitation and savagery.

Initially, many of these patriots without a nation looked towards rising Japan as the beacon of anti-Western modernity. It was in Japan, which crushed tsarist Russia and humiliated reactionary Manchus in Beijing, where Asian students, from India to China and Vietnam, developed a shared awareness of their predicament and developed a vocabulary of modern nationalism.

At the height of its liberal moment, Japanese-sponsored ‘pan-Asianism’ paved the way for the formation of the Asian Solidarity Association, which, according to Harper, ‘evinced a more plural understanding of Asia’s shared history and culture, and embraced José Rizal … as the “quintessential patriot” of the new Asian future’. Though unable to defeat successive onslaughts by the Spanish and US empires, the ‘heroic violence of the Philippine revolution of 1898’, refracted through its celebrated exiles in Japan, inspired a new generation of professional rebels in the postcolonial world.

A passionate admirer of Rizal, the Indonesian teacher Tan Malaka saw himself as a revolutionary heir to the Filipino hero, so much so that Philippine newspapers described him as ‘a Filipino patriot of the generation of José Rizal’, who was so familiar that ‘the processes of his thoughts, and the ideals that give him strength through all his misadventures’ were understandable to the Filipino people. After all, in the words of the Vietnamese nationalist Phan Boi Chau, fellow nationalists across Asia were ‘suffering the same sickness’ and hailed from ‘lost countries’, or what Sun Yat-sen described as ‘hypo-colonies’ of degradation and destitution.

It didn’t take long before an ascendant Japan succumbed to imperial temptation. Eager to turn much of Asia into its own Lebensraum, the increasingly fascist leadership in Japan secured peace deals with Britain and France in exchange for, among others, booting out revolutionary agitators. Within years, Japan transformed from a beacon of hope into the most brutal colonial power yet in places such as Korea, China and, during the Second World War, much of Southeast Asia. And after the assassination attempt on Martial Merlin, the governor-general of French Indochina, by the Vietnamese nationalist Pham Hong Thai, the empire struck back with a vengeance—and Rizal’s filibustero became the ultimate hero of the postcolonial world.

Like Rizal, the new generation of Asian revolutionaries was eclectic and cosmopolitan, a seeming ‘bundle of contradictions’; but unlike the

Filipino hero, they were intellectuals who hailed from humble backgrounds, men and women who ‘travelled as seamen, labourers, servants, entertainers, students and, most often, as exiles’ and resided in ‘the underbelly of the great port cities of empire where they found they were able more freely to organize and act’.

Rather than writing refined novels or making eloquent speeches in the imperial parliaments, ‘The sites of their struggles,’ Tim Harper writes, ‘were the waterfront, the lodging house, the coffee shop, the clandestine printing press in the back alley’.

Ultimately, however, they were all gripped by what the author and translator Harold Augenbraum aptly described as ‘Rizal’s ghost’, and they took delight and found revolutionary refuge in their absolute anonymity in the heart of empire. ☐

TIM HARPERUnderground Asia: Global Revolutionaries

and the Assault on EmpirePenguin: 2020

14

former general, Thein Sein, as president, the release from house arrest of Myanmar’s human rights icon, Aung San Suu Kyi, and a giddy international community elated by the opening. Seemingly, the country had broken the bonds of authoritarianism. Long-standing restrictions on Myanmar’s people slowly eased. Foreign journalists were allowed in. Local media became bolder. Critical civil society came out of the shadows. And foreign dignitaries started to flock to the country, generating a narrative of Myanmar as a modern success of reform, and the efficacy of international human rights and democracy promotion.

Yet Myanmar’s long simmering multiple and intractable conflicts soon burst into the open. First, the resumption in 2011 of an armed conflict between the Myanmar military, or Tatmadaw, and the Kachin Independence Army. Suspended in illiberal aspic from a seventeen-year ceasefire that bifurcated a rebellion begun in 1961, the conflict internally displaced more than 100,000 civilians and featured every form of the sadistic counter-insurgency the Tatmadaw had deployed since the civil war began in 1948. The Kachin conflict renders bare the twin state-building project of majority ethnic Bamar dominance expressed through violent military pacification in Myanmar’s ethnic borderlands, what the scholar Mary P. Callahan called ‘making enemies’, the title of her landmark 2003 book.

In 2012, intercommunal violence exploded in two waves in Rakhine state, home to both a majority ethnic Arakanese (or Rakhine) and a minority Muslim population, many of whom identified as Rohingya. The violence was multisided, abuses perpetrated by both Rakhine and Rohingya communities, but by the end of the year it was clear that Myanmar’s security forces had taken the side of the Rakhine against the predominantly stateless Rohingya minority. The next three years of the transition contested the international promise of the democratic reforms with condemnation of the persecution of the Rohingya.

Galache’s reportage on the ground in both Rakhine and Kachin states includes penetrating interviews of diverse people, expounding on their fears and vulnerabilities. The interviews also expose naked racism—from the survivors of violent clashes in the Central Myanmar city of Meiktila in 2013 to the bilious Buddhist monk Wirathu, and the venerated journalist U Win Tin.

The second part pivots to the past, where the reader is submerged in contested history. From the monarchical period, through British colonialism, independence and military rule, Bamar dominance over the mélange of ethnic identity was based on classification for the imperative of control, argues Galache.

The generation of taingintha (national races), over lumyo (ethnicity), broadly meaning those who belonged in the union over the diversity of identity, became rooted in exclusionary law and practice and played into inevitable ethnic tensions. This affected the Rohingya and many of the ‘accepted’ ethnic races but also Chinese, Indian and many other identities.

This mania for classification resulted in the State Law and Order Restoration Council’s release of the absurd list of 135 national races in the early 1990s that is

M Y A N M A R

Into the labyrinthDavid Scott Mathieson

While driving down the coast of southern Maungdaw in Rakhine state in late 2015, two realities were starkly clear. The first

was the clear separation between communities: Rohingya Muslim villages divided by paramilitary police checkpoints from less numerous ethnic Rakhine communities on the one main road, the architecture of repression. Second was the murderous opportunity provided by the hedged-in geography of the area. The Mayu Mountain ridgeline sat on the east, and the shorelines of the Bay of Bengal lay to the west.

Expelling unwanted Rohingya, then, would be simply a matter of driving up the road, and—through arson, rape and wanton slaughter—clearing the area of those who had lived there for generations but were never officially regarded as belonging. Close to the border with Bangladesh, farther north, were the paddy fields of Rohingya people, who could flee by land or skiffing across the Naff River. I knew that, eventually, the Myanmar state was likely to pursue violent expulsions of the form unleashed in 1978 and 1991 against the same community, and my observations haunted me.

Less than two years later, violence between lightly armed Rohingya militants and Myanmar security forces escalated until, in August 2017, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya were forced to flee into Bangladesh. A violent provocation led to a brutal overreaction by the Myanmar military of forced exodus. Soon, Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh had become the epicentre of an atrocity exhibition that drew hundreds of rights researchers, reporters, aid workers and celebrities working in a teeming refugee camp complex of nearly one million people.

UN reports have led to cases being opened at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, with prosecutors seeking evidence of genocide and forced deportation. A UN Independent Investigative Mission for Myanmar is collecting evidence of grave crimes throughout the country, to an evidentiary threshold contributable to future justice initiatives. The Rohingya tragedy often obscures entrenched armed conflicts in the north and east that remain unresolved, the oldest for seventy years. Despite a flawed peace process since 2012 that has gorged on tens of millions of dollars of Western financial support, civilians continue to be displaced, murdered and abused with almost complete impunity.

Anyone attempting to understand why mass violence against the Rohingya occurred should seek out first this exemplary study by the Spanish journalist Carlos Sardiña Galache. International reporting on the Rohingya since 2012 has been uneven, and emotive exaggerations have often distorted complex reality, although the scale of the violence simply cannot be denied. Amnesty International has produced powerful and accurate reports, as has the long-established Arakan Project which has been toiling away painstakingly for decades on documenting repression of the Rohingya.

Galache’s book steps back from the cacophony of condemnatory media reports to not just chronicle the persecution of the Rohingya, but also to break down the ethnic divisions throughout Myanmar. This is a study that explores the historical and contemporary underpinnings of mass crimes against humanity.

This journey comes in three parts. Galache begins with the over-hyped ‘transition’ of Myanmar: after decades of military rule, with strictly controlled multi-party elections, came the rise of a seemingly reformist

resiliently present in official discussions of citizenship in Myanmar. The list excludes the Rohingya, yet deserves nothing more than ridicule, as many Myanmar friends and colleagues remind me.

For many academics working on Myanmar, much of what Galache interrogates in this central section will not be new. But his rereading of historical

sources follows the trails of ethnic classification through fumbling pre and postcolonial bureaucratic control, plunder and division (never underestimate Britain’s complicity in current conflicts in its former empire). That continues through the failings of the post-1948 independence government, and the cloistering of the country under disastrously inept military-socialist rule, to arrive at a modern condition where intercommunal tensions are used to exploit ethno-nationalist differences by dominant Bamar elites.

Galache has woven into his analysis important comparative perspectives from intellectual giants such as Benedict Anderson, Hannah Arendt and Michael Mann without the obscurantist posturing academics are predisposed to.

This historical interregnum lurches inexorably to the denouement of 2017’s horrors against the Rohingya in the third part. The era starts promisingly, with the 2015 election that elevated Suu Kyi and her long embattled National League for Democracy to power in an election much freer than any since the 1950s. If the government remained curtailed by constitutional privileges given to the Tatmadaw, the election nevertheless proved a unifying repudiation against the military role in future governance.

Yet Rakhine state festered, and eventually erupted in violence—almost inevitable given the objectification and oppression of the Rohingya. Galache writes that ‘policies implemented by the [Myanmar] state between the late 1970s … may not have been genocidal, but they were the key factor in creating the conditions in which a genocide, or a very brutal ethnic cleansing, became increasingly likely.’

Galache rightly doesn’t linger over Suu Kyi’s self-inflicted plummet from international veneration, in large part due to her refutation of Rohingya suffering. He rightly fixates on the entrenched mechanics of ethnic exclusion.

A shortcoming of the book is in Galache’s primary emphasis on the Rohingya and the Kachin, when so many other long-standing armed conflicts and patterns of conditional exclusion besetting people in Shan, Karen and Mon states are unresolved. The rebellion by the Arakan Army, which has focused ethnic Rakhine grievances and aspirations since late-2018 in a new/old conflict of ferocity against the central state, supports the author’s overarching argument. Failing to address long-standing tensions over identity almost inevitably explodes into violence. Yet Galache does not believe that ‘[Myanmar’s] past has determined its present in a mechanical, inflexible way’.

With erudite analysis and intricate historical exploration, Galache has produced the foremost book to comprehend Myanmar’s complicated conflicts. He doesn’t proffer prognostications: a welcome respite from parades of pontificating international experts, who have abjectly failed to understand the ethnic furies they propound to resolve. ☐

David Scott Mathieson is a writer based in Myanmar

CARLOS SARDINA GALACHEThe Burmese Labyrinth;

A History of the Rohingya TragedyVerso: 2020

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Solid objectHolmes Chan

H O N G K O N G

One of Hong Kong’s last remaining Lennon Walls was destroyed on 1 January 2021. On the second floor of Kwai Chung Plaza, next to stores

peddling street food and budget clothing, the metal panels on the side of an escalator were returned to their original sheen. While in the past visitors would see an evolving collection of protest art—a splash of Post-its, punny posters or even full-fledged murals—now they will find only their reflection, warped slightly by the imperfect surface.

The space was first rented by Yummy Corner in 2018 to run advertisements. But as Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protest movement gathered steam the following year, it was turned into an ersatz message board for the community, one of dozens that sprung up across the city seemingly overnight. Hong Kong’s Lennon Walls drew inspiration from the original in Prague, but it is fair to say the student became the master. In the autumn of 2019, each week brought dazzling feats of creativity: Tai Po residents took over a pedestrian subway and made it a ‘Lennon Tunnel’, while the Kwai Fong site was crowned the ‘Lennon Museum of Art’ for its sprawling designs.

The art born of that renaissance was systematically erased in 2020. The government tore down all Lennon Walls on public land, and fear took care of the rest. The Chinese government imposed a national security law on Hong Kong in June, and authorities deemed certain protest slogans illegal. Protest art has not been expressly outlawed, but to many, Beijing made its point clear. Lennon Walls in universities were taken down after police threatened to intervene. Yummy Corner was told by the mall’s management that, in the new year, the ad space was no longer available for rent.

Published just weeks before the national security law came into effect, Defiance and Voices—one a collection of news photography, the other of protest artwork—are meant to be read as historical records. As the anonymous editors wrote in their preface, the goal was preservation. ‘We felt we needed to document the work of the photographers and artists. We wanted to leave something which would remain; something tangible for those who have borne witness to the historic events that have and are taking place,’ they wrote. No further explanation is needed as to the source of their anxiety.

The books have the weight of a time capsule, and not just metaphorically. Their physical dimensions have a certain boxiness, even clunkiness, as though designed to survive a blast. For the photobook Defiance, at more than 200 pages and featuring the work of more than sixty named photographers, this quality can also be felt in its curatorial approach. Photobooks about the 2019 protests are often themed (for example, Ko Chung-ming’s gruesome but necessary Wounds of Hong Kong) or show an auteurist sensibility (Chan Long-hei’s The Unspeakable and Lam Yik-fei’s Woh Yuhng, among many others). But Defiance is maximalist: it doesn’t need to be the best, it just wants to be the most.

A book that focuses on quantity is not inherently a problem. Leafing through its pages, a reader can still be

shocked, edified, even moved. There is an immaculately lit photograph of black-clad protesters holding up umbrellas to counter a water cannon—the droplets are so perfectly suspended in mid-air they look like they came off of the hair of an Instagram model rising from a pool. Taken by the French photographer Rémy Soubanère, it is an incredible shot, but—through no fault of its own—tells us nothing new. The downside of collecting the work of prominent photographers, in most cases working for major media outlets, is that the images have already become part of the cultural lexicon. Defiance is a large undertaking and an achievement in its own way, but as the product of a visually oversaturated historical moment, it struggles to stand out.

Voices, on the other hand, feels much more urgent and revelatory. Here the editors’ mission makes sense: with Lennon Walls being removed and Telegram channels wiped, there is a genuine risk of these artwork being lost forever. And while the images in Defiance have that unnatural sharpness characteristic of news photography, the drawings in Voices are full of rambunctious life. Credit should go to the artist calling himself Childe Abaddon, who created some of Hong Kong’s most iconic protest art and is responsible for curating the book. Voices includes the work of fifty artists, and they are given space to both establish their identity and bounce off one another.

It is in this interplay that the book transcends its original aim: instead of just consolidating memory, Voices has affirmed a genre. Hong Kong’s protest art is often criticised for being derivative, but the book is irrefutable proof that there is a core aesthetic that is distinctly local. Despite their vastly different backgrounds and techniques, the artists were taking part in the same conversation, trying to captivate the same audience.

Abaddon, a veteran of the ad industry, took stylistic cues from the popular 1970s martial arts comic Oriental Heroes: muscular young men in dynamic poses, imbued with righteous fury. In an interview with journalist Rachel Cheung, he said the images were meant to rekindle the flame in the hearts of middle-aged men, and to shift public opinion in favour of young protesters.

Judging by how ubiquitous his work was in 2019—reprinted thousands of times, made into iPhone lock screens, even tattooed onto bodies—one can reasonably argue that Abaddon is Hong Kong’s most popular visual artist of the past twenty years.

To be fair, just because Hong Kong’s protest movement has an aesthetic doesn’t mean the output is necessarily good. A less sympathetic critic might find its emotional appeal too naked. Much of the art is sentimental, tapping into a sense of doomed romanticism that borders on kitsch. Some portrayals of female protesters have been faulted for being needlessly sexualised. The works are earnestly polemical (though it is important to distinguish this from propaganda—there is enough humour and self-knowledge, and its grievances are based on real pain). Yet, for all their failings, Hong Kong’s protest artists have done something remarkable. They have shaped myth.

Consider the ‘braves’—Hong Kong’s radical frontline protesters. Dressed head to toe in black, except for the yellow helmet and respirators with pink filters. Their eyes are partially obscured by protective goggles, which reflect light and give the illusion of a supernatural glow. As of this year, these people can no longer be found on the streets, but as cultural icons they have won immortality. If you read Voices in a single sitting, at times it can feel like there is only one brave, but other times it seems there are one million. The secret to depicting them, I think, is not so much about their gear as their posture: a casual swagger that can, at a moment’s notice, transform into coiled readiness.

While one might assume these drawings are styled after real-life demonstrators, the reverse is also true. The work collected in Voices are perhaps the most successful tools of political mobilisation in Hong Kong’s history. The relationship is symbiotic: just as dissent inspires art, art provokes dissent. One example is ‘Lady Liberty’, a crowdfunded statue made by an anonymous team in August 2019. Its design was selected after a vote by more than 6,000 users of the online forum LIHKG. The four-metre-tall statue was modelled after a young woman who was allegedly shot in the eye by a police projectile, but the symbol was of hope, not trauma: in her right hand Lady Liberty holds an umbrella, and in her left a flag that says ‘Free Hong Kong, Revolution Now’. She is striding forward, and her eyes look up.

Unsurprisingly, the statue is now in ruins. It was taken to the top of Lion Rock, a symbolic perch overlooking the city, on 13 October 2019, but it was knocked down and vandalised a day later. When asked about the destruction of their hard work, the statue’s creators told the press that it was to be expected. Their words do not strike me as pessimism, but as common sense. It would defeat the statue’s purpose to keep it in safe storage; Lady Liberty derives its meaning from being in public, with all the risks and repercussions that might entail.

Taken together, Defiance and Voices belong to that same lineage: they too began as a collaborative project that received overwhelming support from the public. They too were the work of determined, ambitious amateurs, whose reach sometimes exceeded their grasp. They took the form of published volumes, but in spirit they were statues. By gathering the photographs and artwork of their highest aspirations, the people of Hong Kong have built a monument to stand the test of time. ☐

Holmes Chan is a freelance journalist from Hong Kong

Defiance: Photographic Documentary of Hong Kong’s Awakening

Rock Lion Limited: 2020

VoicesRock Lion Limited: 2020

Abaddon

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I arrived in Saigon in May 1965. I came to Vietnam via Laos, where, for eighteen months, I worked first as a stringer, then a correspondent for United

Press International (UPI). Vientiane provided a good vantage point from which to watch the political chaos that followed the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem, the worsening insurgency and the increasing US presence. The commitment of US ground forces, initially Marines and Airborne, changed the dynamic of what until then had been a burgeoning civil war.

Covering the war in Vietnam was a lot more exciting than piecing together garbled reports about Pathet Lao advances into remote villages. Correspondents were accredited to the South Vietnamese government and to the US military—which gave us the right to accompany military operations anywhere in the country. Flying on helicopter assault missions and racing across rice paddies under sniper fire were enough to stoke the adrenaline of any young reporter. We were briefed beforehand, and chose which unit to accompany. Never on those early operations with the Marines, the 101st Airborne or the First Air Cavalry Division did I ever encounter a female correspondent—with just one exception, the veteran Second World War photojournalist Dickey Chapelle.

When, in November 1965, Chapelle was killed while accompanying US Marines south of Chu Lai, in the same area I had been on operation just months before, we were shocked. Then three months later who should show up, camera in hand to take her place, but Catherine Leroy.

I met Leroy when she came round the house half a dozen of us younger UPI staff rented in a quiet back street. Named after our resident major-domo, Frankie’s House gained something of a reputation for ready availability of black-market liquor, plentiful pot and cool music. Frances FitzGerald dropped by too. By the time Kate Webb arrived in Vietnam, I had moved on. So although Webb worked for UPI, I never met her.

Leroy, FitzGerald and Webb were three of the 467 women who in one way or another covered the Second Indochina War in Vietnam and Cambodia (Elizabeth Becker, the author of You Don’t Belong Here, was another). All three of these women decided themselves to go to Vietnam. None arrived on assignment for a major news organisation: all independently paid their way and fought for the right to witness combat alongside their male colleagues. Each brought her own perceptions and sensibilities to the reporting of war, whether through photographs or despatches or books, that matched or bettered those of their male colleagues. All three established their names and reputations in Vietnam. All three were deeply marked by their experiences.

Catherine Leroy arrived first. The product of a strict French Catholic upbringing against which she rebelled, she was game for anything.

One of her early sports was parachute jumping, where she heard stories of the First Indochina War. One would imagine her hearing of the escapades of Brigitte Friang, a former underground agent in the French

Dateline VietnamMartin Stuart-Fox

J O U R N A L I S M

resistance who, as a journalist, parachuted into Dien Bien Phu. Inspired by the thought of becoming a war photographer, Leroy, equipped with a camera and no means of support, flew to Saigon in February 1966. She was twenty-one.

Leroy was by no means the only freelancer attracted by the war. Some arrived with letters of introduction from unheard-of hometown newspapers; others sought accreditation by stringing for one of the wire services. The Associated Press and UPI both paid US$15 (US$120 in today’s currency) for any frame used. Leroy equipped herself with combat fatigues and boots on the black market, where you could buy a firearm too if you wanted one. She never carried a weapon, and nor did I. But several journalists did.

When she first arrived in Saigon, out of necessity Leroy slept in any available bed. It was only natural, therefore, that she gravitated to Frankie’s House. For a while Leroy moved in, but not for long. The pictures that sold were of troops in combat, not those hanging out in the bars of Saigon.

The first flood of correspondents arrived to cover the build-up of US forces from early 1965. By the end of the year, the press corps numbered about a hundred. A year later they had ballooned out to 600. Many came and went, but for those who stayed, competition was fierce. The news agencies assigned staff photographers to major operations, and all correspondents were expected to take photographs. So freelance photo stringers had to come up with something special.

That wasn’t quite as challenging as it sounds, because most operations were ‘sweep and destroy’—across rice paddies and through villages in search of insurgents—which effectively meant capturing and interrogating any young men who might or might not be Viet Cong. Most of the press corps covered the war from Saigon. Those of us who spent most of our time ‘in the field’ got briefed the evening before an operation, after which we could choose which platoon or company, blocking or sweeping, to accompany. The alternative was to wait back at operational headquarters for the first casualties and fly in with a medevac chopper. At least that way we could get shots of the wounded rather than spend days tramping across rice paddies. So who was in place

to snap the photograph no one else got depended on a combination of risk and luck. The crucial thing was you had to be there.

And Leroy was. Besides, living in military accommodation in Danang or Qui Nhon or An Khe with the Marines or the First Air Cav and eating ‘C rations’ was a lot cheaper than a scruffy room in Saigon. Leroy came to feel a bond with the GIs. They were her age, caught up in a war about which they understood little and cared less. She kept to herself, always carried her own pack and never asked for special treatment.

So Leroy fitted in. She cursed and smoked like the men she lived with, and back at base drank to match the best of them. To other journalists, she could be rude and pushy, determined to get a place on a helicopter or go with the unit she wanted. As Becker notes, Leroy discovered what many of us did: that there is nothing more exciting and rewarding for a journalist—or more dangerous—than covering a war.

In February 1967 Leroy was the only photojournalist jump-qualified to take part in what turned out to be the only airborne operation of the Vietnam War. Two months later she showed remarkable courage when she accompanied Marines up Hill 881, near Khe Sanh. The photographs she took of a medic cradling a dead soldier made her famous. Two weeks later her luck almost ran out when she was wounded in a mortar attack and evacuated to an offshore hospital ship to recover.

Undeterred, she returned to covering the war. During the Tet Offensive of 1968 in Hue, Leroy was the only photojournalist to obtain pictures of North Vietnamese soldiers when she and an Agence France-Press correspondent crossed no man’s land and were captured by an NVA unit—only to be released, because they were French.

For these feats Leroy won both the George Polk Award for outstanding news photography and the Robert Capa Award for exceptional courage and enterprise, the first time both had been awarded to a woman. What was not recognised at the time was the psychological toll. Now Leroy’s bad language, heavy drinking and use of drugs would be diagnosed as symptoms of PTSD. Then they were censured as character flaws.

Frances FitzGerald, Frankie to all and sundry, arrived in Saigon a few days after Leroy. FitzGerald’s pampered upbringing could not

have been more different. Her father was a deputy director in the CIA, and her socialite mother was the US representative on the UN Commission on Human Rights. Wealth and family provided privileged access to experts on current affairs whom most journalists could not hope to consult. The war in Vietnam was frequently discussed among family and friends. Opinions differed. So, equipped with a degree in liberal arts from Radcliffe, FitzGerald took it upon herself to find out what was going on.

FitzGerald arrived in Vietnam in time to witness the Buddhist crisis of March 1966. She flew up to Danang with Ward Just, an influential correspondent of the Washington Post, by then and for several years her lover. Fluent in French, FitzGerald delved into the reasons for the Buddhists’ demand for the formation of a neutralist government and a negotiated settlement to the war. As for the war itself, she gauged the impact of major military engagements by their impact on the Vietnamese—displaced families swept up into refugee

ELIZABETH BECKERYou Don’t Belong Here:

How Three Women Rewrote the Story of WarPublicAffairs: 2021

Gianluca Costantini

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

settlements, wounded children in Qui Nhon hospital—in whom the wire services, desperate to cover the next big operation, showed little interest.

Back in Saigon, FitzGerald drew on her sources to investigate the failings of the South Vietnamese government, trying to understand how the US could have locked itself into supporting such an unpopular, corrupt and incompetent regime. In Frankie’s House we were equally critical of both the politics and conduct of the war, but what FitzGerald wanted was an explanation of how the US had got itself into such a disastrous situation. For that, she turned to the French sociologist Paul Mus, author of Viet-Nam: sociologie d’une guerre, a study of the First Indochina War that still have not been translated into English.

While in Vietnam, FitzGerald published several articles on the policies behind and the conduct of the war in the Atlantic and the New Yorker. These established her reputation as a serious commentator. When Just was badly wounded, however, Frankie flew back with him to the US and began work on Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam, her masterful study of the origins of the Second Indochina War. At the time it was published in 1972, the anti-war movement was at its apogee. Fire in the Lake provided its intellectual ballast.

I read the book soon after publication and was impressed, perhaps because its historical perspective endorsed what I took to be the insidious role the French had played in creating the conditions for the Second Indochina War. They should have negotiated with Ho Chi Minh in 1946, as the British did with Nehru and Jinnah and Aung San. Ho had been right when he warned: ‘You can kill ten of my men for every one of yours I kill, but even at those odds you will lose.’ What the Americans never understood was why Vietnamese revolutionaries would submit to such losses year after year after year.

Fire in the Lake excoriated the US for failing to learn from the First Indochina War, failing to understand Vietnamese cultural values and failing to recognise that a war whose only measure of victory was a body count was unwinnable. Trapped within the ideological straitjacket of the Cold War, the ‘brightest and best’ applied the ‘domino theory’ of communist contagion to a country where the main streets of almost every town bear names like Tran Hung Dao and Le Loi, heroes who defeated Chinese armies to preserve Vietnamese independence.

Fire in the Lake was the best example of what might be called journalistic-driven scholarship. FitzGerald called it a first take on history, which it is. But it was also written for a purpose—to challenge the entire US rationale for the war, based on FitzGerald’s own investigations as a correspondent in Vietnam. David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, published later the same year, focused almost entirely on US decision-

making; Fire in the Lake took account of the Vietnamese. It deserves its place, alongside Ellen Hammer’s The Struggle for Indochina, among the most insightful studies of the Indochina wars.

Becker’s third female correspondent is the late Kate Webb, New Zealand born, Australian raised, bureau chief for UPI in Phnom Penh during the

Cambodian phase of the Second Indochina War. For Becker the choice of Webb was partly personal: Becker knew Webb in Cambodia and looked up to her as a role model.

Like Leroy and FitzGerald, Webb came to Vietnam of her own volition by her own means. She arrived in Saigon six months before the Tet Offensive, equipped with a degree in philosophy from Melbourne University and a couple of years working as a junior reporter on Rupert Murdoch’s Sydney Daily Mirror. She also arrived already scarred by death: of her best friend through suicide at the age of fifteen; and of both her parents in a car crash when Webb was eighteen.

In Saigon Webb at first eked out a living stringing for UPI, paid by the word to write about hometowners and stories on South Vietnamese policies while male staffers covered the war. On her own initiative, however, she soon began reporting on Vietnamese politics along with military operations involving the South Vietnamese armed forces, a whole dimension of the war all but ignored by the Western press.

Webb’s break came when she was among the first on the scene on 31 January 1968, when VC sappers penetrated part of the US Embassy in Saigon. Her graphic account convinced UPI to offer her a staff position, the first time any news agency had assigned a woman to cover a war.

Webb was both competitive and professional. Like Leroy, she asked no favours and kept to herself. Webb fitted easily into the UPI bureau. Unlike Leroy, she spoke softly and did not swear. And though she enjoyed a drink with her male colleagues, she seldom stayed for long.

According to Becker, over the two years she spent in Vietnam, Webb came to two conclusions: that the Second Indochina War was an extension of the first, fuelled by the same anticolonial desire for independence; and that its outcome would be decided not by any foreign power but by the Vietnamese themselves. Becker does not say whether FitzGerald and Webb ever met, but if they had, they would certainly have found themselves on the same wavelength.

For very different reasons, the year 1968 was as remarkable as 2020. The Tet Offensive marked a turning point in perceptions of the war; Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election and initiated peace talks with Hanoi; and student demonstrations left campuses and cities in turmoil

across the world. That the war dragged on for another four years, costing hundreds of thousands more lives and spilling over to destroy Cambodia, was entirely due to the unscrupulous machinations of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

Cambodia is the scene for the last three chapters of Becker’s book. Webb first accepted an assignment in the US in order to marry a Green Beret soldier, only to discover he was already married. So, at Webb’s request, UPI sent her to Phnom Penh. The withdrawal of US forces left Cambodia to descend into a civil war far more dangerous for journalists than Vietnam.

In the first four months, twenty-two journalists and photographers were killed in Cambodia, compared with twenty-four over the previous six years in Vietnam. Among them, soon after Webb arrived, were the UPI bureau chief Frank Frosch and photographer Kyoichi Sawada, with whom I had worked in Vietnam. Together they were stopped at a road block and shot by the Khmer Rouge.

On 6 April 1971, Webb herself was captured, along with four Cambodian journalists and a Japanese photographer. For days they were marched at night across hills and valleys to a jungle camp, where they were subjected to daily interrogation. None doubted they would die. And then suddenly they were freed—the only journalists to be captured and released during the Cambodian conflict. Their luck was due to three things: their captors were North Vietnamese, not Khmer Rouge; Webb was travelling on a British passport; and no American was in the party. Otherwise Webb’s obituary in the New York Times would have proved premature but not wrong.

As it was, Webb emerged to find herself the subject of headlines around the world. The series of articles she wrote for UPI were remarkably objective, portraying her captors without self-pity, as individual human beings. But like Leroy, Webb paid a price, both through the cerebral malaria she contracted and the recurrent nightmares that followed. Further symptoms of PTSD included increasing self-isolation and heavy drinking. Her therapy was to write On the Other Side, the book recounting her ordeal.

By the time Becker herself arrived in Cambodia, anti-war demonstrations across the US had forced Nixon to accept terms for a ceasefire almost identical to those he had sabotaged four years before. The agreement did not extend to Cambodia, however, because, unlike the Pathet Lao in Laos, the Khmer Rouge refused to sign on. So for the next seven months, US warplanes hammered targets in Cambodia. Becker and Webb’s reports on the horrendous damage were instrumental in convincing the US Congress to close off the loophole.

When the end came, Catherine Leroy was on hand to witness the final act as North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the

gates of the presidential palace in Saigon. At Clark Air Base in the Philippines, Kate Webb covered the arrival of evacuees. From abroad, Frances FitzGerald and Elizabeth Becker witnessed the end of the tragedy. For all four, the war they had reported with insight and compassion—the displaced civilians, the young men conscripted by both sides—was in the end for nothing. And like those who fought, all four women were indelibly scarred by their experience.

Whether Leroy, FitzGerald and Webb ‘rewrote the story of war’, as Becker claims, is contestable. They certainly influenced the way the Second Indochina War was portrayed and understood, and their place in the history of that war is assured. You Don’t Belong Here provides a fresh perspective not just on how the Second Indochina War was reported, but also on how it can be narrated through the lives of those who witnessed it. In writing it, Becker has made a significant contribution to the history of women in journalism and women in war. ☐

Gianluca Costantini

Gianluca Costantini

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PsychobloomAnne Stevenson-Yang

C H I N A

There is no branch of medicine or the social sciences more entangled with political control than psychology. From the early treatments of

female ‘hysterics’ by Jean Charcot in France in the late nineteenth century to the drugs, lobotomies and shock therapies of the conformity-obsessed 1940s and 1950s, ‘conversion therapy’ for gay people and juvenile boot camps, many of the psychological therapies directed at sufferers below the threshold of hospitalisation are focused on bringing individuals into compliance with social norms. This has been even truer in China than in the West, whether it is the confinement in mental institutions for political dissidents or intensive treatment of adolescents for internet or gaming ‘addiction’. Robin Munro, in Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry in China Today and its Origins in the Mao Era, describes the wielding of psychiatry as a political weapon for the purpose of silencing dissidents.

As social norms, political goals and social expectations shift, so do methods of treatment. Identifying the seam of that change is the concern of Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy by Li Zhang.

‘Since the early 1990s, a “psy fever” (xinli re 心理热) or “psychobloom” has been sweeping Chinese cities,’ Zhang, a professor in anthropology from the US, writes in her introduction. ‘This new phenomenon consists of a broad range of practices including the teaching and learning of psychology, group and individual counseling, self-help, cultivating happiness, and other mental health activities, geared not only for middle-class urbanites but also for marginalized social groups such as laid-off workers.’

The premise of Anxious China is that volcanic social change since the 1980s in China has created often unbearable pressure to earn more money and buy more stuff and that this pressure has led to much higher levels of anxiety and depression. Many individuals have chosen to cope with these stresses through psychotherapy.

Specifically, a huge number of people have undertaken training to do psychological counselling. This training has become a socially acceptable means of self-care: studying for an exam can be justified as career-enhancing, while meditation and other forms of introspection may be seen as selfish. Zhang reports that, in the six years after China’s certification programme was established in 2002, 100,000 people passed the exam and were certified, but only 15 per cent of them went into practice. When she asked exam takers why they had done this course of study, the majority said that it was to achieve better self-awareness.

This narrative can suggest self-indulgence. But there is another side to the same coin: mental illness is often diagnosed when the actual cause of distress is economic or political. China, for example, has a large network of deprogrammers for people who have gone into debt selling through multilevel marketing schemes. Parents often seek counselling for children who feel abandoned after being left with grandparents in rural areas while their parents work in cities and come home just once a year. Zhang offers several case studies of patients who are depressed due to family pressure to earn more money.

So is psy fever really about accepting inequality? Or is the upsurge in interest in psychological therapies a form of self-actualisation?

The heightened focus on individual happiness is quite new. Zhang offers the reader a brief history of

attitudes towards psychology in China: ‘During the official campaign to learn from the Soviet Union,’ she writes, ‘Ivan Pavlov’s theory of reflexology permeated the teaching of medicine, physiology, and psychology in Chinese academia, because it was regarded as scientific and suitable for Chinese society, as opposed to “bourgeois” Euro-American theories.’ Next, during the totalitarian movement of the Cultural Revolution, mental illness came to be regarded as a symptom of dangerous political thinking. Zhang continues: ‘There was a popular saying at that time: “Who needs the psychologist if one has the party?”’ It took emerging from that period of total party control to begin the thaw in psychotherapy.

Part of the reason that psychology in China can seem like it leans towards the individualist, self-indulgent end of the therapeutic spectrum is that China so desperately lacks the medical infrastructure needed to address the more acute forms of psychological distress. The attitude of China’s medical community appears to be that either

a patient is psychotic and needs to be hospitalised and medicated or else he or she is simply rich and idle and should be allowed to pursue wacky therapies as long as they don’t disturb others.

The average sufferer who goes to a Chinese hospital for psychological treatment leaves with a cocktail of drugs. Zhang describes a visit to a local psychiatrist on behalf of her mother, who was suffering from depression. In the five-minute consultation, the doctor prescribed Ambien, Prozac, Olanzapine and Xanax and told Zhang not to bother bringing her mother in next time but to come in herself to pick up the drugs. This focus on medication, while speaking to a deep problem in the Chinese healthcare system, indicates the degree to which therapy in China is not about happiness, but quiet obedience.

Psychotherapy, of course, addresses a broad continuum of needs, from psychosis to existential crisis or simply self-exploration. At the milder end of the spectrum, where therapy tends to be voluntary, self-directed and the domain of the wealthy, Zhang expresses ambivalence. She calls psy fever ‘the globalization of an Americanized idea of mental illness’. But she ultimately comes to an understanding of this fad as, not just self-indulgence, but also a redefinition of what it is to be a functioning member of Chinese society.

Zhang dedicates perhaps too little attention to the ways in which therapy in China supports or conflicts with the demands of the political panopticon. Psychotherapy, after all, can be a means for extending social control into a private realm. The Freudian fever that held the West in thrall mid-century, for example, may appear intensely personal but had a lot to do with establishing the right of socially sanctioned authorities—psychoanalysts—to reach into the nuclear family. In China, therapy as Zhang describes it in her chapter on ‘localization’ or bentuhua, with its greater focus on reconciling the individual to family and social demands, is often used as a handmaiden of social control.

As Zhang was finishing her book, in September 2017, the Chinese government announced that psychotherapy certification was being removed from the list of certifications for 140 recognised professions. This followed a policy launched by a speech in which Xi Jinping called for greater ‘standardisation of psychological therapy’. It remains unclear whether the change will lead to suppression of counselling services or simply a hands-off posture by the state.

But hands off is not an attitude often embraced by Chinese government officials. After the investment-fuelled period of fast economic growth in China, the Communist Party has focused on lowering expectations via the ‘relatively prosperous society’ campaign (xiaokang shehui), so that citizens will no longer aspire to foreign vacations and BMWs, but instead to long weekends in Hangzhou and domestically made Cherys. Now individuals are exploring less material paths to fulfilment and thereby developing a notion of individual aspiration that is threatening to party rulers, whose strategies of social control have always centred on full bellies/empty minds. People seeking autonomy, choice and opportunity are far more politically challenging than people whose principal aspiration is the means to buy an apartment. As with so many of the cultural and spiritual aspects of Chinese society that have been curtailed in the reign of Xi, so too may the growth of psychological therapy turn out to be a blossoming whose season is passing. ☐

LI ZHANGAnxious China: Inner Revolution

and Politics of PsychotherapyUniversity of California Press: 2020

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Coal devotionJeff Sparrow

A U S T R A L I A

In 2014, the World Heritage Committee signalled that it might place Australia’s Great Barrier Reef on its List of World Heritage in Danger. The

Australian government, led at the time by Tony Abbott, responded with horror, not because of what the committee’s concerns suggested about coral health, but at the implications for Australian coal. If the reef were classified as endangered, it feared finance for mining projects might cost more. Rather than reconsider an earlier decision to allow waste dumping in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, the government instead launched a diplomatic mission to prevent the listing.

The incident epitomises the broader narrative told by the journalist Marian Wilkinson in The Carbon Club, a story of how, for decades, Australian politicians have placed the interests of resource companies above any concerns for the planet.

In the 1990s, when the world first debated global warming, a basic dilemma was already apparent. In the long term, Australia—a hot and dry continent—would suffer greatly as the temperature climbed. In the near term, however, it benefited tremendously from the expansion of the fossil fuel economy, exporting more coal than any other nation and selling an array of other carbon-intensive commodities.

Suffice to say, the short-term interests of industry triumphed. As early as the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, both of the country’s major political parties— Liberal (right) and Labor (left)—embraced what became known as the ‘no regrets’ policy: Australia would reduce emissions only if it could do so without any economic consequences.

On that basis, John Howard, the Liberal prime minister, signed the Kyoto Protocol after discovering that Australia’s woeful environmental record could serve as bargaining tool. Since colonisation, European settlers had been clearing the continent (and thus reducing natural carbon sequestration) at a rapid rate. Drought and recession meant, however, that deforestation had peaked in 1990—the date used as a baseline by the Kyoto negotiators. The coincidence allowed the Howard government to claim credits for a reduction that was already occurring.

Australia thus emerged from Kyoto with one of the lowest targets assigned to a developed nation and thereafter insisted (until very recently) that, by beating those goals, it had earned carry-over credits that reduced subsequent obligations.

Wilkinson, a decorated journalist in Australia, notes the direct and immediate influence of the carbon lobby on the country’s politics. In the 2000s, for instance, the Cormack Foundation—the Liberal Party’s own investment company—held stakes in fossil fuel companies like BHP and Rio Tinto. Howard’s nephew advised Rio Tinto on government relations; David Kemp, Howard’s environment minister, had previously employed Rio Tinto’s John Roskam, who ran the climate denialist Institute for Public Affairs, which also received support from the Cormack Foundation.

‘Many Liberal Party officials and staffers,’ Wilkinson writes, ‘moved through the revolving door of politics,

big mining and metals companies, lobbying firms and the public service.’

Mind you, that door did not open only for the conservative side of politics.

In 2007, Kevin Rudd of the Labor Party defeated Howard on a platform that included a pledge of serious climate action. Yet Labor struggled to turn Rudd’s rhetorical commitment into meaningful policy. The ensuing internecine conflict and Labor’s subsequent electoral defeat owed much to pressure from fossil fuel companies and their supporters.

Nevertheless, when a report by environmental activists that labelled coal a ‘destructive industry that destroys the landscape and communities, corrupts our democracy and threatens the global climate’ was leaked to the media in 2012, Labor leaders hastened to condemn it. The treasurer, Wayne Swan, called the report ‘deeply irresponsible’; Craig Emerson, the trade minister, said the activists lived in ‘a fantasy land’; Martin Ferguson, the resources minister, declared their call to delegitimise coal ‘very disturbing’. When Labor lost power the following year, Swan became a director of the coal- and gas-power generator Stanwell Corporation; Emerson undertook consultations for AGL Energy and Santos; and Ferguson accepted a position on the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association’s advisory committee.

Yet, while the tendrils of the fossil fuel industry reach deep within both political parties, it would be wrong to understand Australian policy simply as a result of direct corporate lobbying. Wilkinson documents the role played by institutes and think tanks in forestalling early action on global warming.

Since the 1980s, Hugh Morgan of Western Mining Corporation, one of the country’s largest mining companies, had helped to set the agenda for the Australian right. Morgan co-founded the HR Nicholls Society in 1986 to disrupt the centralised wage

bargaining on which Australian unions had depended since the start of the twentieth century. He bankrolled the Centre for Independent Studies and other hard-right think tanks as they pioneered what would later be known as neoliberalism, and he campaigned to limit the scope of indigenous land rights in the 1980s and 1990s.

As a mining chief executive, Morgan possessed an obvious personal concern in disrupting the consensus on climate science that prevailed briefly in the 1990s. Crucially, though, he managed to present support for fossil fuels as not merely a private interest but as the new frontline on which the right as a whole needed to battle a resurgent left.

That ideological framing helps to explain both the durability and the breadth of the anti-climate movement in Australia.

In his book The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin suggests that conservatism should be understood less as a coherent set of ideas and more as a response to the agency of subordinate classes. As they mount a counter-revolution to preserve public and private hierarchies, reactionaries often borrow from the insurgent movements they oppose, developing their own critique of the elite as too feeble and decadent to defend the status quo.

Something similar became apparent in the campaign waged by the Liberal Abbott against the carbon tax proposed by Labor’s Julia Gillard in the early 2010s. Abbott’s own position on global warming changed repeatedly, but he remained steadfast in his opposition to climate action, associating even the mild measures proposed by Gillard with dangerous radicalism. Drawing on strategies pioneered in the US and relying on activists trained by the Koch brothers, Abbott unleashed a supposed ‘people’s revolt’ against Labor and its climate policies. His senior business adviser Maurice Newman published an op-ed in a national newspaper linking the UN’s concerns about carbon emissions to a plot to construct a New World Order—an illustration of the radicalising effect of the anti-climate action mobilisation.

Marian Wilkinson frames her book with the horrendous 2019-20 bushfire season and the coronavirus pandemic that followed. She

contrasts the government’s interventionist approach to Covid-19 with its lackadaisical response to climate change, and expresses a hope that Australia might be reaching a turning point. But it’s difficult to be optimistic.

As for the government, many people recall that Scott Morrison, the current prime minister, brandished a lump of coal during a parliamentary debate back in 2017. It’s not so often remembered that he did so in support of an attack on renewables launched by his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull came into parliament pledging to fight for climate action—and then spent the whole of his tenure placating the denialists on whose support he depended, in a depressing illustration of the carbon club’s power.

As for the Great Barrier Reef, the Townsville-based Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies published an exhaustive new study a few months ago. It showed that the reef has already lost half its coral—and will almost certainly die unless the world achieves rapid emission reductions. ☐

MARIAN WILKINSONThe Carbon Club: How a Network of Influential

Climate Sceptics, Politicians and Business Leaders Fought to Control Australia’s Climate Policy

Allen & Unwin: 2020

Jeff Sparrow is the author of Fascists Among Us: Online Hate and the Christchurch Massacre

Paul Orchard

20

Work robotsCharles Brophy

M A L A Y S I A

When I first arrived in Kuala Lumpur in 2015, transportation in the city was still dominated by the old red and white, or blue taxis. To

order one, you called a taxi company, used a taxi counter in malls or train stations or tried your luck on the side of the road. It was an analogue model: taxi drivers applied for permits to run their cars, the prices were fixed by the government and a whole system of operators and attendants was required to keep it running. It made the drivers able to monopolise the market, charge off the meter and choose their own routes.

Then Grab and Uber arrived. Within a year, these apps had completely transformed the industry. Their business model placed passengers in direct contact with drivers who often drove as a second job, their prices could undercut taxi drivers and a review system allowed drivers to be monitored. It didn’t need middlemen and it didn’t need full-time workers; it was connecting passengers in need of a more convenient service with drivers who had spare time and needed additional income. In a short period, it changed the fabric of the city.

It also disrupted a way of life. Most conversations I had with taxi drivers revolved around their loss of income, the family who depended on their work and the way in which their formerly protected industry was now open to competition from anyone with a car (in Malaysia almost everyone). They knew they had nowhere else to go, and many didn’t take it lying down. They protested, made police reports and, when that didn’t work, blocked Grab and Uber vehicles until the police arrived to free them.

Yet, while so many Malaysians embraced the new possibilities ride-sharing apps brought, the new-found utopia was short-lived. Soon drivers were complaining of the demands of the app, the fear of a bad review and their declining incomes. Nor were they merely profiteering; they were in this to top up incomes that weren’t keeping up with living costs.

The drivers highlighted two sides of a growing technological divide. They also highlighted that, if the rise of the gig economy was a story of technologically induced job loss, it was also a story of the economic pressures pushing people into gig work. This wasn’t only a question of technology but also of the quality of economic growth.

Khazanah Research Institute is sponsored by Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah Nasional Berhad, and as its latest report, Work in an Evolving Malaysia, shows, technology has already been affecting employment in the country, particularly in semi-skilled professions. Yet its effects are by no means predestined and often depend on the dynamics of particular sectors.

Manufacturing, central to fears of technologically induced unemployment, in Malaysia remains less reliant on technology and more upon cheap migrant labour, ensuring incentives to automate remain low. Yet the report identifies a significant worry around sectors like sales and services, traditionally vulnerable to automation.

This turn to services introduces another narrative into the story of automation. It is part of a broader shift within the Malaysian economy, which began in the early 2000s and has developed alongside de-industrialisation and the decline of manufacturing. Automation is then equally a story of the economic trends that have driven workers into at-risk service sector jobs.

Aaron Benanav, in Automation and the Future of Work, would agree. His book looks to cut through the futuristic hype around automation. While automation

is inherent in advanced capitalist economies, ‘the same is not true’, he argues, ‘of the theory of a coming age of automation’, which extrapolates from technological change to describe utopian or catastrophic narratives of social change.

Benanav laments the focus of ‘automationists’ on technology, arguing that automation is largely not a cause of economic change, but an effect, and that the focus on technology often overlooks that many of the automationists’ fears of growing inequality and low job growth are already with us, particularly in less developed economies. The real story for Benanav is not automation but global economic stagnation.

This stagnation emanates from a crisis of the post-war order. When the US exported capital to western Europe and Japan to rebuild economies and ward off communism, it also induced an over- supply of manufacturing, lowering prices, lowering profit margins and, without new markets to enter, increasing competition.

This process in the 1970s pushed industry out of North America, Europe and Japan towards the rest of Asia, where the global North’s heightened competition and unionised resistance to lower wages could be counteracted by cheaper Asian labour. The narrative of the period was the North progressively de-industrialising and transitioning towards high-tech service work—taking people out of the factories and into offices—while the global South would be developed by the growth engine of industry.

Benanav’s central argument, however, is that the move in the 1970s to offshore labour didn’t resolve stagnation, but only postponed it. And the real story of this period isn’t the globalisation of industry or the passing of European societies into a post-industrial age, but the decline of industry as a unique engine of growth in the world economy.

Since the Industrial Revolution, the growth of productivity and technology in manufacturing has been transformative of societies. Yet from the 1970s manufacturing has been stagnating. In the 1950s and 1960s, manufacturing grew globally at a rate of 7.1 per cent per year, from the 1980s at 3.0 per cent and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis at 1.6 per cent.

The causes of weak global job growth, according to Benanav, are twofold. Where the North has de-industrialised, it has failed to find as dynamic a new engine of growth. And where the global South has industrialised, it has failed to do so at levels comparable to the countries of the North.

For later industrialising Southeast Asia, this has meant that a virtuous cycle of productivity growth, industrial expansion and development hasn’t emerged, and weak industrialisation has hindered development and led to premature de-industrialisation and an earlier turn to services.

This has been true in China where, since the mid-1990s, industry has gone through downturns and upturns. Yet it has been more evident in the former

Asian tiger cubs—Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines and Malaysia—which have begun to shift to service-led growth without first achieving high levels of technological and industrial development.

Malaysia, largely rural and agricultural as a colony, is a prime example. Large-scale industrialisation emerged as central to the country’s New Economic Policy in the 1970s, but really took off with the rise of Mahathir Mohamad. The high-tech electronics manufacturers from Japan establishing factories in the Klang Valley and Penang allowed Mahathir, in 1991, to announce his ‘Vision 2020’ of establishing a ‘prosperous society with an economy that is fully competitive, dynamic, robust and resilient’.

Malaysia’s industrialisation peaked, however, early in the 2000s, not from the fallout of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 but, as Elsa Lafaye de Micheaux argues in The Development of Malaysian Capitalism, from the collapse of the dot-com bubble and a short-term decline in electronics manufacturing that led to a long-term decline in Malaysian GDP growth. Manufacturing declined again in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis.

Automation and the Future of Work reminds us that the global turn to service-led growth has only furthered the cycle of weak growth. Services offer lower returns on capital, lower rates of productivity and less dynamic expansion. They form a relatively stagnant sector, and Benanav sees ‘a clear link between the global expansion of this stagnant economic sector and the ever-worsening stagnation of the world economy’.

As Work in an Evolving Malaysia suggests, what matters isn’t just service-led growth but also the kind of services on which countries rely. On this point, Malaysia’s trajectory remains cause for concern. Its growth in the past decade has been led, not by modern, but by ‘other’ services, many of which are traditional, often labour intensive, low productivity and lower waged. Growth and jobs have been increasingly centred in sectors like wholesale and retail, food and beverages and hospitality, shaping a country of hotels, malls and coffee shops.

Modern services employ fewer Malaysians, but those workers contribute proportionally more to GDP than other services that employ more than half of the workforce. This is true also of Malaysia’s SMEs, which employ nearly 65 per cent of the workforce, much of it concentrated in small and micro firms. These firms contribute proportionally less to GDP than larger modern companies, are highly concentrated in traditional services and employ more people in lower-productivity roles offering lower wages.

When the World Bank noted in 2014 that Malaysia was experiencing a significant growth in ‘aspirational’ households, it also noted that they were not entering the global middle class. They were often just ‘getting by’ as more and more Malaysian workers were pooled into low-productivity, lower-paid and often precarious work.

How will such aspirational households fare in the face of Covid-19? As Aaron Benanav argues, the effects of the pandemic have been worsened by the concentration in precarious service sectors, which will be hardest hit by lockdowns and which find it easiest to retrench labour. While economic growth will return, quality job growth may not, and the worry is that the pandemic will accelerate existing trends, creating fewer, and lower-quality, jobs. ☐

Charles Brophy is the former managing editor of Gerakbudaya

AARON BENANAVAutomation and the Future of Work

Verso Books: 2020

Work in an Evolving Malaysia: The State of Households 2020, Part IIKhazanah Research Institute: 2020

21

Truth seekersChristopher G. Moore

R E L I G I O N

In search of meaning, matters of the heart have been a lodestar for philosophers, seekers, mystics, prophets and thinkers. The heart seekers long to embrace an

enchanted world at a time when disenchantment has sawn the legs off the magic table. There is a tradition of taking refuge in esoteric spiritual practices, abandoning causality and embracing imagination. Storytelling is the saga of how the heart navigates a path through a number of circumstances. Jorge Luis Borges articulated those journeys in his essay ‘The Four Cycles’, which identified four universal and timeless stories: the story of war, the story of return, the story of quest and the story of sacrifice. Borges’ own writings reveal a deeper foundation for storytelling: the space where the heart and mind wrestle over the meaning of reality and sense-making. Philosophy, neuroscience, religion, myth and metaphysical explorations start with sentiment (David Hume’s word), emotion and feelings. Religions and cultures vary as to the roles accorded to shamans, prophets, magic, symbols and meditation.

Alex Kerr’s Finding the Heart Sutra documents the author’s personal journey over nearly half a century to understand, explain, teach and embrace the meaning of the Heart Sutra, which is dated to 661 CE. The sutra was discovered carved in a stone stele at Yunju Temple, seventy kilometres southwest of Beijing.

The basic Tibetan teaching of the Heart Sutra is contained in the ‘Four Profundities’:

The material world does not differ from emptiness.Emptiness does not differ from the material world.The material world is itself emptiness.Emptiness is itself the material world.Emptiness comes from the flux of a fast-moving

universe where everything is subject to the laws of impermanence. In Hinduism and Buddhism there is a concept of samsara—all life goes through a cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. Like entropy in science, every object, thing, event is understood as being in motion, flying apart, changing, decaying, separating into the stillness of emptiness. Our reaction is sadness as we resign ourselves to the ephemeral nature of ideas, thoughts, objects and people. The Japanese have the phrase mono-no-aware to express the feeling that comes with the realisation of impermanence. Rather than sadness, Kerr believes that a deeper, more positive equanimity flows from emptiness. Acceptance allows a person to let go; to understand the desire to resist or stop change. Our passions and desires as well as the instinct to control lose the traction needed to sustain the sadness. How does the Heart Sutra provide a path to enter this altered state of being? Kerr’s mission is to answer this question. The short answer is non-attachment—a condition of the mind as it breaks free from the tethers of ‘praise, ridicule, suffering, happiness, benefit, destruction, gain and loss’. Having achieved this, what secret is revealed? The answer is a metaphorical state described as ‘nothingness’. Finding the Heart Sutra is a portrait without a frame, without paint, with no dimension, size or shape, no model, no representation, no projection. What is it we are looking at hung on the walls of our mental lives? The Heart Sutra sends us to the metaphysical sphere where we confront emptiness and nothingness.

Kerr, an American who divides his time between Bangkok and Kyoto, draws lessons from science on the principle of non-duality. In this realm, a pair of twinned particles annihilate each other as matter and anti-matter collide (Kerr regularly refers to the world of quantum physics as aligning with the teachings of the Heart Sutra). Virtual particles pop in and out of existence. Life is part of a random dance in an unstable, unpredictable world. Yet we cling to duality and project it onto an irrational universe. We spend our lives preoccupied with cultural baggage that divides reality into binary pairs—good and evil, right and wrong, sinful and saintly. The Heart Sutra sits in a tradition of metaphysical exploration that tears down such false consciousness about the world and allows the mind a path to transcend words, sermons, speech and consciousness.

Kerr’s journey owes a debt to two long-time mentors, the expat Americans David Kidd and William Gilkey. The book recounts the settings and lessons of his visits and conversations. Like Kerr, both of his mentors were also long-term residents in Japan from the 1970s through the 1990s. Finding the Heart Sutra is a testimony to their influence and the author’s spiritual development. We find his journey through Buddhism, the Zen tradition, meditation practices and magic.

Kerr is a proficient scholar. He reads Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese. He is also an accomplished calligrapher, and his calligraphy adorns the book. He draws upon these skills to paint signposts along the path of his own journey as he guides the reader on the historical trail of the Heart Sutra. Finding the Heart Sutra is part mystery, part saga, part homage to mentors and masters. While his intellectual gaze points to the East, the journey or quest is a universal feature in storytelling across geographies, time and cultures. To appreciate Kerr’s contribution to the literature is to place his journey in a larger cultural and historical context.

There are echoes of the tradition of the Kabbalah, which predates the Heart Sutra, in Kerr’s book, as in the poems and stories of Borges, T.S. Eliot,

Albert Camus and C.P. Cavafy. The early Kabbalah is traced to the tenth century BCE and provides the roots for magic and alchemy. The Heart Sutra also comes from an oral tradition of passing along the esoteric, secret knowledge of the universe to a select few.

The Heart Sutra is the boulder that Kerr and others before him have pushed up the existential mountain. Many have chronicled their histories of rolling the boulder up their own personal, existential mountains. What keeps such seekers going to the mountain each day? Perhaps they have found the secret Fred Murdock, the fictional character from Borges’s ‘The Ethnographer’, learned from the shaman. Mountain and boulder are a binary duality that exists in our minds. Sisyphus is freed not by believing he can be happy despite this arrangement but by understanding his true nature, the mountain and the boulder as leading to a pathway found inside his own heart.

Kerr’s Finding the Heart Sutra is a worthy map for truth seekers. In this cycle of reiteration and recurrence, nothing is fixed or permanent; there are secrets, there are magic, charms and chants, courage and hope, the falling away of everything as the normal state of our random universe. The Heart Sutra is in the tradition of following trails inspired by magical, mystical sages. Science and mathematics use a different set of language models—both the esoteric and the scientific generate a sense of the world as proof of their model’s superior alignment with reality. In the end we witness an ongoing battle between two different styles of intuition: the enchanted and the disenchanted. Artificial intelligence, with its vastly superior intuition system, may render this distinction obsolete.

Alex Kerr’s personal journey illuminates a life spent in discovery of the universes contained in the letters and words of the Heart Sutra. His is the road less travelled. We should celebrate a book that presents the case for the Heart Sutra as a guide to a way of knowing that goes back to our beginnings as beings who move through an enchanted world shared with demons, gods, spirits, mysteries and secret, hidden messages. Kerr found a way to decode enough of this enchanted world to have it profoundly influence his own life. You finish his book with a feeling that our divisions between knowledge systems based on enchantment and those based on enchantment-killing scientific method may have been an illusion. They both lead to Ithaca. The secret hidden in the Heart Sutra has been in front of us all along. ☐

ALEX KERRFinding the Heart Sutra; Guided by a Magician, an Art

Collector and Buddhist Sages from Tibet to Japan Allen Lane: 2020

Christopher G. Moore is the author of Heart Talk

WikiCommons

Sanskrit manuscript of the Heart Sutra, written in the Siddha script

22

Where they belongFarah Abdessamad

H E R I T A G E

The day the Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened to visitors after New York’s pandemic lockdown, I joined the queues in the so-called

Museum Mile. Once inside, I made my way through the ancient Egyptian galleries, walked some more and paused when I came across a familiar, unexpected smile in the Medieval Sculpture Hall. In a churchlike room decorated with Christian-inspired northern and western European art stood a twelfth-century Avalokiteshvara statue, unmistakably Khmer. It was a strange juxtaposition. ‘Cambodia or Thailand’, read the label. Or? Throughout the Southeast Asian galleries and beyond are more statues like this. I stared at them and a question bored into me: how did these antiquities make their way to the Met, and why haven’t they been returned home?

In 1923, the French issued a paradoxical decree that endorsed the sale of so-called debris to finance the conservation of higher-value objects and sites throughout its colonies in Indochina. Ostensibly, the most valuable objects were to be kept in museums in either Cambodia or France. But who was to decide what counted as pieces of lesser interest? Would the criteria be aesthetic or historical? Were these decisions supposed to stay unchallenged irrespective of an improved understanding of ancient Khmer civilisation? And, crucially, what space was allocated for Cambodians to voice agency over their heritage? Not much.

A discretionary shortlist was drawn up by two French colonial officials: the arts director and the curator of Angkor. ‘I set aside any piece of stone lacking interest and which I judge to be worthless,’ Henri Marchal, a member of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and curator of Angkor, explained at the time. A three-tiered review system was created, but neither the commission—filled with EFEO appointees—nor the EFEO opposed the ‘leftover’ list. They wanted to promote Khmer art abroad and satisfy buyers’ demands, so colonial rules on what was and what wasn’t for sale were readily and regularly circumvented.

If the rules failed in practice, the need for them was abundantly clear. There’s a famous story of twenty-two-year-old André Malraux, not yet Charles de Gaulle’s close associate and future French minister of cultural affairs, stealing a tenth-century bas relief from Cambodia’s Banteay Srei temple in Siem Reap province. Arrested by colonial authorities in Phnom Penh before he could make the sale, Malraux was sentenced to prison, but he obtained an acquittal from Paris. At that time, blood antiquities, or the sale of looted artefacts, were common enough. The French colonisers believed themselves to be at the helm of a cultural salvation mission. Angkor Wat, more than any other site, was considered a treasure needing to be saved. Colonial authorities anointed themselves the guardians of Khmer tradition, and cultural promotion remained an important pillar of their policy in the kingdom during those years.

That one can today find Khmer artefacts mostly in France, and Indonesian artefacts mostly in the Netherlands, is no coincidence. The Guimet Museum in

Paris absorbed much of the Indochinese art collection of the nearby Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography, when the latter closed in the 1930s. Returning Southeast Asia’s Past: Objects, Museums, and Restitution highlights the role of deliberate looting and illicit trading during colonial times, but the book also conveys that the practice pre and post-dated French Indochina or the Dutch control of the East Indies. There were customs of gift exchanges between stately figures, and there was smuggling as well—as in the case of a twelfth-century statue moved from Angkor to the Ayutthaya kingdom three centuries later, and which can now be seen in Mandalay.

Though it is a perennial undertaking, such looting and trading underscore uneven power relations. In the case of Cambodia, a significant number of artefacts disappeared—undocumented—during the Khmer Rouge rule as the regime looted museums and sites to fund its genocidal state. After the regime fell, looting continued during subsequent fighting (something we continue to observe across the world as the art market has become more globalised). Masha Lafont, in Pillaging Cambodia: The Illicit Traffic in Khmer Art, noted that half of the country’s heritage had been looted between 1986 and 2003. Out of the 377 Khmer antiquities sold at the New York-based auction house Sotheby’s between 1988 and 2010, nearly three-quarters of them carried no clear historical records.

Contested objects are often contested narratives, which are interwoven with local, national and sometimes universal significance. Moving from a narrow concept of property to a more encompassing idea of heritage is linked with affirmation, nation-building and legitimacy. Those foundational injustices have fuelled a movement to decolonise museums, academia and historical story-telling on many Western campuses in recent years. The question of physical heritage disappearance is also one of symbolic identity erasure. It is always political, in the fabricated primitive/civilised dichotomy, and leaves an open wound.

In the case of looted antiquities, healing that wound requires restitution and an oft intricate re-appropriation. Returning Southeast Asia’s Past underscores the importance of archives to build evidence for missing

objects. This partially worked in Cambodia thanks to One Hundred Missing Objects: Looting in Angkor, which provided an inventory for an eventual restitution; it was published by the Paris-based International Council of Museums in 1993, at the end of the period of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia. The country is ‘the biggest example of the restitution of objects of art in the world’, with more than one hundred artefacts returned by 2001 (out of an estimated hundreds of thousands plundered), an important, if slim, silver lining after traumatic and difficult decades.

But how many pieces will never be found due to exploitation, conflict and the systematic destruction or forgery of documentation? For Western museums and art collectors, which have derived income and soft power through impressive collections, the book suggests viewing restitution as a ‘win-win’ game. Instead of seeing restitution as a loss or an action clothed in guilt and shame, it can be a gain: in international cooperation and good will, where knowledge and understanding govern enhanced diplomatic ties.

While several books have dealt with looting, Returning Southeast Asia’s Past is a rare addition to the field as it explores the complexities of restitution with breadth and nuance. Composed of three parts, it questions perspectives on ownership (‘contemporary negotiations’), legacies and identities, surveying examples of Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar in addition to Cambodia. The scholarly contributions stimulate thinking on the role that restitutions play in the postcolonial societies of Indonesia and Myanmar, for instance, and open a wider reflection on collective and reimagined memory. Which slice of memory do we choose to cherish and conserve, and what does that say about our present and priorities?

The Metropolitan Museum says it undergoes a rigorous vetting process of its acquisitions in line with the 1970 Unesco convention against illicit trafficking in cultural property. In 2013, the Met returned two tenth-century statues from the Prasat Chen temple in Koh Ker—an ephemeral ancient capital city located in present-day Preah Vihear province—to the Cambodian authorities. The return was made after the Met uncovered research that showed the ‘kneeling attendants’ had been looted during the 1970s. The statues had been in the Asian art gallery of the New York museum for two decades. In Phnom Penh, a delegation of government officials, journalists and Buddhist monks greeted the statues at the airport, with monks performing blessing ceremonies. News of their return was covered by the biggest international outlets. It was a moment of national unity, joy and pride one had waited years to see.

By contrast, at the same time this symbolic and significant gesture was taking place, Sotheby’s faced high-profile litigation over an allegedly illicit Khmer statue it agreed to remove from sale but refused to hand over. Sotheby’s eventually returned the statue in late 2013 after US law enforcement pressed Cambodian ownership claims. Societies are increasingly sensitive about rectifying history’s wrongdoings, and these two recent examples show that voluntary restitutions are indeed a better alternative than legal battles attracting negative publicity.

The Prasat Chen statues from Koh Ker are now located in Phnom Penh’s National Museum of Cambodia—where they belong. ☐

LOUISE TYTHACOTT AND PANGGAH ARDIYANSYAH (EDS)

Returning Southeast Asia’s Past: Objects, Museums, and Restitution

NUS Press: 2020

Farah Abdessamad is a writer based in New York City

‘The kneeling attendant’

23

This book introduces us to the world of Jacob Haafner, a seasoned traveller and prolific travel writer who, over a thirty-year period, lived

successively in South Africa, Java, India, Sri Lanka and Mauritius. Haafner’s many experiences, and his close observations of the societies in which he resided, converted him into a trenchant critic of colonialism and missionaries and instilled a lifelong Anglophobia. Possessed of a prodigious memory, Haafner acquired fluency in seven languages—Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Hindi, Tamil and English. Van der Velde’s detailed overview of Haafner’s life and times is supplemented by germane excerpts from his writings.

Jacob Haafner was born on 13 May 1754 in Halle, Prussia. After his father’s recruitment as a ship’s doctor to the Vereenidge Oostindische Compagnie (VOC, the Dutch United East India Company), the family moved to Emden and, later, in 1765, to Amsterdam. Signed on as a cabin boy, the twelve-year-old Jacob joined his father on the ship Luxemberg, which departed for Cape Town on 25 June 1766.

His father having died en route, Jacob stayed on in Cape Town, where he was employed as a bookkeeper. He also witnessed the execution by public incineration of a young slave girl, an early introduction to the brutality of colonialism. Haafner left Cape Town for Batavia in November 1767 with the promise of employment teaching ‘proper Dutch’ to the children of a colonial family. The adulterous mistress took sadistic delight in the savage punishment of household slaves, who were charged with a range of minor and mainly concocted infractions and subsequently flogged with a flesh-tearing split cane.

Haafner returned to Amsterdam after a further interlude in Cape Town. During this time, he collected botanical specimens, wrote on the atmospheric phenomenon known as the Cape Town tablecloth and encountered a young Khoikhoi woman, who left him with an offering intended as a declaration of love.

Haafner ultimately reached Amsterdam in August 1770 and was reunited with his family. For a while, he was apprenticed to a painter who Van der Velde believes was the famed engraver Reinier Vinkels. Overcome with wanderlust, that ‘incurable disease’, Haafner left Amsterdam the following year, again bound for Cape Town and Batavia. From there he took ship to India, a voyage rendered miserable by the repeated brutalities inflicted by the ship’s captain. Discharged in Nagapatnam on the Coromandel Coast in September 1773, he was employed as a clerk. Retrenched six years later, Haafner moved to Sadras, 200 kilometres north of Nagapatnam. This commenced an idyllic period during which he enthusiastically immersed himself in the vibrant cosmopolitanism of the city. He also met a Vedantic sannyasin who imparted the basic knowledge of the Sanskrit scriptures and convinced Haafner to become a vegetarian. During this period, he also visited the ruins of the great Pallavan dynastic city of Mahabalipuram, whose civilisation impressed him.

The Sadras sojourn ended abruptly with the British capture of the city in June 1781 and its subsequent destruction. In July Haafner was taken to Madras as a British prisoner of war. There, employed as a clerk, he witnessed the prolonged and unspeakable horrors of the famine that followed the investment of the city by the forces of Hyder Ali Khan, the ruler of Mysore.

Empire rageCarl Vadivella Belle

H I S T O R Y

Haafner escaped Madras by promising to deliver confidential letters to a British officer in Tranquebar—letters that he duly handed to the French in Pondicherry. Later, joining an absconding party, he and his partner, the mestizo Anna Weider, undertook a haphazard trip to Jaffnapatnam in Dutch Sri Lanka, a locality regarded then as one of the most attractive places on Earth. Again seized by wanderlust, he joined an expedition trekking through the jungle to Colombo, a distance of some 250 kilometres. Unimpressed with Colombo, Haafner returned to Jaffnapatnam to discover that his investments had been lost and that Weider had abandoned him for a diamond merchant.

Haafner returned to India, arriving in Tranquebar. Outraged by a suggestion that he become a missionary teacher, he journeyed to Calcutta, where his employment with a prominent merchant introduced him to the highest ranks of colonial society. His associates included Sir Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones, who in 1784 founded the Asiatick Society, established to research the customs, philosophies and legal systems of oriental cultures.

In 1786 Haafner left Calcutta for south India. Here he embarked on expeditions to various centres, travelling in a palanquin, which he found more rewarding and less enervating than trekking. In Masulipatnam he met a young devadasi (temple dancer) called Mamia, with whom he fell in love. This relationship ended with Mamia’s tragic death.

Haafner left Pondicherry for Mauritius, arriving on 31 December 1786 after a voyage plagued by storms and doldrums. The island contained a population of about 40,000, of which one-fifth was white, the remainder largely slaves transported from Madagascar. Haafner noted that, while Mauritius had an equable climate and rich volcanic soil, the island was plagued by rats and hurricanes. He was unenthusiastic about St. Louis, a French naval base, which he found corrupt and morally depraved. Haafner left Mauritius on 9 February 1787, returning to Amsterdam via Cape Town.

On 25 May 1787, Haafner arrived in Amsterdam in a politically unstable Netherlands divided between Orange loyalists and reformists. In 1790 he met the twenty-year-old Anna Kruenink, with whom he had three children and whom he finally married in 1808. In 1795, after the French Revolution, his investments in French promissory notes became valueless and his financial position parlous. He supported himself with his writing and the sale of pipes. Heartsick for the tropics, he spent years engaged in sometimes acrimonious correspondence in futile attempts to secure an appointment commensurate with his considerable expertise. However, his travel writings proved successful and were later translated into German, French, Swedish, English and Danish. Finally, in 1805 he was awarded a prize by the Amsterdam-based Teylers Theological College for his critical treatise on the effectiveness of missionaries. Haafner died in 1809 of angina pectoris, a condition aggravated by years of heavy smoking. His translation of the Indian classic, Ramayana, was published posthumously.

This summary of Haafner’s travels does little to convey the vigour of his writing, or the fullness and acuity of his observations. Nor does it

detail the hazards of his voyages on the overcrowded and unsanitary ships of the era, or the dangers he encountered in the course of his journeys on land.

Haafner’s writings are punctuated by his keen eye for the idiosyncratic and his indulgence of eccentric characters. They provide more than a series of historical snapshots and rhapsodic paeans to the natural world of tropical Asia. As Van der Velde points out, Haafner was writing at a time of ascending British power, when what the author calls the emporialistic phase of empire was being overtaken by nakedly exploitative imperialism. His experiences exposed him to the rapacity of Europeans in the East, the repeated cruelties, the needless deaths and the traducements of traditional cultures. Haafner’s writings on Dutch colonialism move us beyond the heavily censored reportage of the VOC and provide insights into otherwise unknown aspects of Dutch colonial commerce.

Haafner never accepted the generic thrust of ‘colonial knowledge’: the body of orientalist knowledge filtered through an imperial lens, assuming inherent European superiority and subsequently refracted back to the ‘native’ population. He was, as Van der Velde points out, one of the first Dutch scholars ‘with a pure interest in the ideas of Indians’, who made every effort to view and portray local cultures in terms of their own validity. This approach is exemplified by Haafner’s study of temple dancers, the devadasis (slaves of the deity). Eschewing the superficial and condemnatory accounts of Western missionaries, Haafner provided the first detailed and sympathetic description of this phenomenon in Western literature.

Haafner was deeply critical of Christian missionaries, viewing them as fanatics who had ‘wreaked devastation and disasters’ around the world and who committed the ‘vilest crimes’ and ‘most horrible wickednesses’. Missionaries were imperialism’s agents, opening the world to European ideals and thus to Western political and economic domination. According to Haafner, the missionaries’ ideological certitude, their crude binary division between the ‘saved’ and the ‘unredeemed’, necessitated that all non-Christians be portrayed as ‘brutish monsters’. His prize-winning book, which provided the first global study of Christian missionaries, met with widespread criticism that reiterated the standard orientalist bromides at the time—that is was both morally and factually wrong to place lesser civilisations on an equal footing with Christian societies and that the only path to civilisation was to bring the benighted into the Christian fold.

Paul van der Velde expresses surprise that Haafner’s work was appropriated by the National Socialists as a source of anti-British propaganda. It might be salient to view this within the context of the Axis powers’ attempts to promote revolution in a British India already destabilised by the Quit India campaign and challenged by the Japanese-sponsored Indian National Army.

Life Under the Palms is an admirable and imaginative introduction to the life and work of an important and generally overlooked figure, a sharply observant writer who, in defiance of prevailing ideological currents, compiled detailed and celebratory accounts of precolonial cultures, thus prefiguring by two centuries the emergence of contemporary postcolonial studies. ☐

PAUL VAN DER VELDE (TRANSLATED LIESBETH BENNINK)

Life Under the Palms: The Sublime World of the Anti-Colonialist Jacob Haafner

Yale University Press: 2020

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Teochew operaKen Kwek

S H O R T S T O R Y

to prevent her daily bowl of fish porridge from coming up with the nausea. On the night before their arrival, Za Bou asked Bee Mui if she wouldn’t prefer marrying an opera star like himself instead of some strange pervert she had never met. Bee Mui stuck her tongue out at him, then blushed, surprised at their familiarity.

To all intents and purposes, the voyage was a success. In numerology, the eight days of safe passage suggested to Bee Mui that she could look forward to a happy and prosperous future in Singapore.

You have no idea that on the day you’re born in 1954, your mother was worried about the route to the hospital being blocked by Chinese middle-

school students protesting mandatory National Service. You have no idea that those protests would escalate into violent riots and break the legs of a neighbour’s son. You have no idea that those riots sealed your mother’s anticolonialism for good.

When you’re two years old, you don’t understand what your mother means when she says she doesn’t want you to grow up like her—though later it will become plain as day how precious it is for a girl to have an education beyond the recitation of the Romance of the West Chamber in Teochew couplets. You don’t see her shame as a divorcee trying to raise a child on her own.

At four, you’re still blissfully ignorant of your mother’s sorrow, thinking you’re her only child, as opposed to her only surviving child. You laugh when she says, nonsensically, that ‘the only good man she ever knew was a girl’. You sense her delight when she bumps into a young man handing out flyers at Ellenborough Market, a street performer who swings between joviality and seriousness. The man insists on being called Comrade Girl. What a funny name! But now it makes sense what your mother said. Comrade Girl visits once a

The biography of Low Bee Mui should be written in at least three languages but can only be rendered in one.

She was a Teochew from Guangdong province and grew up in the port city of Swatow. Bee Mui’s father was an uneducated fisherman, her mother an uneducated breeder of children. Bee Mui had four older brothers and two younger sisters, only one of whom she would see again after leaving China for good.

On June 19, 1939, two days before Japanese forces invaded Swatow, Bee Mui boarded a steamship with little more than the clothes on her back and a hastily procured letter proving she was the wife of a wealthy heûng kêh—an immigrant trader who’d made his fortune in British Singapore. The agreement between Bee Mui’s father and the trader, a first cousin, was that Bee Mui would be delivered to him when she turned fifteen. But the coming of the Japanese necessitated that the pact be sealed a year in advance.

Bee Mui’s voyage was less hectic than the many storied miseries of Chinese immigrants trapped in the steerage of insanitary junks—weeks or months yawing in an asphyxiating hell of faeces, vomit and menstrual blood. Instead, she spent just eight days in the cabin of a steamship with four other youths, who weren’t the rapists she feared they might be. One of them, a boy of sixteen, offered Bee Mui his gunny sack as a blanket and regaled his companions with high-pitched renditions of satirical folk rhymes. This boy, whose moniker was Za Bou—literally Girl—served to remind Bee Mui as to why the Teochews, despite their hard bodies calloused by labour, are historically known to be a tribe of effete vernacular poets.

Ng Za Bou’s songs were disrupted only by his snores. Bee Mui slept on the floor between the twin-tiered bunks of her fellow travellers and snacked on preserved plums

week—and then more frequently in time—to encourage your mother to sew costumes for his troupe and even perform in his shows. He is a kind, playful man and soon you are addressing him as Uncle Girl.

By the time you’re seven, you have seen your mother in more than twenty Teochew operas staged at the Carpenter Street Community Club. You don’t understand all the stories but are captivated by the musicality of the singers’ falsettos and the garish pink makeup that turns their faces into longevity buns. Your favourite show is the one in which a peasant woman rescues an abandoned baby and raises the infant better than his wealthy birth parents. Uncle Girl explains that the opera is an adaptation of a German play that is, in turn, based on a fourteenth-century Chinese drama called The Chalk Circle. It’s all too complicated. Your mother chuckles and says all you have to know is that the story is about ordinary folk, not generals and kings.

When you’re nine, you watch another performance of this opera, staged for a group of bus drivers. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but there is clearly a disconnect between the raucous applause of the audience and the mood of the performers after the curtain call. Running your hands over the palettes and brushes in the dressing room, you misunderstand the murmurs between your mother and Uncle Girl about British agents being present in the audience. As far as you could tell, everyone in the auditorium had been Chinese.

The third shittiest day of my life was the day Mum said she would not support me going to Berlin for the festival. The second shittiest day of my

life was a month later when, succumbing to Confucian propriety, I cancelled my flight. And the shittiest day—the absolute shittiest—was also the happiest. It was the

Elsie Herberstein

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day the biennale committee pronounced Red Rosaries the winner of Best Documentary.

I received the award in absentia at 4:15am on a sweltering February night in 2016. I squealed into a pillow as my producer and girlfriend gave the acceptance speech we’d co-written. Sal dedicated the win to the twenty-two alleged Marxists who had been detained in 1987 on trumped-up charges of infiltrating the Catholic Church of Singapore.

Oh, how I wished I was there, basking under the lights with Sal! How I wished we could raise a celebratory glass of glühwein in the cold Berlin air! I couldn’t sleep after that. I lay on my bed, indulging in fantasies of all the doors now open to me as a director, all the lucrative gigs that would come my way after years of slogging it out as an indie player. I was still buzzing three hours later when the rest of the family trickled into the breakfast room.

My older brother Yong saw my eyebags and threw his arms around me. He and his wife Pearl were the only ones able to offer unqualified congratulations before Mum wheeled Puo Puo in and parked her next to me. Dad shuffled in with his newspaper as our Filipino domestic, Carmen, laid out SPAM sandwiches and soft-boiled eggs on the table.

Mum started to feed Puo Puo. The ancient lady dribbled eggs as she fixed a half-sentient grin on Yong. Dad, pretending to scan the headlines, gave me an inquiring look over his reading glasses. I responded with an ambivalent shrug. He smiled and returned to his paper. Yong took out his phone and was about to digitally transmit the folks’ monthly stipend (what we called the ‘filial quantum’ of his substantial civil servant pay) when Dad muttered, almost inaudibly and without looking up, ‘Congratulations, Sue’.

That did it. Once the good news had dawned on Mum, she unleashed a torrent of woe and worry that had been building steadily since her dismay at my nomination. Unless you’re planning to migrate, what’s there to celebrate? Why must you choose this topic in the first place? The government is going to ban the film here! You better hope this doesn’t cost your brother his job!

Before Dad could rue his careless encouragement, before Yong could jump in to play catfight referee and peacemaker, I was on my feet giving Confucian propriety a good kick in the balls. Exhausted and buzzing with caffeine, I raged at Mum and called her a shitty mother and a terrorised bitch. All her weeks of simmering anxiety I now matched with my own pent-up frustration. The last thing I did before storming out of the house was hurl a sandwich across the table, which landed on Dad’s white singlet with an oily splat.

There is a saying that Teochews meet wherever water touches land. But Bee Mui did not meet her husband-uncle until two weeks after her

arrival. An unsmiling Cantonese amah in a grey samfu had picked her up from Collyer Quay, where Bee Mui first glimpsed the technological marvel of electric trams whirring under gas lamps. She had hoped to ride in a tram but was instead conveyed via rickshaw to a stylish art deco estate called Tiong Bahru. There she was introduced to the Hokkien couple who ran Choon Dry Goods Store and shown up a stone spiral staircase round the back of their shophouse. This led to a lantern-lit apartment that seemed palatial to Bee Mui, furnished as it was with dragon-etched panels and a cushioned rosewood bed.

The amah was a conscientious chaperone. She introduced Bee Mui to the neighbourhood and laid down strict instructions on how to keep house and serve Towkay Yeo Wee Boon as his third wife. The latter point came as a surprise to Bee Mui, as did the realisation that leafy Tiong Bahru, located on the Western lip of Chinatown, was where many towkays kept their mistresses. Bee Mui was too bewildered to be upset.

Her marriage to Towkay Yeo, a man nearly thrice her age, was marked with a tea ceremony largely devoid of ceremony. Dressed in a western suit, Yeo stopped Bee Mui from kneeling before him, but accepted the

porcelain teacup she proffered. He touched her cheek, announced that he had remitted money to her father, then took her on a drive in his Morris Minor. Radiant in a red cheongsam and jade earrings, Bee Mui looked out the window at the hordes toiling under the equatorial sun: coolies flailing hoes into muddy ditches, hawkers drenched in sweat blackened by charcoal fires.

The eighteen guests who attended Towkay Yeo’s wedding lunch at the Golden Orchid—the grandest restaurant in Ellenborough Market—were all men and nearly all members of the Singapore Piece Goods Traders Guild. The men complimented Bee Mui for her looks and congratulated Yeo on his good fortune. As the first course of oyster omelette was served, it dawned on Bee Mui that her wedding reception had been shoehorned into a regular meeting of the merchants who controlled the bulk of Singapore’s textile trade. She felt the awkwardness of being both the centre of attention and completely invisible.

For four months, Towkay Yeo spent most evenings at the Tiong Bahru shophouse and fucked Bee Mui regularly. When Bee Mui’s pregnancy was confirmed in the sixth month, Yeo’s visits dwindled and he appeared only on weekends to play mahjong with friends.

Bee Mui fought homesickness and isolation by learning how to use the abacus and helping out at the Choons’ shop. On her Friday trips to Ellenborough Market, she was friendly but decorous with the strapping, flirtatious Fishmonger Seah, whose discounted pomfret and prawns Bee Mui steamed to perfection for her husband and his guests.

Bee Mui was curious about her husband’s other wives, but he rarely mentioned them and she never learnt their full names. She met them only twice, at Lunar New Year reunion dinners held in the same restaurant where Towkay Yeo conducted all his business dealings. The 1940 dinner was marred by the scorn of First Wife, who did not even deign to speak to Bee Mui. The 1941 dinner was remembered for the empathy of Second Wife, who told Bee Mui she understood the terror of bleeding out a stillborn and the sorrow that lingered even as the body healed.

There was no reunion dinner in 1942. By then Bee Mui had experienced two more miscarriages. Her feelings of inadequacy and shame were deepened by a husband who had grown thoroughly remote—though not (only) for the reasons she assumed. On 15 February, the second day of the Lunar New Year, Bee Mui was seized from her home and screamed at in yet another foreign language.

You don’t remember the exact time they came for your mother and Uncle Girl, but it is pitch black when you are startled awake, bleary-eyed and

confused. Your heart beats to the pounding of boots as you stumble out of bed into the front room. To this day, when your son Yong watches American action movies on TV, the loud voices barking in English fill you with panic and you are transported back to the night of 2 February 1963.

You can still see Uncle Girl’s startled grimace as two policemen club him with their sticks and mash his face into the ground. You can still see your mother struggling in the armlock of two others, kicking and screaming for you to ‘CHUEH LENG LENG!, FIND YOUR AUNT LENG!’ You can still see yourself ducking through legs and toppling a shortwave radio as you leap out the window on to Yong Siak Street.

What happens after: you run to Ellenborough Market covered in a chill sweat and hide in a familiar stall. It feels like hours but is only minutes when Fishmonger Seah discovers you shivering under his concrete counter; and while you recall the look of alarm on his face and the odour of raw seafood, the rest of that fateful day is a blur.

The following week is equally murky, a rash of fevered naps taken in Fishmonger Seah’s flat while he tries to locate your father and his fourth wife. The moment Fishmonger Seah hands you over to Aunt Leng remains vivid: she steps out of the trishaw and tries to take you into her arms but you resist and end up peeing down your legs.

I moved to Sal’s apartment. I’d been planning to move out for a year anyway, and indignation released me. Why I’d dragged my feet for so long was—again—

due to some deep vein thrombosis of correctness drilled into me by Mum. She had grown up alone with Puo Puo and valued our respectability as an extended family. She was as attached as any Asian boomer to the belief that daughters should live with their parents until they’re ready to be married out.

Sal came back from Berlin, smothered me with kisses but didn’t waste her breath on sympathy. Having been with me for yonks, she knew there was nothing left to say about Mum. Once upon a time Sal might’ve reacted to this latest blowout by saying I was the terrorised bitch—my bravado in tackling tough issues at work belying an inability to come out at home. But by now she had accepted me and my mother better than I did. She endured my self-castigation. She understood that for Mum, making a movie about supposed commies was as good as being a commie yourself. Mum was a tortoise, but unexceptionally so: a generation sold on the government’s economic savvy and authoritarian politics shared her qualities of resilience and paranoia.

After dinner I scrolled through a series of texts from Yong. His sympathy and assurances that he would ‘take care of the folks’ filled me with a guilt I could only express as gastric farts. Sal distracted me with work. We got sucked into a powwow about sales agents and distribution deals and a whirlwind tour of other upcoming international festivals. Our plans were as intoxicating as the Moët & Chandon I mixed with charcoal pills.

A month later, I was a few seconds from orgasm on a drizzly Sunday morning when the doorbell rang and I fell off the bed. Sal wanted to finish but I wouldn’t let her, knowing who our visitor was. Sal opened the door and greeted Mum with a smile. I marveled at her ability to hold cool opinion and genuine affection in perfect equilibrium. For her part, Mum had always liked my ‘best friend’ and patted Sal affectionately on the shoulder.

As was the case in all our past battles, there was always a point of thaw when one of us—usually me—would finally soften and reach out to the other. I read Mum’s appearance at Sal’s door as an admission that this was her turn. I pulled on a black t-shirt emblazoned with the letters FCUK U and leaned against the wall of the hallway with folded arms. I entertained the fantasy of Mum throwing aside her umbrella, genuflecting at my feet and begging for forgiveness. What actually happened was her mortifying me with a single utterance: Sue Ann, your Puo Puo is gone.

Three years of rape and an excruciating abortion changed the way Bee Mui viewed her place in the world and sowed the first seeds of what she

would later call her true re-education. It did not happen instantly, but in time she would see that she had been owned by men, used by men, transferred like property by men. She would see that Singapore had been owned by Britain, used by Britain and transferred like property by Britain. She would say she and her adopted country had been slaves well before the Japanese Occupation.

Towkay Yeo was fortunate to escape the carnage of Sook Ching, though his two teenage sons with First Wife were not spared. He was forced to ‘donate’ his wealth in exchange for a stint of hard labour with First Wife, but she did not survive the ordeal. Second Wife, like Bee Mui, was placed in a comfort station but was dead within months from a hacking bout of diphtheria.

After the war, Bee Mui reunited with her devastated husband. The Choons had survived too and welcomed their old tenants back with tears and a reduced rent. Apart from a playground that was converted into an air raid shelter, Tiong Bahru remained surreally unchanged.

Yeo did not have the wherewithal to resurrect his textile business. But with the help of a Teochew dock worker, he managed to salvage a bumboat. He used it to move charcoal from Indonesian barges up the Singapore River to the Boat Quay distributors, also owned by Teochews. The spirit of kakinang—clan kinship—was key to his survival.

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He earned enough to make ends meet, but exaggerated his recovery in one letter to Bee Mui’s father. When Bee Mui said she wanted to earn some extra money as a seamstress, Yeo did not object. Bee Mui sang to herself as she sewed late into the night, alternating between folk rhymes and opera tunes.

Bee Mui’s voice grew stronger even as her husband’s nature grew cruder. He found a taste for liquor and started gambling on chap ji kee. Bee Mui did not object on the few occasions when Yeo initiated sex, but the relative closeness they had found after the war waned with the years. She became pregnant not long before he announced he was taking another wife, Leng Leng, who was Bee Mui’s youngest sister.

Bee Mui welcomed Leng Leng into their home, orientating her sister just as the Cantonese amah had done fourteen years earlier. Then, on the sixteenth day of the Lunar New Year of 1954, Bee Mui asked Yeo for a divorce. Ignoring his verbal tirade and her sister’s tears, Bee Mui vacated the Tiong Bahru shophouse and set up a small haberdashery in Pagoda Street with savings from her needlework. She was determined to raise the child growing inside her on her own terms.

For a year until his death, you live under the roof of a man who is legally your father and in reality a stranger. No photographs of him remain and

you cannot remember his face. His existence remains a tiny footnote in your recollection of the years during which the primal terror of losing your mother gradually morphs into resentment. Aunt Leng will never stop insisting that your mother had been used by Uncle Girl. And yet, young as you are, you know this is not the truth. She had been aware and willing.

When you are sixteen, you discover two newspaper clippings that Aunt Leng keeps in an old chest. She herself would not have been able to read them, but you can. The clippings are about Operation Coldstore, the massive sting that led to the arrest and detention

without trial of more than a hundred Communists and leftist sympathisers, including thirty-one politicians, forty trade unionists, eighteen educators and eleven artists. You realise the word artist means as little to you as the word leftist. You know only that you had been abandoned by your mother for a treacherous cause. You feel a pang of rage.

The following Lunar New Year of 1971, you pay your respects to Aunt Leng with deliberate emphasis: ‘Seng jia joo yi, Ma.’ You have been the centre of her universe since she became a widow and washerwoman at twenty-six. At once moved and distraught, Aunt Leng who is now Ma shakes you by the shoulders—angrily, you think. But then she pulls you into a desperate embrace.

You love and pity Ma. She is poor but resourceful. She makes decent meals with meagre ingredients and pours her wages into your education. She could not have predicted how your high school, like all Chinese medium schools, would grow obsolete in a new age of English instruction. She is proud when you secure a place at Nantah, ignorant of the university’s enrolment crisis and your own struggle amid a wider culture war. Like many of your engineering classmates, you speak Singlish with exaggerated self-mockery to disguise feelings of insecurity. An inner voice dredges up words once spoken by your birth mother: the neocolonialists are winning. The voice infuriates you.

You consider hiring a private tutor to improve your English, but end up taking Japanese night classes instead. When you justify your decision to Ma by citing the superiority of Japanese technology, she frowns but says nothing. You wince then, recalling Ma’s distaste for Japanese anything. Nonetheless, your linguistic gamble pays off. You ace your first job interview after graduation and are hired as a quality control technician at Aiwa. Aiwa! One of the best electronics firms (among many) which have sprung up across the new Jurong Industrial Estate. You know your sex will ultimately hinder your

advancement—but it is enough that you are a financially independent woman, able to support yourself and Ma.

In four years that burden will ease, when you accept the clumsy advances of a younger supervisor and, later, his proposal. That Andrew Lok is not kakinang dismays Ma, but you couldn’t care less. You know he is a decent, faithful man who will not treat you the way Ma’s boozing, gambling bum of a husband treated her.

Despite your closeness to Andrew, something prevents you from telling him about your birth mother until a year after marriage. When he asks for the reason behind your reticence, you respond with reticence. You say only that you want the past to remain in the past. In 1981, the year your second child Sue Ann is born, the state imposes a ban on dialects in the media. Andrew says he will miss his Cantonese TV comedies, but you experience a strange catharsis knowing one of the art forms that will surely perish is Teochew opera.

Mum returned two weeks after the funeral. I imagined she had timed her visit. I imagined she had checked that Sal’s car was not in the

driveway before making her approach. I imagined she had an agenda—to order me back home. If so, she did not mention it straight away. Instead, she waited to be invited in. I led Mum into the kitchen, making sure to be a few steps ahead so I could pull the smoochy polaroid of me and Sal off the fridge. I put on the kettle.

We sat and sipped our tea until I could bear the silence no longer. I rued the fact that Puo Puo’s death had inexplicably tilted our battle of wills—once again—in Mum’s favour. I apologised, only half-heartedly, for calling her a bitch. But I was sincere in admitting how guilty I felt that Puo Puo’s last memory of me was that of a SPAM-hurling harpy.

Ma’s jaw remained set, but her tone belied the forgiveness in her words. You know your Puo Puo remembers nothing of that day. This was true. After her stroke, Puo Puo rarely spoke, and when she did it was

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only to reminisce about her childhood in Swatow and an estranged sister I never met.

I told Mum I wished I’d known Puo Puo better and immediately cringed at the lameness of the sentiment. Ugh. Honesty reduced to a platitude. Mum looked down and sniffed, turning the teacup impatiently in her hands. I braced myself for the order to pack my things but it never came. Mum’s phone beeped. Just the funeral manager, sending me the final bill, she said, clearing her throat.

I shifted in my seat and started rambling about the wake. I recounted how Yong and I were constantly dishing out peanuts and packet drinks that nobody wanted. How Dad was inundated with complaints when the portaloo broke and leaked tributaries of piss on to the neighbours’ driveways. How by the time the company sent their greasy ah beng in shit-stained coveralls to repair the loo, the wake was practically over.

Mum set her teacup down with a loud clink. I thought it was her way of telling me to shut the hell up, but no. When she looked up her face was cracked with tears.

Low Bee Mui stepped out of Outram Prison just before the sun rose on 29 January 1968—a Tuesday and the eve of the Lunar New Year. She

was alone. She had not seen Girl since their arrest. She found herself wandering back to Ellenborough Market, where she bumped into Fishmonger Seah. No longer strapping and no longer flirtatious, Fishmonger Seah was painfully aware that his old customer now bore the taint of sedition. Nonetheless, he bid Bee Mui good morning and asked her how she was. Bee Mui leaned forward and opened her mouth. She could not describe the torture she had undergone, nor the moment she bit her tongue off to avoid incriminating herself and her lover. Fishmonger Seah gagged and recoiled in horror. Later that night, as crowds whooped and whistled to usher in the Year of the Monkey, a stray firecracker sparked a massive fire that razed Ellenborough Market to the ground, wrecking the livelihood of a thousand stallholders. Fishmonger Seah would always wonder if it had been Bee Mui who had started the blaze, out of despair for all she had suffered.

You don’t recognise the man wearing coveralls who shows up at the wake. You are startled when he introduces himself as the son of Low Bee Mui.

You don’t know how to react in the moment. Your head reels at the mention of oo nang eh lao bu: our mother. The man says he has been trying to contact you for years and it was by sheer luck that he had glanced at the obituaries and saw Aunt Leng’s picture and name. He has so much to tell you, he says. Our mother married my father after his release. They contacted Aunt Leng but she would not allow them to see you. You hold up a hand, recover your composure and reply coldly that this is not the time. He nods, chastened, and hands you a small white envelope before departing in a blue pick-up truck. In the envelope is some condolence money, a business card for Ng Motor Repair and a small cassette tape you won’t have the strength to play until well after the cremation.

Mother Tongue was released in 2019. Interviews with Mum and her half-brother, as well as the audio recordings of Ng Za Bou aka Comrade

Girl, form the spine of the documentary, which shows how the latter’s song-and-dance troupe evolved from staging classic operas to performing Communist agitprop. The film honours the washerwoman who wasn’t my grandmother and the dissident who was. Like Red Rosaries, Mother Tongue was a success overseas but banned at home for ‘undermining national security’. One week we were collecting a Silver Lion in Venice, the next we found ourselves sitting before a panel of stony bureaucrats from the local Board of Film Censors. In the end, neither the accolades nor the criticism mattered much. What mattered was Mum’s remarkable decision to sit before the camera. What mattered was the moment after one private screening, when she turned to Sal and me and said, Why don’t you get married? ☐

Ken Kwek is a filmmaker, playwright and author

P O E M S

Winter wanderingsA shower of the wondrous, thunderous rain,Then a winter breeze Christened as my old love,That I left shattered somewhere stillAs a festering dilapidation,As fallen petals of amaryllis.

Here, I Sit near my window and look through everything misty and drowsyAs denuded lust hovers through the corners of dark, And refracts through my vision,

Huddled in the unmistakable chalky greenOf the Banyan tree drowned in clouds.Birdies chirp, swinging leaves,As the garish light falls through the barricade of sky,

A curtain trapping light, I feel in the wind, tasting of peat and Ash— A churn of wilderness simmering through the thickets of life As the morning tunes of crickets, sear through

As hymns in the incantation of the wintry hours, Whilst morn wistfully flowers.

Gestalt of memoriesIt never deceives the cognition of yearning, churning in the Sulphur empires of the soul, grizzled in the grassy lawn of memories, green, tarred, charcoaled.It happens on days like thesewhen the air is the aftertaste of rain,the sky—chunks of sandalwood, andthe heart a museum of unavoidable pain evoking in a synergy of clustered emotions,Raw, raw like the sudden sputter of blistering rain, memories scatter in the unknown angular slants of light,Broken into uncountable pieces—beloyari, glass like yet joining, joining to fill in the dried ocean within,To come together as wholesome integrity, charting the iridescent vulnerabilities of the heart, to fill The parched topology with the softening touch of warmth, the endless, resfeber, the converging path of the body, mind, heart, Journeying, journeying.

During the warThere’s always a warring within—the innards sealed and gritty With the shards of the uncertainty brimming, And scaffolding the land in its bouts ofThickening dark blight.

There are soldiers outside fallenLike trampled petals of flowers, bloodied, dirtied, misshaped,And there is the horizon—the shoreline of the cratered face of sky Singing a litany into a future that holds nothing but an emptiness,An elegy of unforgiving loss.

We sit by the flat television screens,Apprehensive, apprehensive—Nothing’s enough—no protests, no voices, no bloody battling,

It only asks us to take in the panorama of seeing everything grow and dieIn the abrupt emergence of a strife—The hearts still shattered as glasshouses,Eyes misted with a hollow light,

We slip aside in the obscure corners beside bedsides And demand aubade of peace.

S Rupsha Mitra

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Call me AntSunisa Manning

T R I B U T E

Anthony Veasna So was a new friend who felt almost immediately like an old one. We called ourselves diasporic neighbours—him from a

Khmer American family, me from a Thai American one. We talked about visiting Southeast Asia together. I’d show him Bangkok, glitzy and delicious, where his exuberance would fit right in. Then we’d go to Cambodia and ‘visit some family’ before finding another spot in the region where neither of us had been. I have a husband and son, but, somehow, I was sure the trip would happen.

We met in January 2020 at the Tin House Writers Workshop, in a blustery coastal town in Oregon. I had a bad cold that we later learned was pneumonia. Anthony sat next to me, even though I was a snotty mess. He handed me tissues as we talked with other friends about Asian writers entering the US market, and Sianne Ngai’s work. I didn’t know he was going to be one of the last people outside my family to hug me; soon after we returned to the Bay Area, California declared a lockdown.

At Tin House, Anthony spoke all the time of Alex Torres, his partner, who was home in San Francisco eating potato chips, he said, because Alex couldn’t cook. Anthony made him breakfast every day of their relationship, which began when they were undergraduates at Stanford. There was a moment when Anthony turned to me and said with this solemn face: ‘You can call me Ant. Ant and Al. That’s us.’ I knew I had been invited into the circle. I have a small circle too.

During this year’s fire season in California, which was long and brutal, Ant would text: ‘My sister says the smoke’s really bad. Is it bad near you?’ We are—were—both asthmatic. It was hot enough that I took to wearing nightgowns all day. He and Alex were ‘wearing swim trunks like they do in Cartagena in the heat ha ha ha’.

I drove into San Francisco to hang out with him. Standing at the door to his apartment as he put his shoes on, I told Ant to roll wet towels and stuff them in the cracks where the windows had settled, where I could see the sky. ‘The smoke can get in here,’ I said. ‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I vacuum three times a week.’ That moment haunts me. I should have insisted.

We walked to Mission Dolores Park. Anthony was reading Nietzsche for a class he was taking to keep his brain in motion. I was reading Simone de Beauvoir. We kept trying to convince each other to read our respective books, but neither of us would budge. He had precise, sharp taste. We could really get into it. You didn’t offer your work to Anthony to critique unless you wanted him to dismantle it, but that was the gift—that he read your work like it was deserving, that he gave comments presuming publication. Ant taught me to use LOL. He said, ‘You aren’t too old!’ Being around him made me laugh, and shake out of some of the tight anxiety of being a minority in America.

Anthony was from Stockton, and loved being from the same place as Maxine Hong Kingston. I envied him such lineage. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m lucky.’ While Anthony acknowledged the hardship of being from an immigrant family, in my experience he dwelled more often on its gifts. He was going to make it big. He was going to play his cards right, which is how he said it, and probably go to LA, where you can actually make a living as a writer. Or teach high-school English—all the fun and none of the academic toxicity. Anthony was more than representation, but he knew how hard it is to get attention as a Southeast Asian writer. He was going to change the story of Cambo Americans, as he

called his community. Skirt the trauma narrative of arriving in America as a refugee from the Khmer Rouge and celebrate, instead, the verve and hustle of a resilient community.

I grew to love the way he loved his family. I wanted to meet Alex, but Ant declined for him, protecting his partner’s introversion. I watched them flirt on Twitter instead. Ant sent me pictures of his nephew. I sent him pictures of my son. He told me about his big sister defending him on the playground, how she shielded him from taunts about what Anthony would come to understand was his queer identity. I heard about his mother. ‘I was raised by strong women.’ He talked of and worried about his cousins and siblings all the time. I recognised the overprotective immigrant tone, the one that wants to gather your people in your arms and carry them.

When my novel debuted, he collaged a photo of me from 1970s-era Thai stamps, the same timeframe as my book. We joked that book launches are more meaningful than weddings. He said: ‘Honestly tho. It takes more work. And devotion. To write a book.’ He was a slow reader, and made sure to write me this text in the avalanche of our banter: ‘Also I got your book and the writing is so good. You are not frivolous.’ The lines made me cry. We are never going to get to talk about what he thought of my novel, and that kills me. He is never going to see his beautiful books debut and that kills me.

I knew, when I decided to write this piece, that I should read through his published stories so I could talk about his work as much as our friendship. But I couldn’t do it. Not yet. To do so would be to admire the way his talent for irreverence was undergirded by a love of our human foibles. We are bereft of that now.

When his story collection Afterparties debuts, or on the 100-day anniversary of his passing, or on his birthday, I will sit with Anthony’s work and let his voice come alive again. But right now I couldn’t stand it: such vibrancy might deceive me into thinking that this has been a grotesque misunderstanding. Whenever it is that we are able to emerge from isolation, I will find it hard not to go to his building, not to haunt Mission Dolores, not to scroll through his social feeds, unbelieving once again.

Anthony’s most famous short story was published by the New Yorker. It’s called ‘Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts’. I learned that donut shops are to the Khmer community what nail salons are to the Vietnamese one, namely, the engine of their foothold in America. To steel myself to write this piece, I went to my favorite donut shop run, yes, by Khmer women. A stack of donuts—plain glaze, old-fashioned, chocolate glaze—accompanied me as I wrote these words. Such a sentimental gesture would probably have made Anthony laugh, but he would understand it too. Do what you have to do, he’d say.

With his loss, the title of his short story collection, Afterparties, has taken on a grim double entendre. It would be like Ant to throw his own afterparty, wherever we go when we leave this realm. He feels near. I have almost texted him. I have the feeling he’s watching our grief. I can imagine him giving his droll sideways grin, saying: LOL, I thought you’d send bigger flowers. It would be very like Anthony to post selfies from the other side. It’s not so bad, he’d say. Your skin’s amazing here. ☐

Sunisa Manning is the author of A Good True Thai

Charis Loke

Throughout her sixteen years of life, her parents’ ability to intuit all aspects of being Khmer, or emphatically not being Khmer, has always amazed and frustrated Tevy. She’d do something as simple as drink a glass of ice water, and her father, from across the room, would bellow, ‘ There were no ice cubes in the genocide! ‘ Then he’d lament, ‘How did my kids become so not Khmer?,’ before bursting into rueful laughter. Other times, she’d eat a piece of dried fish or scratch her scalp or walk with a certain gait, and her father would smile and say, ‘Now I know you are Khmer.’

What does it mean to be Khmer, anyway? How does one know what is and is not Khmer? Have most Khmer people always known, deep down, that they’re Khmer? Are there feelings Khmer people experience that others don’t?

Variations of these questions used to flash through Tevy’s mind whenever her father visited them at Chuck’s Donuts, back before the divorce. Carrying a container of papaya salad, he’d step into the middle of the room, and, ignoring any customers, he’d sniff his papaya salad and shout, ‘Nothing makes me feel more Khmer than the smell of fish sauce and fried dough!

Anthony Veasna So, ‘ Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts’

29

Political terrorTyrell Haberkorn

F I C T I O N

The years 1973 and 1976 are the bookends of progressive political possibility in Thailand. On 14 October 1973, hundreds of thousands

of students and citizens took to the streets to push out a ruling triumvirate of dictators and clear the way for democracy. After fifteen years of military dictatorship, the people wasted no time and worked to create equality in relationships between bosses and workers, landlords and tenant farmers, urban and rural dwellers, professors and students, and most significantly, the rulers and the ruled. Inspired by the rising left throughout the region and the world, dissidents revived the writing of Thai socialists banned during the dictatorship and translated Lenin, Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon and many others into Thai.

Alongside the open struggle and transformation in the cities, the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), active since the 1920s, organised in the mountainous margins of the country. But by 1975, with transitions to communism in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, the ruling monarchy-military-capital elite began to fear that loss of power and prestige would land on their doorstep and a right-wing backlash began. They made no distinction between those struggling aboveground in the cities, those in the CPT, and the many who moved between both worlds. All were cast as un-Thai enemies of the monarchy, nation and religion, the murder of whom, to quote a virulent monk, Phra Kitthivudho, would not be demeritorious.

The backlash culminated in a massacre of students at Thammasat University in Bangkok on the morning of 6 October 1976 and a military coup late that afternoon that returned the country to dictatorship. Over forty-four years later, the massacre remains unresolved, the perpetrators are still unpunished and the coups have continued, with four more since then.

Sunisa Manning unravels the hope, imagination and terror of this three-year period of possibility in her luminous and challenging novel, A Good True Thai. Centred on the lives of three university students—Det, Chang and Lek—this is a novel of struggle, friendship, obligation and the forms of love that bind and liberate them. Det, the son of a granddaughter of King Chulalongkorn, or Rama V, the fifth king of the Chakri dynasty, is a commoner who worked his way up to be minister of education. He is at once constrained and emboldened by his place high in the ever present hierarchy of the country. Chang, the son of a savvy single-mother factory worker who sews leather purses for the wealthy, is class analysis embodied. Lek, the most clarion voice in the novel, is the oldest daughter in a Sino-Thai immigrant family. She knows and senses more about hierarchy and class than Det and Chang, the two men whose lives she brings together and pushes apart, perhaps because her gender and ethnicity make acuity essential for survival in patriarchal, xenophobic Thailand.

When the protests begin in October 1973, both Chang and Lek go into the streets, while Det, who has started to date Lek, stays back. At home in his palatial house on the night of 13 October, Det is drawn into the streets by the sound of gunfire. Accompanied by P’Preechai, the driver who would be his closest friend if not separated by the chasm between the high and low born, Det searches the streets and hospitals for Chang and Lek. When he cannot find them, Manning drops one of the brilliant insights on loss in a time of struggle that recur throughout the book: ‘… Det holds onto the

anger of that October and the shame that he wasn’t there, that he hadn’t joined, that he was left scrambling like the weak, to find those with the courage to act, who are gone.’

Chang and Lek survive and appear as heroes at Det’s door the next afternoon, when democracy has blossomed after the king takes the side of the protesters and the three dictators have gone into exile. From this moment forward, the lives and fates of Det, Chang and Lek are inseparable. They organise workers and attend student meetings together, the verve of the change they are fomenting palpable in Manning’s fluid prose. But Lek’s daring persistence in the service of change soon leads the three to a point of danger and decision.

Lek’s commitment to rebellion is signalled early in the novel, when she sends a nun’s habit flying across the room while discussing Madame Bovary in secondary school. But while knocking off the nun’s habit earns her a reward—expulsion from a cloistered Catholic girls’ school and a place in the elite public school, Triam Udom, where many student activists then and now

study—revolt in university nearly costs her everything. She dreams of being a writer and translator like the most famous among the dissident writers punished and silenced in the 1950s, Jit Phumisak.

Like Det, Chang and Lek, Jit was a student in the Faculty of Letters at Chulalongkorn University. In 1953, he proposed a daring change for the student yearbook, displacing the traditional picture of King Chulalongkorn on the cover and content glorifying him with critical perspectives. Jit was hauled before 3,000 students to explain himself, but thrown to the ground and beaten before he had a chance to do so, and then suspended from the university for twelve months.

In 1975, Lek plans to print Jit’s never-printed yearbook as well as poems of Jit’s that she and other students find buried in a professor’s garden. In real life, Jit was allowed to finish his degree in 1957, but was arrested and imprisoned on the accusation of being a communist in relation to a tract he published, The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today, which traced the lasting power of feudal ideas even beyond the end of absolute monarchy in 1932. After being released from prison after seven years, Jit fled to the jungle and joined the CPT. He was assassinated by state forces in May 1966. His writing and life have inspired each successive wave of student activism, and in October 2020 Chulalongkorn University students formally apologised to Jit for his persecution by their seniors.

When Lek’s plan to print Jit’s yearbook becomes known to the university administration in A Good True Thai, the consequences are even graver than those faced by Jit. She is accused of lèse majesté, or insulting the king, punishable by years in prison and social sanctions that would affect her entire family. Det, despite feeling as though her actions are a personal attack on him, since King Chulalongkorn was his grandfather, implores his father to intervene. Lek escapes unscathed, but the incident pushes the three friends to flee to the jungle and join the CPT. Like the real-life students who actually fled, what they find is not the paradise beyond hierarchy that they imagined. As Det, Chang and Lek try to figure out who they are individually, to one another, within the society they have left and the new one they are working to build, the costs of political transformation become blindingly personal. As the novel concludes with the 6 October 1976 massacre and the end of possibility, Manning elegantly unveils how right-wing forces exacted these costs upon the whole society.

A Good True Thai was published in September last year, just as secondary and university students were emerging as leaders of the most

radical mass movement to emerge in Thailand since the October 1976 massacre. As 2020 moved into 2021, the future of the movement remained undecided. King Vajiralongkorn has yet to respond to, or even acknowledge, the demands calling for reform of the monarchy.

Although rising Covid-19 cases may keep protesters out of the streets for a few months, the protests have raised a series of questions about the relationships between the monarchy, state and people that are unlikely to go away on their own. Those with power will have to respond, hopefully with dialogue rather than the repression that they have so often chosen. ☐

Tyrell Haberkorn is author of Revolution Interrupted

SUNISA MANNINGA Good True Thai

Epigram Books: 2020

30

Jakarta storiesJennifer Lindsay

I N D O N E S I A

Comma Press is a small publishing house based in the British city of Manchester that champions contemporary short-form writing in

translation by emerging and established writers. It had the wonderful idea of publishing a series of short-story volumes called Reading the City, juxtaposing cities, languages and their writers and translators. There have been twenty-one publications in this series, including this latest Jakarta volume.

The Book of Jakarta is made up of ten short stories by Indonesian authors—Sabda Armandio Alif, Hanna Fransisca, Cyntha Hariadi, Afrizal Malna, Dewi Kharisma Michellia, Ratri Ninditya, Yusi Avianto Pareanom, utiuts, Ben Sohib and Ziggy Zesyazeoviennazabrizkie—some of whom are established writers and some relative newcomers.

The collection is edited by Maesy Ang and Teddy W. Kusuma, the co-founders of POST, an independent alternative bookshop and publisher located at a traditional market in South Jakarta. POST also has a policy of championing new writers, hosting events and workshops and supporting small regional publishers in Indonesia. It is a good match with Comma, and it is excellent to see this collaboration that brings Indonesian writing into a new network of international readers.

The stories in the volume cover life in Jakarta from the early 1970s to the present, and two are set in a dystopian near future in a failed, semi-submerged city with decrepit fun parks. The time period covers the Suharto era (1966-98) of authoritarianism and rampant development, the 1998 riots and fall of Soeharto, and the following Reformasi era with its failures.

Jakarta is a chaotic, polluted metropolis of about 12 million (depending on how and when you count), the nation’s political capital and a site of hope and despair for its inhabitants, many of whom are migrants from the regions seeking work. Jakarta is a rich backdrop and integral part of people’s lives in the cracks between authority, corruption and development, trying to get lucky. Politics is never far away. Indeed, the first Indonesian novel published in English, Mochtar Lubis’s Twilight in Jakarta (translated by Claire Holt and published in 1963) vividly depicted Jakarta against the bitter 1950s politics of the Sukarno period (1945-66).

The ten stories in The Book of Jakarta are well selected. They offer a strong sense of place, complementing each other. Amid the rain, flooded streets, mud, heat, pollution, crowded neighbourhoods, cramped rooms, dead ends, traffic jams and constant noise are small patches where people rendezvous, escape and cross paths. Public transport, taxis and motorbikes provide places for people to interact and observe as do small street stalls and food venues. Food is a crucial aspect of Jakarta life at all levels—talking about it, plotting to find it, and savouring it with friends or lovers.

Many stories describe a sense of momentary freedom from the oppressive realities of Jakarta life: a bride-to- be out on a night motorbike ride with a former lover (Ratri Ninditya); a homeless pair who hang about the theatre and philosophise (Afrizal Malna); a man riding a free tourist bus and being taken for a Japanese tourist (Yusi Avianto Pareanom); senior citizens planning a group suicide outing at an old amusement park

(Ziggy Zesyazeoviennazabrizkie). Others focus more on being stuck: in a driverless car with the app not working as it heads straight for a submerged part of Jakarta (utiuts); trying to negotiate rules at the immigration office (Hanna Fransisca); becoming resigned to a mother’s life as a prostitute (Dewi Kharisma Michellia); a Muslim cleric being snubbed by two former students now radicalised (Ben Sohib); a girl of Chinese descent discarded as her new friend suddenly emigrates after the anti-Chinese riots in 1998 (Cynthia Hariadi); buskers getting caught up in the 2019 protests (Sabda Armandio).

The writing in this collection is varied, some showing more mastery of the short form than others. This is to be expected from a publisher (Comma) and editors (POST) whose policy is to provide a platform for aspiring writers beside those more established. Some stories are absolute gems; Ratri Ninditya is masterful at using the city as metaphor for inner feelings of her bride-to-be; Hanna Fransisca’s immigration office story encapsulates the crazy negotiation of ludicrous bureaucracy in Jakarta life. Yusi Avianto Pareanom’s story of a day in the life of a young man going around Jakarta doing errands is a standout, capturing the wild conversations one can have in brief encounters in this chaotic city.

The translators—Mikael Johani, Khairani Barokka, Rara Rizal, Zoē McLaughlin, Shaffira Gayatri, Annie Tucker, Paul Agusta, Eliza Vitri Handayani, Syarafina Vidyadhana, Daniel Owen—are featured equally with the authors and have done a great job. As a translator myself, I appreciated their attention to idiosyncracies of language. The voices are alive with personality. The translation feels colloquial but retains a sense of the original. With minimal use of footnotes, and retaining Indonesian names, especially food, the translation also keeps a strong sense of place. ☐

Jennifer Lindsay is a writer and translator. Her translations include four anthologies of essays by Goenawan Mohamad, Leila S Chudori’s novel Nadira, Hersri Setiawan’s Buru Island: A Prison Memoir, Linus Suryadi’s Pariyem’s Confession

MAESY ANG AND TEDDY W. KUSUMA (EDS)The Book of Jakarta

Comma: 2020

Maesy Ang and Teddy Kusuma

31

Divided selvesMichael Freeman

P O E T R Y

The Soviet formalist Vladimir Propp’s morphology of Russian folk tales claimed they were based on a determinate set of core narratives. Something

similar is discernible in the poetry of the Asian diaspora, which has taken on the status of a subgenre with its own preoccupations and story lines.

This literature has become extensive and varied enough to have its own 600-page anthology, To Gather Your Leaving, featuring poetry of the Asian diaspora in the United States, Australia and Europe. The core of the subgenre is an ensemble of binary elements, one facet in an uneasy tension with the other. The culture of the homeland left behind is at odds with the culture of the new-found land. Homeland history and international conflict intersect. The poet’s early life is remembered, memorialised even, as a contrast with her new social situation and lifestyle, a subsequent sense of a clash of values, traditional community contrasting with the fabric of the society where the poet has ‘ended up’ and the tightrope between nostalgia and tough-mindedness, identity politics in the politics of cultures.

There’s a corresponding duality, occasionally turned into a dialogue, between national traditional styles of literature and modernist, post-modern aesthetics—an international and intertextual tracking. It’s not merely a stylistic matter of one literary text surfacing later in another at a micro level, but rather an interface of whole cultural traditions at the macro level: the poet writing in her ‘new’ idiom in formal interplay with her ‘old’ idiom. It’s more than a deployment of styles. Insofar as Nina Mingya Powles and Leung Rachel Ka Yin reflect and refract this interface, they rotate it, inspect its core from their own shifting angles. The poet construes and translates her divided self between one cultural formation and the other, departure and arrival.

So the cultural configuration left behind by the exile, migrant, refugee is something that refuses to be left behind: its characters, ideograms, syntactic and epigrammatic forms are enacted as a parallel, even a counterpoint, to the arrived-at culture, with—in the case of these two collections—the Chinese characters interposed as logograms, iconic notation. The very title chengyu chinoiserie highlights this facet: on the one hand there’s an assertion of the traditional Chinese chengyu—saying, adage, pragmatic nudge, idiomatic yet value-laden—and on the other hand chinoiserie, connoting a degree of superficial homage, a stylistic fashion.

The poets are readily assimilated to the subgenre geographically, one from Hong Kong to Oxford, the other of Malaysian-Chinese heritage who lived in New Zealand and now lives in London, and cross-cultural iconography is central to both. Magnolia, 木蘭 is Powles’ first substantial collection, and Leung’s chengyu chinoiserie is a focused pamphlet. Both with Chinese roots and both have now published in England.

Leung’s poem ‘paper drunk’ is a love lyric—like the majority of these poems—but comes with a collage of hit-and-run references, a footnote to Arabic melodic traditions and modern Swedish music, an oblique allusion

to Scott Fitzgerald, a self-referential nod to Veblen and the poem’s sardonic subtitle ‘the new americana’, with ‘ain’t it a kitschy world, love’. The titles are of a pattern: keynote image, italicised subtitle, a chengyu parallel or aphorism flagged up in Chinese characters. This poem’s ‘feeling cavity opens for the first time’ moves from erotic imagery, a quotation from James Joyce, and a ‘salt-sweet homunculus’ then on to God and snippets from the Catholic rosary, with the Virgin entering the scene after ‘some taxidermy of her tongue on / the young girl’s vestal navel’ and being blessed among women comes ‘(through pores and cracks her / heady sea-foam maiden.)’.

The poem ‘drunk on life’ with its ‘paper slit, gaping giddy / Bolshevik daddy. /it’s the devil’s rouge / the camera’s one glassy eye / … it sees you / lover boy ... my sharpest jealousy’ has maybe an echo of Sylvia Plath, but Eden and Elysium are being sought and glimpsed alongside the worlds of jellyfish and tadpoles. Seas, rivers, pools, rain—there’s a strong current of liquid imagery running throughout this restless but cohesive pamphlet, where a good deal of the cohesion comes from off-setting the subjectively lyrical against—or with—the objectivity of the formal chengyu.

Powles’ poem ‘Conversational Chinese’ begins with a parenthetic rubric ‘(Please fill in the blanks by choosing the correct word from the list below)’ then plays with page space and foregrounds the gaps, elisions, options in a prose narrative of a Chinese girl escaping to the Malaysian peninsula where she marries, learns English, educates her children in a Chinese Catholic school and longs to send them across the sea ‘where she would one day visit them’. It ends with an interrogation in Chinese characters, providing the answers with the narremes and imagery recurrent in many accounts of diaspora journeys. Even the titles of the poems in this major section of the book spell out and track the motifs and memories redolent throughout the subgenre: ‘mother tongue’, ‘origin myths’, ‘portraits of home’, ‘some titles for my childhood memoir’, ‘dialectal’, ‘dreaming in a language I can’t speak’.

In the prose poem about Maggie Cheung’s blue cheongsam, the fabric’s pattern triggers a recall of the tablecloths in roadside cafés in Malaysia and Singapore, but it then recalls a lantern bought in San Francisco’s Chinatown. As though to underline the cross-cultural intertextuality, there’s a concluding set of notes spelling out the precise borrowings. And the references aren’t only literary: Zhang Yimou and Hayao Miyazaki movies are invoked, Mulan the warrior princess is resuscitated from legend in two contrasting movies, one by Walt Disney, then by Jingle Ma.

In both of these collections, language itself is theme and trope. In one of Powles’ poems, ‘This dialect has no written form / only hands feeling for a sound … I could search for characters resembling this / I could transcribe this …’ It’s not just such a dialect within such a language. You could say these poems are about the dialectics of diaspora. Perhaps the poets would object that I have homogenised their distinctive voices to labour a general gloss on the subgenre. Well, that’s true of chengyu. But even Powles’ title poem ‘Magnolia, jade orchid, she wolf ’ soon shifts from reflections on the flowering tree to multi-layered, bilingual recollections of learning Chinese, ruminations on cultural relativities: ‘In the country where I was born, the trees are a different language. A language I am trying to learn.’ ☐

NINA MINGYA POWLESMagnolia, 木蘭

Nine Arches Press: 2020

LEUNG RACHEL KA YINchengyu chinoiserie

The Hedgehog Poetry Press: 2020

Michael Freeman is Mekong Review’s poetry reviewer

Tiếng đập cánh từ đâuCơn mưa đột ngột bay tới thành phố trong đêm mang theo đầy côn trùng, có lẽ đây là cuộc di tản lớn nhất của chúng từ lúc chuyển sang mùa đông mới. Ban đầu, tôi nghe tiếng đập cánh ồn ào, rì rầm như trăm ngàn tiếng ong, cả thân thể tôi lên cơn sốt vì chờ đợi một cuộc hoán đổi không gian sống kỳ quái và ngoạn mục sắp tới. Nhưng rồi dường như tiếng đập cánh nhỏ dần, nhỏ dần và cuối cùng tôi, dù cố gắng căng tai lên cũng chẳng còn nghe được âm thanh nào, nhìn qua cửa kính, tôi chỉ còn thấy một màn mưa mù mịt và lặng phắc. ‘Sẽ chẳng bao giờ có một sự đổi thay nào thực sự xảy ra cả, bọn chúng có lẽ đã chết hàng loạt trước khi đẩy bật được con người ra khỏi cái thành phố u ám này,’ tôi nghĩ. Tiếng cha tôi thì thầm bên tai: ‘Những linh hồn tội nghiệp. Họ đã đập cánh không ngừng nghỉ. Họ thất bại vì va phải những tấm kính dày chắc chắn bảo bọc quanh những ngôi nhà.’ Tôi hốt hoảng: ‘Vậy còn cha? Cha đang nói từ đâu thế?’ Tôi gắng gào lên thật lực, và tôi đau khổ nhận ra bao nhiêu năm qua, từ khi cha tôi qua đời, tôi triền miên sống trong căn nhà mà tôi đã cố công bọc quanh bằng những tấm kính rất dày. Tôi nhìn ra ngoài màn mưa mù mịt và lặng phắc bay, đường phố và những mái nhà đang dâng lên đầy xác côn trùng.

Nhã Thuyên

Where are the wings beating from

A rain claps down on to the city one night carrying with it a swarm of insects, perhaps their biggest migration since the winter’s change of season. At first, I hear the noise of flapping wings, abuzz like a hundred thousand bees, my whole body fever rises in anticipation of the complete conversion of living space that’s about to happen, spectacular strange. But then the flapping wings seem to fade, fade and in the end I, though straining my ear, could hear no sound at all, gazing out the window glass, could only see a curtain of rain dark and death-silent. ‘There will never occur any true change at all, maybe they all died before they could push people out of this dismal city,’ I think. My father’s voice whispers in my ear: ‘Pitiful souls. Flapping their wings without rest. Banging their defeat against the thick sure glass wrapping these houses.’ Panicking I ask: ‘What? Father? Where are you?’ I summon a howl with every ounce of power, I realise how many years it’s been, since my father passed, miserable, I’m living interminably in the house where I strive to be wrapped in the thickest glass. I gaze out beyond the curtain of rain dark and death-silent drifting, the streets and rooftops surging with corpses of insects.

Translation by Kaitlin Rees

P O E M

32

Language is powerViolet Cho

T R A N S L A T I O N

In Myanmar, as elsewhere, the parasite of colonialism is still eating into our consciousness. The harm it wreaks has not been adequately diagnosed. When it

devours those in positions of power, such as bureaucrats responsible for education, welfare and governance, the harm is amplified.

The colonisation of Myanmar ended with so-called independence in 1948, but the ideology and practices of the colonial apparatus have yet to be dismantled. Colonialism still lingers in the society in many forms.

The production of knowledge in Myanmar continues to be racialised, following colonial ways of categorising people, based on a hierarchy that now benefits Bamar Buddhists, in place of white British Christians. In this process, indigenous people in Myanmar are forced to deal with the continued negation of self. Indigenous forms of knowledge, language and cultural practices are relegated to superficial performances, as seen in the ‘union dance’, the pretend houses of National Races Village and caricatures on maps and postage stamps, which reinforce colonial hierarchies of race. In school, official forms of knowledge are in Burmese and English, while the top-down implementation of ‘ethnic language and literature education’ punishes indigenous children with extra hours out of school to learn their language, influenced by the Burmanised curricula. Burmese is the medium of instruction for history, science, mathematics and other subjects. Ethnic minority languages are taught by the state only to ethnic minority children, a superficial act of reform while Burmanisation persists. University students can major in Italian, German or Korean but not Shan, Ta’ang or Rakhine.

Like a parasite, colonial forms of knowledge can be difficult to identify; they spread across generations and are often taken for granted. Western forms of knowledge are structured as superior to non-Western ones. In universities—a domain where colonial forms of knowledge is regenerated—indigenous knowledge is mostly invisible.

Much that is officially known about Myanmar was classified as ‘knowledge’ because it was written down by white European men, in English. This remains the basis for education in Myanmar. In this system local knowledge is devalued. Where are Pwa k’nyaw (Karen), Zomi or Mon political theorists, historians, scientists and philosophers? Do they not count as producers of knowledge in their own right?

Bamar language and local wisdom are also negated by colonial structures of knowledge, which remain today. Indigenous people are at a double disadvantage, forced to navigate the system where Burmanisation has replaced colonisation. In Myanmar, education is still based on a universalising pedagogy rooted in Britain. Agriculture, development, economics, law, governance and other fields of knowledge are imported to Myanmar from the West. Local pedagogies from Mutraw, Monywa or Putao and other Indigenous forms of knowledge are unrecognised and unvalued.

It does not need to be like this. The authorities need to re-examine all aspects of society in relation to recent history of colonialism. It is time to place value on local knowledge and worldviews, and the languages that carry them. Losing local forms of knowledge means losing touch with who we are and where we came from.

We live in an interconnected world and should embrace multiculturalism. But respecting and learning different cultures should not come at the expense of local languages and local forms of knowledge. We can

learn from one another by translating and engaging with new ideas through local languages and contexts. We need to move away from colonial thinking that places cultures in a hierarchy, where some languages and literatures are valued over others.

‘Pwa k’nyaw’, the article translated above, offers a path forward in critiquing colonial hierarchies of language and knowledge. It was published in 1891 in Dawkalu, a weekly newspaper in Pwa k’nyaw language. Dawkalu means ‘whole nation’, part of a unity project and one of the earliest modern forms of indigenous-language media in Burma. No author is named—perhaps it was written by a group of people. The article is focused on Pwa K’nyaw language, but the writers see language as central to human knowledge.

Written at a midpoint in the colonisation of lower Burma, the article represents a form of resistance against colonial ideology. The writers have developed a radical view that places Pwa k’nyaw language and knowledge at the centre for the Pwa k’nyaw people. The Dawkalu view is that the best language and system of knowledge is from one’s own culture, and local forms of knowledge grow as new ideas are translated through indigenous languages. The Dawkalu article provides tentative ideas for liberation from colonial Burmanisation. We need to build on these ideas today and to challenge the unequal relations in knowledge production and education. ☐

Pwa k’nyaw language. Learning mathematics, in either English or Burmese, must be explained and understood in Pwa k’nyaw language. May Pwa k’nyaw not pretend to master other languages, while being unsatisfied with their own language. May they not avoid learning in their own language, when understanding comes from one’s first language.

Elders are rigorously advocating for Pwa k’nyaw language. But are Pwa k’nyaw education department heads being forced by their superiors to not educate Pwa k’nyaw in Pwa k’nyaw language? We do not understand this, and of course we wish they would also love their own language. Some may say the government objects to this, but we have seen the government give permission for mathematics exams to be written not only in English and Burmese but also in Pwa k’nyaw. Why is this the case? Is it not because the reality is that students learn better in their own language?

Of course, it is good to learn in Burmese, and even better if we learn in English, but we must prioritise learning in Pwa k’nyaw. We can no longer abandon this. Education should initially be in Pwa k’nyaw. If we are active in learning in our own language, the work of our elders who created our written language and literature will keep progressing.

Otherwise be warned: Pwa k’nyaw could regress by a century and while the language will not die out, the written form could disappear.

May all Pwa k’nyaw educators remain loyal to their language and teach children so they can seek knowledge through their mother tongue. Do not just see the insignificant prize associated with Burmese or English languages, but also see how knowledge can bring contentment when we feel the solace of our own language. When Pwa k’nyaw love their language, they will love learning in their mother tongue, and knowledge will be produced in books and writing published in Pwa k’nyaw. Some Pwa k’nyaw will master the languages of others and translate literature into Pwa k’nyaw so that students can easily acquire knowledge from other languages.

Translated from Pwa k’nyaw (S’gaw Karen) by Violet Cho

In which language is it easy and appropriate for Pwa k’nyaw to learn? It is in their own language, which they have spoken and understood since

childhood. It is in the language they have used from when they were babies and began to babble. It is in the language of lullabies their mothers sang, the language that mixed with their mothers’ milk as a birthright, flowing into their bloodstream and into their thoughts.

Therefore, they may grow up with this language. Thinking and dreaming in this language. When this happens, the act of grasping knowledge, for Pwa k’nyaw in their own language, is within reach and brings satisfaction. If that is not easy in their own language, then using the language of others is beyond difficult.

In fact, not much knowledge has been written in Pwa k’nyaw language, but thoughts can easily emerge when people use their mother tongue. Of course, it is good to know other languages because it broadens our heart and our thinking. To pierce through the languages of others, which involves epistemology and cultures of control, and to transform it into our own epistemology, is not easy, so gaining knowledge in other languages is like carrying a double load as we climb the mountain.

It will be easier for us to learn when diverse forms of knowledge are transformed into Pwa k’nyaw language. Some students claim that they do not understand mathematics and other forms of knowledge that are written in Pwa k’nyaw language as fast as they do in Burmese and English. This is a boastful claim and a lie.

What is hard to understand are different terms. If we can remember those terms and their meanings, at the end of the day, it will become easy. For instance, ‘nature’ is always used in other languages. For us, if we understand the meaning of this word as ‘creation, birth and formation’, this will become easier when people say ‘the order of nature’ which can be understood as ‘the order of creation’. If people say ‘the law of nature’, we will know it refers to the law that rules upon creation.

Pwa k’nyaw who are learning in English or Burmese should understand everything through

Pwa k’nyaw

Violet Cho is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University

33

In my hutongAnthony Tao

Anthony Tao is a writer and editor based in Beijing

N E I G H B O U R H O O D

I live on a hutong—a narrow alley characteristic of old Beijing, now romanticised due to its scarcity—in a rented courtyard home. The flat has only three

rooms, but the layout and design are smart, with a high slanted ceiling and tall glass doors and windows that let in swells of natural light. For much of the past year, realtors have been bringing people by every week. My landlord, a German architect who purchased this space ten years ago and overhauled the interior, is trying to sell it for 9 million yuan—about USD1.3 million, or just under US$2,000 per square foot. It’s an astronomical price, but understandable: there aren’t many hutong units left, especially ones with a private courtyard, and especially ones that used to belong to Liang Qichao.

Liang was one of imperial China’s most brilliant essayists and reformers, someone who weaponised words against the late Qing’s ruinous orthodoxy. But sometime during the First World War, he lost his faith in the modernity he preached and was gradually sidelined by history. Still, his influence was far reaching. ‘There can be no construction without destroying what’s already built,’ he wrote—words that inspired Mao Zedong, who destroyed many of Beijing’s hutongs to enact his vision of New China. Liang lived just across my alley in a large courtyard that has since been carved up into several dozen units; the only evidence that Liang used to be there is an engraving inside the courtyard’s entrance. On the site my apartment occupies was Liang’s personal library—so I reside among the ghosts of his books and ideas.

That comforting thought doesn’t mean much to prospective buyers. They ask about the apartment’s size, the heating (from wires underneath the floor), the direction the front door faces (south, which is good). They ask about the tree in the front courtyard, a toon

with a thick trunk and roots that cause the paved tiles to bulge—specifically, whether it can be removed. ‘I think you can chop it down,’ the realtors say.

The tree is majestic—unique, quaint, a relic that doesn’t quite belong amid new Beijing’s skyscrapers and highways. It’s possible I think this because, like most expats in Beijing, I am merely renting an experience. Although I’ve lived here for more than a decade—was born here, with much of my family still around—the fact that I am a US citizen means I will always be viewed as a sojourner, forever passing through. That affects how I assess experiences: are they worth writing home about? In a city that has been resurfaced, remade, razed and rebuilt beyond count, glazed with promises of modernity and GDP, I gravitate towards the old.

It’s a bit selfish. Because here’s the truth about the majority of Beijing’s hutong homes: they are cramped, designed for utility instead of aesthetics, commonly stocked with curios from a monochrome era; they have poor insulation and terrible plumbing; they flood during summer rainstorms and have pipes that freeze during winter; plaster is perma-peeling from thin walls that protect no one’s secrets. The people who live in hutongs are likely to have been there forever, the sorts of idiosyncratic fogeys who might report you for having foreign guests. Then there’s the gentrification: real estate companies buying up dilapidated constructions and renovating them for renting to well-to-do foreigners, which means people from terribly different backgrounds often find themselves thrust together.

No wonder prospective buyers baulk at the price tag. They’re looking through a different lens. Where I see an elderly neighbour who cares for the neighbourhood strays, they see a crazy cat lady. Where I see a toon tree as a symbol of history, they see a perpetual source of

Anthony Tao

rotting leaves. Where I see charm, they see inefficiency—wasted space.

But there’s a third way to see the courtyard home—or any home. That’s with nostalgia, through a child’s eyes.

There’s one person I’ve met for whom my place is invaluable.

Two years ago, coming back one night, I encountered a man showing a woman my door. This didn’t strike me as unusual, because my address is identified on Baidu Maps as ‘Liang Qichao’s Former Study’, so I do encounter the occasional tourist. I asked if I could help, and the man embarrassedly replied, ‘Oh no, I was just passing by. I wanted to show my wife where I grew up.’ This place? ‘Yes, right here.’ I invited them in. ‘It’s late,’ he demurred, but I insisted.

Inside, he stood next to my standing counter, nodding. ‘My grandparents used to sleep here,’ he said, regarding the kitchen sink. ‘They liked to play mah-jong. We kids weren’t allowed to be around during those times.’ Where did you go? ‘Outside, to play. We had a lot of fun. Or to my room, back there’—he pointed at the bathroom. ‘My parents’ room was next to it.’ How many total rooms? ‘Many. There were walls here and here. This was all divided up. We cooked over there. There was no toilet.’

I informed him that my landlord was trying to sell the place. ‘For how much?’ Both he and his wife both shook their heads at the price. ‘Times have changed,’ he said, while his wife sighed. I tried to keep them as long as I could, but I didn’t know what questions to ask. I just knew that what he said felt authentic, and it was good to listen. ☐

34

Press forwardAbby Seiff

P R O F I L E

For evermore, technology and the pandemic will be intertwined. School, work, grocery shopping, doctor’s visits, happy hours, weddings, funerals,

court hearings, entertainment, holidays—all of it unfolding amid a pandemic on one of our three screens. Across much of the world for much of the past year, if your job couldn’t take place on a screen, you were deemed ‘essential’—though rarely paid accordingly—and forced to risk your health or your life outside the home. If your home lacked internet, your child was ‘left behind’, forgotten. In what seemed like a matter of moments, the human interactions needed to identify abuse, to ward off depression, to give shape to our lives, disappeared. In exchange, we got technology: a life raft, something we are so lucky to have, even as it falls so very short.

Like all of us, the journalist Anup Kaphle has been thinking a lot about technology over the past year. On a cloudy December day, Kaphle and I met on our respective computer screens in our respective homes, just five miles apart in New York City. We had planned to sit bundled up on a park bench and talk through our masks, but the temperature had dipped below freezing. Fat snowflakes drifted past his window in Queens and mine in Brooklyn. Occasionally, my cat would walk across the thin piece of metal containing Kaphle’s head, shoulders and bedroom, neatly arranged to appear many times each day on his colleagues’ screens.

Kaphle’s job is to think about technology. Rest of World, where he works, focuses solely on the impact of technology across the globe—a remit that covers everything from Japanese loyalty-point influencers to the rise of spyware in India. Brought on board as executive editor in February 2020, Kaphle moved from Kathmandu to New York City to help guide the launch. In the weeks that followed, Kaphle’s wife gave birth to their first child, New York became the global centre of the pandemic and several members of the team, including the founder and chief executive, contracted the virus. Rest of World launched in May, just two months late.

‘We had to rethink how to assign stories, how to keep freelancers safe and how to report tech stories, when almost all the headlines in the country were focused on public health,’ said Kaphle. ‘I would say it was not a huge pivot, because suddenly, the entire world was remote. And technology was at the front and centre of everything.’

Rest of World is the brainchild of Sophie Schmidt, who spent nearly two years planning the site, building up a team and headhunting talent like Kaphle. A decade of working abroad for tech companies like Uber and Xiaomi, coupled with stints in Myanmar, South Africa, Dubai and elsewhere, left Schmidt convinced of a gaping hole in the mainstream media approach. ‘Western technology coverage is dominated by the same handful of companies and figures; it feels suffocating. And it misses the bigger shift at hand: how technology built anywhere can now impact people everywhere. That’s a profound change, yet there is so little reporting on who these new companies and leaders are, and what their rise means for the world,’ she said in an email.

Schmidt, whose father is the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, has committed to funding the publication for the next decade. The publication has a short, clear conflict-of-interest policy that any writer who has ever been paid by a company, invested in a company or had a close family member work for a company must recuse themselves from the story.

The operating cost of the first year was about US$6 million, according to Schmidt. That guaranteed, substantial budget has allowed Schmidt and Kaphle to build a newsroom unburdened by financial considerations.

‘When I joined, the mandate was fairly clear: let’s build a team. This is the goal,’ said Kaphle.

The newsroom pulls from the best of both traditional media and non-profit journalism. There are regional editors based, so far, in Mexico City, Tokyo and Nairobi. More editors—photo, features, deputy—are scattered from Hong Kong to El Paso. There is a rigorous fact-checking process, something several freelancers cited when I asked them about their experiences. The pay is well above average.

If, ultimately, most of the editors come from similar media and education backgrounds, it is in its selection of writers and coverage that Rest of World stands out. The writers come from everywhere, but what they have in common is ‘a real knowledge of the story’, said Kaphle. There is little sign of the fixer-foreign correspondent dynamic; articles are written by reporters on the ground with intimate knowledge of the story. Should a reporter be unaccustomed, say, to writing in an Americanised long form or narrative-journalism style, the editors will work with them on it. The publication appears to be striving to erase the gatekeeper mentality, still prevalent in much international reporting.

The pieces that make it to Rest of World’s home page are similarly absent of the ‘anchors’ a certain class of editors insists is necessary to draw in a Western reader—like, say, the proximity of a gross human rights violation to a popular tourist destination. A story about Pakistanis struggling with poor internet in Gilgit-Baltistan is, truly, about Gilgit-Baltistan. Disproving the widely held belief that readers won’t care about reporting unless there’s some link back to their lives, the piece also happens to be one of the site’s most-read articles.

‘Often the true stories of people are ignored, and, when told, they’re condensed in a way that does a disservice to what’s actually at stake and why it matters and who it matters to. And a lot of that is about who is telling these stories,’ said Kaphle. While that’s changing, slowly, he noted, Rest of World provided an opportunity to launch off an altogether different foundation. ‘[We could] find a way to tell these stories without imposing a Western gaze, and really allowing the local views to play out. They know the perspective, they know the sources, they know the people, right? So in the end our readers can really understand what is what is happening, why it is happening and to whom does it matter the most.’

Before taking the job at Rest of World, Kaphle was briefly editor-in-chief of the Kathmandu Post, where he spent eighteen months remaking one of Nepal’s largest dailies. Coming in as an outsider, note those who worked under him, was no easy task. But in focusing on heavy-hitting reporting, long form and investigations, Kaphle raised the quality substantially, ultimately drawing an international audience. That approach was shaped by his time in US newsrooms, where he previously spent the entirety of his editorial career. His years working with foreign correspondents at the Washington Post, Buzzfeed and Roads & Kingdoms has tracked the shifts—for better and worse—in international reportage over the past decade.

‘One of the things that attracted me, in first place, was not only the fact that we were going to be able to do international reporting—which is expensive and rare,

and the stories don’t always pan out, because you always try to tell stories from a very American perspective. I’ve been on the receiving end of this as both an editor and reporter in newsrooms in the US. But I think what was intriguing was the name itself. It represented me. It represented millions and millions of people like me, who’ve always sort of felt like their stories were ignored in some ways.’

Born and raised in Pokhara at a moment of intense upheaval in Nepal, Kaphle grew up in a politically engaged family. He recalled a childhood studying

in English-language schools, poring over local tabloids with his parents and, once, bearing witness to a terrifying attempted assault on his father—a civil servant who angered the wrong people while supporting an opposition leader.

‘It’s dangerous, nobody wants to challenge what happened … To me, as a young person, it was like, somebody should write about this in a local paper, right? Those were kinds of things that were motivating me. I used to write essays in school and win awards, and the more I learned about writing and the world, I really wanted to see how I could be a part of it.’

When Kaphle secured a visa and scholarship to study environmental science at a small university in Tennessee, only to switch his major to English, his father was furious. ‘I think the first time he spoke to me properly after that was [when], I’d gotten this internship at Newsweek … and he was like, oh okay, maybe you’re doing well.’

Kaphle, who arrived with US$500 on hand and earned money by tutoring his US classmates in English, couldn’t return to Nepal for three years. Friends and professors took him to their homes for holidays. When he failed to get an internship at the local newspaper, an editor telling him gently, he recounted, ‘They’re never going to hire you. Have you seen anybody who looks like you who’s worked here?’ Kaphle began mentally preparing himself to return home. He would become a journalist in Nepal and ‘start at the back of the line, basically’ in his quest to become a foreign correspondent. Getting into Columbia Journalism School, among the most prestigious masters programmes in the world, changed that.

‘I went to work for the Atlantic, and I went to Afghanistan for reporting and [made] a couple decisions that really paved the way for me. I thought, all right, I think I can do this. And working at the Washington Post was a dream come true.’

The past year represents both an expansion and an implosion. Kaphle now works out of his bedroom; his wife works at the dining room table. His mother, who flew to New York to help out when the baby was born, has been stuck for months amid flight cancellations and closures—thousands of miles away when her own mother died. Kaphle’s father, caught at the other end, has yet to meet his granddaughter in person. Amid it all, the flattened, heightened, life-through-screen, there are reporters to hire and risk assessments to compose and news meetings to lead and strategies to plan.

‘Trying to do that all, with a new human being— I’ve learned a lot this year about life,’ said Kaphle, with a wry, tired laugh. ‘Hopefully, we all come out of this really strong, and just appreciate everything we went through together.’ ☐

Abby Seiff is a freelance journalist based in New York

35

Lauren Crothers

36

Dropping EnglishMarc de Faoite

P U B L I S H I N G

Malaysia has two major national print newspapers in English and at least half a dozen English-language online news

portals. Yet, while there appears to be a sufficiently large English-literate readership for news, this audience doesn’t seem to embrace local fiction in English with the same enthusiasm.

For the most part, book sales are insufficient to make publishing contemporary Malaysian fiction in English a financially viable prospect for most publishers.

Amir Muhammad is the founder of the publishing companies Matahari, Fixi and its subsidiary Fixi Novo, which specialises in Malaysian English-language fiction.

‘We were lucky enough to have quite a few Malay bestsellers,’ he says. ‘Aside from the KL Noir books and the first horror stories by Tunku Halim, however, we haven’t had any English bestsellers.’ His definition of a Malaysian bestseller is a book that sells 10,000 copies, in a country of almost 33 million people.

Without the market that publishers need to survive, it is increasingly difficult for local writers to get published in Malaysia. This in turn makes it difficult to sustain a culture in which writers can even survive, never mind thrive, even less be read, at least locally.

It is often said that Malaysia is the only country that went from using English as a second language to using English as a foreign language in the space of one generation. This didn’t happen by accident.

Though Malaysia might still be considered a young country, it is not as young as its inhabitants, the average age currently hovering around thirty. While English is still a compulsory subject in both primary and secondary education, it hasn’t been the main medium of instruction since the early 1980s.

Whether the initial motivation was to shrug off the cultural shackles of colonialism, or a natural extension of a populist ethno-centric political stance, or simply the logical proposition that a country’s education system should use the national language, or a combination of these, there is no doubt that Malaysia’s linguistic landscape in the twenty-first century is very different from the one that prevailed when the nation declared independence in 1957.

Malaysia still remains linguistically diverse, but these policy changes have led to increased linguistic insularity, not just within the majority Malay community, but also in the Chinese-speaking community, which increasingly uses Mandarin to the cost of the other Chinese languages historically spoken in Malaysia.

‘While most middle-class Malaysians do speak English, at least part of the time, they don’t read local English fiction,’ says Amir. He mentions ‘cultural cringe’ as part of the explanation for Malaysia’s ailing English-language fiction market, a phenomenon that occurs in former colonies, where locals have an internalised and sometimes unconscious bias, tending to view their own cultural products as inferior.

The cosmopolitan and outward-looking nature of part of Malaysia’s English-literate audience may also go some way to explain why foreign writers sell better on average.

In 2020 Malaysia lost K.S. Maniam, a writer whose contributions to English-language writing in his country are incalculable. His death marked the passing of an old guard of Malaysian writers who produced much of their work during the years when English was still the country’s primary medium of education. But it also underlines the fact that even the youngest of Malaysian

readers schooled at that time have already reached retirement age.

Last year was one of exceptional challenges, with many publishers and booksellers struggling to survive. Tens of thousands of Malaysians lost their jobs, while many of those still employed are now more careful with their discretionary income.

‘People baulk at paying RM20 [approximately US$5] for a local book,’ says the Penang-based writer Anna Tan, who is president of the Malaysian Writers Society. ‘That could be the price of meals for one or two days at a hawker stall. And RM20 is already cheap compared to RM45 [approximately US$11], which is the average price of an imported paperback now.’

I asked Amir if the distraction of ever present screens could be one explanation for why Malaysians seem to be reading less locally written fiction.

‘Without social media, Fixi wouldn’t exist,’ he says. ‘So, we are grateful for smartphones.’

With a novel and a new short story collection planned for release this year, Amir remains characteristically optimistic, yet pragmatic.

‘I will continue to publish English books,’ he says, ‘but most of the output still needs to be in Malay so that all my staff can get paid.

‘Maybe one English novel a year is doable. The idea also is to sell translation rights, as not many people would be able to translate from Malay to other languages, except English.’

Fixi Novo’s most recent call for short stories to the popular KL Noir series received more than 220 submissions, from aspiring and accomplished writers. Out of this, barely 10 per cent were selected.

Interestingly, much of Malaysia’s writing scene is increasingly taking place beyond the country’s borders. Internationally recognised writers like Tan Twan Eng, Tash Aw and Preeta Samarasan are based overseas. Norway-based Long Litt Woon’s memoir, The Way Through the Woods, has been translated into more than a dozen languages, while books by UK-based Zen Cho have attracted a large international readership.

Singapore-based Penguin SEA recently published several books by Malaysian authors, including Elaine Chiew, Julya Oui, Tutu Dutta, Tunku Halim and Paul Gnanaselvam. That Penguin is willing to take on Malaysian writers is a vote of confidence in the quality of their work, but it also highlights the difficulty writers have in being published in their home country, where many of the publishers today are shadows of their former selves.

Meanwhile, back in Malaysia, Fixi Novo’s 2020: An Anthology didn’t meet with the hoped-for success. Compiled to mark the year when Malaysia would declare itself a developed nation, the anthology contains some of the finest contemporary writing published in English in recent years. As it’s turned out, the fate of the book might be seen as something of a metaphor for the year as a whole. On its merits, it should have been a bestseller; instead, a large quantity of the first and only print run is destined to be pulped. Whatever its literary merits, the book was a commercial flop.

That bookshops were closed or inaccessible for a significant portion of the year didn’t help. But even when Fixi Novo dropped the sale price, from RM20.20 to the ridiculously low figure of RM2.02—the price of a glass of teh tarik—the book still proved almost impossible to sell.

Time will tell whether Malaysian readers will be more receptive to Fixi Novo’s upcoming releases. If it’s anything like the anthology, the local writing and publishing scene is doomed to shrink even further.

Though Malaysia is one of the two Southeast Asian countries where English is most used, the language does not have the same status as

in neighbouring Singapore, which has what outwardly appears to be a healthier publishing scene.

In Malaysia, ‘only works in Malay can be recognised as national literature’, explains Amir.

Despite Tan Twan Eng’s Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, being an international bestseller and recently made into a film, his books have never been translated into Malay, nor have they received the national recognition they might have had if they had originally been written in the national language. This is far from the exception, but more the rule when it comes to writing in English in Malaysia, where the government provides little or no support.

‘I see it as a trade-off,’ says Amir. ‘The government is less likely to interfere when it comes to other languages [than Malay].

‘It is generally best to stay away from government ministries,’ he adds. ‘I prefer how things are done in Indonesia, which has a receptive public, but it is assumed the government will hinder things, [rather] than Singapore, where the public is largely indifferent, so publishers become dependent on grants and awards.’

For better or for worse English has become the international lingua franca. It is a doorway, or at least a window, on to a larger world. Whether the baggage of its colonial history is too heavy, or whether the language’s global dominance undermines the image of the national identity Malaysia seeks to forge for itself, turning away from English, while other countries in the region increasingly turn towards it, makes a statement about how Malaysia sees its place in the world. It is also a binary way of looking at things. It doesn’t have to be one thing or the other; it can be both.

There are still enough Malaysians who use English to their benefit for the language to continue to play a role in the country, both economically and socially, and there are still enough Malaysian writers working in English for Malaysian fiction to continue to grow into the future. But how much of that writing will be embraced locally, or how much will only find an audience and publishers overseas, remains to be seen. ☐

Marc de Faoite is a writer based in Penang

changeHeavy grey outof season thick coat summer hangingover the beach a sandal maroonedon the incoming tide

Rory Harris

P O E M

37

If you grow up in Singapore, at some point during your childhood you find out about hawkers. This happened for me when I was four or five. At that age,

my mum would bring me to her office now and again, and there was an old hawker nearby who sold fishball noodles, which my mum liked to have for lunch. The noodles came packed in a plastic sack with a plastic drawstring, and if they hadn’t been sufficiently jumbled in the packing, they were certainly a mess by the time we got back to her desk to eat.

Many hawker dishes are so humble they struggle to live up to the status of being a meal. You can call them snacks and no one will look at you funny. This is convenient, because it means you can eat five or more times a day while still only having three meals. Fishball noodles fall into this category. There are some noodles in dressing, a few fishballs and maybe some slices of fish cake, which is to say: noodles with fish paste and more fish paste. This particular hawker used ketchup in his dressing, which I have refused to allow anywhere near my noodles for thirty years. His dish is the first clear memory I have of food that was made by someone outside my family, because it did not taste like home cooking. It tasted slapdash and daring and cacophonous. It tasted of something that had been made at speed, by someone who knew with absolute certainty that his work—though hurried—would still be good. My mother and my grandmother were Teochew, and their cooking was both simple and fussed over.

At some point not too long after, I found out about hawker centres. While I must have gone to any number of hawker centres before the age of eight, I have no recollection of any of them. The first I really remember was the canteen in my primary school. School canteens in Singapore are hawker centres in miniature. Hawkers pay nominal rents and in return charge prices appropriate to the budgets of small children. I have always been struck by this act of socialisation. I don’t remember when I first saw an American school cafeteria, with its single steam table line, but I remember how much I pitied the children who had to eat there. We might not have been much for freedom of speech or thought, but we believed in the freedom to choose your own damn lunch.

I realise now what a throwback the school’s hawker centre was. The broader hawker trade had been largely cleaned up and regulated by then, and street vendors were typically gathered in concrete stalls in government-built, government-approved hawker centres—with running water and electricity in every stall. The school canteen, by comparison, was a roof on posts. It didn’t have a wall to call its own, being defined by a retaining wall on one side and the concrete school quadrangle on the other. Each stall consisted of a table and a propane burner. I don’t think the stalls had plumbing. They certainly didn’t have refrigeration. Facilities for both were shared, in a large, tiled room that doubled as the drinks stall. When I’m talking to health inspectors nowadays, I like to imagine what they would have had to say about this place where I—and hundreds of other schoolchildren—ate five days a week.

Confronted with the opportunity to exercise personal agency as an eight-year-old, I bought the same thing nearly every single day—because it was so good I almost never wanted to eat anything else. Char kway teow, smoky and black, with a single egg and three tiny cubes of rendered fatback in each plate.

Childhood snacksTse Wei Lim

F O O D

It did not taste like home cooking. It tasted like a speech made outdoors: more ambitious, more alive. Home cooking was proper. It might be delicate, or expedient, or filled with affection, but it was always proper—even when things were made in the hundreds, by a kitchen full of aunts. There was an awareness in my mother’s kitchen of the cleaning up to be done afterwards, the smoke that might fill the house, the drop of oil rolling down the outside of the bottle.

These concerns did not trouble the auntie frying my char kway teow. Her wok had a blast radius marked by noodles and soy sauce. You could see the miasma around her from across the canteen and smell it from across the yard. She worked with a fluency that, to my eight-year-old eyes, bordered on magic. Her spatula danced around the wok while she cracked eggs with one hand, chatting with her neighbours and the line of schoolboys waiting in front of her. Watching her, I understood for the first time that skill was connected with results.

The taste memory of that char kway teow has stayed with me for thirty years. It’s rare to hear Singaporeans agree about hawker food, but my old classmates all swear it was the best char kway teow they’ve ever had. It’s nice to have an audience of eight-year-olds.

If you grow up in Singapore, at some point you find out that some hawkers are better than others—and that the best ones of all are off in Malaysia, where the government is more liberal, the stalls are dirtier and everything is just ineluctably tastier. I had this conversation with my uncle, wide-eyed, at the age of twelve.

My father is Malaysian, and had for many years insisted that the hawker food in his hometown of Muar was the best of all. I dismissed this as a partisan view, because it was well known in the family that my father’s tastebuds were unreliable at best. Hearing it from my

uncle was different. My uncles all considered themselves gourmands, and the uncle who told me this considered himself the greatest of them, with a palate almost as fine as my grandfather’s.

The Singapore school system does a good job of inculcating a sense of national pride, so this may have been the first time I seriously considered the idea that the Singaporean way might not be a panacea. The very traits that made Singapore a more advanced country than Malaysia, I was told, were the traits that meant Malaysia had better hawker food. Our government was too efficient, we liked things too orderly, things in Singapore were altogether more controlled than they were up north. For proof, one only needed to consider the decline in the quality of hawker food that had taken place since the hawkers were all corralled into the hawker centres. Those same hawkers, when selling on the streets, had turned out far better food. I think this narrative still circulates today.

At this point, I was in a different school. The canteen closed early, so after school, my classmates and I would find our way to a coffee shop nearby. There were at most a handful of stalls there, quiet beneath the fluorescent tubes. We usually ate roti prata, which could be counted on to be greasy and hot. It was served, as prata always seems to be, on blue melamine plates, with thin aluminium cutlery that bent as soon as it met the food. You pinned down the prata with one implement and yanked at it with the other until it gave, and then crammed whatever size chunk you had into your mouth. The best prata flakes, like a croissant, before your teeth encounter a slightly resistant centre. But these were a chore to choke down, dissatisfaction dipped in curry gravy. I remember sitting there chewing, thinking about how roti prata in Malaysia might taste. ☐

Tse Wei Lim is a chef and author

WikiCommons

Boon Tat Street, Singapore

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In the southern Indian city of Bangalore (or Bengaluru, if you prefer the official, syrupy version), names point to the melange of eras, empires and

confluences that have danced in and out of these geographical coordinates over centuries.

If, for instance, you were to find yourself in a specific part of town, you would disembark from a rickshaw or Uber ride saturated with the loud, pulsating sounds of the region’s Kannada film industry (ingeniously labelled Sandalwood). Skipping past unceasing traffic on the central Queens Road, you would enter a tiny haven of a side street—Edward Road—named in accordance with familial affiliation and surrounded by the tangential roads Cunningham, Jasma Bhavan, Ali Asker and Infantry.

Within the quietude of Edward Road, you might savour the abundance of centuries-old trees, not failing to notice the plushness of the buildings packed around you. Reaching the end of the lane, you might just consider turning back and exploring in other directions. But if you were to persist you would be rewarded with the aroma of darkly brewed coffee, a sanctuary for the soul and words gathered with care. For here—appended to a mixed-use bungalow plot containing a school, a spa and an Airbnb rental—lies Champaca Bookstore, Library and Cafe, nearly engulfed by foliage.

It’s almost as though Champaca doesn’t want to be discovered. ‘I was scared that the location was too hidden, like a secret,’ the owner and proprietor Radhika Timbadia admits with a laugh. She needn’t have worried. In roughly a year and a half (the bookshop opened in June 2019), Champaca has attracted the sort of adoration and niche following that independent bookstores usually take years to cultivate. Much of this has to do with the ambience: arty canopies that sway at

the slightest hint of a breeze; clusters of flora that form an encircling welcoming committee around Champaca’s large, open windows; the lingering subtlety of a native plant—the bookshop’s eponym, Magnolia champaca—at the counter; dark wood and dancing light; and, of course, the books, occupying floor-to-ceiling shelves.

‘I wanted this to be an open, green space where book lovers could idle and browse, or simply gather over coffee and a warm bite to eat,’ Timbadia says. Part of Champaca’s appeal lies in the fact that Timbadia has approached the bookshop as a reader would. Cosy nooks abound, and the mood is quiet and welcoming. Leaves from the enfolding trees flutter in from time to time. Most importantly, the books themselves—rarities, well-loved classics, popular fiction, graphic novels, small-press poetry, forgotten folklore and a wealth of translated literature—have been curated with finesse and passion by the Champaca team.

Timbadia seems an unlikely candidate for this kind of story. Born in Bombay (Mumbai), she moved to Bangalore in her teens and ended up devoting herself to ecology. The nuances of being an ecologist have since seeped into her calling as a purveyor of literature. ‘I was used to long, meditative spells—always reading and researching, spending extended periods of time with nature, wildlife, books, being immersed in my subject,’ she says.

Timbadia is ardent when mentioning her team’s contribution to the soul and identity of the bookshop. ‘Champaca is what it is because everyone has brought a little something special,’ she says. ‘Ideas, projects, events—everything has been part of a fluid, organic process where things get added and improved. Should we have book readings and select soirees? Sure. Should we nurture a small children’s library

that prospers over time? Absolutely. Is there room for cultural collaborations? Yes. Does the café menu need tweaking? Totally. Everyone here was a reader first, and they’ve added a terrific amount of perspective to what Champaca can be.’

On a crisp winter’s day, what Champaca can be flourishes in plain sight. Sunlight streams in through the canopies. People discover things, or ask for recommendations. Time seems to slow. Perhaps Champaca could have prospered only in a city like Bangalore—home to a fertile culture of secondhand bookstores (such as the legendary Blossom Book House) and a general populace in love with the written word. India’s literary ecosystem isn’t exactly geared towards indie bookshops, but it’s an interesting time to have a conversation about the role of bookstores and publishing in effecting change.

I wonder how hard this surreal year has hit Champaca. ‘It’s been incredibly tough,’ Timbadia admits, ‘but also empowering.’ She explains, ‘We launched our online store, much earlier than we’d anticipated. We also launched an annual subscription service, where we bring our recommendations directly to readers—this year focusing entirely on translations. These have proven vital in our desire to cultivate a local community, to gather something special for readers.’

Timbadia mentions that many readers have turned to cookbooks and romance novels—‘you know, all the fun stuff ’—during the past year of flux. I ask her what she’s been reading. ‘N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became,’ she says—and then, after a brief pause and a chuckle, ‘Crime. I’ve turned to a lot of crime.’ ☐

Erica Eng

Siddharth Dasgupta is a poet and novelist

Siddharth DasguptaBooknook

T H E B O O K S E L L E R

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HAS CHINA WON?THE CHINESE CHALLENGE TO AMERICAN PRIMACY

THE DEFINING GEOPOLITICAL CONTEST OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY IS BETWEEN CHINA AND THE US. BUT IS IT AVOIDABLE? AND IF IT HAPPENS, IS THE OUTCOME ALREADY INEVITABLE?

KISHORE MAHBUBANI, A DIPLOMAT AND SCHOLAR WITH UNRIVALLED ACCESS TO POLICYMAKERS IN BEIJING AND WASHINGTON, HAS WRITTEN THE DEFINITIVE GUIDE TO THE DEEP FAULT LINES IN THE RELATIONSHIP, A CLEAR-EYED ASSESSMENT OF THE RISK OF ANY CONFRONTATION, AND A BRACINGLY HONEST APPRAISAL OF THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES, AND SUPERPOWER ECCENTRICITIES, OF THE US AND CHINA.

CHOSEN BY FAREED ZAKARIA AS ONE OF HIS ‘BOOKS OF 2020’

PRAISE FOR HAS CHINA WON?“China and the US are locked in a struggle for international primacy, and

the result of this contest will shape the world order for generations to come. Kishore captures the complexity of this battle with the measured nuance and clear insight it deserves. Not to be missed.”

—Ian Bremmer, author of Us vs. Them and president, Eurasia Group

“Kishore Mahbubani has long extolled what the West taught the rest of the world and how many parts of Asia, including China and India, have benefitted from what they have learnt.

Yet no one seems more surprised at what China has learned from the US than the United States itself, which now sees China purely as a rival that threatens its global primacy.

Mahbubani asks pointedly: what did China do to deserve this? He has gone further than ever before to challenge his readers to think of the consequences if the rivalry is allowed to grow unchecked.”

—Wang Gungwu, University Professor at the National University of Singapore

“Kishore Mahbubani has written an excellent and important book on much the biggest question in international affairs: how will the relationship between the US and China evolve? Humanity desperately needs these superpowers to co-operate. It seems more likely to have ceaseless friction between them. If it is the latter, argues Mahbubani, it is quite likely that the US will end up at a severe disadvantage, not so much because of China’s inherent superiority, but rather because of US mistakes, not least a failure to grasp the Chinese reality.”

—Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times

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