Thomas A. Bass on Fukushima

VOLUME 5, NUMBER 3

Emma Larkin revisits the Thammasat massacre

Peter Yeoh profiles Jeremy Tiang

Alicia Izharuddin rails against Malaysian food

MAY–JULY 2020

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mekongreview.com PUBLISHER & EDITOR Minh Bui Jones

DEPUTY EDITOR Ben Wilson MANAGING EDITOR Robert TemplerCONTRIBUTING EDITORS ko ko thett (poetry), Preeta Samarasan (fiction)

DESIGN Ben Wilson WEBSITE Nicholas Lhoyd-Owen SUBSCRIPTIONS Shu Wen ChyeSUB-EDITORS Allen Myers, Gareth Richards, Rhiannon Alexander

COVER Elsie Herberstein ARTISTS Damien Chavanat, Charis Loke, Gianluca Costantini, Janelle RetkaADDRESS PO Box 417, Broadway, New South Wales 2037, Australia; editor@mekongreview.com

Mekong Review is published four times a year; next issue August

VOLUME 5, NUMBER 3 MAY–JULY 2020

T H A I L A N D 3 Emma Larkin Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok, by Thongchai Winichakul

P O E M S 5 Anthony Tao Coronavirus

C H I N A 6 Richard Heydarian Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis, by Jiwei Ci

H O N G K O N G 7 David Parrish Unfree Speech: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act, by Joshua Wong (with Jason Y. Ng)

T A I W A N 8 Michael Reilly The Trouble with Taiwan: History, the United States and a Rising China, by Kerry Brown and Kalley Wu Tzu Hui

I N D I A 9 Somak Ghosal The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment, by Joy Ma And Dilip D’souza

N O T E B O O K 10 Peter Guest Isolated

J A P A N 11 Thomas A. Bass Made in Japan

C A M B O D I A 19 Prumsodun Ok An Illustrated History of Cambodia, by Philip Coggan

M A L A Y S I A 20 Carl Vadivella Belle Towards a New Malaysia? The 2018 Election and Its Aftermath, by Meredith L. Weiss And Faisal S. Hazis (editors); The Defeat of Barisan: Missed Signs or Late Surge?, by Francis E. Hutchinson and Lee Hwok Aun (editors)

S I N G A P O R E 21 Simon Vincent Hard at Work: Life in Singapore, by Gerard Sasges and Ng Shi Wen

S O U T H K O R E A 22 Peter Tasker Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech, by Geoffrey Cain

M E M O I R 23 Martin Stuart-Fox Impermanence: An Anthropologist of Thailand and Asia, by Charles Keyes

F I C T I O N 25 Siti Keo A New Sun Rises over the Old Land, by Suon Sorin

F I C T I O N 26 Bryan Thao Worra Run Me to Earth, by Paul Yoon

S H O R T S T O R Y 27 Wong Yi Night-shift scenes

P O E T R Y 28 Michael Freeman To Gather Your Leaving: Asian Diaspora Poetry, by Boey Kim Cheng, Arin Alicia Fong and Justin Chia (editors)

N E I G H B O U R H O O D 29 Melody Kemp Vientiane

P R O F I L E 30 Peter Yeoh Jeremy Tiang

T R A V E L 32 Conner Bouchard-Roberts Carry across

F O O D 33 Alicia Izharuddin Against Malaysian food

U R B A N 35 Pim Wangtechawat Very Bangkok: In the City of the Senses, by Philip Cornwel-Smith

M U S I C 36 Mina Bui Jones WOMADelaide

F I L M 37 David Scott Mathieson Free Burma Rangers, by Brent Gudgel and Chris Sinclair (directors)

T H E B O O K S E L L E R 38 Brian Chee-Shing Hioe Causeway Bay Books in Taiwan

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The silence of 1976Emma Larkin

T H A I L A N D

THONGCHAI WINICHAKULMoments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the

October 6, 1976, Massacre in BangkokUniversity of Hawai‘i Press: 2020

Meet Chair Guy, the subject of a black-and-white photograph taken on the morning of 6 October 1976, in Bangkok, Thailand. Though

Chair Guy is smartly dressed—in a safari shirt and what appear to be matching trousers, neatly ironed—he is barefoot. The expression on his face is impossible to read: it could be anger, exhilaration or nothing more than the result of physical exertion. The camera has caught him mid-action as he leaps up and raises a metal folding chair over his head, preparing to bring it down with full force upon a dead body hanging from a tree.

A crowd of onlookers form a neat semicircle around the scene, as if they are watching some kind of outdoor circus performance. Most of them are casually dressed young men; their expressions are mixed, but a number of them appear to be smiling. One small boy’s face is lit up with what looks like a broad grin of sheer delight. Clearly visible in the background are the austere facade of the Supreme Court and the golden spires of the Grand Palace.

Though nearly forty-five years have passed, Thailand remains haunted by this image, and by Chair Guy.

The attack started just before dawn that day, with thousands of students barricaded inside Thammasat, one of the country’s top universities. The students had gathered to protest the return to Thailand of General Thanom Kittikachorn, a military dictator ousted by an earlier student-led uprising, in 1973, and now found themselves besieged. Police blocked the main gates; navy boats were positioned on the adjacent river. And on Sanam Luang, the royal parade ground in front of the campus, right-wing groups gathered, also in their thousands.

Cold War tensions were at fever pitch as the dominoes of Southeast Asia toppled to communism. In the previous year, North Vietnamese troops took Saigon, the Khmer Rouge declared Year Zero in Cambodia and the Pathet Lao abolished the monarchy in Laos. Thailand was battling its own communist insurgency in the hinterlands; the state was trying to prevent communist infiltration and establish die-hard loyalty to the capital, and the crown, through groups like the Nawaphon (New, or Ninth, Force), which spread right-wing propaganda; a vigilante force called Krathing Daeng (Red Gaur); and a network of Village Scouts active across the countryside. At the time of the student protest in 1976, these right-wing groups had been summoned to the campus by an army radio station and were being whipped into a frenzy. Broadcasters had told them that the students were communists and that many were not even Thai but yuan (a derogatory term for Vietnamese) and nak phaendin (literally ‘heavy on the earth’, or something akin to scum). During one broadcast, a presenter chanted, ‘Kill them, kill them, kill them …’

When police charged the campus, firing pistols, M16 rifles, and M79 grenade launchers, the furious crowd followed. Wounded students were dragged onto the parade ground, along with the dead, and tortured. Some were doused in petrol and set alight. Others had wooden stakes driven through their chests. At least four bodies were hung from the tamarind trees that ring the Sanam Luang parade ground and beaten with whatever came to hand—shoes, sticks, a folding chair.

It was a fast and savage bloodletting, over before noon. More than 3,000 students were arrested afterwards. The official death toll was forty-one, but many believe it to be more than twice that. Workers for one of the city’s emergency rescue foundations providing burials for unclaimed bodies said they handled over a hundred corpses that day.

The subject of Thongchai Winichakul’s Moments of Silence is not so much what actually happened on 6 October, but the silence that followed. There

has never been an official investigation, and a blanket amnesty issued two years after the event absolved all perpetrators from blame. Most school textbooks make no mention of it, and those that do gloss over it in just a few sentences. To this day, the event remains cloaked in mystery, poorly understood and often misremembered. Thongchai’s revelatory memoir-cum-history charts a chronological journey through this silence, examining its causes, exploring its impact on individuals and exposing the toll it has taken on the collective psyche.

Thongchai is not, in this instance, an impartial historian. He was a student leader in 1976 and the book opens dramatically, in situ at Thammasat University, with a nineteen-year-old Thongchai speaking into a microphone at the back of the organiser’s stage. As police stormed the grounds, it was his voice that reverberated around the campus, repeating, ‘Please, my police brothers, please stop shooting.’ He was later arrested and spent two years in prison as part of the so-called Bangkok Eighteen, alleged ringleaders of the demonstration. After his release, he completed his degree at Thammasat and then left Thailand to pursue postgraduate study in Australia, later moving to the United States, where he taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and eventually retiring from teaching to write this book. As such, Moments of Silence was years in the making and is part of a lifelong journey to bring some kind of justice to the friends he lost on that day. As he states more than once, ‘part of my soul is in this book’.

By nightfall on 6 October, a military coup had

seized power and placed a moratorium on all news. The photograph of Chair Guy might never have been seen had the Associated Press photographer who took it, Neal Ulevich, not anticipated the clampdown. Concerned that authorities would confiscate the film from his camera, he left the area shortly after taking the photograph and hurried to the AP bureau office to develop and print his pictures so they could be quickly wired out of the country. Later that same day, police began raiding newspaper offices to seize film and photographs of the event.

Ulevich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year for his ‘photographs of disorder and brutality in the streets of Bangkok’. In Thailand, only one newspaper—the English-language Bangkok Post—reported the fact, and did so without running any of his images.

The cover of Moments of Silence is illustrated with a line drawing of the hanging body from Ulevich’s photograph, a ghostly rendition that—like the event itself—is devoid of detail and visible only in outline. Hangings, and photographs of the hangings, play a grimly recurring role in the story of 6 October.

A week before the crackdown, a photograph was published in several newspapers showing two dead men hanging from a gate. There was a gruesome choreography to the image; the two had been hung side by side, with their heads drooping at the same angle and

Thongchai Winichakul at Thammasat University in 1976

Thongchai speaking at a demonstration outside Thammasat in 1976

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their swollen tongues protruding from their mouths. The men were labour activists who had been sticking up posters protesting the return of General Thanom; it was widely understood they had been hung in place by police as a warning to other protesters. The students at Thammasat were undeterred, however, and performed a defiant skit that included a mock execution. A student was posed hanging from a tree with his neck similarly angled and his tongue lolling out. When a photograph of the scene was published in newspapers the next day, it became apparent that the student who had played the hanging victim bore, on camera at least, a startling resemblance to then crown prince Vajiralongkorn. One outraged headline declared, ‘Students Hang Effigy of the Crown Prince and Trample on the Hearts of All Thais’.

Fact began to merge with fiction in the very first announcement of the coup group on the evening of 6 October, when the new government

explained that the students had come under the sway of communists and that their protest was part of a plot to bring down the kingdom and destroy the monarchy. This narrative was enforced over the following days and months by a widespread suppression of all leftist thought and opinion. Thongchai describes left-leaning newspapers and magazines being shut down by the authorities and people burning incriminating books in their possession: ‘Hundreds of books, including several academic texts, were banned. Some academics and journalists were arrested, hunted down, interrogated, and publicly denounced as communists.’ When around 3,000 students fled to join the communist insurgency in the jungles, the veil of silence surrounding 6 October was further reinforced.

In a chapter entitled ‘The Massacre and Unanswered Questions’, Thongchai poses a series of questions, some of which are not only unanswered but also—in Thailand, at least—unaskable. The country’s lese-majeste law punishes criticism of the king with a prison sentence of up to fifteen years; the law is broadly interpreted and has been effective in silencing both criticism and critical analysis of the monarchy’s role in Thai history and society. Thongchai (whose book has not been published in Thailand) asks to what degree the palace may have been involved in various aspects of 6 October, from the return of General Thanom to the bolstering of the right-wing movement, and to the crackdown itself. But such is the unspeakable nature of the topic that evidence and fact are almost impossible to pin down.

Thongchai writes that atrocities like those at Thammasat are especially difficult to process in Thailand because ‘they do not fit the master narrative of the national saga of unity under a benevolent ruler for development and prosperity. They are at odds with the noble biography of the country’. In order to maintain this master narrative, reconciliation is often upheld over truth and understanding. The result is a kind of half-truth that relegates painful episodes to the shadows for the greater good: ‘The past is (not was) abundantly full of lies. What is left to the present is the normative Thai life in which fact, fiction, fantasy, reality, role play, and real life are fused.’

It wasn’t until two decades later that a proper commemoration of 6 October 1976 could be held.

In 1996, at an event initiated by Thongchai, a symbolic cremation at Thammasat honoured those who had died and was followed by a two-day event featuring video footage of 6 October and an exhibition that included Ulevich’s photograph. Thousands attended, and it was the first time the general public were able to see for themselves what had actually happened in 1976. It was, by all accounts, deeply moving and heralded the beginning of a quiet reclaiming of history.

After the 1996 commemoration, in post–Cold War Thailand, it became possible to talk and write more openly about 6 October as long as there was no mention of the palace—in other words, as long as the unanswerable questions remain unasked. Nonetheless, memoirs of former students and radicals were published, and scholars were able to conduct more in-depth research. In 2000, Thongchai gained access to police

documents and autopsy reports stored at the Library of the Attorney General Office. It took years to sort through the seventy-three boxes (containing more than 30,000 pages) that were disorganised, uncatalogued, and covered in dust. In 2016, the Documentation of October 6 (Doct6) project was launched by volunteers, on a shoestring budget, to create a digital archive of documents, testimonies, audio and visual recordings, and newspaper clippings. The group’s efforts to collect information are often scuppered by the extreme sensitivities that continue to surround the topic. Requests to interview families of the dead revealed that only a third of respondents were willing to be interviewed, while another third refused. The remainder have so far proved untraceable.

Still, even after all this time, new details are emerging. It had always been thought, for instance, that the person in Ulevich’s photograph was the only victim to be hanged on 6 October, but autopsy reports revealed the existence of a second victim, and Doct6 researchers have since confirmed that four, possibly five, people were hanged that day. Three of the victims have been identified, though the person in Ulevich’s picture, and on the cover of Thongchai’s book, remains unknown.

As more photographs of 6 October came to light—emerging from private collections, long hidden—Thongchai noticed that Ulevich’s

photograph wasn’t the only one to capture Chair Guy. He spotted him in other pictures, adding newspapers to a fire of burning corpses and sitting on the naked body of a dead woman. Thongchai dubbed the man Chair Guy and set out to identify him.

One of the most chilling chapters of Moments of Silence, ‘Silence of the Wolf ’, covers Thongchai’s efforts to trace and interview perpetrators. Not all of the people he contacted were willing to meet him. As he explains, ‘the silence protects them; they need not break it’. The interviews were also constrained by Thongchai’s identity and his direct involvement in events; while it was always unlikely that he would be able to coax any unspoken truths or grand confessions from the perpetrators, his interviews inadvertently act as a reckoning of sorts—the closest any of them will come to facing up to what they did that day.

Thongchai interviews members of the various right-wing groups, as well as retired soldiers, intelligence agents and others. They remain unrepentant, justifying their actions by the need to protect their nation, religion and king—the three ideological pillars of Thai-ness:

They killed for a higher purpose, for reasons that Emma Larkin lives in Thailand and is the author of ‘Finding George Orwell in Burma’

took precedence over individual lives. For them, the enemy in 1976 was the communists, the purported Vietnamese aliens, or a subhuman class of beings. They did not see the victims as individuals like themselves. This rationale implies that they did not kill in rage or ignorance, and that the outcome justifies the brutality as long as Thais still subscribe fanatically to the ideology of Thai-ness.

Thongchai showed photographs of Chair Guy to the people he interviewed, but none of them admitted to knowing who he was. This silence is not caused by forgetfulness. ‘Instead,’ writes Thongchai, ‘it is a symptom of the inability to remember or forget, the inability to articulate memories in a comprehensible and meaningful fashion, or to depart from the past completely. I call this condition between remembering and forgetting the “unforgetting”. ’

For now, Thailand remains trapped in this liminal realm. As Thongchai notes, ‘The unforgetting breaks out in a freaky noise piercing the normative Thai-ness from time to time. The October 6 memory continues to haunt. It cannot rest in peace because it has no resting place yet in public memory.’ It can exist only in scattered repositories, pieced together from old photographs and private memories. Yet such is the extent to which it has been internalised that the horror can be evoked by just a fragment of Ulevich’s photograph—a folding chair hung from a rope in an art gallery, a graffitied stencil of Chair Guy on a city wall, a smiling crowd gathered around a hanging figure in the background of a rap video. As Thongchai writes, ‘It is present but not recognized. It is mentioned but not understood, apparent but not meaningful, and unforgettable but not remembered.’

If Thailand ever reconciles with or integrates this grim chapter into the national history and collective psyche, it will be because of brave books like Moments of Silence. Though Thongchai has not yet been able to identify Chair Guy, he still wonders about him:

Was he a trained agent provocateur who was assigned to incite the crowd by committing those acts, or was he an ordinary person turned into a desecrator by events of that morning? As time went by, as decades passed, did he regret his acts? Did he brag about them? How did he remember what he did? I wish I could track him down. I would like to meet him, to ask him those questions, without vengeance and with the promise not to interrupt his answer. ☐

Thongchai (seated, far right), with fellow detainees from the 6 October massacre, at Bang Khen prison in 1977

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CoronavirusAnthony Tao

P O E M S

In the Neighbourhood

We smiled through facemasks,said hello with our brows,held open doors

to remind each other we were still here. Miss Chen the grocerwas gone, back to her hometown.

Old Li the barber was gone,along with his radio. Zhou the locksmithonly left a phone number, Min absconded

with her cherished regrets, andthe Zhang family, who made flatbread,never returned: Gone

for the new year, the signon their door read.Those of us still here

nodded knowingly, sidesteppedcouriers zipping down our alleyson our way to Tang’s noodle shop.

The sky is nice, we grunted. The air clean.We were surrounded by kindness that barelyseemed real. Our throats itched for coal

and tar. Whatever else we craved,of insurrection or speaking truthto bureaucracy, whatever small

bonuses we desired for ourselvesor ailments we nursed, of angeror temperatures, we did it indoors.

We pulled our curtains and waiteduntil the kettle screeched, then saidexactly what we had always wanted.

In the Bedroom

The virus watched, nose pressedagainst the window, but the lovers didn’t notice, they rolled like bonobos, shaking

the bed. We heard through our walls, which means they could hear us, too,shaking in ways animals can,

forgetting—forgiving—our limbs, our organs, all the ways our rococo parts can thrash, can work toward climax, can spoil,

omphalos of all the worlds where weexist, our vigour omnidirectional.On the other side, our other neighbour

pounded on the wall. Damnhim, we thought, could he nottake it up with the virus, out there?

Of course, we knew we were being unfair. The virus was here to stay.We could sense it even now, lonely

virus shivering in the cold,eyes alit upon the ecstasy unfolding,time and everything stopped, its breath

fogging up our window, trying to leavea reminder, its mouth curled in an O, shouting Ooh-la-la. And, Bravo!

In the Air

Masks. Wearing them,we were more awareof the other.

Our eyes locked more often,for longer, searching for provocation,gauging interest

down to conjunctiva.We experimented with sounds,soughing and snuffling,

and remembered the lessonsour cats and dogs had taught:ears back, head tilted. We were polite

to those we did not care for,widening our expressions,softening our brows

to say we understand the feeling.But occasionally, next to a bodywe leaned toward,

we grimaced with yearning,with agony and despair that we could notrip off these masks and laugh

at our poor nerves aflutter. Our gazes settled on cloudshadow and withy,old tiles upon rooftops and dragon wings

rippling the pale blue. We saw the ways we merge with the world, with the air, taking into our lungs

the trees, the purslane in pavement, the rewards for being who we are. Magic, we saidto ourselves, forgetting what we were afraid of.

In the Heart

We stopped saying hello.We infected with caprice, infectedones we love with doubt,

those we dislike with conviction;with memories of the gone,which is an exacting affliction,

afflicted as we are with the same disease;with misunderstanding,avoidable if we weren’t simply ourselves;

with truth blasted out like a sneezewe’d meant to keep in. We sighedin bed, patted the outline of body next to us,

soothed by the warm hiss of the shower. The virus was gone, and in those early dayswe filled its vacuum with energy and humour;

then with our sense of what is righteous,trying to infect others. In our purgatorywe had learned what was meant by

‘human condition’, and nowwe wondered what was worth celebrating.A triumph for humanity, the news trumpeted

while we questioned if we deserved it.We leaned away from bodies, stoppedholding doors. We dragged our feet

on office carpets, poured coffee without smelling.We looked mockingly on those still masked,forgetting the ways we are infectious.

We walked the streets like sorrowful ghosts.With two fingers we rubbed our chest,wondering what was missing.

These poems were originally published under the title ‘Coronavirus in China’ in ‘Rattle’ in February

Anthony Tao is a writer and editor in Beijing. His poetry has appeared in ‘Prairie Schooner’, ‘The Cortland Review’, ‘Borderlands’, ‘Frontier’, ‘Michigan Quarterly Review’ and ‘Cha’

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The coming angerRichard Heydarian

C H I N A

JIWEI CIDemocracy in China: The Coming Crisis

Harvard University Press: 2019

In his novel The Plague, Albert Camus writes, ‘the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile’. In late April at least a third of the world’s population

were under one form of lockdown or another, with many megacities falling into silence.

My loved ones, stretching from the shores of the Mediterranean and the Caspian Sea all the way to the west coast of the United States, are grappling with variations of collective quarantine, under a whole host of increasingly desperate governments. As for me, I’m trapped in Manila, in the ever-widening shadow of president Duterte, who has been granted unprecedented emergency powers in the name of fighting a pandemic whose origins lie in the very country he so admires.

The United Nations secretary-general António Guterres has warned that the coronavirus crisis is ‘threatening the whole of humanity—and the whole of humanity must fight back’. Following the announcement of a three-week-long lockdown in the world’s second-largest nation, India’s prime minister Narendra Modi appealed for cooperation: ‘If we are not able to manage this pandemic in the next twenty-one days, the country and your family will be set back by twenty-one years.’

We are experiencing a foretaste of what scientists call ‘existential risk’; one arms-control expert has compared the pandemic to a nuclear attack. With millions of infections around the world, experts have drawn our attention to horrific precedents—most notably the Spanish flu, which a century ago killed around 50 million people worldwide and likely also originated from China.

And then there is the immense economic pain, which will ravage the informal sector, drive unemployment levels to new heights, and leave even the comfortably middle class in a state of economic panic. In the words of the New York Times, we are confronting a ‘pandemic caste system’, with ‘the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched to the limit by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had’. Economists are warning of a ‘Greater Depression’, the largest global economic contraction in recent memory. Yet it’s the unfolding human tragedy that should command our greatest attention.

‘A generation has died in just over two weeks. We’ve never seen anything like this and it just makes you cry,’ lamented a funeral director in the northern Italian city of Bergamo, the centre of Covid-19 outbreak in March. In a testament to the scale of a historic tragedy unfolding at the heart of Europe, on 13 March the city’s newspaper, L’Eco di Bergamo, dedicated ten pages to obituaries.

In short, the Covid-19 pandemic is the greatest and most devastating crisis that humanity has confronted since, at the very least, World War II. Thus, a generalised sense of panic and grief will grip large sections of humanity in ways that defy language and transcend existential paradigms.

With recent studies from China showing that the highly transmissible virus can extend its tentacles as far as 4.5 metres, even leading scientists are increasingly confounded about the true nature of this planetary enemy. Credible mass-produced vaccines, meanwhile, are unlikely to be rolled out until the second quarter of 2021. We are all trapped. We are all in exile.

But how did we get here? How and why did a relatively containable viral mutation in Wuhan, China’s Detroit, transmogrify into an assault

on the human species? Was it, in the words of Minxin Pei, China’s ‘pathological secrecy [that] hobbles the authorities’ capacity to respond quickly to epidemics’? He goes on: ‘To maintain its authority, the [Chinese Communist Party] must keep the public convinced that everything is going according to plan. That means carrying out systemic cover-ups of scandals and deficiencies that may reflect poorly upon the [CCP’s] leadership, instead of doing what is necessary to respond.’

Against this gloomy backdrop, Jiwei Ci’s Democracy in China is incredibly apt yet potentially tenuous. Stretching across some 400 pages, the book represents one of the most ambitious and sweeping treatises in favour of democratic transformation in the world’s most powerful bastion of twenty-first-century totalitarianism. The author writes, with little irony, that his goal is

to make the argument not only coherent but also compelling. So compelling, that is, that the parties concerned, including the CCP, will have no good reason to reject its plausibility as a prudent assessment … of certain crisis tendencies in China’s political status quo and, second, of democracy’s much-needed contribution to counteracting such tendencies.

And why would the CCP even bother to listen? Well, because of an impending ‘legitimation crisis’, Ci argues, which transcends questions of mere ‘performance’—that is, the provision of basic order and economic prosperity—and instead concerns a modern version of the ‘mandate of heaven’. For the author, the Xi Jinping administration, widely considered as the most authoritarian and powerful since the end of the Cultural Revolution, has both the unique opportunity and the difficult task of implementing necessary democratic reforms lest the communist regime’s very survival be imperilled under the next generation of leaders.

In a sense, Ci’s book is an heir to the long tradition of modernisation theory, starting with the panoramic observations and sweeping conclusions common among the works of Alexis de Tocqueville and Max

Weber in the formative years of social sciences, and of Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama in more recent decades. In fact, there is more than a tinge of ‘inevitablism’ sprinkled throughout the book. The author self-consciously draws inspiration from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–40), in which the Frenchman argued that rapid modernisation, progressive social equalisation and an iron spirit of egalitarianism created the conditions for a robust republican democracy.

In his two-volume magnum opus The Origins of Political Order (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay (2014), Fukuyama highlights how the balance of power among the ruling elite, the rising middle class and the broader masses shapes the destinies of not only democracies but also political systems. Ci echoes broadly similar arguments in the case of China, where he believes—openly drawing on Tocqueville’s notion of equality of (social) conditions facilitating political democratisation—that modern China has the ingredients to transition into a relatively mature and stable democracy.

Ci writes optimistically of a ‘China that is witnessing an inexorable democratization in its ethos, its organization of production and consumption, its structure of human interaction and familial relations; in a word, in its entire society, as distinct from its political system’. In short, the Fukuyaman social balance of forces has tilted in favour of political liberalisation, if not fully fledged democracy.

This streak of Hegelian thought inevitably becomes more apparent when the author argues that

only a democratic political regime has a chance of maintaining a legitimate and stable government in the context of a democratic society. Given that it is manifestly a democratic society today, China has already taken the ... irreversible [my emphasis] first step, whether by design or by default. Therefore, in the interest of a legitimate and stable political order, it has no choice [my emphasis] but to take the second.

Philosophically, the book’s political moderation and enlightened pragmatism builds heavily on the Kantian notion of Prussian freedom—namely, that one is free to exercise moral and intellectual agency so long as it doesn’t directly contradict the political status quo. Hence Ci’s argument in favour of CCP-driven democratisation, where there is ‘the sense of being free as individuals and as members of civil society and of being citizens with a credible role in shaping the life and destiny of the political community’.

By dispensing of metaphysical, Platonic arguments in favour of the moral superiority of democracy, the book echoes John Rawls’s practical argument in favour of social justice: a stable liberal order should be anchored on a sociologically shared and rationally defensible conception of what would be collectively beneficial, even to the most vulnerable sectors of the society, from behind ‘a veil of ignorance’.

‘The main reason for having democracy in China is that democracy is our best bet for effectively responding to current and especially impending legitimation challenges ... likely to be the most stable and durable regime ... under the circumstances in which China now finds itself,’ Ci writes.

But by appealing directly to the communist regime in China and highlighting its supposedly centrality (and presupposed willingness) as the potential locomotive of political liberalisation, one could detect, perhaps

Damien Chavanat

7

RebelDavid Parrish

H O N G K O N Gthrough a less charitable prism, none too subtle intimations of an ‘enlightened absolutism’ hypothesis, though not as absolute as Austrian emperor Joseph II’s infamous dictum, ‘Everything for the people, nothing by the people’. In Ci’s formulation, China is primed for democracy but the tortuous journey should be led by an avowedly authoritarian regime.

Meanwhile, the book also echoes a narrative common among police regimes across the Middle East, where the likes of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak unabashedly imposed a social contract: iron fist or bloody anarchy. A democratic transition without the CCP’s visible hand could create ‘unprecedented opportunities for all separatist tendencies to suddenly expand and try their luck in more confident and aggressive ways than ever before’. Moreover, there is the threat of socio-economic disintegration a la post-Soviet Russia, where the ‘democratic transition could turn into such a capitalist morass as to make neoliberal capitalism in the West look positively socialist. If we are not careful, this may well be the fate of China’s democratic transition, leaving many, possibly hundreds of millions, to wonder about the point of democratic change’.

Democracy in China is strongest in its ‘prudential’ argument in favour of democratisation in China, its astute analysis of the anatomy of

political legitimacy, and its commendable debunking of a cottage industry of ‘political orientalism’ falsely portraying China as essentially an authoritarian ‘other’ immune to the universal appeal of republican democracy. Quite paradoxically, the book is most convincing in its identification of immense practical obstacles to democratic reform in contemporary China.

The author correctly emphasises multiple structural deficits, namely the absence of any independent political force outside the tentacles of the communist ruling party; the vacuum of moral agency in a highly consumerist, traumatised and historically suppressed society; the prospect of civilisational disintegration and destructive predation by hostile outside powers; and the tightening grip of the capitalist oligarchy on the Chinese economy. Each of these challenges is immense.

Surprisingly, the book is most controversial, and even questionable, where one expects to find its greatest strength and lucidity: its portrayal of the Hong Kong protests. According to Ci, ‘What the movement expressed instead, above all, was many Hongkongers’ desire for apartness—the desire, that is, not so much to create a new (democratic) Hong Kong as to retain or restore what was once true of old Hong Kong—namely, its palpable and conspicuous difference and separateness from China.’

This reductionist analysis is more a portrayal of an ‘alternative’ point of view rather than a comprehensive take on the rapidly evolving situation on the ground. It strangely ignores a broad literature on democracy activists such as Joshua Wong and his rebellious heirs, who are opposing the intrusion of Chinese authoritarian ideology, beginning with the planned introduction of ‘patriotic education’ into school curriculums, as well as Beijing’s perceived betrayal (via proxies) of its initial promise for universal suffrage under the Basic Law.

In fact, any student of political science would know that in its current form Hong Kong is not even what scholars such as Adam Przeworski and Larry Diamond would see as a minimalist-procedural democracy—precisely what the protesters are asking for, among other freedoms, as they peer into an abyss of Chinese totalitarian rule that their parents hardly experienced or even expected.

The author correctly emphasises the depth of economic inequality as a potential driver of discontent, but conversations with young protesters suggest that what’s at stake is an ideational struggle, which is beyond just a bratty snobbery towards a supposedly unsophisticated mainland. Still, one should welcome Ci’s proto-Kantian take on the Hong Kong protests as an ‘alternative’ view from the less radicalised (if not avowedly conservative) sections of the revolting city-state.

Richard Heydarian is the author of ‘The Indo-Pacific: Trump, China, and the New Struggle for Global Mastery’

David Parrish is a former marketing executive at Penguin Random House in Hong Kong

JOSHUA WONG (WITH JASON Y. NG)Unfree Speech: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act

Penguin: 2020

Unfree Speech is the right book at the right time. For anyone who has followed the news from Hong Kong in recent years, this

book puts everything into perspective in a highly accessible way. Unfree Speech also gives us useful insights into the mind and values of Joshua Wong, who has now been on the front line of politics since 2011, when he was just fourteen.

The book comes in three parts. The first covers Wong’s early years and success with student activist group Scholarism, under which he challenged the Hong Kong government on a proposed national curriculum in 2011, before moving on to the Umbrella protests of 2014 which essentially shut down the centre of Hong Kong island for seventy-nine days. The second part details Wong’s time in prison, and here we learn more about his family, his Christian values and his realisation that there are layers of Hong Kong society he had not connected with or perhaps not even considered before his time in prison. Once Wong engages with those from different backgrounds who are in prison for drugs, theft or violent offences, he realises that there is more that connects than separates them. Wong’s official transition to adulthood is marked by his transfer from a young offenders’ institution to an adult prison on 13 October 2017, his twenty-first birthday—not part of his original life plan, I suspect.

Wong rounds out the book with stark warnings of how the Chinese Communist Party has successfully spread soft and not-so-soft politics throughout the free world, how it controls Chinese students studying in the West and how the party is using its considerable financial leverage to influence global agencies. Much of this will not be new to many readers, but having it presented in this way provides a stark warning to us all, and especially those of us who value freedom over lies and dogma.

Political activism in Hong Kong, after 1997, reaches back to the Article 23 protests of 2003, when an estimated 500,000 people took to the streets, causing the Hong Kong government to back down; the 2011 national curriculum demonstrations; through to the Umbrella Movement of 2014. Now we have the extradition-bill crisis, which has subsumed life in Hong Kong since June 2019, with no end in sight. Upwards of two million people have been on the streets, something approaching a quarter of the population. The bill has gone the same way as Article 23 and the national curriculum, but the protesters are emboldened and now there are more demands—‘Five Demands, Not One Less’, as the slogan goes.

In other hands this could have read like a collection of pieces, but with Jason Ng’s deft touch it is a body of work that provides a primer for the uninitiated and shines a light in the dark corners of Hong Kong politics for us all. ☐

The Covid-19 pandemic is China’s Chernobyl, though more ambiguous and more destructive. On the surface, China is no Soviet Union. It’s

integral to the global economy, responsible for almost a third of global GDP growth in recent years. In many ways, it’s immanent in the functioning of universal capitalism. Its bureaucracy, one of the world’s oldest, has been hailed for its emphasis on competence and dynamism, most famously by venture capitalist Eric Li. Unlike the Soviets’ largely isolated and extractive economy, China is the world’s factory and an increasingly dominant player in cutting-edge industries, including artificial intelligence.

So impressed are some by China’s strides in new-generation technologies that the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari has postulated the dominance of digital authoritarianism in the twenty-first century in contrast to the decisive victory of the West’s Hayekian spontaneous organisation in the preceding century. China is rich, prosperous and technologically advanced in ways the Soviet Union never was, or could ever become.

Throughout the first two decades of the post–Cold War period, China opportunistically sailed on the crest of US-led economic globalisation. The upshot of this seemingly symbiotic Sino–Western dynamic was what Joshua Cooper-Ramo termed the ‘Beijing Consensus’: a post-ideological commitment to mercantilist win-win intercourse with the world, especially the postcolonial realm. It was not until the tail end of the Hu Jintao administration, which coincided with the global financial crisis and the Great Recession, that we began to see a new assertiveness in Beijing, as the inheritor of a millennia-old imperial tradition began to carve out its own global empire on the cheap. Instead of an ‘end of history’, what we soon got was President Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’ and hopes for a ‘great rejuvenation’ of one of the world’s oldest empires-in-disguise.

On closer examination, China is the Soviet Union, but in a very specific and consequential way. Since Xi’s ascent the country has appropriated Maoist politics, with disturbing consequences for systemic stability. In particular, the purge of rivals, ostensibly on corruption charges, has unleashed fear and trembling, which has incentivised cover-ups and sycophancy. Crucially, China-based investigative journalists at Caixin Global have revealed that scientists were instructed to destroy the evidence of a new SARS-like virus when it first emerged. As a Wuhan-based journalist lamented, ‘Everyone must understand, first of all, that this epidemic was allowed to spread for a period of more than forty days before … any decisive action [was] taken.’ To put the crisis into context, the journalist explains, echoing Pei’s argument, ‘the main efforts undertaken by the leadership, and by provincial and city governments in particular … were focused mostly not on the containment of the epidemic itself, but on the containment and suppression of information about the disease.’ This accounts for the widespread outrage and calls for press freedom across China after the death of Li Wenliang, one of the eight ‘whistleblowers’, who exposed the true nature of the pandemic threat last year.

There is clear evidence of a systematic cover-up by Chinese authorities in the early stages of the pandemic. Instead of owning up, the Chinese regime is expected to dig in. Eager to deflect accountability, the CCP seems to have anticipated what could be the greatest torrent of anti-China sentiments in recent memory by launching its own counter-offensive, including the bizarre claim that the contagion is a US biowarfare conspiracy.

In a telltale of the coming rage against Beijing, one group in Dallas is suing the Chinese government for US$20 trillion in damages. We don’t know what the exact trajectory of the pandemic will be, given the differential responses from a complex array of institutions around the world, but what’s clear is that, geopolitically speaking, things are going to get very ugly. ☐

8

Strait defianceMichael Reilly

T A I W A N

KERRY BROWN AND KALLEY WU TZU HUIThe Trouble with Taiwan: History, the

United States and a Rising ChinaZed Books: 2019

One of the biggest myths in contemporary international relations is the often repeated and widely accepted mantra of the Chinese

government that Taiwan is part of China. It is taught in Chinese schools as if it were fact, and millions, indeed billions, of foreigners accept the assertion without question. Dissenting views within China are suppressed, and those in Taiwan who suggest otherwise are demonised by China as ‘splittists’. Hand in hand with this is the claim that ‘reunification’ is only a matter of time.

But today, reunification is further away than ever. The Trouble with Taiwan helps explain why. Kerry Brown and Kalley Wu Tzu Hui claim only to be updating and disseminating discussion of some key issues, not to be engaging in original scholarship. But the very fact that one of the key sites on social media for discussion of books about Taiwan is called Books about Nerdiness, without any sense of irony, shows how little published work there is in English about Taiwan generally, despite its history and its contribution to culture, not to mention its place in international relations. For this reason alone, this book is welcome.

At the heart of their analysis is the authors’ argument that the democratisation of Taiwan since 1996 has made reunification a remote and unlikely prospect. The advent of democracy on Taiwan, they argue, has led to the existence of two fundamentally different and incompatible political systems, and by becoming a democracy, ‘Taiwan has succeeded in placing perhaps the strongest barrier between itself and politics on the Mainland’. They helpfully, and rightly, explain that, for all the differences in their political campaign rhetoric, at bottom there is more in their views of China that unites Taiwan’s two main political parties, the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), than divides them. Both rule out unification with China until and unless the latter is itself democratic—and if that ever happens, the question of unification will almost certainly become moot.

But China’s rulers find this hard to grasp and assiduously court politicians from the KMT while cold-shouldering those of the DPP, whom they denounce for being ‘pro-independence’. Brown is a scholar of Chinese politics and one of the book’s strengths is its analysis of Beijing’s handling of Taiwan, helping explain why China’s leaders seem so often to get this wrong. It argues that the PRC has created ‘a policy led as much by emotion as by rational choice’, something that seems destined to continue under Xi Jinping’s style of politics, where ‘the power is more often than not in the story being told’. The inertia in Chinese policymaking that this creates is explained well, the authors arguing that ‘there seems limited evidence that analysts in the PRC are able to properly comprehend what sort of transformations are happening in Taiwanese society [as they] operate within an ideological framework’.

But placing Xi’s stance in a broader context would have been helpful. Under Hu Jintao, for example, the Chinese government was willing to engage with the previous DPP government in Taipei, the two governments negotiating and agreeing most of the groundwork for the ‘early harvest’ of direct flights and tourist visits that marked the early months of

Ma Ying-jeou’s government in 2008. Yet that DPP administration was far more hawkish in its position on Taiwanese independence than the present one under Tsai Ing-wen has been.

The authors ascribe this inertia to the risk for Chinese policymakers that any reassessment would require removal or readjustment of the policy framework set by Mao Zedong. But Mao himself was happy to change his views on Taiwan. He told Edgar Snow in 1936 that he did not consider Taiwan to be Chinese territory and that the Communist Party’s policy was to help it gain independence from Japanese rule, only to change his mind after Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taipei in 1949. His early view is airbrushed from Chinese history, but how much of the inertia in present-day policymaking is due to his later view and how much to the inflexibility and subservience of the Chinese bureaucracy?

The Trouble with Taiwan is also strong in explaining the psychological impact on Taiwanese of China’s success in denying the existence of a separate Taiwanese identity. National identity is one of our most intimate and important possessions, so fundamental to our sense of belonging that few of us truly understand or appreciate what it means to have this most basic right denied. It was invoked by former British prime minister Theresa May when she said, ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’. The leaders of the Soviet Union understood its power, which is why stripping someone of their citizenship was one of the most powerful weapons in their arsenal against dissenters. Yet, as the authors explain, Taiwanese cannot cheer on their own country in international sporting events, they cannot compete under their own name or under their own flag at the Olympics (contrary to what the book claims on the latter). Increasingly, they cannot even find their own country in the scroll-down list when doing something as basic as booking an international flight or hotel accommodation.

The authors are weaker, however, in their analysis of the economic aspects of the complex relationship between Taiwan and China, their attempts to be concise resulting in an at times simplistic overview. They claim that the Taiwanese economy is a manifestation of the Chinese one, but most observers, surely, would put it the other way around. China may be Taiwan’s largest trade partner and export market but an uncomfortable,

if rarely stated, reality for China is that the dependence is mutual: Taiwanese companies have been among the biggest overseas investors in the Chinese economy, above all in the electronics sector. China’s largest private-sector employer is Taiwanese company Foxconn, eight of its top eleven exporting companies are Taiwanese, while China’s huge instant noodle market is dominated by two Taiwanese firms and its middle classes shop at Taiwanese-owned department stores. The book states, correctly, that Chinese investment in the Taiwanese economy remains highly circumscribed but skates over the—often pernicious—impact of Chinese-owned or Chinese-influenced media on Taiwanese politics and society.

Brown and Wu assert that the current situation in cross-strait relations is unsustainable. It is a view widely shared, given the expectation that the Chinese Communist Party will never accept de jure Taiwanese independence, and not the less worrying for that. But it is far from new. As papers in the British national archives show, almost fifty years ago British diplomats were arguing that the most likely future relationship for Taiwan with China was a form of autonomy: ‘one country, two systems’ before that phrase ever became a statement of policy. Since then, China and Taiwan have become interdependent to a degree hard to imagine then, but Taiwan has also become economically much stronger and more self-reliant. Rhetoric aside, the status quo suits both sides, so there seems no reason why it should not continue indefinitely.

The authors also rightly point to the often significant but easily overlooked cultural differences between the two sides of the strait. Perhaps unwittingly, they demonstrate one themselves in their constant use of the word ‘reunification’, a word that finds little favour in Taiwan, where the response is likely to be ‘reunification with what?’ Not since the Qing dynasty has the island been ruled from Beijing, while the People’s Republic of China has been in existence for only seventy-one years and even the Republic of China only since 1911 (in the brief period after World War II when the Republic of China governed both the mainland and Taiwan, the seat of government was in Nanjing). Even then, Beijing’s rule was often more nominal than real and formally extended to only a little over half of the island.

It’s a pity that the narrative goes only to 2019, for the authors’ claim that standards of living matter more to Taiwanese voters than ‘sometimes more abstract geopolitical issues’ was arguably undermined by Tsai Ing-wen’s re-election as president in early 2020. An assessment of what this means for Beijing’s policy would have added to the impact of the book.

It’s also a pity that the quality of the proofreading and editing doesn’t match the force of the authors’ argument. Errors abound: in statistics, in terminology (super conductors, instead of semiconductors, for example), in names (Annette Lee instead of Annette Lu, or Chun Yi-lee instead of Chun-yi Lee), and the two countries are 100 miles apart, not 100 kilometres. Less haste and greater attention to detail would have made for a better, more powerful book. Despite the blemishes, it remains an important, thought-provoking and welcome addition to discussion of what remains a poorly understood but major international geopolitical issue. ☐

Michael Reilly is a senior fellow in the Taiwan Studies Programme at Nottingham University and a former visiting fellow at Academia Sinica in Taipei, and was the United Kingdom’s representative to Taiwan from 2005 to 2009

9

Deoli CampSomak Ghoshal

I N D I A

JOY MA AND DILIP D’SOUZAThe Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the

1962 Chinese-Indian InternmentPan Macmillan India: 2020

On 18 November 1962, three days before the month-long conflict between India and China ended, the Indian army, under orders from

the government of then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, began rounding up as many Indian citizens of Chinese ancestry as they could from all over the country. Smarting from the humiliating defeat they had suffered at the hands of the Chinese, the soldiers stormed around with a vengeance, picking up people they suspected of spying. There was no need to produce any proof of wrongdoing; it was enough simply to ‘look Chinese’ to be deemed suspicious. The exact ethnicity of the suspects did not matter, nor did their status in society. From high-profile professionals to restaurateurs to small business owners, few escaped the wrath of the government, which was smarting from its loss in the battle for the Aksai Chin region in the north.

The army came calling at all hours, including the dead of night. Men were asked to leave with only the bare essentials, assured that they would be released soon. In some families, as the men were being led away, the women and children joined them, not wanting to be left by themselves, fearful of what the future held. Those who chose to stay behind faced mounting racial slurs from people they had looked upon as fellow citizens, neighbours and friends.

In the end, some 3,000 Indian citizens of Chinese origin were removed from their homes in different parts of the country, most of them from the eastern and northeastern states of West Bengal and Assam. They were held in local prisons for a few days, with no clear reason given for their arrest, then transported by train and trucks to Deoli, a nondescript town in the western state of Rajasthan. During the long journey from one end of the country to the other, their train stopped numerous times to pick up provisions. At each place, it was stoned by the locals. Only much later did some of the detainees learn that the compartments they were in had ‘enemy train’ scribbled on the outside, making them easy prey.

The former location of an internment camp for Japanese prisoners during World War II, Deoli is an obscure dot on the map of India. The detainees were unprepared for its arid desert climate and unfamiliar with the local language. Most of them had spent nearly all, if not all, their lives in India. They spoke Hindi, Bengali, Assamese; only a few were conversant in any of the languages spoken in China. But just like that, one day they found themselves in Deoli, where they would spend from a few weeks to several years before earning their reprieve. In the intervening time, after the initial disbelief had subsided, life settled into a dystopian rhythm—people fell ill and recovered, people died, babies were born, youngsters went without schooling for long phases. Those who were released returned to their home towns to find their dwellings gone, their businesses destroyed.

Joy Ma was born in the Deoli internment camp and grew up in India, before leaving for graduate school in the United States. But years would go by until

she confronted the truth of the circumstances of her birth—or the enormity of what it meant for her family to be marked as one of the Deoliwallahs (the people from

Deoli). By the time she turned five, the family had left the camp and were living in Calcutta—among the last six families to leave Deoli in 1967. While browsing photo albums, little Ma wondered there were no pictures of her as a baby alongside those of her older siblings. ‘We were at the camp and we didn’t have a camera when you were born,’ her mother, Effa, told her when asked. For Ma the ‘camp’ remained a thing of the past, hazy and indistinct, until, at the age of fourteen, she experienced, for the first time, the raucous celebrations for the Chinese New Year by her community in Calcutta’s Chinatown. Puzzled about why her family never observed the holiday, Ma accosted her mother again. This time, her mother told her that their family was interned on that very day in 1963 and ‘didn’t want to celebrate it’.

Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, information about the family’s time in Deoli began to come together over the years, filling in gaps, piling detail upon detail, until the past was revealed in all its horrific specificities. Apart from the stories of her family, immediate and extended, Ma began to hear those of the Chinese diaspora in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe. But the turning point came in 2012, when she was requested by an Indian magazine to write an article for the fiftieth anniversary of the Sino-Indian War. Initially reluctant to revisit those painful days, Ma was convinced by the need to make the Deoli episode known to a wider public. She called her mother and asked her, once more, about the day their family was taken away. Their conversation ended in tears, but Ma’s article opened a floodgate.

Ma soon began to hear of other writers and researchers gathering the stories of the Deoliwallahs, her network began to grow, and voices began to pour in from across the world. The Deoliwallahs is faithful oral history, painstakingly collected by Ma over the years and transformed into moving narratives of loss and trauma, interspersed with chapters on the political and social history of Sino-Indian relations, written by Dilip D’Souza. The personal testimonies are reproduced almost verbatim, irrespective of the inevitable overlaps. Memories recur of food scarcity; of the unhygienic state of the ‘barracks’ in which people were forced to live; and of those lost days,

months and years—of suspended life, work and education. In 1963, when then home minister Lal Bahadur

Shastri, who would take over as prime minister after Nehru’s death, visited Deoli, the inhabitants begged him for better living conditions. One survivor, Andy Hsieh, remembers speaking to the minister directly. ‘ “Mr Shastri, I’m eighteen now,” I told him. “I’m supposed to be in high school … Can you do something? Can we study in the town during the day and come back to the Camp?” ’

Shastri promised to look into the matter on his return to Delhi, but nothing came of Hsieh’s request. In the official report of the visit, the Deoliwallahs were living contentedly in the camp, well taken care of by the Indian state (which gave them a pittance as monthly allowance), with no complaints whatsoever.

Ma is upfront about what Deoli was to the internees:

In Chinese, we refer to Deoli Camp as chap chung yin (Hakka) or chi chung yin (Pinyin), which translates as ‘gathered-together camp’ or ‘concentration camp’ … There is simply no term for an internment camp in Chinese, so when some people initially referred to it, they called it a concentration camp in English. For the Deoli internees, it was the concentration camp.

Quibbles over terminology aside, Deoli Camp won’t be the last of its kind, sadly, at least in India. Last year, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi passed a controversial law, amid widespread public protests, that grants citizenship to persecuted minorities—except for Muslims—from three neighbouring countries. Alongside it is a proposal for a national population register that would weed out undesirable illegal immigrants and move them to refugee camps. To qualify as citizens, these latter, most of whom are among the most disenfranchised, would have to produce identity papers they are unlikely to possess, or be able to procure them legally. As of November 2019, in Assam alone, six such camps had held 988 of these ‘foreigners’, among whom at least twenty-eight died. ☐

Somak Ghoshal is a journalist from Bengaluru, India

An identification card from Deoli Camp

Supplied

From The Deoliwallahs

10

IsolatedPeter Guest

N O T E B O O K

I have now taken the same photograph about three dozen times. In the left-hand corner is Shinjuku, towers muddled with haze, mirrored on the right

almost exactly by Ikebukuro. In the centre, low-rise Tokyo in all its bent perspectives. Roads that snake between the upper storeys; a canal suspended above the warren of backstreets, the neon dice and billboards that seem to float at ground level.

Tokyo, filmic in any weather, has been skipping channels. One day it snowed and was dark at noon. For three days in a row, the wind blew at 30 kilometres per hour and skittered dead leaves in through the window. Just once, in bright sunlight, a maintenance worker in a mask and overalls climbed up onto the water tower on the building opposite and balanced ten storeys up without a harness. Unable to leave the apartment, this is all I can shoot.

Self-isolation is strange, and made stranger by not quite knowing whether I should be in it or not. I’m not sick enough to find out what I’m sick with. Japan’s policy on testing for the Covid-19 virus has been to look away wherever it can. The threshold for testing is high, and I never quite met it. Even doctors who want to test their patients say they can’t get clearance. So, in the absence of a diagnosis, I panic-bought frozen vegetables, Scotch and dry carbohydrates and sealed myself in my two-room flat to wait for the symptoms to pass.

Those symptoms: shakes. When I first moved into the flat, there were earthquakes every few weeks, small ones that made the concrete hum and rattled the crockery. In the absence of medical advice, I turned to the Japanese seismological survey to figure out whether the vibrations were me or the tectonics. A fever—possibly. On day seven a thermometer arrived from Amazon. It is pink and it tells me when I’m ovulating. Fever dreams, waking at 4 a.m. gasping for air, not sure whether I’m sick or dreaming that I’m sick. When my friends and colleagues check how I am, I say ‘not dead’. What other answer is there? I’m not.

In Japan, we don’t know if there’s a crisis. We haven’t checked. We won’t, until things go bad.

For most of March, we were on the precipice of a lockdown that was always a day away. Abe Shinzo’s government has apparently been split on when to act. The economy has been drifting for some time, and the sudden end to the Chinese tour parties that prop up the retail and travel sectors has likely pushed it into recession, helped on its way by an unpopular rise in consumption tax. That, along with relatively low numbers of confirmed Covid-19 cases, has encouraged the government to hold its course and keep the economy open. This state of denial or grace meant that, while global superpowers built tent cities to house their casualties, Japan put up banners to celebrate the imminent Olympic Games, which were always going to happen in July until suddenly they weren’t.

Even as cases started to tick up in Tokyo—14 million people, 500 beds set aside for Covid-19 patients—the government held on, past the end of the tax year, allowing companies to book what profits they could before the inevitable stock market tank. Yuriko Koike, the Tokyo governor, urged people to be responsible and stay home, but she has no powers to declare or enforce a real lockdown.

In the vacuum, life went on. On work nights izakayas were still crammed, windows frosted with beery huff that I can only hope comes out sterilised by the booze. The metros emptied out on weekends, but weekday rush hours were still rushed. When the early spring brought out the sakura blossoms, hundreds of people still laid out their picnic blankets and lounged in the parks.

Throughout, the numbers of infected people stayed low. There is a thread of reasoning in the local media that Japan has defied the exponential function because it is culturally predisposed to social distancing and good hygiene. I have had it earnestly explained to me that cultures that take their shoes off upon entering the house are naturally more resistant to pandemics. This insistence has led to a degree of cognitive dissonance. Because Japan excels at social distancing, social distancing is unnecessary.

Some—often, but not always, foreign—pundits subscribe to the idea that Japan is just somehow healthier than the slovenly West. The mythical fish diet, the distance running. The twelfth-hour workdays in poorly ventilated offices. The rushed pre-made konbini meals. The absence of paid sick leave that means workplaces and metro carriages are normally half filled with bemasked and grey-faced salarymen spluttering into their smartphones. The constant state of exhaustion that is still a badge of courage for lifetime straphangers. On Saturday mornings, watching the battle casualties stumbling back from Kabukicho, Tokyo always looks like ground zero for something.

Whether or not this mythic culture really has saved Tokyo, we will hopefully live to find out. More likely, it is what has held back a decisive response. The insularity and conservatism of corporate Japan are legendary. A consultant here once told me that, presented with the option of change or die, most of his clients would choose oblivion.

Faced with a bona fide existential threat, employers simply don’t have the technology to respond. Japan’s present is still a 1980s vision of the future, where robots commingle with fax machines and women are expected to dress like air hostesses for the office.

So much of socially distanced Japan relies on close contact with paperwork. Whole generations have graduated from top schools to spend years as trainees stacking, compiling and moving paper. Nothing is official unless it is printed and stamped with red ink. Utility bills have to be paid in cash at the 7-Eleven.

Many companies have never issued their staff with laptops, preferring them to remain tethered to their desks. Those lucky few who have succumbed to ‘teleworking’, as it is charmingly known here, tell me that they have to give their managers itemised lists of the tasks they have completed during the day. Now, between absent-mindedly overfeeding their pets and children and reading the labels on their bottles of spirits, they have to invent tasks furiously—all the while facing the grim reckoning that their average workday is largely vacant, composed of hour upon hour of meetings that felt unnecessary even before every colleague became a potential vector of infection.

All this together means that a shutdown here would be more profound than in London or New York, or any other city where Netflix is the lowest common denominator of collective experience. There the transition to teleworking is mostly dietary and sartorial. Here it could be epochal. No more staggering from izakaya to ramen-ya on the way to the last metro. No more paper-shuffling apprenticeships. No more awkward applause around conference tables. The foundational elements of corporate culture, lost to the digital age at last.

So Japan isn’t looking too hard, leading to this strange Schrödinger’s crisis and an uneasy calm with intermittent bouts of hoarding. Shops have been out of toilet roll for more than a month, and on the day my self-isolation ended, a rumour of an imminent lockdown flooded my local supermarket with weaponised pensioners sweeping the lower shelves of non-perishable goods.

Towards the end of my internment—after maybe ten days of compulsively taking photographs from the balcony and arguing with my robot vacuum cleaner, which has developed a glitch so that it now erratically rearranges the furniture and ruts with the bathroom scales—my symptoms subsided entirely. What they left behind was a kind of workaday dread, a background hum of disquiet that I can’t shake off.

We are, finally, heading for a real lockdown. A state of emergency will be declared any day, and I will be back in confinement. We all will. And waiting for that, I have found I’m also waiting for an earthquake. Night after night before I go to bed, I get a compulsion to lift everything valuable down from their shelves and lay them out safely on the floor, as though I’m waiting for the punchline of this strange not-quite crisis. ☐

Peter Guest is a journalist based in Tokyo

Peter Guest

11

Fukushima is oddly tidy for all that death that lurks in its forested hills and emerald-green river valleys. On 11 March 2011, or 3/11, as it is known in Japan,

nearly 20,000 people were killed by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that wiped out entire towns and scrubbed the northeastern coast of Japan free of human habitation for up to ten kilometres inland. Even before the tsunami flooded six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima power plant, the Tohoku earthquake—the biggest recorded in modern Japanese history—had crippled the cooling system and sent the plant careening towards the meltdowns and explosions that would rock it over the next few days. One hundred and sixty thousand people were evacuated from a nuclear exclusion zone that kept growing, until parts of it, downwind of the reactors, stretched nearly 100 kilometres inland.  

Nine years on, three of Fukushima’s reactors are still so radioactively hot that the robots sent to examine them are fried in minutes. Five thousand people labour daily to contain the ongoing disaster. They pump cooling water into reactor cores and fuel pools, while struggling to keep the damaged buildings from collapsing. More than a billion litres of contaminated water—the equivalent of 480 Olympic-sized swimming pools—are stored on site in rusting tanks. Another river of groundwater flows down from the mountains into the basements of the flooded reactors, where it becomes contaminated before leaking into the Pacific Ocean. 

Ringing the power plant are the police check points that keep people from entering areas that will be radioactive for decades, if not centuries. Outside this nuclear exclusion zone labours another army of workers in white hazmat suits. Totalling 88,000 over the years, these are the nuclear gypsies, an itinerant labour force, often recruited by the Japanese mafia, who are hired to fill black vinyl garbage bags with topsoil scraped from school yards and other debris gathered from around people’s houses. This removes enough radioactive material to allow parts of Fukushima to be declared open for resettlement. The government has also redefined allowable levels of radiation exposure. In Fukushima prefecture, these levels are twenty times higher than any place else in the world, including the rest of Japan. The threshold for what qualifies as nuclear waste has also been raised. This is now eighty times higher.

‘The Japanese government has been aggressively pushing the lifting of restrictions orders for contaminated municipalities in Fukushima,’ says Tilman Ruff, co-founder of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. ‘This artificially reduces the number of officially recognised evacuees. While attempting to create a misleading illusion of return to normality, the government is still now, nine years after the disaster, applying an allowable radiation annual dose limit for the public of 20 millisieverts. It is the only government worldwide to accept such a high level so many years after a nuclear disaster.’

Before the 2020 Olympics were postponed by the coronavirus pandemic, the relay race marking the opening of the games was scheduled to begin at J-Village, the Japan Football Association Academy for training soccer players. J-Village lies nineteen kilometres south of Fukushima Daiichi. This is Fukushima Number 1, or FI, as the complex of six nuclear reactors was called, to distinguish it from Fukushima Daini, Fukushima Number 2, another complex of four nuclear reactors built ten kilometres from J-Village. J-Village

housed atomic refugees from Fukushima and served as the command centre for managing the disaster. Now scrubbed of contaminated particles and soil, the site was supposed to showcase what organisers were calling Japan’s ‘Reconstruction Olympics’. From here would begin the relay race through the abandoned towns and rice paddies surrounding the Daini and Daiichi reactors. The torch would then head to Fukushima City, sixty-five kilometres to the northwest, where the first six Olympic Games in softball and baseball were to have been played.  

Fukushima is ‘under control’, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo reassured the Olympic Committee in 2013. ‘Mr Abe’s “under control” remark was a lie,’ said former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi at a press conference in 2016. Since then, charges have escalated into claims that Japan bribed its way into securing the Olympics. The head of the Japanese Olympic Committee, who has since retired, is currently under indictment in France for buying the votes of African delegates with US$2 million laundered through a PR firm in Singapore. In the meantime, the cost of the 2020 games—even before the added expense of delaying them—had ballooned to US$26.4 billion.  

In April 2019, Prime Minister Abe rode the bullet train from Tokyo to Koriyama City. From there he was driven in a motorcade to J-Village. According to his official schedule, the prime minister ‘interacted with elementary and junior high school students’ long enough to shoot some photos. From Japan’s football training camp, he drove nineteen kilometres north to the Fukushima power plant, where his car was waved through the gate and parked at the base of a viewing platform. Abe mounted the platform and positioned himself in front of Fukushima’s reactors long enough for another photo op. He would later describe how safe Fukushima was, because on this, his third visit to the power plant, instead of wearing protective clothing and a face mask, he was dressed in a suit and tie. Abe’s visit to Fukushima lasted six minutes.

As radiation continues to leak from Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean and surrounding countryside, perhaps 100,000 people are still displaced from their homes. The area remains an officially designated nuclear exclusion zone, but the Japanese government stopped paying housing subsidies to evacuees in 2017. This is part of an effort to force people back into their abandoned towns. As the UN special rapporteur noted in 2018, ‘The gradual lifting of evacuation orders has created enormous strains on people whose lives have already been affected by the worst nuclear disaster in this century. Many feel they are being forced to return to areas that are unsafe, including those with radiation levels above what the government previously considered safe.’ With most of Fukushima’s refugees reclassified as ‘voluntary evacuees’, the Japanese government claims that only 41,112 people remain displaced. 

Japan is conducting a risky experiment with its citizens. The contest involves learning how to survive in an irradiated landscape. Citizen scientists, women’s collectives and support groups with ties to Chernobyl and other nuclear exclusion zones have formed to meet the challenge. They are building home-made radiation detectors, developing radiation-resistant crops, sharing news online, filing court cases and exchanging information around the world. 

‘The government, on the grounds that an emergency situation prevails, has scrapped the usual regulations and abandoned several million people to live in

Made in JapanThomas A. Bass

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contaminated areas,’ says Koide Hiroaki, a nuclear physicist who has been a fierce critic of Japan’s ‘nuclear village’—the term used to describe the country’s pro-nuclear lobbyists and officials. ‘Staying in contaminated areas hurts the body, but evacuation crushes the soul. These abandoned people have been living in anguish every day for eight years,’ he says.  

Refugees from the Fukushima disaster were resettled in prefab encampments erected in parking lots and fields at the edges of inland cities away from the coast. The camps have been emptying since the government cut off aid to evacuees in 2017, but few people have returned to their old homes in the exclusion zone, which today is filled with ghost towns, abandoned store fronts, collapsing houses, vine-covered cars and wild animals nesting in the urban ruins. 

Given the government’s desire to resettle the area as rapidly as possible, it is not hard to visit Fukushima. The bullet train north from Tokyo to Iwaki takes about four hours. After picking up a rented car, paranoid visitors worried about eating local food can drop into the market in the basement of Iwaki’s biggest department store and stock up on rice balls and water. From there one drives north over a range of mountains, before dropping down into what were once the green paddy fields and pastureland of coastal Fukushima. The first hint that one is entering a disaster zone comes when the road crests the mountains. The big green signs along the highway, instead of indicating exits and local attractions, give LED readouts for the amount of caesium-137 and other gamma radiation blowing up from the coast. The numbers fluctuate with activity at the power plant and the prevailing winds, but one is advised to travel these roads as rapidly as possible, with the windows closed.     

Far in the distance, one catches a glimpse of the ruined power plant. Crouched near the water on a shelf carved from a rocky headland, Fukushima Daiichi’s six reactors and eight fuel storage pools are covered with construction cranes that look like praying mantises feeding on a delectable carcass. A line of grey steel towers runs from the plant up into the hills and south towards Tokyo, which used to light itself with energy from Fukushima. Thrown over the pylons is a black net of power lines that no longer carry power. This was once a mystical place, where atoms were split to light up the night sky in Tokyo. Now it looks like the hulking wreck of a ruined civilisation. 

Running north and south from Fukushima are the concrete seawalls that Japan built after the tsunami to protect itself from future earthquakes and shock waves. The walls stretch intermittently for 480 kilometres along the eastern coast of Honshu, Japan’s main island. Nine metres high, the walls look like runways in an empty airport. Down at water level, the massive revetments block the horizon behind a grey scrim of concrete. The walls are positioned against an invasion, but the invader, in this case, is the ocean from which Japan gets much of its food. On a coastline often lashed by tsunamis and typhoons, where the Japanese used to look out to sea and read the waves for signs of danger, now they hunker behind concrete walls that have failed to protect them in the past and that are likely to fail again in the future. 

Dropping down into the plain surrounding the power plant, one senses that something horrible has happened here. The land has been swept clear of houses, schools, towns, harbours. The wave that doomed Fukushima Daiichi also drowned people and animals, before sucking their bodies out to sea. Some towns were destroyed completely. Others look like gap-toothed

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survivors that are missing some but not all of their buildings. What the tsunami did not destroy was subsequently doomed by the radioactive fallout from Fukushima. The forced evacuations and the toxic clouds that still waft up into the hills have left the scrubbed plain and towns eerily quiet. No one is working the fields. No one is herding animals or sailing fishing boats out to sea. No one is driving to town for groceries or picking up children from school. 

The only signs of activity come from trucks rolling through the countryside. They are carrying black vinyl bags full of irradiated refuse that is being dumped in the former rice paddies and fields of Fukushima. Mountains of debris have been scraped up by workers, many recruited from Vietnam and the Philippines, who travel through the abandoned towns around Fukushima like white-suited locusts, removing topsoil, saplings, brush, bark and other radioactive material from areas being readied for resettlement. The flat-topped pyramids of toxic waste are a temporary solution, says the government, which is offering a large sum of money to any community willing to build a permanent repository. So far there are no takers.  

Yuki and Eri, my two research assistants, and I drive past a field full of men in hazmat suits. They are scraping five centimetres of topsoil off a pasture whose red clay now looks like a nasty wound. Down at sea level, with a concrete wall looming over us, we thread our way through a construction site where workers are building a white fence around a towering pile of one-tonne vinyl bags. The country opens into scrubby fields swept free of habitation, save for a couple of houses that look like something remaining after a tank battle in Flanders. The windows are blown out. Mouldy shoes are stored on racks inside door frames with no doors. All the furniture is gone, except for one house with a piano upended in what used to be the living room. In front of a three-storey building that was once a school, we come on a strange sight, a half dozen oversized frogs, cast in concrete, that are lined up like sentinels. Rising over the building, on the seaward side, is a tower that served as a lookout for scanning the horizon. Because their teachers saw the wave coming and led everyone to high ground, the children in this school were saved.

Farther south along the coast rises a little hill with stone steps leading up to a Shinto shrine. The shrine survived the tsunami, but its stones are cracked and heaved. Moss grows in the votive niches. The coast was once covered with pilgrimage sites. The most curious of these are the stone markers placed on the hillsides. Dating back hundreds of years, the stones are carved with inscriptions that warn about tsunamis. The stones are time travellers, speaking through the ages, saying, ‘Beware! The ocean has come this high and destroyed everything in its path. Whatever you build below this marker, it too will be destroyed.’    

Still farther along the coast one finds another strange sight, a windowless, four-storey building with a chimney poking out of the roof. This is one of the incinerators that Japan has built every few miles up and down the coast. One reason why the countryside looks so empty is because workers have been collecting all the ruined houses and boats, the furniture and flotsam that was scattered over the landscape and burning it, regardless of how toxic it is, so that now the ash in these incinerators is a concentrated mass of radioactive material. This has not stopped Japan from allowing the ash to be used in construction projects, which is one reason why people have recorded dangerous levels of radiation at building sites throughout the country. 

We drive into Namie, a once-thriving city of 20,000. Namie is now a ghost town of abandoned buildings and traffic lights blinking over empty boulevards. Eight kilometres north of the power plant, the city lies within Fukushima’s original twenty-kilometre exclusion zone, which was evacuated soon after the plant began releasing plutonium, caesium, iodine-131 and other radioactive substances. The houses in Namie are beginning to fall into the ground. Their roofs are covered with white splotches where the tiles have blown

off. The cars parked out front are overgrown with vines and creepers. The yards are untended, with perennials poking up through the weeds. Other yards, closer to the centre of the city, have been scraped of topsoil. Here the houses have been power-washed and left standing on what look like clay tennis courts. A fishing boat leans against an abandoned bowling alley. The car dealers downtown have showrooms stocked with radioactive cars. The clothing stores are displaying sun dresses and chinos that were in style nine years ago. The grocery stores are filled with food dumped off the shelves during the earthquake and aftershocks. The hospital is a looming hulk with locked doors and weeds growing in the parking lot. The schoolyards have been scraped of topsoil, but no children have returned to play in them.  

Scattered throughout the town are metal posts, topped with LED readouts showing the amount of gamma radiation blowing through the air. On days when the readings are high, with the wind blowing directly from Fukushima Daiichi, people are supposed to stay indoors with the windows shut. Three thousand six hundred radiation monitoring devices have been installed in the towns and up in the hills behind the reactors. The devices read low, people say, measuring one-half to one-third what is recorded by their personal devices. Critics also say the posts are spaced too far apart, missing the hot spots where radiation can spike to alarming levels. The monitoring posts are one of the few remaining signs of an ongoing nuclear disaster, but the Japanese government is in the process of removing them.  

The posts measure ionising radiation emitted primarily by caesium-137, a radioactive element that was first observed on Earth in 1945, after the first atomic bomb was exploded in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert. The four types of radiation—alpha, beta, gamma and neutron—are invisible forms of matter that destroy human tissue. They are distinguished by their levels of energy and ability to penetrate solid objects. Gamma rays enter our bodies and alter genetic material by ionising, or removing electrons from atoms. Living cells that are ionised will die, mutate or become cancerous. Hardest hit by ionising radiation are cells that are rapidly reproducing, such as those in a growing foetus. While gamma rays can travel through matter easily, destroying bone marrow and internal organs, alpha particles are blocked by clothing (although lethal if ingested). Beta particles are blocked by thin sheets of metal or plastic. Gamma rays are stopped by nothing short of lead shields or concrete barriers. Neutron rays, which are released during the fission process in nuclear reactors, are large radioactive particles that can travel many miles and pass through everything, including concrete and steel. 

Ionising radiation enters our bodies and food chain in a variety of ways, and, thanks to a process called bioaccumulation, the higher an animal eats on the food chain, the higher the concentration of radionuclides. The effective dose of radiation required to sicken or kill you is measured in sieverts (Sv), which is named after Rolf Sievert, the Swedish physicist who first calibrated the lethal effects of radioactive energy. A burst dose of 0.75 Sv will produce nausea and a weakened immune system. A dose of 10 Sv will kill you. A dose somewhere in between gives you a fifty-fifty chance of dying within thirty days. Guidelines for workers in the nuclear industry limit the maximum yearly dose to 0.05 Sv or the equivalent of five CT scans. So how many sieverts are currently being produced by Fukushima’s melted reactors? The latest reading from reactor No. 2 is 530 Sv per hour. This means that every hour the reactor is emitting more than 10,000 times the yearly allowable dose for radiation workers. With reactors this hot, Japan’s plan to scoop up Fukushima’s nuclear fuel and dump it somewhere, which is projected to take forty years, may not be possible. In this case, Fukushima, like Chernobyl, will have to be entombed in three giant pyramids of concrete, which will be Japan’s legacy to the archaeologists of the Anthropocene. 

Measuring gamma radiation is useful, particularly on days when the radiation climbs to dangerous levels, but these measurements are by no means a complete picture of Fukushima’s toxicity. For this one needs soil samples, mass spectrometers, electron microscopes, radiographic imaging and other sophisticated equipment. Radioactive isotopes from Fukushima, including caesium-134/137, have been wafted around the world, with substantial levels found in California vineyards, Pacific Ocean currents and even in people’s homes and everyday objects. In 2013, microparticles from Fukushima—little glassy beads loaded with radioactive caesium and uranium—were discovered in Japan when scientists began collecting vacuum cleaner bags and automobile air filters. These bags and filters, when laid on top of x-ray plates, lit them up with radioactive hot spots. The hot spots were bacterium-sized particles that had been shot out of exploding reactors and travelled over Honshu Island down to Tokyo and beyond. 

Fukushima prefecture is full of hot spots, and these hot spots keep moving as microparticles are washed down from the mountains. A recent discovery by Shaun Burnie, a senior researcher with Greenpeace, who has directed radiation surveys in Fukushima since 2011, shows how dangerous the area remains. Burnie uses drones and high-tech sensors mounted on cars, but on a crisp fall day in October 2019 he decided to take a handheld radiation detector and pay a visit to J-Village. Burnie was in the parking lot, watching a youth soccer match being played on the field and walking towards another group of children who were sitting on the tarmac eating their lunch, when he began measuring radiation levels over 71 microsieverts per hour. The normal reading in this area, before the Fukushima meltdown, was 0.04 microsieverts per hour. Burnie’s reading, 1,775 times higher than normal, meant that anyone breathing dust off the J-Village playing fields could have been inhaling an intensely charged radioactive particle.

‘This is one of the most shocking discoveries I’ve made in decades of radiation surveys,’ Burnie says. The place was crowded with ‘sports fans, family members, and coaches’ strolling through what was effectively a toxic waste dump. Greenpeace wrote a letter alerting the Japanese government to ‘high levels of radioactive contamination and serious public health risks at J-Village’. Getting no reply, Burnie announced his discovery at a press conference in December. Tokyo Electric sent workers to clean up the area, but Burnie returned to find other hot spots they had missed. The Japanese government continues to claim that there are no radiation risks in Fukushima. ‘With the exception of areas deemed “difficult to return”, ’ says Reconstruction Minister Watanabe Hiromachi, using Japan’s polite expression for nuclear exclusion zones, ‘we have decontaminated the entire area’.

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Officials say that Fukushima is safe because the level of background radiation in the surrounding environment is no higher than

in New York City or Shanghai. This may be true, but, again, one is referring only to gamma radiation, and the argument is deceptive for other reasons. The confusion is due partly to the fact that Fukushima refers to three different things: a destroyed nuclear power plant, a prefecture more than twice the size of greater Shanghai and a capital city. Ignoring microparticles, hot spots, glowing reactors, toxic wastewater and other inconvenient facts, the Japanese government measures the background radiation for ‘Fukushima’ by averaging the readings from all the gamma radiation detectors placed outside the nuclear exclusion zone. 

One should also note that the background radiation for New York City includes not only the cosmic radiation that rains down on Earth from the heavens or trickles up from radioactive rocks, but also the residue from 520 nuclear bombs that were exploded mid-air during the Cold War, mainly by the United States and Soviet Union, but also by France and China, whose last bomb exploded in 1980. Altogether, including bombs fired underground, 2,056 nuclear weapons have been detonated. In other words, background radiation is not necessarily a natural phenomenon, nor is it necessarily good for you. 

If Rolf Sievert got his name on the unit for measuring the health effects of radiation, it was Henri Becquerel, co-winner of the Nobel Prize with Pierre and Marie Curie, who got his name on the unit for measuring total radioactive releases. The Promethean splitting of atoms produces radioactive disintegrations known as hits. One hit is one becquerel, and each hit can cause damage or disease. The current benchmark for nuclear disasters is the 1986 explosion at Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4, which released 85 quadrillion becquerels of caesium-137. 

Nobody knows the comparable numbers for Fukushima, since most of its radioactivity was dumped into the Pacific Ocean. At the high end, Fukushima released twice as much radioactivity as Chernobyl. At the low end, the release was one-fifth of Chernobyl’s. But if 85 quadrillion becquerels sounds like a large number—and indeed it is—this is only one-tenth the amount of caesium released by nuclear bombs, which lofted a staggering 954 quadrillion becquerels of caesium into the atmosphere and marked the onset of the geological era known as the Anthropocene.

Another misunderstanding underlies the claim that Fukushima’s background radiation is safe. The background radiation in New York consists of rays or photons that pass through the body and leave. The radionuclides from Fukushima are not rays, but dust-like particles that if inhaled or ingested can prove lethal. Throughout the area, radionuclides of caesium-137 have accumulated in ditches, drainage areas, kitchen gardens and schoolyards. One can walk a few steps in any direction from a safe area and stumble into a hot spot. This is what a researcher found when he examined the Azuma baseball field in Fukushima City, where the Olympic games were scheduled to start. The field had been scraped clean, but just outside the stadium were patches of grass radioactive enough to qualify as a nuclear waste site.     

Seventy per cent of Fukushima consists of forests and mountains. This reservoir of radionuclides cannot be decontaminated. In the lowlands, the vinyl bags holding scraped-up topsoil have begun to break apart with sprouting vegetation, and every summer, as typhoons lash Japan’s eastern shore, dozens of bags are washed out to sea. Scraping off five centimetres of soil lowers radiation levels, but it is not correct to call this ‘decontamination’. The process is more about managing people’s perception of radiation than it is a solution. Caesium-137 and strontium-90 persist in the environment for hundreds of years, and this radiation is not being recycled or eliminated. It is merely being moved from one place to another, and it will keep moving with the area’s winds and rains and ocean currents.

The Japanese government is taking other steps to hide the ongoing disaster. A government-sponsored

study of radiation exposure outside the nuclear exclusion zone undercounted people’s exposure by two-thirds. Doctors have left the area because the government refuses to reimburse them when they list radiation sickness as the cause for nose bleeds, spontaneous abortions and other ailments resulting from ionising radiation. (The only acceptable diagnoses are ‘radiophobia’, nervousness and stress.) The spike in thyroid cancer among children in Fukushima is dismissed as a survey error, produced only because more children are being examined. The government has mounted no epidemiological study in Fukushima. It has established no baseline for comparing public health before and after the disaster, and as radioactive ash and soil from Fukushima are spread throughout the rest of Japan, detecting the long-term consequences of the disaster becomes increasingly difficult.  

It is in Namie that I experience my first direct encounter with radioactivity. As I get out of the car to photograph the bowling alley with the boat leaned against it, there is a metallic taste in my mouth, a lick of gunmetal. People undergoing radiation therapy experience the same metallic taste; so, too, did the pilots who dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As we head down National Route 6 towards Fukushima Daiichi, road signs instruct us not to stop or get out of our car, and we drive with the windows shut. This highway is kept open for the construction vehicles that carry workers to the power plant. We wedge our car into a stream of truck traffic and roll towards the electric cables that run up the mountains towards Tokyo. The auxiliary roads to our left and right are closed with accordion fences and guarded by men in blue uniforms. The men wear white gloves and cotton face masks, which offer scant protection against the swirling dust and contaminated air.   

We stop on a bluff overlooking the ocean. Below us, down on the shoreline, rise the big square boxes of Fukushima’s six reactors. We are parked on the alluvial terrace that was cut away to build the power plant. This was the fatal mistake that doomed Fukushima from the beginning. General Electric, which prepared the site and built the reactors, lopped twenty-five metres off a natural promontory to put the power plant near the shore. This required less pumping of cooling water. It was cheaper. The plant was built eleven metres above the ocean, with a three-metre seawall. Later enlarged to six metres, this wall was easily overtopped by the fifteen-metre wave that washed over Fukushima on 3/11.

Locating cooling pumps at the ocean’s edge and backup generators down in the basement were other mistakes. So too was buying GE’s Mark 1 reactors.

These were known to have design flaws and inadequate containments. Fuel storage pools covered with flimsy metal roofs were built on top of the reactors, and when one of these pools exploded at reactor No. 4, a fresh nuclear core and another three reactors’ worth of nuclear fuel were exposed to the sky. Save for a valve leaking from a nearby reservoir, the pool would have run out of water, ignited a fuel pool fire and forced the evacuation of Tokyo as a massive radioactive cloud billowed from Fukushima down to the Imperial Palace, which lies 225 kilometres south of the reactors. 

We stare for a few minutes at the cranes swinging over the plant. They are shoring up the damaged buildings, installing temporary tanks for holding contaminated cooling water and offloading fuel from a storage pool in one of the reactor buildings. Workers in hazmat suits are welding pipes and driving earth-moving equipment through a construction site that looks like the set for a sci-fi movie. This could be an operating room for giants, where ten-storey scalpels probe the exposed organs of a dangerous creature—maybe Godzilla—born of atomic radiation and raging for revenge. This is no place to linger. Our dosimeters are spiking, and the metallic taste in my mouth is getting stronger as we turn around and head back up the coast. 

W  hat must be admitted—very painfully—is that this was a disaster “Made in Japan”, ’ concluded the official parliamentary

report on Fukushima. The disaster resulted from the ‘ingrained conventions of Japanese culture’. This includes deference to powerful interests, including TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which owns the Fukushima reactors. TEPCO ranks among the least trusted companies in Japan. It has been fined on several occasions for false reporting on inspections and repairs. In 2002, one of these scandals forced the resignations of TEPCO’s president and chairman. Fukushima was a ‘man-made disaster’, said the investigating commission, because the power plant’s design was faulty, its seawall defences were known to be inadequate, and the company proved incompetent in handling the crisis. 

‘Across the board, the commission found ignorance and arrogance unforgivable for anyone or any organization that deals with nuclear power,’ the report concluded. ‘We found a disregard for global trends and a disregard for public safety.’

Critics say that leaving TEPCO in charge of containing the Fukushima disaster is like asking the local power company to launch a space station. TEPCO has confessed to misleading the public about the amount of radiation leaking from the plant and the progress of the clean-up. It keeps delaying the start for emptying Fukushima’s fuel pools, its strategy for dismantling the reactors is fundamentally flawed, and it has failed at even the most straightforward technological challenges, such as containing the radioactive groundwater flowing from the reactors. 

The public learned these facts when the secret testimony of Fukushima plant manager Masao Yoshida was revealed by Asahi Shimbun newspaper. Before his death of cancer of the oesophagus in 2013, at the age of fifty-eight, Yoshida had been summoned to the J-Village soccer training camp for twenty-eight hours of interviews with Japan’s parliamentary investigating committee. Showing obvious disdain for both his TEPCO bosses and Japan’s nuclear regulators, Yoshida described an alarming train of events, many of them at odds with the official story of what happened at Fukushima.  

At 2:46 p.m. on 11 March 2011, the day Fukushima was destroyed, Yoshida was sitting in his office on the second floor of the business building in the centre of the site. He was looking at documents when the building began to shake with enough intensity that binders fell from the shelves and a TV set toppled over. Yoshida tried to dive under his desk but failed. The ground heaved under him for five minutes as the Tohoku earthquake tore a trench in the ocean floor 370 kilometres to the northeast. The quake was so massive that it shifted the coast of Japan 2.4 metres closer to the

Masao Yoshida

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United States and knocked the Earth 38 centimetres off centre, thereby shortening the length of the average day by 1.8 microseconds. Forty-one minutes later, a wall of water travelling at the speed of sound slammed into Japan’s northeastern coast, destroying everything in its path as it rolled inland. Among the victims were close to 20,000 people either killed or missing and a power plant whose backup generators and cooling pumps had been built below sea level. 

When Yoshida was able to walk next door to the general office, he found a ceiling panel collapsed in the middle of the room. Documents were scattered over the floor, and white dust floated in the air. Even before the tsunami arrived, he knew the plant was in trouble. The site had lost electric power. Pressure gauges showed damage to the reactors’ cooling pipes. The isolation condenser in Unit 1 had failed. The reactor was no longer being cooled, and Yoshida feared it was heading towards the meltdown and runaway chain reaction that would eventually blow it up. That the reactor was already emitting hot radioactive gases from its core was confirmed by monitors outside the plant, which had begun recording releases approaching 12 millisieverts per hour. 

Yoshida launched himself into a mad scramble to contain the disaster. He rode out the aftershocks from the earthquake and watched in horror as the tsunami struck the plant. The wave flooded the diesel generators that were temporarily powering the facility. Standing in a dark office filled with dead computers, Yoshida ordered workers into the parking lots to salvage batteries from flooded cars. When this jerry-rigged system failed to operate the control valves and restart the cooling pumps, he formed ‘a suicide squad of oldies’ and rushed them into the reactor buildings. Facing lethal waves of radiation as they scrambled in the dark over waterlogged wreckage, the workers tried to force open valves with their bare hands. Known as the Fukushima Fifty (although they actually numbered sixty-nine, including Yoshida), the suicide squad stumbled through reactor buildings filled with a thick white mist of hydrogen and water vapour. 

The dose limit for Fukushima’s workers was raised from 1 millisievert, the level for the general populace, and 20 millisieverts, the level for nuclear workers, to 100 millisieverts, and then, on 14 March, it was raised again to 250 millisieverts. This is five times the US legal limit for nuclear workers, but since most of the plant’s dosimeters had been destroyed by the earthquake or washed away by the tsunami, no one knows how much radiation these men received. The official death toll for Fukushima workers from cancers linked to the disaster currently stands at six, according to Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. Masao Yoshida is not included in this count. 

Yoshida called TEPCO headquarters and asked that fire engines big enough to pump water into the reactors be sent from Tokyo. The tsunami had destroyed roads and towns along the coast. The fire engines got lost. They suffered flat tyres and ran out of petrol. At one surreal moment TEPCO announced that it was running out of cash and asked for donations from the public. Suspecting that the company was lying to him about the severity of the disaster, Naoto Kan, Japan’s prime minister, helicoptered into Fukushima for a meeting with Yoshida at 6:00 a.m. on the morning of 12 March. Both men were engineers who had graduated from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Kan was a mechanical, not a nuclear, engineer, but he had already discovered that the head of Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) was an economist who knew very little about nuclear energy and nothing about nuclear accidents. The same was true for the other members of Japan’s ‘nuclear village’, the powerful network of vested interests that had ringed Japan’s earthquake-prone shores with nuclear reactors.

At 3:56 p.m. on 12 March, a little more than twenty-five hours after the Tohoku earthquake, reactor No. 1 exploded in a fireball of hydrogen gas that blew out the roof and walls and began spreading radioactive material across the Pacific. As they watched the news bulletin

on TV, Kan turned to the NISA chairman who was in the room with him and asked, ‘What was that just now? Wasn’t that an explosion?’ The chairman had both hands over his face. He made no reply.  

At the time, TEPCO’s chairman was in China on a press junket. He was touring the reporters assigned to cover the nuclear industry on an Asian holiday. The president of TEPCO was also out of town, and, with no one ordering employees to release information to the prime minister, Kan was kept in the dark about what was happening at Fukushima. Like other advanced industrial countries, Japan is covered with radiation detectors that feed into a centralised monitoring system. The system is supposed to track wind currents and steer refugees away from contaminated areas. For most of the disaster, the wind was blowing out to sea—a lucky break for the citizens of Tokyo—but when the wind swung inland, blowing to the northwest, a radioactive cloud swept over refugees fleeing in that direction. None of this information was delivered to Kan.  

The prime minister received another rude surprise when he learned that Fukushima No. 1 had been built by General Electric and installed in 1971 as a turnkey operation—as in, ‘Here’s the key to your nuclear power plant. Turn it on.’ Because the operating manual for the reactor belonged to GE, TEPCO refused to give it to the government. Even when the manual was later released to the Japanese parliament, GE’s intellectual property rights were protected by having parts of the manual blacked out. 

While he was dealing with the explosion at reactor No. 1, Yoshida noticed that the cooling water in reactor No. 3 was dropping precipitously. Only belatedly did he realise that the fresh water source he had been instructed to use had dried up. Hydrogen had to be vented from the reactor or it, too, would explode. Hydrogen can be vented one of two ways, either from the bottom of the reactor, through water, which removes most of the radioactive iodine, or from the top, straight into the air. Having run out of water, Yoshida ordered that the reactor be dry-vented, but the operation was stopped by TEPCO officials in Tokyo, who feared they would be blamed for irradiating the Japanese countryside. 

At 11:01 a.m. on the morning of 14 March, as a government spokesman was reassuring the public that everything at Fukushima was under control, reactor No. 3 exploded on live TV. The split screen image—government spokesman on one side, exploding reactor on the other—showed the power plant enveloped in a cloud of dust and gas that bore a terrifying resemblance to the mushroom cloud that billowed over Nagasaki in 1945. The resemblance was no mistake. Reactor No. 3 was a MOX reactor, running on mixed oxide fuel made

from uranium and reprocessed plutonium. (The bomb dropped on Nagasaki had a plutonium core.) Japan has a huge stockpile of plutonium generated by its nuclear reactors. The country has spent billions of dollars trying to develop the technology to reprocess this plutonium. Several workers have been killed and the technology has yet to succeed, and here was the ultimate setback—a MOX reactor blowing up on live TV. The government responded by banning images of the explosion from television and joining TEPCO in forbidding use of the word meltdown.

While Japanese viewers were denied a second look, the rest of the world watched replays of reactor No. 3 exploding. Reactor fuel and parts of the reactor core itself are blown through the roof, leaving the spent fuel pool on top of the building exposed to the atmosphere. Billowing overhead is a black cloud of radioactive iodine, plutonium, caesium and other toxic gases. Mixed into this cloud are chunks of concrete and steel that fall back to earth, injuring eleven workers with flying debris. Out of the south-east corner of the reactor comes an intense pulse of radioactive gas. A slow-motion replay of the event reveals that a nuclear fission chain reaction has produced a detonation shock wave travelling at 900 metres per second, faster than the speed of sound. No nuclear power plant in the world can survive a detonation shock wave. Horrified spectators were watching radioactive gases flooding over Japan. They were also watching the myth of nuclear safety being blown sky high. As the Asahi Shimbun would later write about the government’s efforts to ban these images from TV, ‘In a nation where the government agency overseeing nuclear plants and electric power companies has no qualms about hiding crisis information, the situation can only be called hopeless’. 

The following day, on 15 March, at 6:14 in the morning, reactor No. 2 exploded. It was the most heavily loaded of Fukushima’s reactors, with the freshest and largest load of radioactive fuel. Yoshida watched in horror as the reactor began melting through its containment vessel. ‘That penetration would have led to enormous amounts of highly toxic radioactive substances, such as plutonium, uranium and americium, spewing into the living environment of humans,’ he told investigators. ‘Plant workers would be exposed to huge doses of radiation.’ The Japanese were being torched by three atomic explosions—delivered not by an external enemy, but at their own hand. When the fire engine pouring water on reactor No. 2 ran out of diesel fuel, ‘This was when I thought we were coming to the end,’ said Yoshida. ‘I was the closest to death at that moment.’

Yoshida imagined he was watching a real-life version of The China Syndrome. Radioactive fuel was burning through its containment vessel and liquefying everything in its path as it burrowed towards the centre of the Earth. After it melted through the bottom of the reactor and hit water below, the nuclear core exploded. Steam rose from the damaged building and radiation levels at the power plant increased four-fold, indicating that the reactor’s suppression pool—the doughnut-shaped tube of water meant to cool the reactor in an emergency and capture any radioactive particles before they leaked into the atmosphere—had been breached. 

Fourteen minutes before reactor No. 2 exploded, Prime Minister Kan had left his office and driven the short distance to TEPCO’s nearby headquarters. Kan, who had been living in his office, had learned at 3:00 a.m. that TEPCO was planning to evacuate its workers and abandon Fukushima Daiichi. ‘Abandonment would mean the end of Japan,’ Kan wrote in his post-Fukushima memoir, My Nuclear Nightmare. On entering TEPCO’s headquarters, he summoned the company’s executives into a conference room and in effect seized the company. ‘Abandonment is not an option,’ he told them. That would result in a disaster ‘two or three times the size of Chernobyl, equal to ten or twenty reactors’. 

‘It would not be out of the question for a foreign country to come along and take our place,’ Kan said. When he was later criticised for this outburst, Kan redoubled his attack on ‘the closed nature and secrecy

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of the nuclear power industry, which was burdened by bureaucracy and monopolism in science … Throughout the entire system there reigned a spirit of servility, fawning, clannishness and persecution of independent thinkers, window dressing, and personal clan ties between leaders.’

Kan had already sketched a contingency plan for evacuating Tokyo and its 50 million inhabitants. While Japan was declaring a twenty-kilometre nuclear exclusion zone around the Fukushima power plant, the US military was instructing the100,000 soldiers and dependents at US military bases to evacuate from within eighty kilometres of the plant. 

At 6:00 a.m. that morning, at the same time that reactor No. 2 was blowing up, reactor No. 4 exploded in a hydrogen fireball that blew off the roof and walls, leaving the spent fuel pool at the top of the building open to the sky. The reactor was down for maintenance, but its gas venting system was linked to reactor No. 3, which was producing enough flammable hydrogen to blow up both reactors. The core for unit No. 4, containing ninety tonnes of uranium, had been offloaded into the spent fuel pool. The pool already held 500 tonnes of fuel. In total, the fuel that was now on the verge of igniting in a runaway chain reaction contained 37 million curies of caesium-137—about ten times the amount released at Chernobyl. While a plume of radioactive smoke spread over Fukushima, another black plume was rising from the US embassy in Tokyo, which had begun burning sensitive documents and preparing to move south to Osaka. 

The fuel pool at reactor No. 4 was four storeys above ground at the top of the building, where it was unshielded except for a metal roof. Water had to be pumped into the pool to keep it from igniting, but Fukushima no longer had any working generators or pumps. Emptied of water, fuel pools can catch fire in runaway nuclear chain reactions that produce intense pulses of gamma rays and neutrons. Since the world has yet to find a safe place for storing nuclear waste, most of this waste is stored on site. Crowded with nuclear assemblies that are packed closer and closer to each other, the average fuel storage pool holds the equivalent of six nuclear cores. Fukushima Daiichi had a total of six reactors, three of them shut down for maintenance, and seven spent fuel pools. Fukushima Daini, the newer plant to the south, had four reactors and an equal number of fuel pools. These ten nuclear reactors had a total capacity of 9,096 megawatts, making the plant almost two and a half times larger than Chernobyl. Now that the fuel storage pools were also at risk, the disaster had reached global proportions. 

Yoshida gave orders to shelter in place and prepare to re-enter the damaged reactors. Instead, he watched dumbfounded as 650 employees commandeered company buses and fled down the coast towards Tokyo. This included all of Fukushima’s senior employees, including division managers and section chiefs, and all the officials from Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency. By 8:30 that morning, Yoshida—abandoned by everyone except his ‘suicide squad of oldies’—had begun the last-ditch effort to save Fukushima’s reactors from total annihilation.  

His bosses at TEPCO headquarters had instructed Yoshida not to use saltwater for cooling the reactors. The salt would corrode the containment vessels and make the reactors unusable, and somehow TEPCO imagined restarting the reactors at a later date. Yoshida was still receiving instructions from his bosses not to cool the reactors with saltwater. He ignored them. He ordered the fire trucks to start pumping water from the ocean, as he desperately tried to cool the reactor cores before they melted through their containments and exploded. At the same time, for fear of alarming the public, the Japanese government was refusing to distribute stable iodine tablets, which block radiation from being absorbed by thyroid glands. 

Naoto Kan was forced to resign in August 2011. His government had made too many mistakes in handling the disaster. Before leaving office, he tried to pre-empt Japan’s nuclear village by shutting down the country’s

fifty-four nuclear reactors. It is Japan’s ironic fate—and the root of its current crisis—that Kan was replaced as prime minister by Abe Shinzo, a military hawk and nuclear booster, who is moving to restart Japan’s nuclear reactors and convince the world that Fukushima is open to resettlement. 

W ith J-Village freshly repainted, Japan may be ready for the Olympics in 2021, but it is not ready for the world to look too closely at the

perilous state of its nuclear affairs. TEPCO is planning to release its billion litres of contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean as soon as the games are over. For years, the company maintained that this water had been cleaned of radioactivity, save for tritium, which is water soluble and thereby impossible to remove. In September 2018, TEPCO was forced to admit that its cleaning process had failed, and the water is actually contaminated with high levels of strontium-90 and other radioactive elements. Japan’s fishing industry opposes releasing the water, and so too do Korea, China and other countries that still ban the importation of food from Japan. 

Fukushima’s storage tanks, originally intended as a short-term solution, are built out of cheap steel, which has begun to corrode and leak. An Olympic-sized swimming pool of contaminated water is added to the site every week. It is no consolation that TEPCO has finally acknowledged what critics have said for years. The water is still radioactive—at levels up to 20,000 times higher than allowable safety standards—and TEPCO has no idea what to do with it.

From the day it opened, Fukushima Daiichi struggled to contain the groundwater that rushed down from the nearby mountains and flowed through the plant. Fukushima today is a swamp of groundwater and cooling water contaminated with strontium, tritium, caesium and other radioactive particles. Engineers have laced the site with ditches, dams, sump pumps and drains. In 2014, TEPCO was given US$292 million in public funds to ring Fukushima with an underground ice wall—a supposedly impermeable barrier of frozen soil. This has had ‘limited, if any effect’, says Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority, which is advising TEPCO to write off its high-tech failure and get back to pumping out the water.  

In 2017, the Japan Institute for Economic Research estimated that the cost of cleaning up the plant and compensating people for their lost homes and livelihood could reach US$628 billion. Today, the cost is ticking close to a trillion dollars, about one-fifth of Japan’s entire economy, making this the most expensive industrial accident in history.

Japan has no tradition of investigative reporting. Instead, Japanese media rely on kisha clubs: reporting pools organised by big companies and government agencies. Even this limited reporting was hobbled in 2013 when Japan adopted a law protecting ‘specially designated secrets’. Whistleblowers, journalists and bloggers who obtain information ‘illegally’ face up to ten years in prison. Japan, which used to rank near the top of the World Press Freedom Index, by 2016 had fallen to seventy-second place.

‘A nuclear accident could cause the entire country to stop functioning,’ said Kan, after becoming an ardent opponent of nuclear energy. Japan is the least likely place in the world to find an energy grid powered by nuclear reactors. Atomic bombs killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese in World War II. In 1954, a Japanese fishing boat was accidentally irradiated by a hydrogen bomb exploded over Bikini atoll. Japan is rocked by more than 1,000 earthquakes a year and whipped by typhoons that roar over its islands every summer and autumn. The country has a large anti-nuclear movement, but somehow, even after Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Lucky Dragon fishing boat incident, Fukushima and dozens of other nuclear mishaps, protesters have not managed to halt Japan’s investment in nuclear power.  

The push to build nuclear reactors in Japan was aided by postwar censorship, which blocked discussion of atomic radiation, a PR campaign promoting ‘atoms for peace’, and the work of a Japanese CIA asset who proved remarkably effective at getting Japan to buy nuclear technology from the United States. After World War II, the US spent trillions of dollars developing atomic bombs and loading 50,000 of them into strategic bombers and onto missiles. It built a huge industrial base devoted to mining uranium, refining and enriching it, and producing nuclear weapons that grew ever larger and more lethal. Pasting a fig leaf over this arms race, President Eisenhower, in a speech to the United Nations in 1953, proposed using ‘atoms for peace’. Technology good at killing people would be redeployed for boiling water in nuclear reactors. Eisenhower’s plan would keep the nuclear industrial base intact and the scientists who developed this technology employed. It would cement alliances with client states while providing them with nuclear fuel and technology. It would counter Soviet efforts to build their own nuclear alliances, and this transfer of military technology would make certain people very rich.  

The CIA asset who proved so adept at pushing nuclear reactors into Japan was Matsutaro Shoriki. Shoriki began his career as a police commissioner in Tokyo skilled at assassinating communists and labour organisers. He was sacked for failing to prevent an attack on Crown Prince Hirohito but rebounded with enough wealthy backers to buy the Yomiuri Shimbun, which became Japan’s largest newspaper, with a circulation of more than 14 million. At the end of World War II, Shoriki was imprisoned for twenty-one months as a Class-A war criminal, but again he emerged as head of a media empire, which this time included Japan’s first commercial TV station and professional baseball team. His ultimate dream was to arm Japan with nuclear weapons. The first step towards this was the acquisition of nuclear reactors. In 1956, the CIA enlisted Shoriki and his media empire to support an ‘Atoms for Peace’ exhibition in Hiroshima. Hugely successful in swaying the Japanese public into supporting nuclear energy, the exhibition began with a Shinto purification ceremony welcoming the atom back to Japan. Shoriki went on to become a high government official and the first head of Japan’s Atomic Energy Agency.   

Japan bought its first nuclear reactor from the UK in 1966, but by the 1970s it was buying light water reactors from GE. These were turnkey plants, designed in the United States and assembled in Japan. The first of these was TEPCO’s Unit No. 1 at Fukushima, which began operating in 1971. TEPCO’s president at the time came from Fukushima. Knowledgeable about the risks involved in building reactors in this seismically unstable part of the world, he called his purchase of nuclear

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technology ‘a deal with the devil’. All of Japan’s nuclear power plants would be built in similar places—coastal areas, undeveloped and poor, despite Japan’s booming postwar economy. 

Nuclear power demands a nuclear state: a top-down, secretive hierarchy staffed by technocrats willing to vaunt a dangerous technology over the public interest. The technocrats hide information from the public and even from the governmental bodies meant to regulate them. As soon as Japan flipped the switch on its nuclear reactors, they began suffering the radioactive leaks and explosions that have plagued the industry from its inception. TEPCO may be no worse than anyone else in the business, but the company’s forged documents, cover-ups and lies about nuclear accidents are exposed with surprising frequency. 

Large amounts of disinformation and propaganda surround nuclear energy. The industry mounts a formidable PR machine devoted to muddying the issue. Nuclear energy is safe and clean, it says. Nuclear accidents are infrequent and emit small amounts of radiation which may actually be good for you. This theory, called hormesis, posits that low levels of radiation make you more fecund or long-lived. Natural levels of background radiation vary by more than a thousand-fold, and some people do, indeed, seek out the radioactive waters of Ramsar or Kerala as natural fountains of youth. Unfortunately, the evidence confirms what scientists have known ever since Nikola Tesla burned his fingers with X-rays in 1896. No amount of radiation is good for you, and the greater the exposure, the worse the effects. 

In a paper published in 2012, Anders Møller, at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, and Timothy Mousseau, at the University of South Carolina, reviewed the scientific literature on hormesis. Instead of improving your health, low-level radiation ‘increased mutation rates, impaired immune function, increased incidence of disease, and increased mortality’. Mousseau is visiting Kerala, Bikini, Chernobyl, Fukushima and other hot spots to collect more data. Already a leading researcher on the ecology and evolutionary consequences of nuclear contamination, he expects this research to flesh out in greater detail what we already know. Except for one radioactive-resistant bacterium, Deinococcus radiodurans, which is nicknamed Conan the Bacterium and listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s toughest organism, radiation is a mutagen and killer of living organisms. 

So why is nuclear energy currently being promoted as part of the Green New Deal? Air pollution, much of it produced by coal-burning power plants, kills about 7 million people a year, including more than 1 million in China and 60,000 in Europe. The yearly cost for premature deaths and health care is in the trillions of dollars. Given these stark statistics, compounded by global warming, rising sea levels and massive migrations in the face of famine and war, every country in the world—save for the United States, which in 2017 began withdrawing from environmental treaties—has committed itself to finding less toxic ways to produce electricity. Nuclear power was an ageing technology slipping into senescence, with no new nuclear power plants being built in the United States since the 1970s, when the industry seized the opportunity to rebrand itself as ‘green energy’. Aided by PR sleight of hand, the zombie sprang back to life and re-emerged not as a producer of radioactive fallout, but as a carbon-free energy source, jostling centre stage for a photo op alongside wind and solar. 

Nuclear energy is not green. The mining and enrichment of uranium are a toxic process requiring large amounts of fuel and energy. To reduce emissions and contain the inevitable mishaps and meltdowns, nuclear reactors are enveloped in concrete, and concrete manufacturing is a big emitter of carbon dioxide. Nuclear power plants rank among the world’s greatest thermal polluters. They require huge amounts of water to cool their cores, and the outflow from this process has raised local water temperatures by many degrees.

(Nuclear power plants often shut down during heat waves, when rivers and lakes become too hot to cool them.) This water is also radioactive—at low levels we are told—but every operating reactor is a source of contamination. Hundreds of thousands of people are still displaced from their homes as a result of nuclear disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Adding to this human toll are premature deaths and rising cancer rates. The storage of nuclear waste in spent fuel pools and toxic dumps is another energy-intensive suck on global resources. When one includes environmental costs, government subsidies and other externalities, nuclear technology, far from being green, is black all the way down to its origins as a weapon of mass destruction.      

Nuclear research is financed by dirty money—weapons manufacturers and totalitarian states intent on stockpiling plutonium and building bombs—but it is also financed by so-called smart money. Bill Gates at Microsoft, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Peter Thiel at Facebook and dozens of other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have invested in nuclear energy. They are tinkering with reactor designs from the 1950s, using thorium instead of uranium, for example, and rebranding these reactors as fourth generation-new-improved models. Other bright ideas include replacing big nuclear power plants with lots of little ones scattered throughout the countryside. Imagine nuclear submarines beached in Iowa. Unfortunately, even if these reactors could be shown to work safely, none of them eliminates the problems of radioactive waste and accidental emissions.

Japan’s public works project in Fukushima—building sea walls, ice walls, incinerators and dumps—is described as recycling or restoring or cleaning up

the area, but there is no such thing when dealing with atomic radiation. Six million tons of dirt have been stuffed into vinyl bags and deposited in Fukushima’s former rice paddies. (This is more than six times larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza.) The soil will remain contaminated for thousands or even millions of years. The government says that Fukushima’s toxic dumps will give way to a permanent solution by 2045, but this date keeps slipping as TEPCO announces one delay after another. In the meantime, as soil and ash from Fukushima get spread around the country, identifying the health effects of the disaster becomes increasingly difficult. Instead of a control population and an affected population, the entire country is affected.  

Only one out of every ten Fukushima workers is employed directly by TEPCO. The rest are nuclear gypsies, contract employees recruited from Japan’s underclass. The biggest labour contractor in Japan is the

Yakuza, the mafia. The mob in Japan, like the mob in New York or Naples, is capable of doing good work, but its labour record—even excluding bribes, coercion and kickbacks—is spotty. It skims profits by subcontracting seven layers down. It outsources to vulnerable people who don’t speak Japanese, and it operates with minimum regard for worker safety.

Even TEPCO’s direct employees have suffered from lax monitoring. In 2011, workers laboured for weeks with no radiation detectors. When detectors were issued to shift bosses, the bosses reported the same exposure for everyone. This ignores the fact that radioactive contamination is not evenly distributed. Near Fukushima’s reactors, one step in the wrong direction will produce readings that spike to lethal levels. The plant’s vents and smokestacks are known to be particularly hot. The smokestack at reactor No. 1, a 120-metre chimney that workers are desperately trying to remove before it collapses, is radiating a dose of 2 Sv per hour.    

In 2011, the rules on radiation levels were changed so that schoolchildren could be exposed to the same level of radiation as adults working in nuclear power plants. Anyone objecting to this twenty-fold increase, from 1 to 20 millisieverts per year, is criticised for succumbing to ‘harmful rumours’. Dissent against official policy is treated as a form of economic sabotage, since talk about radiation depresses the sale of food and other items from Fukushima and reduces tourism. Children are mocked for wearing protective face masks. Refugees from Fukushima are scorned in other parts of Japan, and the Asahi Shimbun reports ‘widespread bullying and stigmatization of evacuees’. It also describes the government ‘enforc[ing] an unspoken understanding that those who resist discrimination by the state (by evacuating, for example) should be punished’. Women from Fukushima are shunned as marriage partners, for fear that their exposure to radiation will lead to genetic mutations, and a new kind of Fukushima divorce has emerged, men returning to the area in far greater numbers than their wives, who insist on keeping their children as far away as possible.

 

As the Fukushima reactors torched themselves into a mess of molten steel and concrete, burning at over 1,200 degrees Celsius, they

melted through their containment vessels, fractured the concrete pads below, and came to rest perhaps in the rivers of groundwater that flow from the alluvial terrace above Fukushima into the Pacific Ocean. In the official version of the story, the reactors were not destroyed by the earthquake. They were destroyed by the tsunami that arrived forty-one minutes later to knock out the cooling pumps and backup generators. Eyewitness accounts describe something different: reactors that were a mess of broken pipes and gushing water before the tsunami arrived, and radiation levels outside the plant that had begun climbing to dangerous levels, again before the wave hit. 

Why the reactors exploded and how much radiation was released are also disputed. The official version says the lack of cooling water in the reactors produced clouds of hydrogen gas that blew out the roofs and walls at reactors Nos. 1, 2 and 3, as well as the spent fuel pool on the roof of reactor No. 4. The photographic evidence and intense pulses of radioactivity tell a different story. It was not just hydrogen gas that exploded, but fissile material from the nuclear reactors themselves. The microparticles that one finds scattered around Japan are a key part of this story. They are bits of steel from the reactor cores, pieces of zirconium cladding and nuclear fuel from deep inside Fukushima Daiichi. Under a microscope, one can see that some of these particles are perfectly spherical. Shaped like planets in outer space, they are the product of uranium atoms split in half and dusted like death stars over the shores of Japan. 

No one knows how much radioactivity was released at Fukushima. Most of the plant’s dosimeters were swept away in the flood or knocked offline. Readings from US military planes flying overhead and ships sailing offshore

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differed dramatically from those reported by TEPCO. The same is true for spot readings of air and soil samples around the plant. Most of what we know about nuclear disasters at Chernobyl, Fukushima and elsewhere comes from modelling what is known as the source term. This is the amount of fuel in a reactor, and one has to examine a reactor’s core to guess how much of its source term exploded. 

Nine years after the disaster, no one has been able to examine the reactor cores at Fukushima, and no one even knows where they are located. The scant evidence reported so far is troubling. The cores are not melted into solid lumps of uranium mixed with molten concrete and steel. Instead, they are scattered in a mess of hot particles and other debris. After Chernobyl exploded in 1986, the reactor was entombed in a concrete sarcophagus. Designed to last a hundred years, it lasted thirty, before a new US$2 billion shield was installed in 2018. TEPCO rejects all talk of building a concrete tomb over Fukushima. It plans instead to remove the nuclear debris and dump it off site, but so far, as the robots get fried on their suicide missions and radiation continues leaking into the surrounding air and water, every step in this process has failed. 

Nuclear energy began its life in secret as a weapon of war. Wilfred Burchett, the first reporter to visit Hiroshima after the attack, wrote that people were dying from an ‘atomic plague’. The existence of radiation sickness was denied by the US government, which moved to expel Burchett from Japan and throw a tight net of censorship around Hiroshima. If it were not only blast and heat, but also an ‘atomic plague’ that killed people, the US feared that its new bomb would be labelled as a chemical weapon, which had been banned after the gas attacks of World War I. 

It was not until five years after the bombing of Hiroshima that the US began studying the medical effects of atomic radiation. It created the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), a ghoulish enterprise devoted to collecting the corpses of dead hibakusha (‘bomb-affected people’), estimating their proximity to the nuclear blast and computing dose rates for the effects of atomic radiation. The ABCC had a ‘no aid’ policy that prevented it from offering medical care. Its work was limited to computing how much radiation was required for cell death, cancer, sterility and other debilitating effects. These calculations underlie today’s recommendations for limiting radiation exposure. Originally measured in REMs, which stands for ‘Roentgen equivalent man’, these dose rates are calibrated for the average adult male. The ABCC missed the first five, most lethal years of contamination. It began monitoring the incidence of cancer only in 1988. It undercounted the death toll and miscalculated people’s position in relation to the blast, but apart from these limitations, two facts about radiation sickness are generally accepted by experts in the field. There is no threshold below which nuclear radiation is safe, and exposure to low doses can kill you as effectively as high doses, although at a slower rate.

The ABCC, under a different name, is still in business studying the survivors of nuclear fallout. It continues to tally the effects of radiation in producing cancers, cardiovascular and thyroid diseases, and other genetic effects that are passed from one generation to the next. Radiation affects women and children more than men. Suppressed fertility and birth defects are other legacies. The US government denied the existence of radiation sickness and tried for years to limit reporting on it. A strict censorship regime, preventing any discussion of the bomb and its effects, was slapped on Japan, and the legacy of this regime persists today. Settlers began returning to Hiroshima within a year of the city being bombed. Chernobyl and Fukushima will not be so lucky. Soon after it was attacked, a typhoon scrubbed Hiroshima of radioactive particles. The nuclear isotopes at Fukushima are more long-lived, and the summer typhoons have the opposite effect, bringing loads of contaminated soil down from the mountains and redepositing it along the coast.

For the past twenty years, Anders Møller and Timothy Mousseau have led research teams studying the birds and other animal populations around Chernobyl and now around Fukushima. ‘Every rock we turn over we find damage,’ says Mousseau. The fruit trees at Chernobyl stopped seeding after 1986. The pine trees are bushes, ravaged by mutations. Mousseau and Møller, in over a hundred published papers, have documented that prolonged exposure to low-level radiation increases genetic mutations in animal populations and produces developmental abnormalities, including albinism, small brain size, tumours, cataracts, lowered sperm count, reduced fertility, and even behavioural abnormalities that affect bird calls and mating rituals.  

The effects on humans are no more benign. In northern Ukraine and Belarus, neural tube birth defects are six times higher than the European norm. There is a spike in the number of thyroid cancers and babies born with small brains or no brains at all.

‘The layers of toxicity and their interactions are too complex to sort out,’ Mousseau says. ‘Researchers throw up their hands in despair.’ He reports: ‘UN agents work to minimize the story of a public health disaster. They serve their client states, and these are the major nuclear powers. In the 1990s these countries were facing big lawsuits from the people harmed during the development and testing of nuclear weapons.’ So everything was done to lowball the number of deaths and malignant health effects from nuclear disasters.  

‘Forty-five million curies of radioactive iodine were released at Chernobyl,’ Mousseau says. ‘Twenty billion curies of radioactive iodine were released from testing nuclear weapons by the US and Soviet Union alone. Global fallout spread mostly in the northern hemisphere. In the same decades rates of cancers, mainly childhood cancers, once a medical rarity, increased in the northern hemisphere. So too did birth defects, fertility problems, and thyroid, and paediatric cancers, which continue to rise. Male sperm counts since 1945 have dropped in half.’

The most alarming medical news from Fukushima concerns the incidence of thyroid cancer in children. A rare disease with a normal incidence of one in a million, in Fukushima prefecture its rate has skyrocketed to one in 2,000. Critics dismiss this as a ‘screening effect’ and claim the cancer surgery on close to 300 children was unnecessary. ‘This is not true,’ says Dr Shinichi Suzuki, at the Fukushima Medical University and former head of the survey team. ‘The cancers that have been treated up to now are too serious and aggressive to explain away with arguments like the “screening effect”. ’

Baba Tamotsu was the mayor of Namie, a city of 20,000 people located eight kilometres north of Fukushima, when the town was hit by the triple

disaster of 2011. He witnessed the earthquake and tsunami first hand, but it was from watching Fukushima Daiichi explode on TV that he learned he had to abandon Namie. He had no instructions from Tokyo, no aid or transport. Baba and hundreds of his fellow citizens loaded themselves onto school buses and fled to the northwest—directly downwind of Fukushima’s radioactive plume. 

‘I feel pain in my heart but also rage over the poor actions of the government,’ Baba told researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles, who visited him soon after his return to Namie in 2017. ‘It’s not nice language but I still think it was an act of murder. What were they thinking when it came to the people’s dignity and lives? I doubt that they even thought about our existence.’

Baba and his band of atomic refugees settled into gymnasiums and other temporary shelters as the radioactive cloud kept forcing them westward. Finally, they came to rest in prefab metal shelters measured by the size of how many tatami sleeping mats they held. In Baba’s case it was four mats. He lived here for six years, until the government declared parts of Namie open for resettlement. In April 2017, before his death the following year, Baba led a handful of older people back to their ruined city, where they found palm civets and monkeys nesting in the abandoned houses and wild boars roaming the streets.

‘I used to be an advocate of nuclear power. I regret it deeply,’ Baba told the UCLA researchers. He choked up and then broke into tears during the interview. He confessed to failing the people of Japan because he, like other government officials, had believed in the ‘safety myth’ of Japan’s nuclear superiority. The idea that Fukushima was safe for resettlement was another myth. A mere 1–2 per cent of Namie’s former citizens followed Baba back to their ruined city. Everyone else would now be labelled a ‘voluntary evacuee’ and bumped from the rolls. 

This was a ‘human-made disaster’, Baba said, agreeing with the official governmental report on Fukushima. TEPCO had been warned that its seawall was inadequate. Company engineers were planning to enlarge the wall when they were stopped as a cost-saving measure. ‘We know … that it was possible for TEPCO to anticipate a giant tsunami,’ Baba said. ‘Seismologists brought in by TEPCO had already warned them of such a possibility in 2008 or 2009 … You can’t call this an example of expecting the unexpected, since a giant tsunami had in fact been anticipated. 

‘The piping of the cooling system had already been cracked and damaged by the earthquake before the tsunami hit,’ Baba said. ‘If so, the reactors would have been heating up even before the tsunami arrived, because cooling water had not been getting to the reactor core through the damaged pipes … This was definitely human error, there is no doubt about it.’

Baba had been back in Namie for three months when he was interviewed. ‘I don’t have any neighbours, so I have no one to talk to,’ he told the UCLA researchers. ‘I can’t assign monetary value to what we’ve lost, but I never thought that I would end up having such a miserable life.’

TEPCO offered to pay Baba 100,000 yen (less than US$1,000) for his ‘mental anguish’. The sum was based on payouts for auto injury claims. ‘I was furious, wondering what the hell they were talking about,’ he said.

His eyes filled with tears again when he was asked to describe what it was like to return home after living for six years in a refugee camp. ‘There used be about six hundred houses and buildings along the ocean, but they were all swept away by the tsunami. When I saw the aftermath, I knew something incredibly awful had happened. Actually, I couldn’t even look at the ocean for about a year and a half after the tsunami. I was just so scared.’ He also avoided looking at workers from TEPCO. The sight of them made him too angry. 

Tomoko and Takemori Kobayashi

18

Eight kilometres north of Namie, in Odaka, an area known for its samurai forts and temples, Mrs Tomoko Kobayashi runs a ryokan, a country

inn that was inherited from her grandmother and her mother. Mrs Kobayashi and her husband, Takenori, who had been living in an eight-tatami-mat shelter, were among the first people to move back to Odaka when the area was reopened to settlement in July 2016. They gutted the interior of their ryokan, washed down everything reusable, planted flowers along the road between their hotel and the train station and declared Odaka, with its horse farms and long tradition of silk weaving and samurai festivals, open for business. 

Not believing anything they were told by the government about radiation levels in the area and ongoing emissions from the power plant, they took one more important step. With money raised by a TV telethon and equipment donated from Germany, they opened their own radiation testing lab. They organised hundreds of volunteers to canvass the surrounding area, measuring and mapping its radiation. They collected information from around the world on what crops to grow in nuclear exclusion zones. And they began making regular visits to Chernobyl to learn from their colleagues with thirty more years of experience of how to live in irradiated landscapes. ‘You measure everything and keep measuring,’ says Mr Kobayashi, a retired labour negotiator. ‘That’s the most important lesson we have learned from Chernobyl.’

Walking into the Kobayashis’ inn is like entering a space capsule in orbit. You kick off your shoes at the front door, glide over a varnished wooden floor and slide open a panelled door that leads into the big room where the Kobayashis and their guests eat their meals. In the centre of the room is a long table for dining and discussions. At one end is a TV screen and media centre. At the other end is an open kitchen with a big stove covered in simmering pots. Wooden booths line the far side of the room. This is where the paying guest are served their meals. Everyone else—a continually shifting crew of volunteers, interns, family members and visitors from various NGOs—eats the common meal, served from a clay pot and bowls set in the middle of the table. One of the wooden booths near the kitchen serves as Mrs Kobayashi’s desk. This consists of a towering pile of books and papers organised in geological strata. In other words, there is no organisation, save for Mrs K’s ability to reach into the Pleistocene and pull out exactly the document she is looking for. 

The walls of Mrs Kobayashi’s inn are lined with photos showing the volunteers and interns who have come to scrub down the ryokan, cook the meals and do other work around town, as refugees and even a few new settlers from elsewhere in Japan have begun moving back to the area. Along with planting the flowers in front of the train station, Mrs Kobayashi hands out pamphlets, books and even collections of poetry to inquiring visitors. She hosts guests for three meals a day and runs

Illustrations by Gianluca Costantini

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’

a small gift shop. This samurai territory is known for its horses, and she also owns a stable for rescued animals. Like other livestock in the exclusion zone, her horses have been marked with a white brand, to keep people from eating the meat. 

Outside the Kobayashis’ refurbished inn, the rest of Odaka suffers from nine years of neglect. The train station is surrounded by hundreds of bicycles rusted into place, and many shops are closed and abandoned. But the town also shows signs of coming back to life, with a new social centre for residents, a silk-weaving shop and a shopfront incubator for new businesses. On rotating days of the week, chefs cook meals in noodle shops and restaurants that are starting to reopen, with long lines in front of them and people arriving early, before the food runs out. The town has even attracted an artist and magazine publisher, who landed here after walking the entire Tohoku coastline and deciding that this was the best place to settle.   

It is sumo season while I am visiting the Kobayashis, the final round of the year-long tournament. After eating his meals, Mr Kobayashi slips into a neighbouring room to watch the non-stop coverage of large men slapping their thighs and tossing each other out of Shinto-blessed arenas. He knows all the athletes and team songs and rice-scattering rituals, which come at cherry blossom time and mark the onset of spring. This is Mr K’s final break before the summer rush of activity starts in earnest. 

On the day that I am invited to visit him at his laboratory, we drive a few kilometres north from Odaka to Minamisoma, a coastal city of 70,000 people that became briefly famous when the mayor went on YouTube in March 2011 to say that the Japanese government had abandoned him and his fellow citizens, sending no food or water or other desperately needed aid. We drive through a suburban sprawl of low-rise buildings before parking in front of what could be a liquor store or dry cleaner, except for a sign over the door identifying this as the Todokedori Radiation Testing Center, which is named for the cheerful bird in its logo.  

We walk past buckets of contaminated soil that have been left on the front porch , waiting to be tested, and walk into a large room that looks like a cross between a college classroom and a day-care centre. Three men in open-necked polo shirts work at computers next to a woman who has brought her child to play on the floor. Other people are tacking maps to the walls. Beside sampling soil and food, Mr Kobayashi organises teams of volunteers who walk the forests and fields of Fukushima every six months, compiling surveys of radiological contamination and producing these maps that show low-dose areas in blue and contaminated areas in red. This work would normally be done by governmental agencies, but all the public radiation testing centres in Fukushima have been closed. ‘Immediately after 2011, we had eight centres like this one,’ he says, ‘but now we are the only one left.

‘The official government centres have lots or rules,’ Kobayashi says. ‘One family can bring one thing, usually what they are growing as a crop. But we measure food from supermarkets. We measure berries and mushrooms foraged from the mountains. We measure everything.’

He has found fish and reindeer meat imported from Finland that is still highly contaminated by Chernobyl fallout. ‘We have a very stringent limit for contamination here in Japan,’ he says. ‘This is set at 100 becquerels per kilogram, which is far lower than what is allowed in Europe.’ Kobayashi has measured European foodstuffs with 500 or 600 becquerels per kilogram. If Europe after Chernobyl had not raised its allowable levels of contamination, the continent would produce very little edible food. 

This is not to say that Japan has been spared from its own high levels of contamination. ‘I bought a mushroom from the Aizu farmer’s market that measured 3,000 becquerels per kilogram,’ Kobayashi says. He was also surprised to find that mushroom contamination increased in 2015. Perhaps due to heavy rains or unannounced releases from the Fukushima power plant, it rose to 11,000 becquerels per kilogram, 

‘This has to make you wonder if the government is making a mistake allowing people to resettle in contaminated areas,’ says Hideki Jinno, the head of an NGO in southern Japan, who is visiting the Kobayashis. Jinno reports that his group of concerned citizens used to donate money and travel yearly to help people in Chernobyl, before they realised they should do the same thing for the victims of Fukushima. He and the Kobayashis are planning their next trip to Chernobyl, which they have already visited several times. What lessons have they learned about how to live in irradiated landscapes? It is the mushrooms and berries and wild animals and foods foraged from the mountains that carry the most lethal loads of contamination, and no one should eat these foods, or any food grown in contaminated areas, without taking it to a lab to be tested.

Next to the map-lined room at Kobayashi’s lab is a smaller room full of dosimeters, spectrometers and other specialised gear for measuring radiation. One of these German-donated machines costs US$15,000. This is where Kobayashi and his volunteers are about to spend long hours looking at the summer crops and other food people are hoping to eat. Testing everything, trusting nothing, except for the readouts from radiation detectors: is this what our future looks like? A day-care centre full of radiation maps and equipment for monitoring our contaminated Earth? ☐

Since our first issue, in November 2015, Mekong Review has been publishing some of the sharpest literary writing on and from Asia.

The international travel restrictions and lockdowns due to the Covid-19 pandemic have had a devastating impact on our business. Thus, in this trying time, we are launching a Patreon campaign to keep us going. If you are in a position to help, please visit patreon.com/mekongreview

Colin Cotterill Yimericks

Mario Del PeroMarginal countries

Christina FirpoStolen children

Soth PolinThe anarchist

NOVEMBER 2015 VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1

19

His historyPrumsodun Ok

C A M B O D I A

PHILIP COGGANAn Illustrated History of Cambodia

John Beaufoy Publishing: 2019

For anyone who frequents the few English-language bookshops in Phnom Penh, Philip Coggan is a familiar moniker in their limited Cambodia

sections. The author ‘fell in love with Asia on his first visit to Bali, and has been traveling and living in the region since’. His experiences working in the NGO sector and as a freelance journalist inspired his fascination for his host country, spurring him to produce titles such as Shiny Objects of Desire: A Novel of Cambodia and Spirit Worlds: Cambodia, the Buddha and the Naga. His latest offering is An Illustrated History of Cambodia.

In an interview on Cambodia News English, the author says, ‘I started writing out of a wish to share what I’ve learned about Cambodia … It’s a book for the layman (and woman). I’ve aimed it to be readable, not too detailed, but accurate and up to date.’ The resulting 208-page work, full of illustrations, paintings, photographs and maps, printed on nice paper and organised into six sections, explores 10,000 years of Cambodia’s history beginning with the Stone Age. As a Cambodian, my experience of An Illustrated History of Cambodia was one of mixed feelings and questions.

These complications begin on the very first page in ‘Defining Cambodia’, where Coggan suggests that ‘the kings of Angkor probably took their name’ from the Kamboja, an Indo-Iranian tribe considered ‘savages … distant barbarians on the edges of the Indian world’. There is no evidence that ancient Khmers considered these peoples as the progenitors of our civilisation.

In fact, the Khmer explanation for the Sanskrit name Kamvujadeśa, or Kambujadeśa—as contemporary Kampuchea was inscribed by our ancestors—is kambu (gold), ja (born), and deśa (land), together meaning ‘land born of gold’. One quick search in Samdech Chuon Nath’s dictionary, available online in Khmer, will reveal this.

This etymology is significant as it is synonymous with the Suvarnabhumi of Indian myth, legend and history. Famed for its riches, the destination of many ancient Indian merchants and bodhisattva of lore, Suvarnabhumi was in fact mentioned in Khmer epigraphy, describing King Isanavarman I in the seventh century CE as the ‘King of Kings, who rules over [Suvarnabhumi] until the sea, which is the border, while the kings in the neighbouring states honour his order to their heads’.

Now, the concept of Suvarnabhumi is not without its modern nationalist and political dilemmas. Some scholars therefore urge reading the inscription with caution, stating that the king merely meant the ‘golden lands’ of his domain. This, however, is academic and institutional neurosis that leaves no room for the art, poetry and genius of ancient composers and scribes, who could and would have possessed the skill and desire to use layered, multiple meanings in their words.

King Isanavarman I rules over the golden lands, the precious earth of Suvarnabhumi. This nation is also known as Kambujadeśa. The sage Kambu Svayambhuva—‘Kambu the Spontaneously Born’, or more directly, ‘Spontaneously Born Gold’—from whom Kambujadeśa takes its name, is tied to Preah Thaong, another mythical ancestor. Although synonymous with the Brahmin Kaundinya who marries the naga princess Soma, whose story has survived and evolved among

the people in oral culture for centuries, Preah Thaong’s name can be translated as Sacred Gold.

Coggan’s limitations concerning Khmer, Sanskrit and Pali—and the culture and history associated with these languages—become apparent when he criticises the French for referring to Khmer ministers as ‘mandarins … under the misapprehension that Cambodian officials could be compared to the professional bureaucracy of the Vietnamese state they had just conquered’. This statement is made without knowledge that ‘mandarin’ is derived from the Sanskrit mantrī, the word Khmers used and use in our court, out of the orbit of Sinicised Vietnamese culture. This lack of understanding is attested further in a caption in which he writes: ‘Devatas, minor goddesses who act as celestial door keepers. Their descendants, the tevodas, still serve the same function.’ Devatā, the romanisation in Sanskrit IAST, and tevoda, the English romanisation according to the Khmer accent, is the same word and concept, spelled only one way in Khmer (ទេវតា).

These minor misinterpretations reveal an immense blind spot in Coggan’s lens and understanding, which looks at and upon Cambodia solely through non-Khmer scholars and texts. If unchecked and unbalanced, this can propagate and canonise misinformation as truth, perpetuating colonialist attitudes and imperialist narratives of Cambodia as fractured, unwholesome and broken.

For example, Khmer people often call the heavenly beauties carved at Angkor Wat tevoda, apsara or tep apsar, the last two names referring to their roles as celestial dancers. There are some non-native scholars and lay folk, however, perhaps citing Sappho Marchal’s Khmer Costumes and Ornaments, who condescendingly scoff at the latter identifications as Khmer ignorance, asserting they can only be tevoda due to their iconography, regalia and size.

This is contrary to the fact that tevoda denotes both male and female deities in Khmer culture, and is sometimes interchangeable with deva (god) in Khmer literature. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that heaven and earth mirror each other in the Khmer conception; the dancing ladies of the human palace, who serve the king, are reflections of the dancing servants of the gods in heaven. Technically, both can be described using the Old Khmer phrase knum vrah rapam, which can mean ‘slaves of the sacred dance’ or ‘dancer-slaves of the gods’. Further unity of being and identity lies in the Middle

Khmer Reamker, where tep apsar—also denoted with condensed meanings as neang tep suor srei—assist Sita in birth on Indra’s orders.

Lastly, the inept notion that these tevoda could not be apsara because the former wear skirts and the latter wear short pantaloons (kbin) reveals a lack of rootedness in locality. A friend visiting Myanmar—our neighbours who share much custom and history—remarked that the men would roll up their long longyis ‘into short kbin’ when they played soccer. They did not become different beings due to their manner of dress, but merely assumed an active role and dimensionality. Furthermore, there are certain cases, such as at the temple-mountain of Bakheng, where the larger female ‘doorkeepers’ mentioned by Coggan are dressed exactly the same as the dancing female figures carved directly above them.

This might feel like frivolous nitpicking to some. However, this disconnect embodies the legacy of violence in which colonial powers created rifts and ruptures out of nothing, separating peoples and races through ‘science’, carving vague and arbitrary borders to gain power and manipulate our people and resources. The French did this by pitting the genius Khmer of Angkor against the degenerate Cambodgiennes in the fields (a 1928 National Geographic article, citing Cambodia connoisseur George Groslier, reifies this racism). Thai nationalists do it by pitting the ancient Khom, a major source and foundation of their royal language, arts, customs and culture, against the backwards Khamen of present-day Cambodia.

Their words should live as a testament to history, but what happens when they are resurfaced, brought back to life and reused without analysis and criticality? What will readers unfamiliar with Khmer history or Cambodia come to think and carry with them? More importantly, what of the young, impressionable Khmers in Cambodia and the diaspora, scrounging for every piece of knowledge pertaining to their sense of home and identity?

Ironically, Coggan’s tendency to highlight oddities and trivia—why is it important to know that King Harsvarman III was crowned ‘the same year that William the Conqueror invaded England’?—hearkens back in tone to the colonial travel writings and adventure films produced during early European and American encounters with Cambodia. These curiosities, perhaps drawn forth to attempt a popular, entertaining accessibility, sometimes appear cherry-picked, creating a sense of superficiality and exotica.

What is the difference in devotion, depth and distance between love and enthusiasm? What is the responsibility of writers, of producers of culture, whose work can be galvanised as truth, myth, guide and weapon in the present and future? How can we be approachable and accessible while being sharp and precise, our mud as rich and beautiful as our lotus blossom rising towards clarity, illumination and enlightenment?

An Illustrated History of Cambodia, with its reliance on others’ work and its author’s lack of deep connection and expertise, is historiography as usual. Ignoring the ever present and ever telling embodiments of reality such as food, dance, language and literature—culling a linear political drama solely from written English sources—it fails to capture the culture, spirit, ethos and narratives of the people and land it attempts to circumscribe, define and contain. ☐

Prumsodun Ok is founding artistic director of the dance company Prumsodun Ok & NATYARASA

WikiCommons

20

Coalition divisionCarl Vadivella Belle

M A L A Y S I A

MEREDITH L. WEISS AND FAISAL S. HAZIS (EDITORS)

Towards a New Malaysia? The 2018 Election and Its Aftermath

NUS Press: 2020

FRANCIS E. HUTCHINSON AND LEE HWOK AUN (EDITORS)

Defeat of Barisan Nasional: Missed Signs or Late Surge?ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute: 2019

On 9 May 2018 Malaysia elected a new government, the Pakatan Harapan (PH, Coalition of Hope), defeating the ruling

coalition, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) dominated by the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, which together with its predecessor, the Alliance coalition, had ruled Malaysia since independence in 1957. PH secured 48 per cent of the popular vote and 118 of the 222 parliamentary seats, BN 34 per cent and seventy-nine seats, Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) 17 per cent and eighteen seats and Warisan 2 per cent and eight seats. Voter turnout totalled 82 per cent of the electorate, the second highest in Malaysian history.

Malaysia is a complex nation, both ethnically and regionally diverse. The population consists of Malays (55 per cent), Chinese (23 per cent), Indians (7 per cent) and others (15 per cent). In regional terms, the so-called Malay belt states on the east and northwest of the peninsula tend to be considerably more conservative than the west coast and southern states. The East Malaysian states, Sabah and Sarawak, less developed than those of West Malaysia, often vote on local rather than national issues.

Towards a New Malaysia? and Defeat of Barisan Nasional examine the Malaysian election from a range of perspectives, covering much common ground but differing in certain key aspects. Both books trace the development of PH, analyse patterns of voter behaviour, election issues and campaign strategies. Commentaries are supported by an impressive array of tables, charts and graphs. However, both overlook topics of importance. Neither work discusses voting patterns among the Orang Asli (native people), and Towards a New Malaysia? omits any dedicated analysis of the Indian electorate. Defeat of Barisan Nasional inexplicably neglects any detailed exploration of the increasingly central role of political Islam. And neither book mentions developments on the night of the election, namely the crucial reassurances of public order issued by key security personnel once it became obvious that PH had prevailed (thus ensuring that there would be no repetition of the racial violence of 1969), or the civilian blockade that prevented the flight into exile of defeated Najib Abdul Razak and his wife Rosmah.

Both books describe the initial formation of the PH coalition in September 2015, consisting of the rather uneasy alliance of Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR, People’s Justice Party), the Democratic Action Party (DAP), and Amanah Negara (National Trust Party, or Amanah), made up of ‘progressives’ who in June 2015 splintered from an increasingly intransigent PAS. These parties were later joined by a new Malay-based political party, Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (PPBM, United Indigenous Party), largely composed of erstwhile members of UMNO disaffected by the 1MDB scandal, and headed by former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad (1981–2003). To complicate the already complex

picture, in September 2016 Shafie Apdal, former UMNO deputy president, formed Warisan, which allied with PH. It was agreed that in the event of a PH victory, the nonagenarian Mahathir would become prime minister and, after a specified period, would hand over the leadership to his former deputy, Anwar Ibrahim. This arrangement was based on the twin assumptions that Anwar (with whom Mahathir had reconciled) would be freed from jail and receive a royal pardon.

The coalition won the 2018 election. However, within eighteen months PH had unravelled. From the outset PH found it impossible to fulfil the perhaps unrealistic expectations its victory had aroused. Promised economic reforms were stymied by the parlous financial situation bequeathed by the defeated BN government. The overall economy remained sluggish, wages stagnated and the value of the ringgit declined. Legal reform stalled, and repressive legislation remained on the statute books. In the meantime, UMNO and PAS, playing upon populist fears that both the Malay ‘race’ and the sanctity of Islam were endangered by a putatively Chinese-dominated government, mobilised Malay support. In the end tensions between the Anwar and Azmin Ali factions of PKR, brought to a head by the issue of leadership succession, led to talks between the Azmin faction and UMNO, the defection of key members of PPBM, the resignation of Mahathir and the installation of Muhyiddin Yassin as prime minister.

While the 2018 election results have been widely interpreted as a defeat of a deeply corrupt government centred upon the person of Najib, both books make clear that this narrative has obscured other structural and social factors.

Although the administration had delivered a robust economy, economic discontent was a primary factor in BN’s defeat. This was fuelled by rising costs and the imposition of a 6 per cent goods-and-services tax. Other issues included the 1MDB scandal and concern about the scale of projected Chinese investment. East Malaysians were perturbed by issues affecting devolution of state powers and the development gaps between Bornean states and those of the peninsula.

The May 2018 election revealed deep divisions within the Malay electorate, both between the so-called ‘Malay belt’ states and the remainder

of the peninsula, where PH won a number of Malay majority seats. However, PH’s victory was on the back of a minority Malay vote. Ironically, the first past the post system of voting, often used to UMNO’s advantage, tended to favour PH candidates.

Serina Rahman’s study of rural Malays, who comprise 30 per cent of the total electorate, revealed that voters strongly tended to support ‘those who maintained the ethnocentric discourse of Malay rights, Islamic supremacy, and the longevity of royal houses’. In their examination of urban Malays, Adib Zalkapli and Wan Saiful Wan Jan’s examination of urban Malays shows that the Islamic/Malay agenda remained the central priority in their worldview. Their continued traditional respect for political leaders meant that UMNO corruption and graft were not major issues. However, many were worried by the rising cost of living, and members of the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) land schemes were disinclined to vote for UMNO.

Ngu Ik Tien and Lee Hwok’s examination of Chinese voters reveals an electorate that since 2008 has become increasingly disillusioned with BN. Chinese

concerns revolve around preservation of traditional cultural values, guarantees of individual rights and the advancement of an inclusive democratic state. In 2018 an estimated 93 per cent of Chinese supported PH.

Ananthar Raman Govindasamy provides an overview of voting patterns of the Indian community. He outlines the rise of the Hindu Rights Action Force in 2007 but underplays its influence in turning Indians against BN in the catalytic 2008 election. While Najib identified Indian concerns as a BN priority, the measures introduced did not reach their intended targets. Indian concerns included lack of economic opportunities, corruption and the country’s leadership. An estimated 82 per cent of the Indian electorate voted for PH.

Chapters devoted to state issues focus on five key states: Sarawak, Sabah, Kelantan, Johor and Selangor. The East Malaysian states, Sabah and Sarawak, have long been regarded as BN ‘fixed deposit’ states, and indeed following the 2013 election it was representation from these states that allowed BN to retain power. In both the devolution of state powers created resentment against the central administration. In Sarawak voters swung to PH, and in Sabah Warisan proved pivotal.

Kelantan, a ‘Malay belt’ state, has traditionally been far more religiously conservative than the remainder of Malaysia. Despite allegations, later substantiated, of PAS receiving considerable sums of money from UMNO, PAS won the majority of the parliamentary seats and swept the state legislature.

Johor, long regarded as a BN stronghold, and despite the open intervention of the royal house, was won by PH. Dominant issues included Najib’s increasing unpopularity, FELDA mismanagement and the appointment of local politician Muhyidden Yassin as chairman of Johor PH. In Selangor PH built upon the popular and efficient PH state government.

Since the racial riots of May 1969 and the subsequent imposition of a Malay political and cultural agenda, performative Islam has largely displaced adat (or traditional Malay custom) as the defining characteristic of ‘Malayness’ and is increasingly deployed as an instrument of inter- and intra-ethnic control. Towards a New Malaysia? traces the rise of political Islam in Malaysia and its increasingly assertive and combative trajectory and analyses the deeper issues behind the election of the PH government.

Despite earlier noted omissions, these books, taken together, provide a detailed account of the events that led to the defeat of a long-installed and increasingly corrupt and authoritarian regime. As such, they document an important milestone in Malaysia’s history. But both also reveal that, despite sixty years of nation building, Malaysia remains fragmented by a myriad of particularistic ethnic and religious impulses. In this context it is apposite to refer to the cautionary observations of Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid and Che Hamdan Che Mohd Razali, who warned that a single election would not erase years of inculcated scaremongering, and that the 2018 election had thrown into sharp relief a contested national identity, namely between advocates of an ‘inclusive civic nation’ and proponents of a narrow ‘ethnocracy driven by identity politics’. The fall of the PH government has resulted, in the short term at least, in the triumph of the latter. ☐

Carl Vadivella Belle is the author of ‘Tragic Orphans: Indians in Malaysia’ and ‘Thaipusam in Malaysia: A Hindu Festival in the Tamil Diaspora’

21

This working lifeSimon Vincent

S I N G A P O R E

GERARD SASGES AND NG SHI WENHard at Work: Life in Singapore

NUS Press: 2019

At first, the announcement sounded like music to my ears. After months of consternation over seeing my retired father stepping out of the

way of speeding e-scooters and vexation over reading mounting reports of collisions with pedestrians, I was relieved to hear that the government would be banning personal mobility devices (PMDs) from footpaths.

Strangely, though, the ban came into effect overnight on 5 November 2019, despite several prior occasions in which officeholders insisted on the necessity of PMDs as part of ‘active mobility’ plans.

The announcement then provoked another sound: the collective anguish of food delivery drivers working for Deliveroo, GrabFood and Foodpanda, who had come to rely on these devices for their livelihoods and who number around 7,000.

In just a week, the number of drivers at one MP’s meet-the-people session swelled from thirty to 300, as scenes of drivers urging that the ban be revoked went viral online. ‘We are human, not dog ah eh. We got mouths to feed, man,’ one driver said.

While the drivers had not assembled at Hong Lim Park, the one space allocated by the state for demonstrations, it was clear that what was unfolding at void decks and community centres was indeed a protest.

With that, whatever thoughts I had of PMD drivers as a nuisance on footpaths were refocused on ordinary workers now struggling to get by, as distinct from the errant drivers who were behind the nearly 300 cases of accident in 2018.

Pedestrians and delivery riders were simply reacting in their own ways to a larger policy, in this case, the Active Mobility Bill, which was passed in 2017 to legalise the use of bicycles and PMDs on public paths. Pedestrians bemoaned the lack of safety on footpaths, and workers in the gig economy had simply filled the demand for food delivery that was created by the law.

Fast forward to April 2020, when thousands of coronavirus cases in foreign worker dormitories shine a light on the cramped and unsanitary living conditions of those who build the infrastructure of this nation. Migrant rights groups, after years of advocating better dormitory regulation, are validated in a country that is inhospitable to activism.

Whom in this often considered cosmopolitan nation do we imagine as the marginalised? What if we, the perpetually overworked in Singapore, could see ourselves more closely reflected in each other? Would we be more attuned to the toil of the most economically vulnerable?

These were the questions Hard at Work: Life in Singapore, a collection of interviews with sixty workers, from a range of occupations and cultural backgrounds, raised. As the title suggests, the foregrounding theme is the universality of work as lived experience.

Singaporeans work longer hours than most of their peers in developed countries. One recent estimate by office access control company Kisi puts the

number, which includes commuting time, at nearly forty-five hours per week.

It is unsurprising then that many of the interviewees talk, with varying degrees of resignation and humour,

about the relentless need to compete, survive and, if possible, thrive. A motorcycle mechanic who is his own boss, for instance, works twelve-hour shifts, taking a half-day off only on Sundays.

‘You see ah, once got family, you must think what to eat! Haha! Must be responsible. Survive lah. That’s why ah, work, work, work every time, until Sunday also I still open shop. Until I go for holiday only one time a year,’ he says.

The candour and colloquial tones reflect the decision of the student interviewers and editors Gerard Sasges and Ng Shi Wen to leave out commentary and, as much as possible, let the workers speak for themselves.

In the resulting monologues, pathos is an undeniable theme. An ice-cream uncle, the local term for those who park their cart-laden motorcycles along footpaths to sell ice cream, laments declining profits and the physical toll of standing.

‘But no choice, don’t like, also need to work,’ he says, before ending his interview on this fatalistic note: ‘I got nothing much to look forward to lah. Just waiting to die! Nothing much that I’m interested in. People are also changing. It’s so different from kampung days.’

A twenty-three-year-old undergraduate and academic ghostwriter has turned the paper chase for academic qualifications to his own benefit. Charging wealthy foreigners and locals ‘who are desperate to get a good grade’ S$250 for 2,500 words of essay writing, he has worked out this justification for his shady enterprise:

‘In Singapore, the tuition we’ve received just because our parents could pay for it, all the extra advantages we had that other kids may not have had, it’s all part of a whole industry. And as long as you have a system like that, you will have wealthy elites who will game the system at the expense of others.’

Race and ethnicity are also repeatedly brought up by interviewees to express their varied lots. A Chinese national who works as a student care teacher says most Singaporeans do not like people from her country. Yet this sits uneasily with her later comment that ‘between the Malays and Chinese, we feel that Malays are very lazy’. The stereotype of the lazy Malay, propagated since colonial times, seems to have translated, in this case at least, across nationalities.

It is a testament to the intellectual honesty of the editors that they do not shun presenting, if not

elaborating on, the ethnic tensions in work and economic relations in Singapore. In this regard, Hard at Work fills a vacuum in the country’s inequality debate that has been reignited in the last few years.

Notably, the writer of the foreword is Teo You Yenn, the author of This Is What Inequality Looks Like. In her much lauded book, Teo chose not to dwell on race, even though she acknowledged later that her publishers ‘strong-armed’ her into writing that Malays were over-represented in her field work.

It is not hard, though, to point out social and political structures that make race an undeniable factor in class relations. Social welfare and aid, for instance, are channelled through racially delineated self-help groups in Singapore.

The interviewees of Hard at Work candidly point to such structures. Take the police officer who references this rarely discussed, but widely known and felt issue: Malays are absent from certain positions of national security. ‘Officially it wouldn’t be called discrimination, but they rather use the broad term of policy,’ he says, ‘they’ being a seemingly amorphous term for the police force or the powers that be.

The government hesitates in assigning Malays to high-ranking positions of national security, especially in the army, the navy and the air force, because of the risk ascribed to Singapore’s proximity to Muslim-majority countries. Meaning that Malays might hold allegiances to their religion above the nation.

In her foreword, Teo writes that ordinary people, unlike academics, have no qualms in referring to ethnic, religious and national differences.

One of the first steps in articulating and addressing inequality might very well be seeing our unified struggle against dehumanising competition in the workplace. However, if we avoid addressing social systems that, by their very logic, stratify us, we might be lost to the true distance that needs to be bridged.

On 30 November last year, a few weeks after the PMD fracas, I attended a forum on housing in which the speakers advocated improving security of tenancy for the economically vulnerable who make up the gig economy.

In making this point, the economist Yeoh Lam Keong spoke of the formation of an ossified underclass, before citing the PMD incident. ‘You can see the uncomfortable racial composition of that underclass.’

I had noticed this, too, but never expected anyone to point out that Malays (he did not name the race specifically, but it was obvious) made up most of the demographic. Yeoh highlighted a social crisis that needs to be redressed.

After the PMD ban, I was able to accompany my father on errands with renewed peace of mind. There were no grating honks, sirens or revving

motors to signal the passage of e-scooters.Since home isolation measures began in April to

curb the spread of the coronavirus, food delivery—now only through motorcycles and bicycles—has become an essential service.

The streets are quieter than ever, but eerier, as the quarantining of foreign workers brings construction projects to a halt and to the fore their marginalisation from Singapore’s rapid development. ☐

Simon Vincent is a journalist and the author of ‘The Naysayer’s Book Club: 26 Singaporeans You Need to Know’

Ng Shi Wen

22

Family co.Peter Tasker

S O U T H K O R E A

GEOFFREY CAINSamsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech

Penguin: 2020

Samsung is everywhere these days. On towering screens in New York’s Times Square, partnering with leading edge designers at London Fashion

Week, unveiling its latest foldable phone. Even at the Oscars, where the granddaughter of Samsung’s founder was on stage celebrating the multiple triumphs of the film Parasite, which she produced.

Samsung used to model itself on Sony. Today, though, Samsung’s stock market value is over three times the size of its former exemplar’s, and its one serious rival is Apple. How and why did this happen? Geoffrey Cain’s well-researched and often highly entertaining account offers plenty of clues to the rise of this extraordinary entity, which bestrides the world of twenty-first-century high-tech while staying true to its East Asian roots.

‘Fuck Steve. He’s dead and we were right. Samsung was right.’ So declared a US marketing executive at Samsung in 2017. Jobs had mocked Samsung’s large-screen phones when they first appeared, but years later Apple launched its own series of similar phones. The greater frustration was that Apple, via the charisma of Steve Jobs, had created an image of creativity that helped it secure higher prices and higher profits while casting Samsung as copycats.

The reality was more complex. It was not Apple that first launched the smart phone, but Blackberry. Jobs borrowed liberally from Sony and even Panasonic. Samsung has been the trailblazer in foldable phones and phones equipped for 5G, the next-generation network that will enable full-length movies to be downloaded in seconds.

Teams of engineers can be innovative, as well as Californian hipsters. Samsung’s recipe is gaseon, the Korean version of the Japanese kaizen, meaning continual improvement, which is often associated with Toyota.

Though best known to the public for its smart phones and large-screen TVs, Samsung is also a huge producer of flash memory chips and touch screens. One of its most important customers for these items is none other than Apple—from whose perspective Samsung is a crucial supplier. The two competitors are, in the words of one of Cain’s sources, ‘joined at the hip’.

Apple is so astonishingly profitable because it is a ‘platform company’ that focuses on software and design. Production is outsourced to enormous job shops such as Taiwan’s Foxconn (aka Hon Hai). The other members of the ‘FAANG’ group (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) of companies that dominate the high-tech landscape are newly minted internet companies.

Samsung, by contrast, was founded eighty years ago. A traditional manufacturer with 310,000 employees worldwide, three times as many as Apple, it has a corporate culture that is rooted in its origins.

Samsung is a chaebol. Written with the same characters as the Japanese zaibatsu, the word means ‘industrial group’. Its founder, B.C. Lee,

was educated at Waseda University in Tokyo, as were many members of the Korean elite in the colonial period. When he established his first company in 1936, a vegetable and dried fish shop, he chose the name

Samsung, meaning ‘three stars’, as a kind of homage to Mitsubishi, which means ‘three diamonds’.

In 1950, Lee visited war-battered Japan, where he viewed fifty factories and business sites and was bowled over by the resilience and work ethic of the Japanese just a few years after their shattering defeat.

‘The Japanese steadfastly valued loyalty and prioritized the cosmic self over the individual and the public over the private,’ he wrote later. ‘The Japanese capacity for unity and diligent work comes from that patriotism.’

In line with Japanese human resource practices, he prized loyal, lifelong generalists as employees and reportedly sat in on 100,000 recruitment interviews. For the ‘Samsung man’, Cain notes, ‘company was family and family was company.’ Stamina-sapping group activities, such as forty-eight-hour hikes, were used to build physical and mental toughness. There are obvious parallels with the ethos of Japanese salarymen, the hard-charging corporate samurai on whose labours Japan’s economic miracle was based.

Lee was a frequent visitor to Japan and was to marry a Japanese woman, as other members of the dynasty have subsequently done. It was from his favoured Hotel Okura that he issued the ‘Tokyo Declaration’ in 1983, committing Samsung to becoming a major force in semiconductors. Lee Kun-hee, his third son and eventual successor, visited Japan to meet semiconductor experts nearly every week.

‘I tried to learn from them anything that might be of use,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘I would often secretly bring in Japanese experts on Saturday and have them teach my engineers overnight.’

He would have had no problem in communicating with them. Like his father, Lee Kun-hee was a graduate of Waseda University and a fluent Japanese speaker. Jay Y. Lee, the founder’s grandson and current boss, studied at Harvard Business School, but also has an MBA from Keio University, the rival of Waseda, and is also a Japanese speaker.

Through its formative years and into this century, Samsung has always had top-level Japanese advisers whose opinions were taken very seriously, such as industrial designer Tameo Fukuda. Presumably, some of them facilitated the unofficial transfer of intellectual property that Lee Kun-hee mentioned above.

How did a company which had so much in common with corporate Japan succeed so spectacularly when its Japanese rivals have floundered? In a sense, Samsung’s success is a tribute to the Japanese business model, yet there is one very significant difference between corporate Japan and Samsung: the ownership structure.

After World War II, the US occupation authorities dissolved Japan’s zaibatsu industrial groups on the dubious grounds that they had been largely responsible for the rise of militarism. In the early postwar period, the zaibatsu coalesced again, but with one crucial difference. The founding families were no longer there. Instead, the companies developed an intricate network of cross-shareholdings that protected managements from outside pressure.

Japan’s postwar system of capitalism without capitalists meant that financially nobody had ‘skin in the game’. Ultimately that led to complacency and strategic inertia—even at Sony once Akio Morita, the charismatic founder, was gone. No salaryman CEO could issue Lee Kun-hee’s radical challenge to his staff: ‘Change everything, except your wife and children’.

As Cain makes clear, Samsung is a controversial presence in South Korea. Samsung Electronics alone accounts for some 25 per cent of total stock market capitalisation. Any organisation that big and wealthy is bound to become a political actor. Cain describes heated street confrontations between anti-Samsung demonstrators (mostly young and left-leaning) and Samsung supporters (mainly older and conservative). Attitudes to Samsung, as with attitudes towards Japan—the two are intimately connected—express a larger fracture in South Korean society.

Samsung has certainly been involved in its fair share of scandals. Jay Y. Lee, the effective leader of the chaebol, did jail time after being found guilty of corruption in 2017. Yet when South Korea’s leftist president took a delegation of businessmen to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in September 2018, prominent among their number was the recently released Jay Y. Lee. A South Korean business delegation without Samsung would be like Barcelona football team without Lionel Messi.

Today Samsung dominates its sector as Japan’s electronic behemoths were once expected to do. In the Darwinian world of high tech, it flies the flag for old-fashioned engineer-led manufacturing—and for old-fashioned dynastic capitalism. It may not be cool and it may not be pretty, but the results speak for themselves. ☐

Peter Tasker is the author of ‘On Kurosawa: A Tribute to the Master Director’

The Indonesia-Malaysia Dispute Concerning Sovereignty over Sipadan and Ligitan Islands: Historical Antecedents and the International Court of Justice JudgmentD S Ranjit Singh

In 2002, ASEAN made history when two of its founder members—Indonesia and Malaysia—amicably settled a dispute over the ownership of the two Bornean islands of Sipadan and Ligitan by accepting the

jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which ruled in favour of Malaysia. The case at once assumed great significance as a beacon of hope for the region which is plagued by numerous disruptive territorial disputes.

Soft cover US$29.90 978-981-4843-64-5 244 pp 2019

The Defeat of Barisan Nasional: Missed Signs or Late Surge?Francis E Hutchinson and Lee Hwok Aun, editors

The results of Malaysia’s 14th General Elections of May 2018 were unexpected and transformative. Against conventional wisdom, the newly reconfigured opposition grouping Pakatan Harapan (PH) decisively defeated the incumbent Barisan Nasional

(BN), ending six decades of uninterrupted dominant one-party rule. This analytical work is complemented by personal narratives from a selection of GE-14 participants.

Soft cover US$29.90 978-981-4843-89-8 509 pp 2019

Website: bookshop.iseas.edu.sg Email: pubsunit@iseas.edu.sg

MR 2020-May.indd 1 20/2/20 4:40 PM

23

Scholar and believerMartin Stuart-Fox

M E M O I R

CHARLES KEYESImpermanence: An Anthropologist of Thailand and Asia

Silkworm Books: 2019

The first thing about this memoir that piqued my interest was its title. Impermanence is not a concept that has much traction in the West, much

less in Christianity. It is implicit in Heraclitus’ dictum that one can never step into the same river twice, but the Christian West has been shaped by belief in revelation as the source of absolute truth. Science is a bit less dogmatic: as Karl Popper pointed out, we can never be absolutely certain that scientific knowledge is absolutely true. But the curve of theoretical paradigm change is asymptotic, and scientific progress can be measured by its instrumental application: if things work, we can be pretty sure we’ve got some of it right.

The Buddhist view of the world is very different. Impermanence (Pali: anicca) is one of the three core signs of being, the three indelible characteristics of all existence. Charles Keyes nowhere mentions the other two, so we don’t know whether he embraces either or both. One is dukkha, usually misleadingly translated as ‘suffering’ but better understood as ‘unsatisfactoriness’: no matter how joyous life is at any moment, there is no way any human being can avoid sickness, old age and/or death. The other is anatta, meaning absence of any eternal essence in the form of an atman, or soul. For, as the Buddha discovered after seven years of introspective meditation and taught for the rest of his life, all a human being consists of is changing aggregations of material form, perceptions, sensations, thoughts and consciousness.

Impermanence is central to the Buddhist conception of how the world is: think the symbolism of cherry blossoms for the Japanese. For Keyes, it is not the metaphysical concept that matters, however, but the psychological comfort provided by the realisation that all is transient as he copes with the changes he has undergone ‘in status, lifestyle and body’ since retiring, downsizing and being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. What we are not told is whether Keyes counts himself as a Buddhist and, if not, how Buddhist concepts like impermanence have influenced the way he has lived his life.

You don’t have to read very far into Keyes’s memoir to recognise that this is a book by a scholar. Even the prelude has footnotes, and there are plenty more along the way, providing information about sources (letters home, diary entries, fieldwork notes, all precisely dated), about the meanings of words and concepts, and about the people Keyes encountered in the course of his career, their interests, their publications and, yes, their status within the spectrum of Southeast Asian studies. The writing is measured, precise, unemotional, the account comprehensive but modest. Keyes shies away from assessing his own contribution to Thai and Southeast Asian studies, though it has been considerable.

Charles Keyes was born in a small town in the cattle country of northwestern Nebraska in October 1937. Soon after, the family moved to

Idaho, where ‘Biff ’, as he was always called by family and friends, grew up as an outsider, a Presbyterian among majority Mormon classmates. The young Keyes was not an outsider by choice—he joined the Scouts and the YMCA—but more because both at school and later at Nebraska University he was studious and serious and got good grades. Today we would probably call him a nerd.

University set the direction of Keyes’s life. From physics and maths, he gravitated to English and anthropology, took a keen interest in world affairs, actively campaigned for John F. Kennedy on campus and gave up, as he puts it, ‘formal affiliation with any religions’—code, I surmise, for loss of faith. What he took from Christianity was its message of social activism, along with a realisation of the need for ecumenical dialogue across the barriers of belief. Both would be lifelong convictions.

Keyes chose Cornell over Harvard or Chicago to pursue graduate studies in anthropology and, once there, Southeast Asia over the Middle East or the Americas. At the suggestion of his prospective supervisors, he embarked on serious study of Thai language and Buddhism, while at the same time casting around for a topic on which to write a dissertation. Eventually he settled on Isan, the area of northeast Thailand once part of the Lao kingdom of Lan Xang, and arguably then still more Lao than central Thai. The topic he chose to study was the relationship between Isan villagers and the central government as the region became integrated into the Thai state. It was a good choice, and one that kept his interest for half a century, from his first single-authored publication to his last.

Keyes and his wife Jane arrived in Thailand in August 1962 and spent the next four months improving their Thai, making useful contacts and working out where best to conduct fieldwork. Keyes decided on the central Isan province of Mahasarakham, where local officials directed him to the village of Ban Nong Tuen, fifteen kilometres from the provincial capital. There the couple settled in for eighteen months as farang members of the community, taking part in village life, attending ceremonies, making donations, observing and being observed.

Anthropological fieldwork is problematic at the best of times. As the controversy over Margaret Mead’s conclusions about Samoan sexuality illustrate, it is difficult to know whether informants are answering questions accurately and truthfully, or making light of the exchange and relating what they think the anthropologist wants to hear. Very often it’s a bit of both. Though he does mention some misunderstandings, Keyes avoids discussion of this observed-observer problem, while making clear how much he sympathised with—indeed, identified with—‘his’ villagers.

My brother is an anthropologist who lived in Bali for

eighteen years. Over that time, his understanding about what he was doing changed. From the first, he immersed himself in everything Balinese, to the point where, after several years, he identified so deeply with Balinese culture that he felt uncomfortable visiting Australia. During this time he made lifelong Balinese friends, but in the end he realised that, no matter how warmly he was accepted into the lives of his Balinese informants, and no matter how long he interacted with them (and their children), a divide that could never be bridged would always exist between how they understood Balinese culture and how he did.

Keyes is too good an anthropologist not to be aware of this. He was frequently reminded by the villagers of Ban Nong Tuen of the gap that existed between them, and how differently each understood the relationship between them—as illustrated, for example, in the villagers’ persistent belief that all farang were immensely wealthy, an impression reinforced by every US citizen they came into contact with, from aid workers to soldiers on a nearby NATO exercise. And of course the Keyes were wealthy, no matter how hard they tried not to show it, and, unlike the villagers, free to leave at any time. So the observer–observed relationship morphed inevitably into a patron–client one, as anyone who knows anything about Lao culture and society might expect. And it was as a patron that to his credit Keyes maintained contact with the villagers of Ban Nong Tuen long after he returned to Cornell, obtained his doctorate, and took up a teaching position at the University of Washington.

The Keyeses came back to Thailand twice more for extended periods: first in 1967 to conduct fieldwork far from Isan on the Burmese border at Mae Sariang; and again in 1972 when Keyes took up a position as visiting professor at the University of Chiang Mai; on each occasion for a couple of years. Significantly, Keyes’s research in Mae Sariang pursued several of the same themes that had interested him in Isan: ethnic relations, the influence of Buddhism, forms of accommodation to government authority.

One thing that was different in Mae Sariang, however, was the presence of five competing denominations of Christian missionaries. In Papua New Guinea, I have seen the divisions such competition can create in previously cohesive communities, and how previously vibrant cultural traditions become impoverished as a result of conversion. Keyes was interested in how conversion could reinforce ethnic identity (in the case of Christianity, and conceivably Islam), or assist in social integration into the Thai state (as missionary activity by Buddhist monks among upland minorities was designed to do).

Keyes refrains from directly criticising Christian missionary activity in Mae Sariang, but the fact that he preferred to attend ceremonies in the local Buddhist wat implies what he thought. Indeed, for the abbot he became both friend and mentor. Keyes has written perceptively on why the Thai are not Christian, in an article in which he argues that ‘historic religions’ like Christianity and Buddhism ‘derive their coherence from a belief in an abstract being [God] or principle [the Law of Karma] under which all other supernatural powers as well as humans are subject’. Historic religions, in other words, rationalise the supernatural—and Christianity and Buddhism do this equally well.

I cite this example because it illustrates what is and is not included in this memoir. What is included is where Keyes went, where he lived, what he did and who he met, plus the cultural and historical background

Charles Keyes in Maha Sarakham Province, Thailand, November 1967

Jane Keyes

24

Embark on a pictorial journey through the temples of cinema in Thailand’s Movie Theatres: Relics, Ruins and the Romance of Escape.  This culmination of 10 years’ worth of field work includes both original and vintage photographs, travel essays, and a rich collection of movie theatre paraphernalia, as well as a section of the movie theatres of neighbouring Laos. Author Philip Jablon highlights more than 50 of the most compelling, significant and breath-taking of these architectural spectacles in the twilight of their lifespan.

To order a signed copy with complimentary vintage movie theatre ticket directly from the author, send a message to the Southeast Asia Movie Theater Project Facige.

Praise for Thailand’s Movie Theatres

“Philip Jablon has done miracles here. The temples of lights, the ships or dreams, are revived. We have forgotten the beautiful rituals involving cinema, all the ingredients that made every film special. This book in an emotional journey to keep.”

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, filmmaker (Palme d’Or winner for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives)

“Philip Jablon’s definitive look back at the Thai movie palaces of the past is a masterful work of cultural archaeology—a testament to the rapidly changing evolution of visual story-telling.”

Newton Tomas Sigel, American Society of Cinematographers (ASC)

“For a few short decades in the twentieth century, Thailand produced some of the most innovative movie-theater architecture in the world. But as the Thai public has turned to other entertainment mediums, and theaters have closed, those great dream palaces are disappearing from the landscape. With a keen eye for architectural details, and a deep understanding of history, Phil Jablon has set out to preserve the memory of Thailand’s movie houses. His spectacular photographs reveal the glamour and ambition of a world that was as fleeting as the celluloid images they celebrated.”

Inga Saffron, Architecture Critic, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Supported by

Discover Thailand’s lost cinemasrequired for context. If the reader wants to know what Keyes thought about what he was doing, how he came to the conclusions he did or how his experiences shaped his beliefs, one must read between the lines. Nowhere, for example, does Keyes explicitly argue for the significance of history in shaping the culture and society that an anthropologist observes during relatively brief fieldwork, though the extent and degree to which history provides a crucial dimension of Keyes’s work on Thailand is by no means common across a discipline that notably entertains structural and functional explanations.

The most fascinating event that Keyes recounts from his years in northern Thailand was not the visit of King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit, but an expedition accompanying the abbot of the Mae Sariang wat to recover ancient manuscripts that had been discovered in a remote cave. It took days of travel by elephant through mountainous forested country to reach Red Cliff Cave overlooking the Salween River. Some manuscripts had been damaged by robbers and others eaten by termites; but a sufficient number were still intact to fill nine large plastic sacks. This was not just an adventure, but an extraordinary find, for all the manuscripts had been copied prior to the end of the eighteenth century and provided new insights into northern Thai history.

Keyes took up a two-year teaching position in social science at the University of Chiang Mai in July 1972. It was an interesting time to be in Thailand, for the worldwide student protest movement was about to reach Thai university campuses. Of more concern to Keyes than radical student politics, however, were accusations that US academics studying Thai village life were contributing to the anti-communist counterinsurgency campaign, and thus were little more than lackeys of US imperialism. Keyes was so incensed that he agreed to participate in a film narrated in Thai that demonstrated what he, as an anthropologist, had actually been doing.

The last three chapters of the book shift focus from Thailand to the United States, to Keyes’s career as teacher and administrator, as supervisor of both Thai and non-Thai postgraduates, and as an academic ambassador, fostering relations between US and Southeast Asian scholars and institutions. Given the cloud that anthropology was under, Keyes’s first task in taking up a position at the University of Washington was to establish anthropology as a discipline whose value lay in promoting tolerance through revealing the cultural diversity of humankind. And that’s what he continued to do.

What Keyes felt when, in October 1976, the brief experiment in democracy in Thailand was brought to an end with the massacre of student activists in Bangkok, we are not told. But it is evident from his later publications that, from about then on, he took increasing interest in the political dimensions of social and cultural change in Thailand. And it was the political crisis of 2008–10 that brought Keyes’s work full circle, back to the villagers of northeastern Thailand for whom he had such sympathy and affection.

The Red Shirt demonstrations of those years are not covered in this memoir, but I wonder if Keyes recognised the villagers of Ban Nong Tuen among the demonstrators who so persistently struggled to defend the government they had elected. In Finding Their Voice, Keyes argued that the political activism of the Red Shirts, overwhelmingly from northeastern and northern Thailand, is understandable as the outcome of a process of historical change in the course of which ‘traditional’ peasants became ‘cosmopolitan’ citizens through taking advantage of new opportunities in a globalising economy, and that it was this that promoted growing awareness of their political power within a democratic order. He is probably right; but sadly, of course, since Keyes published his analysis, Thai democracy has been all but demolished. I can’t speak for Keyes, but everything in this memoir suggests that he must hope that the impermanence that characterises human existence extends to the current Thai political order, and that Isan voices will be heard again. ☐

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

25

City of hopeSiti Keo

F I C T I O N

SUON SORIN A New Sun Rises over the Old Land

(translated by Roger Nelson)NUS Press: 2020

Suon Sorin’s popular novel A New Sun Rises over the Old Land (1961) is part of a larger literary moment in Cambodian history. The diminishing French

empire, along with the dissolution of Indochina, had triggered an identity crisis among Khmer intellectuals. To create a new, more stable identity centred on Cambodia, these intellectuals developed the broloam lok (the modern Khmer novel) as a canvas on which to project a collective cultural image. The broloam lok soon began to capture the Cambodian imagination: fewer than two novels per year were published in the 1940s, but this number rose to seventy in 1957 and a hundred in 1966. These novels covered a wide range of topics, from prostitution, to the flight of urban workers, to the lives of the middle class.

Ly Team Teng, a Khmer literary critic, noted in 1970 that ‘the literature produced during these times is valuable in every way, worthy of being named independence literature or national literature’. Sorin’s novel, like much of the literature of Cambodia in this period, captures the everyday lives of ordinary Cambodians.

A New Sun Rises depicts the trials of Sam, a man scraping by as a cyclo driver in late-colonial Phnom Penh. The story begins in 1960, with Sam on a train, returning to the capital for the first time since his departure seven or eight years earlier. On this train ride, Sam remembers when he had first arrived in Phnom Penh, as an eighteen-year-old from Battambang province escaping the Khmer Issarak, or Free Khmer. From there, Sam tells the reader of his attempts to find work in the city, his stints in jail, and his wife’s rape and her death, along with that of their unborn child.

Roger Nelson’s approachable translation is the first English-language edition of a full-length Khmer novel. Nelson has condensed the main text to a little over a hundred pages, and the clarity of his translation is apparent from the first scene. His introduction and analysis are also useful, especially his argument on the instrumentalisation of literature in support of Sangkum Reastr Niyum, a political movement founded in the mid-1950s by Norodom Sihanouk.

Nelson argues that ‘the temporal ambiguity in the narrative—heightened by the extended flashback structure—raises the possibility that inequality and impoverishment continue[d] even under Sihanouk’s rule’. While Nelson recognises that ‘Sihanouk remains irreproachable, in the novel as in all public discourse during the period’, he maintains that the ‘social and economic inequality that the novel’s characters embody continued under the new regime, as did the precariousness of life for the urban poor, and the cruel disdain which the wealthy elite felt for them. For Nelson, Sam’s recounting of the past, as he travels to Phnom Penh, suggests that this inequality continued into the Sangkum period, and that A New Sun Rises is a story of continuous hardship and class disparity.

I wish to offer an alternative reading of Sorin’s novel. While Sorin depicts class inequalities and the harsh realities of cyclo drivers in Phnom Penh, he does

not suggest that these inequalities continued under Sangkum Reastr Niyum. Indeed, in chapter 18, Sam notices that the Sangkum government has provided

a shelter for cyclo drivers, and the people living inside all looked remarkably happy … Now, the workers in the new era had achieved their great destiny, which was provided by the generous hospitality of the Royal Government. They had been rescued, provided with a place to live, a place to shelter from the rain and from the heat of the sun.

Sorin, via Sam’s memories of the past, contrasts this image of happy, sheltered cyclo drivers with that of Sam when he is homeless and vulnerable to the elements. The words ‘now’ and ‘new’ capture the rupture between the past and the present, between the years before Sangkum and those of Sangkum itself. The novel emphasises discontinuity rather than continuity.

Sorin portrays this rupture between the old and the new in his depictions of ‘modern Phnom Penh’ (the title of chapter 18). When Sam returns to Phnom Penh, in 1960, he notes how much the city has changed from when he lived there in the early 1950s. There is more traffic, for example. Yet Sam says ‘the city [is] also very neat, orderly, and well-organised’, echoing Sihanouk’s vision for Phnom Penh. In fact, Sam’s tour of Phnom Penh mirrors that undertaken by the protagonist of Sihanouk’s 1965 film, Apsara. These images of the capital as orderly differ from some accounts of 1960s Phnom Penh. In 1961, the newspaper Réalités cambodgienne complained that the traffic on Norodom Boulevard was becoming ‘more and more anarchic’ because stop signs were ‘rarely respected by the drivers of most vehicles’ and ‘a number of automobilists did not respect the Law’. Chau Seng, in a 1963 article in Neak cheat niyum, another newspaper, described how

on the morning of January 23, 1963, Trasok Peam (Sweet Melon) Street, which is to the west of Psar Tmey (Central Market) and close to the police headquarters, was chaotic with big and small automobiles crowding one another. The cars came to a standstill, taking two hours to get out.

For some, then, Phnom Penh was not a neat and orderly city. Yet Sorin failed to mention the chaos of urban life when he spoke of the Sangkum government. His desire to propagandise Sihanouk and Sangkum Reastr Niyum is one reason for the discrepancy between

the Phnom Penh of his novel and that of various newspapers. Another possible reason is Sorin’s impulse to show the differences between the late colonial period and the Sangkum period. In his aspiration to show both the old and the new, A New Sun Rises fails to depict temporal continuities. The novel is about how Sangkum Reastr Niyum is new, and different from the old. The Sangkum regime is the new sun:

In times past, this old land had been wilted and despairing. It had been without the light of the sun, and without any thought of growth. Now, a new sun shone its light on that nature. This was the brightness of the growth that was being built by all the peasants, and by His Majesty Samdech Norodom Sihanouk, the Father of National Independence and the most marvelous leader.

The discontinuity in the novel will be important for scholars of Cambodia, since it offers insights into how the Democratic Party failed and was eclipsed by Sihanouk’s regime. As a historian who seeks to understand the characteristics and tribulations of Cambodian democracy, I find chapter 9, ‘The Deceitful Politicians’, and chapter 12, ‘The Ungrateful Politicians’, the most captivating. In these chapters, readers will find depictions of political practices during the early days of Cambodia’s experimentation with democracy. The late colonial period (1945–54) was the first time Cambodia developed a constitution, written by the leaders of the Democratic Party: Ieu Koeus, Sim Var and Prince Yutevong. It was also the first time Cambodians held elections and voted for their representatives. These developments are why Sorin labels this era ‘the period of false independence’. While I can quibble with Sorin’s characterisation, his novel is the only source I know of, in Khmer and by a Khmer, to provide some level of cultural representation of these elections. The colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence offer some Cambodian perspectives, but they are often filtered through the voices of the French sûreté.

When Sam becomes a union leader, he works to help get politicians elected. The ensuing vignettes show how the democratic experiment functioned in late-colonial Cambodia. Sam’s disillusionment with the corrupt politicians suggests possible reasons why Cambodians rejected parliamentary democracy and accepted Sihanouk’s populist, one-party rule. The establishment of Sangkum Reastr Niyum and the suppression of the Democratic Party had lasting negative consequences for Cambodian democracy. In addition to showing the democratic processes of the late colonial period, the novel renders visible the insecurity Cambodians experienced during the late colonial period. Many know this period as the First Indochina War, in which Cambodia appeared marginalised and whose main theatre involved French and communist Vietnamese forces. Yet Sorin’s novel demonstrates how the war had a tremendous impact on Cambodians, especially those in the countryside—the war is the main impetus for Sam’s migration to the city.

In the preface, Sorin described A New Sun Rises as ‘a story of the struggle between the horrible and the good; it is a story of the struggle between poverty and wealth; it is a story of the struggle between death and life’. Embedded in Sam’s tribulations is the hope that joy will emerge from despair. ☐

Siti Keo is a student at the University of California

Phnom Penh, circa 1960

26

Lao liteBryan Thao Worra

F I C T I O N

PAUL YOONRun Me to Earth

Simon & Schuster: 2020

Outside of books by Lao writers, Laos doesn’t often figure in literary historical fiction beyond Colin Cotterill’s Detective Siri series or novels

like Adam Lewis Schroeder’s In the Fabled East. For decades the country was mentioned only briefly in fictional works such as John Le Carre’s The Honourable Schoolboy or pulpy action-adventure paperbacks. Southeast Asian fiction tends to be set in Thailand, Cambodia or Vietnam, building upon ground established in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American or The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, who opted to create the fictional nation of Sarkhan to explore their ideas about coming conflicts in the region.

Although Laos has endured various states of civil war and occupation since the 1700s, it is typically characterised as a quiet, peaceful Eden—that is, until the Secret War era, when the US State Department and the CIA, around the same time as the Vietnam War, circumvented the Geneva Accords and supported the Royal Lao government. This included conducting a secret bombing campaign that ultimately contaminated more than 30 per cent of Laos with unexploded munitions. This is the romanticised period that typically captures the imagination of those discovering Lao history for the first time, embodying a particular Apocalypse Now-meets-Casablanca mystique.

Paul Yoon’s novel Run Me to Earth, his second, examines the fictional lives of three orphans during the war for Laos. Opening in 1969, the story follows its characters across an ambitious fifty-year span. Yoon, an American writer from New York, explores new territory in how we fictionalise Laos in literature, pushing the boundaries of what we change and what we keep recognisable.

Yoon’s prose may frustrate some readers; spare yet elegant, it jumps from one perspective to another and goes back and forth in time. It alternates between the intimate and the formal as he presents six interconnected stories focusing on different characters brought together by the war. Some might consider this jarring, while others might be more concerned about questions of cultural ventriloquism. But when his prose is beautiful, it’s beautiful.

Given the complex politics of the time, Run Me to Earth showcases the brutality of the secret American bombing and harsh conditions of re-

education camps and postwar Laos. Finding themselves in their various predicaments, Yoon’s characters often ruminate. ‘She wondered, too, what proof of herself, of them, would remain in this house after they were gone,’ one reflects.

Yet readers with roots in Laos may be hard-pressed to recognise themselves, their country or their culture in this novel. Yoon and the publisher have repeatedly emphasised that Run Me to Earth is a work of fiction, one that changes the chronology and geography of Laos. For example, the book features a town called Phonsavan near the famed Plain of Jars, but it’s not the historical Phonsavan. In the historical Phonsavan, established in the late 1970s, you can catch Hmong bullfights or talk to locals about the rocket that hit the Tham Piu cave in 1969, killing more than 374 people taking refuge

there during the war. Readers familiar with Laos might wonder if Yoon’s city is meant to be Muang Phuan, or Xieng Khouang. The Phonsavan of Run Me to Earth is not described in enough detail to suggest that it is. The Tai Dam, Phuan, Khmu and Tai Daeng people who historically also made this region of Laos their home have been erased from the story. So it goes. Ethnic Lao and Hmong are mentioned, but readers will need to look elsewhere for an understanding of their customs and traditions.

Run Me to Earth isn’t intended as an anthropological treatise. In the fictionalised Laos of this novel, everyone seems to have abandoned the traditional Lao greeting of saying sabaidee or giving people a polite nop. The orphan characters of Alisak, Prany and Noi, as well as their friend Dr Vang, are likeable enough, but none of them could reliably tell you where to find a good bowl of khao piak or how to cook sticky rice. When a character hits their brother on the head, Yoon doesn’t call attention to how taboo this would be in a traditional Lao household, leaving it to the reader to know. One suspects these are the kinds of kids who wear their shoes inside and can’t tell dok champa from gaeng kee lek.

As orphans in Laos, their outlooks on life and responses to crisis are human enough, but it’s hard to say why these characters, then, had to be Lao. Could the book just as easily have been set in Cambodia or Vietnam, which also hide unexploded ordnance, or some Southeast Asian Macondo, if one is not going to take a Lao approach to this scenario?

Run Me to Earth cites the research of respected scholars such as the late Grant Evans, Vatthana Pholsena and Joshua Kurlantzick, as well as a speech by former US president Barack Obama and even the work of Hmong poet Mai Der Vang. Yoon’s novel clearly asserts itself as fiction, becoming an outright alternative history when characters are imprisoned in a re-education camp for seven years, until 1977. Historically, Lao re-education camps were not established until after 1975. The more than 3,000 people who endured the camps in real life might take a dim view of this artistic liberty, but readers not directly affected by it will probably see this as a minor chronological quibble in service to the novel’s overall ambitious themes.

Finding modern Lao fiction in English by Lao writers can be a challenge. We have the novels of T.C. Huo—Land of Smiles and A Thousand

Wings. There are the short stories of Souvankham Thammavongsa collected in How to Pronounce Knife, and the late Outhine Bounyavong’s Mother’s Beloved: Stories from Laos. Only a handful of Lao memoirs are readily available, like I Little Slave by Bounsang Khamkeo. The creative writing collections of the SatJaDham Lao Literary Project have long been out of print. So, in this literary landscape, a novel like Run Me to Earth attracts attention.

In the United States, the most well-known Lao character has been Kahn Souphanousinphone from the animated TV show King of the Hill. In modern literary works, we’ve yet to see an enduring Lao character who captures our imagination—a Don Quixote, Inspector Javert, Hester Prynne or Wittman Ah Sing. It’s hard to say with certainty if Alisak, Prany or Noi will ever achieve such stature, but they are all we have for the moment. ☐

Bryan Thao Worra is a poet and writer based in California

Available through Edgewise Press, Inc. 24 Fifth Ave. (No. 224), New York, N.Y. 10011

epinc@mindspring.com | edgewisepress.orgrichardmilazzo.com

Scenes of Everyday Life: Poems of Vietnam, Indonesia,

Cambodia, Russia, 2016by Richard Milazzo

(with mixed media works by Aga Ousseinov)Published by

TSUKUDA ISLAND PRESS Hayama-Tokyo

New Complete Essays: 1984-2019by Jonathan Lasker

(edited and with an introduction and commentary by Richard Milazzo)

Published and distributed by EDGEWISE PRESS

New York

E D G E W I S E

Jonathan Lasker

New Complete Essays1984-2019

27

On days when Joseph works the night shift, before drifting off to sleep, Cherie turns off the overhead light in the bedroom and

switches on the small nightlight, watching the faint yellow glow illuminate the ceiling and silhouettes of the objects in the room, invariably realising that life is truly short. Her friend forwarded her a math problem circulating online: If you want to have two children before the age of thirty, and the two children are spaced three years apart, working backwards, when will you get pregnant, when will you enjoy post-marriage life just the two of you, when will you get married, when will you start preparing for the wedding, when will you begin dating? If you happen to meet Mr Right when you’re twenty-one, do the math, and you’ll clearly see that you’ve already fallen far behind this marriage timeline. Counting from the time they have kids, when will both kids grow up and graduate from college, when will the kids be married off, when will she and Joseph save up enough money to retire, how many years will there be between their retirement age and the average life expectancy for Cherie and Joseph to have a second chance at spending quality time together just the two of them? Perhaps when you love someone, you begin fearing that you and your partner will eventually die—Cherie thinks too much about Joseph’s possible death, gets all choked up, and calls Joseph’s phone to hear his voice, but he’s always busy, and so she doesn’t dare shut off the nightlight the entire night, afraid that if the light goes out, these thoughts that frighten her will return to haunt her mind, one after the other.

When Joseph comes back from his shift to go to sleep, she’s not afraid of the dark, as he’s beside her. He has to tightly draw the thick curtains, blocking out all the sunlight in the bedroom at 10 a.m. or 4 p.m. so that he can fall asleep as quickly as possible, catching up on sleep in time for his next shift. When he finally climbs into bed, Cherie leans over his chest, listening to his heartbeat. She doesn’t understand the medical mysteries of heartbeats, but she knows he’s still alive.

Will these heavy and forceful sounds thumping in her ears ever stop beating? She longs to persuade him to switch to a job that doesn’t require working shifts—newspapers have long reported relevant scientific findings that working shifts can lead to premature death. Fortunately, he doesn’t smoke, but he occasionally has a few drinks, and regularly eats Spam fried noodles, both of which are factors contributing to premature death—if he doesn’t live to the average life expectancy for a man, then in the life that she has calculated, the days that they can spend together just the two of them post-retirement will be even shorter. At this thought, she wants to cry all over again.

He works in a five-star hotel and frequently tries to amuse her with stories of the high-level executives of foreign companies and local upper-class women whom he meets in the executive lounge, or the bantering and squabbling with colleagues in between wiping glasses and serving food. Maybe he’s not a very good joke teller—she rarely laughs at his chatter about work. Sometimes, when he’s regaling her with stories, she notices a glimmer in his eyes, a bit like the starry skies in van Gogh’s paintings, and also a bit like the glint in those gigantic eyeballs in girls’ manga. He prattles on about the national currency of the tip he received when completing a special assignment for a guest, how everyone in the kitchen shared an unimaginably huge platter of pastries, how a guest who’d followed his advice to explore Hong Kong’s more remarkable and small-scale attractions beyond ‘Pearl of the East, City of Culinary Feasts’ came back and raved to him about the city, unable to see that after toiling away night after night, every time he returns home from work, the first words out of his mouth are, ‘So sleepy’, and not ‘I miss you’.

Nor has she succeeded in persuading him to consider changing to a position in the hospitality industry that doesn’t entail working shifts. With his reading abilities, a degree in hotel management shouldn’t be too difficult. If he becomes an office manager, like her, he can go to work when the sun

Night-shift scenes*Wong Yi

S H O R T S T O R Y

rises and come home to rest when the sun sets, instead of taking turns with his colleagues being the reason that one of the windows in a postcard of Hong Kong’s city nightscape is lit up. But he is the kind of person who likes to dance to the beat of his own drum. It would kill him to sit at a desk every day for nine hours—his childhood wish had been to find a job where he didn’t have to sit in an office, but her wish is that after they grow old together, they’ll sit side-by-side in an outdoor cafe in Europe, admiring the colour of the night sky in early autumn, waiting for young waiters to serve them hot drinks and refreshments. If Joseph ruins his health at a young age serving hot drinks and refreshments to others, and dies before her fantasy retirement arrives … at this thought, she bursts into tears. He’s tired, not because of his shift, but because he doesn’t want to keep arguing with her about why he doesn’t want to follow her advice and change jobs, doesn’t want to keep telling her to stop letting her imagination run away from her, doesn’t want to keep convincing her not to put too much stock into the often-contradictory health information and scientific findings in the newspapers. Life isn’t that profound—if he’s happy with the present, why change things to avoid a bad ending that may not even come? And after he grows old, he doesn’t know whether the wife who’ll be beside him will be her; he pretends to be sound asleep, unable to hear her deliberate cries. There are only a few hours before he has to get up and go to work. All he wants is a good rest. ☐

* After Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Café Terrace at Night’

First published in Chinese in ‘Ming Pao Weekly’, 14 June 2019. This translation, by Jennifer Feeley, was commissioned by Spicy Fish as part of its publishing program at the 2019 Singapore Writers Festival

Wong Yi is a Hong Kong writer, librettist and editor

Charis Loke

28

Border crossingsMichael Freeman

P O E T R Y

BOEY KIM CHENG, ARIN ALICIA FONG AND JUSTIN CHIA (EDITORS)

To Gather Your Leaving: Asian Diaspora PoetryEthos Books: 2019

Poetry anthologies, as often as not, are platforms for a polemic, staking a claim for a ‘movement’, conferring a status on shifts in the genre. They are

a principal vehicle for literary taxonomies and histories, are mobilised as weapons in the struggle. To Gather Your Leaving is one such map for a poetic territory.

The poems collected here are the documents of border crossings: from the nations and cultures from which the writers are exiled—exiles themselves or the descendants of exiles, emigres or refugees—and then to the cultures where their writing seeks its readership. At the core of this cultural intersection are the lines of Debjani Chatterjee:

Indifferent language of an alien shore, the journey was troubled but I am here: register me among your step-children … but I do not come to your rhythms empty-handed— the treasures of other traditions are mine.

The poems track alienations and assimilations: dislocations from cultural communities, their language and landscape, then transitions into different cultures while struggling not to traduce the values of the original cultures.

So the poems are embedded in a set of identity politics and its background in geopolitics, whether regional hegemonies or proxy wars. But this is to generalise the voices that speak here: it’s in their individuality—their forms and images, their syntax and rhythms—that this collection has its weight and edge.

Still, for all the sheer heterogeneity of the voices and styles, there are striking contiguities, cross-currents, underlying continuities. On the evidence of such texts, the introduction is right to cite Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile, to speak of ‘the exilic mind and diasporic state’—where it’s both the state of mind and the adopted nation state with its different culture, within which and against which the poems stand their ground. The editors note that not many of the writers here were forcibly expelled from their natal cultures, though many are the children of refugees who were pressured into exile, but a sense of cultural rift and loss, a sense of spiritual displacement pervades the collection, and many of the poems circle round a return to home, their actual home or the home their family members had left, whether an actual visit or an imagined return that acts as a symbolic centre in the poem’s reflections.

A duality underpins most of these poems, two strata and the disruptive tension between them: of how it was and how it is, of a contrast of landscape, of one generation and the next, of past violence and present uneasy stasis, binary conditions being navigated, not resolved. Nostalgia doesn’t do the trick, nor does visiting ‘homeland’ in family-history tourism; in most there’s a tough-minded realism about what memory makes of things, whether a collective memory or the scars of a family’s wounds. Even the old joke about cultural relativism kicks in: don’t be so open minded that your brain falls out. Openness brings vulnerable exposure; the poems are an attempt to manage it.

The four poems by Mai Der Vang offer a clear example, each digging into history and landscape and

exile. She teaches and is published in California, but her family lived in Laos during the Vietnam War, members of the Hmong community that fought on the side of the United States and then went on to bear the reaction of the Pathet Lao. Two poems are a direct address, one generation of the diaspora speaking to the generation before, evoking the distance in time and culture, evincing the difficulty in crossing the gap. Her lyric poem ‘Your Mountain Lies Down with You’ circles round botany and topography for its symbols of distance in time and place. Beginning with ‘Mourn the poppies, the mangosteen and dragon fruit. / But you come as a refugee, an exile, a body seeking mountains, / Meaning the same in translations’, it closes with ‘Grandfather, you are not buried in the green mountains of Laos / but here in the Tollhouse hills, earth and heaven to oak gods. / Your highlands have come home, / And now you finally sleep.’ California’s Mount Whitney matches the Phou Bia in Laos, the magnolia reminds grandfather of the dok champa, the national flower of Laos that he cradled from homeland to ‘the ghettos of St Paul’. In sharp contrast, her poem ‘Dear Soldier of the Secret War’ stays with the backstory to the exile, the brutalities of the Pathet Lao after the US war: ‘Your Hmong village is a graveyard’. The other poems, ‘Calling the Lost’ and ‘Transmigration’, speak to their titles: ‘I am refugee. You are too. Cry, but do not weep’. In these poems the simplicity of the imagery, diction and syntax focus but don’t reduce the complexities of the situation being evoked.

Many of the poems by other authors here are more oblique and opaque, some more coolly analytical, some hanging on anecdote, some opening up into a narrative. A few play typographic and page-space games. Some are dramatic monologues, others expand in a bricolage of shifting images, remembrance of times past, which deepens the sense of exile rather than comfort. A few set up an aphorism in order to pick it apart: Shirley Geok-Lin’s ‘Riding into California’ begins ‘If you come to a land with no ancestors / to bless you, you have to be your own / ancestor’ and continues ‘Ghosts welcome us

to a new life, and / an immigrant without home ghosts / cannot believe the land is real’.

Many start with the transient: ‘At present, on this sleeper train, there’s nowhere to arrive’. There’s considerable intertextuality in the epigraphs and allusions. One poem is formally prose that rotates round a passage from Marguerite Duras: ‘Writing was taking an image, a ferry crossing the Mekong say, and empty it of all significance until it became an idea, an image caught between memory and forgetting’. (After translating Chinese poems, Ezra Pound asserted, ‘An image is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’.) The poem ‘Opus Tesselatum’ is a mosaic of ‘the fragments of my shattered history’ in which ‘I gather every bright shard, collect every broken piece, / wash and polish, press them into place’. The recurring word interrogated throughout these poems is home, the lost one, the new-found one, but a homing instinct forced to track both ways.

Not all of these poems are explicitly about those central issues of the diaspora, but in the framework of this edition even a sensuous lyric is likely to be read as elegiac. A moment of memory will take on symbolic or even polemical overtones—‘memory revises me’—as an image of one lost landscape will echo and resonate with another from a different homeland.

But there’s an oddity in the organisation of the book. The poets are listed under the cultures within which they write and are published, but not in a listing of the national cultures of their background; nor is there an index of those lines which would have strengthened the anthology’s main aim. A good deal of this cultural geography, the backstories, can be discerned from the poems’ internal evidence or the bibliographical apparatus, but the arrangement under where the poets are writing rather than where they’re from in their ‘natal cultures’ risks an implicit and reductive homogenisation of disparate Asian cultures. But that’s surely not intended, and the editors’ introductory essay mitigates any such charge with some usefully specific exposition and reference to secondary sources.

There’s already an academic industry on the literature of diaspora, categorising its themes and forms, teasing out the sociology and ethnographics, but these poems provide the texture and specificities; they track the imaginative unfolding of the sense of displacement and the tensions of cultural assimilation. Precisely because of the compelling range and richness of this collection, it’s important not to schematise it. The introductory essay construes these texts as exilic poetry almost as though this were a sub-genre, but if it is, then it’s a strikingly polymorphous one in the styles and formal structures on display here, and any shared characteristics are thematic rather than formal. Even my earlier invoking of the term ‘identity politics’ is itself reductive: it suggests a narrowing of the issues, of the imaginative cutting edge in these stark testimonies of individuals and generations caught up in historic ruptures.

To Gather Your Leaving builds to a history of dislocation and alienation as it’s reflected and refracted in what have now become several waves of diasporic poetry. A classic anthology, it stakes its claim and maps a territory, though not to aestheticise and historicise its territory. The causes and consequences of the diaspora continue. A new edition might come to include writing from Rohingya displaced from Myanmar into Bangladesh or—an internal diaspora—the Uyghur in China’s ‘national re-education’ gulag. ☐

Spirit House (four)

sibling follows sibling into thorn forest girl holds stickof incense tip aglow37 nats await atop Mount Popa

volcanic relicssister brotherblue-throated barbets

lightning cluenest lands on soft earthentwined vines

distant blazecandle wick floating in bowl of oil

Mau Shein Win

P O E M

29

Rise and fallMelody Kemp

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

W hile I was peeling garlic, Minnie, my reliable front-door dog, rose unsteadily on her arthritic legs and launched into her heavy-

throated barking. Someone was outside. I waited for a knock. None came.Refreshing my lipstick so I didn’t look like I felt, I

went to the door. Leaning heavily and somewhat unsteadily against the

spare wheel of my battered ’93 Suzuki was a slim man with tousled hair. He wore a skinny-legged black suit and white open-necked shirt with a pair of long-toed shoes that curled upwards, as I imagined Aladdin’s did.

‘I’m Public Security’ were the first words he slurred at me. I felt a flash of cold. I was a journalist and had often been warned I was under surveillance. Laos in general and Vientiane in particular do not enjoy scrutiny. In fact, the week before, a dodgy American bloke who pretended he was an ocean fisheries expert (why was he in a land-locked country?) had found me at a riverside bar and warned me that I was being watched. By a perch, cod or stingray, I mused?

In his hand the Public Security man held a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. My immediate thought was that he must be an underling who couldn’t afford Black or Green. It was obvious that the ‘Suze’, as she is known, was the only thing holding his skinny frame upright, but nonetheless he waved the bottle at me as an invitation to join him. I fetched two glasses, trying to control my prickling anxiety.

He poured a decent three fingers into both glasses, emptying the bottle, which he tossed into my garden. We clinked a smeary sokdee (‘good luck’). I managed a smile tossing back the bad-tasting whisky. I was aware that it was only just before 5 p.m.

A fading sun glinted off the Mekong River, which flows downstream outside our house. Any evidence

of the houseboat moored ten metres downstream was gone, as the dry season starved the river of water, pulling the eccentrically designed houseboat out of sight. As the sun turned red, matching Public Security man’s eyes, he smiled, managed an admirably tanged ‘See ya later’, and a laugh before a backwards push launched him onto his feet and out the gate.

The drunken ‘See ya later’ proved prophetic, as I would later see him strolling past the house, his eyes carefully averted, towel in hand, ribs visible through a yellowed singlet worn over cotton shorts, to take (and probably give) his ablutions on the banks of the Mekong only fifty metres away. The Mekong giveth and the Mekong taketh away.

Y ears ago, our lane was unofficially known as Coffin Street because of the conveniently located corner stall that sold high-quality ornate

paper burial chambers. When he wasn’t preening his collection of fighting cocks, our soft-faced neighbour, with his ready smile, made the finest, most creative coffins in Vientiane.

After a tussle with cancer years ago, I had had a pessimistic eye on a black-and-gold structure. I loved its elegant lines and just the right degree of ostentation. I never did find out why it was black while the others were all white. The Public Security guy was there to tell me, among other things, that he had taken Mr Coffin’s land and was about to replace that business with a hardware shop.

Our creative artisan neighbour disappeared overnight, along with his cocks and possibly the coffins, though rumour has it he incinerated them all in disgust. He left behind an exposed smelly squat toilet with its attendant aquatic life, and nothing else.

A token hardware shop was set up made of poorly

joined corrugated iron. It was a bad marketing model, and customers did not arrive. The monks across the road had little need for large tins of garish paint, G clamps or asbestos-based roof tiles. Rather they needed cards for their mobiles, to which they were more attentive than the dharma. Public Security man’s workers, bored at the inactivity, would amble around to sit with our night guards. Eventually he and his shop just disappeared and were replaced by Chinese spyware.

T he Mekong River is our neighbourhood’s signature. For fifteen years we have listened to long-hulled cargo boats thud rhythmically on

their way either to repairs between the rusting walls of the dry docks 500 metres upstream or to the adjacent port to deliver loads of sand. The docks mark one end of the river walk and our neighbourhood. Wat Sop, the Corpse Temple, named for a hydrological artefact that once sent the odd floating body to beach on its riverside steps, marks the southern border.

Since my meeting with Public Security man six years ago, the issues I reported on—dams, resettlement and corruption—have superseded the natural power of the seasons and caused the river to still its rhythmic rise and fall. Its murky characteristic brown has turned greenish blue, a sign that the river’s life-giving sediment and nutrient load was being diverted. Only a few weeks ago I woke to waves and turbulence as the waters held back by China were suddenly released, causing a peculiar backflow as it merged and clashed with the regular downstream flow. I realised I was watching a symbol of riparian pathology. The Mekong River’s new chromatic vibrancy is not an indicator of cleanliness, but of biological death. ☐

Melody Kemp is a writer based in Vientiane

Nick Freeman

30

On standbyPeter Yeoh

P R O F I L E

On 14 March, Jeremy Tiang tweeted, ‘My play has been postponed indefinitely and I made a pink cake’, with pictures of a pinkish Swiss roll he

had just baked while self-isolating in his apartment in Flushing. ‘Looking forward to baking my troubles away,’ the Singaporean writer and translator quipped in the same thread.

Two weeks earlier, we had arranged to meet at Kinokuniya’s Cafe Zaiya in Bryant Park to discuss his play with the prolix title Salesman 之死: The (Almost!) True Story of the 1983 Production of Death of a Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre Directed By Mr Arthur Miller Himself from a Script Translated By Mr Ying Ruocheng Who Also Played Willy Loman. It was set to premiere at the end of March at Target Margin Theater in Sunset Park, an ethnically diverse neighbourhood in Brooklyn.

It was early Saturday afternoon, and business in the Japanese bookshop in midtown Manhattan was brisk. Despite Covid-19 infections and deaths spiking in China and Italy, not to mention an outbreak in Washington State, most shoppers didn’t appear to be taking any precautions. At the time, no one could foresee how quickly New York would become the centre of the coronavirus epidemic in the United States.

In the cafe where I waited for Tiang, no one wore masks—I wasn’t wearing one—nor were they adhering to the social distancing rule of keeping at least six feet apart. From where I was sitting, I could see Bryant Park’s lawn and its surrounding towers, anchored by the New York Public Library’s marble Beaux-Arts building. People drifted across the lawn, still too cold for them to linger, and Sixth Avenue outside Kinokuniya was noisy with traffic. In only two weeks, the entire area would become a ghost town.

I imagined Willy Loman, the tragic figure in Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, hurrying across the green to get to 42nd Street station to catch the subway back to Brooklyn after failing to persuade his boss to let him work in New York. Perhaps he stopped briefly at the fountain to catch his breath and gaze at the buildings around him, reassuring himself that the American Dream was alive and well, that despite his own failures, his sons, particularly Biff, could still attain material wealth and social mobility through hard, honest work.

As I was conjuring my own fiction, Tiang arrived. After we shook hands, he discreetly sprayed his hand with a small sanitiser and settled down on the stool beside me. I pretended not to notice even though there was a distinct smell of disinfectant. Because he lives in Flushing, in the borough of Queens, which has the largest population of Asian Americans and Chinese immigrants in New York, I assumed he was more caught up in the gyre of grim news coming out of Asia than most Manhattanites.

In his Twitter bio, Tiang describes himself as a novelist, a translator from Chinese, a playwright, managing editor of Pathlight (an English literary magazine of Chinese writing in translation) and a member of Cedilla & Co (a collective of literary translators). His oeuvre is indeed impressive. He has translated into English many Chinese novels—and also a Jackie Chan autobiography!—short stories, poetry collections and plays.

He won Singapore’s National Arts Council’s Golden Point Award writing competition in 2009 for his short story ‘Trondheim’ and studied translation at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2011. He published a short story collection, It Never Rains, on National Day, in 2016, which was shortlisted

for the Singapore Literary Prize, and won the prize with his first novel, State of Emergency, released in 2018.

When Tiang began writing State of Emergency, a fictional account of a family embroiled in the leftist movements in Singapore’s political upheavals, in 2010, he received a National Arts Council grant. But the council withdrew the rest of the award money after reading the novel’s first draft in 2016. The Emergency of 1948, warfare against pro-independence communist guerrillas in Malaysia and Singapore, is still a sensitive topic in the island nation.

Now, living in New York, he has written a new play. ‘I think of them as part of the same practice,’ he explained when I asked if he preferred one genre over another. ‘They feed each other. I’ve learned a lot about playwriting by translating plays. The fact that I’m a playwright helps my translating. The fact that I write and translate plays enables me to bring a kind of performativity to my fiction writing and translation.’

Tiang, forty-three, was born into a blended family—his father is a Singapore-born Sri Lankan and his mother is Malaysian-Chinese; he grew

up speaking English at home and Mandarin at school. His parents communicate in the Cantonese dialect and Tamil, neither of which Tiang speaks; he communicates with them in English. He left Singapore when he was nineteen to read English at University College Oxford and study acting at Drama Centre London, and lived in London for several years before moving to New York.

Beyond instinct and raw talent, writing also comes from the love of language. ‘The languages you grow up with are quite random, and you don’t have a choice,’ he said, glancing at Bryant Park. Maybe he saw Loman, too, anxiously darting across the lawn. ‘All work has a context and nothing’s truly abstract. The best work is writing that grounds its story in lived reality.’

His childhood of traversing languages also got him interested in translation. ‘Translation is a way of pulling together all these different things,’ he said. ‘By going across cultures and languages, I feel it helps to make sense of being in between. There are writers who are very secure within a single language and culture, and they can write entirely within that. I belong in a lot of places, and I belong nowhere. And translation is a way of making sense of that.’

Salesman 之死 in many ways expresses Tiang’s interest in exploring the babelic nature of language. He tells the story, with some poetic licence, of Miller’s trip to China in 1983 to direct Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, Miller was invited by Chinese playwright Cao Yu and actor Ying Ruocheng to stage the play in their city. To bring a US play to communist China then was an artistic push for earnest post-Mao reform. Miller couldn’t resist.

He told John Lahr of the New Yorker that Salesman ‘signaled the changing cultural mood’ of the US postwar boom, ‘a journey to the interior of the American psyche’. Miller wanted to call his play ‘The Inside of His Head’ because Loman ‘is all the voices’. And he also ‘toyed with the idea of having the proscenium designed in the shape of a head and having the action take place inside it’. Although Salesman is particularly American, Miller believed it was possible to take it to China. In his Loman, the legendary playwright saw a universal experience. He later wrote in Timebends, his memoir, ‘Willy was representative everywhere, in every kind of system, of ourselves in this time.’

Tiang couldn’t remember when he came across the play. ‘I would have been in my teens. There were many things I didn’t completely understand, mainly because I didn’t know enough about America. But as I read more American books and plays (and watched more American TV) I was able to fill in the gaps. I’ve never actually seen it on stage! I don’t know why … And I see a lot of theatre. When I watched the Beijing production on video, that was my first time watching the play all the way through.’

But he wasn’t interested in adapting Salesman, as there have been countless revivals since 1949. In fact, there was another revival at the Young Vic in London last year, set in the Brooklyn home of a black US family, with Wendell Pierce playing Loman and the magnificent Sharon D. Clarke as Linda. In his review for the Guardian, Michael Billington remarked on the play’s ability to transcend skin colour.

Matt Wolf from the New York Times disagreed. He felt that race wasn’t explored enough: ‘The obvious reason is that such discussions don’t feature in Miller’s text … the script makes much of Willy’s desire to be liked, and you can’t help but wonder whether an African-American man in post-World War II Brooklyn wouldn’t worry more about being accepted … The production, you feel, could dig a bit deeper still.’

You can sense that Tiang is attempting to dig deeper still and come up with a fresh take. His Salesman 之死 is more about Miller staging Salesman in Beijing, a sort of play within a play, or a response to it, and also putting into relief Ying’s role as translator and actor—he translated Salesman into Mandarin and acted the role of Loman. To make Salesman 之死 different, making life more difficult for himself and Michael Leibenluft, the play’s director, Tiang wrote his play in Mandarin and English, and for an all-female cast.

‘Death of a Salesman is a very male story,’ said Tiang. ‘This is a way of redressing that balance. Arthur Miller is played by a [white] woman. That’s kind of a signal that this isn’t meant to be a documentary representation. Hopefully the audience will understand that, although we’re drawing from an actual event, we’re also exaggerating them a little … to unpack issues. Because we weren’t there, we don’t know exactly what happened. We’re pushing it a little further and using that as a way of saying, well, what was going on under the surface?’

What about that very long title? ‘It started out as just Salesman 之死,’ explained Tiang. ‘But it was pointed out to me that people who don’t read Chinese would have trouble googling the title (and there’s already a film called Salesman), so we needed a subtitle, at which point I decided to go for maximalism. The play is bilingual, so it seemed right that the title should be, too.’

After our meeting, things evolved quickly. Stringent restrictions have been imposed as the pandemic engulfs New York City, turning it

into an eerily desolate metropolis. Tiang’s play has been postponed, in line with Broadway’s decision to shutter its theatres until the crisis is over, and no one has any idea how long this shutdown will last.

Tiang agrees with the decision. ‘It’s better to be safe,’ he emailed me. ‘It’s clear from the experiences of other countries that it would be safest to stop public gatherings for the time being.’ But both Tiang and Leibenluft are confident the play will be staged eventually, though they don’t know when. ☐

Peter Yeoh is a writer, editor and art book designer

31

Lauren Crothers

32

Carry acrossConner Bouchard-Roberts

T R A V E L

P ast midnight, my companion and I were walking along an unmarked two-lane road in the south of Thailand, north of Phang Nga town, on our way

back to Bangkok. An hour ago there was a suggestion of a village in this direction, but now we were lost among endless, near-identical trees. The trees were in careful rows, row upon row barely illuminated by my headlamp. We debated what they were. Eventually, roaming a bit off the road (now just dirt) we saw a V-shaped spout wedged into a trunk and a viscous white liquid dripping into a hanging bucket. Rubber plantations … The sight of gridded jungle from the plane, days before, came back with a stark realism. Of course, every tree was part of a large monoculture, and we were right in the stomach of it.

This was an ecology of southern Thailand I’d heard about. I had no reason to be surprised; I had read articles about the industry’s hundred-year-old beginnings and the myth of how a wealthy provincial ruler smuggled the first trees from Indonesia. Yet the experience arrived sidelong and unexpected. It was unfamiliar and immense, and sat oddly in my being—how do you feel the loss of something you never knew personally: outside your country, your ecology, your lifespan and your language? These monocultures will eventually strip the soil, eventually erode into themselves.

My companion and I were very lost. Wandering after dark. Little creatures, we were so utterly small.

I am not from Thailand, or even Southeast Asia. I am from small town on the south coast of the Salish Sea, a body of water that connects the west coast of

Canada to the United States and sovereign Indigenous lands. It is a region defined by fecundity, biodiversity and marine life as much as by devastating logging practices, overfishing and colonial settlement. It is a paradoxical place.

I first came to Thailand when I was nine, with my parents. Nearly every year since, I’ve crossed the Pacific to return to a village southwest of Lampang. I learned the language. In my free time, I translate Thai poems into English. I cannot translate in the other direction. In my home country I work as a bartender to pay the continually rising rent (characteristic of my region). When I can, I travel—mostly around the Salish coastline but sometimes, with planning, abroad.

This practice of travel, I feel, keeps my mind alive and reminds me of my idiocy. It remains intricately tied to my ideas of education and self-understanding, of undoing prejudice. It also creates a dilemma: In the age of climate catastrophe, is there such a thing as ‘sustainable travel’, or even ‘ethical travel’? If not, should we travel at all?

These questions are deeply inadequate. They are foolish. Of course we should all strive to be less wasteful, less ignorant. But ecotourism and its cousins are just trends to ease the guilt that travel often brings to the forefront of our consciousness. Ah, yes, New York Times editors, maybe if I reused that bottle and flew only once a year the world would be a better place: meanwhile, Coca-Cola alone produces 200,000 plastic bottles a minute and Amazon operates 110 cargo flights a day. The scale of the tragedy is nearly incomprehensible; individual changes are pebbles against a flood.

The Anthropocene, the Capitalocene—this age we seemingly awoke in, a geological and historical epoch now defined by human consequences for the planet and by a climate catastrophe. A critical mass of human acts is now cascading into what may be the greatest tragedy of our species thus far. Cities will disappear, crops will fail,

cultures will migrate in massive flows to both welcome and war. These are old human occurrences, yet today the scale is magnitudes larger.

There will be a loss of innocence. There already has been. Any notions of human exceptionalism will dissipate, painfully, as the definition of ‘human’ (as separate from ecology) collapses from within and without. This may be a point of hope; we will relearn what being human means, build new connections and rebuild forgotten communities. But the realisation is immense and its implications unimaginable. Civilisation’s narrow boundaries, of the wild, the self and the soul, will disappear and be redrawn.

This is the reality of our era, and the real scale of the question at hand: there is no such thing as ‘moral travel’ or a ‘moral traveller’. Ecotourism is merely a brand. Taking more or fewer flights is a question of privilege not ethics. To travel is to bear witness to this human experiment, to suspend oneself immorally from the everyday, in hopes of getting a reply, however brief, to the real question at hand: What does it mean to be human?

Walking in the plantation yielded an answer atonal and disharmonic. A human with too much power displaced countless species, including other humans, in order to create a single biological ode to short-sightedness, greed and exceptionalism. And this is a truth about us.

There are nights when meaning feels far away, when I feel the only real human virtue is translation. Maybe this ambient depression is

why I am drawn to travel.Translation (from translatus), meaning to ‘carry

across’—to shepherd across water and through borders between linguistic and cultural systems. A good translation is an understanding of meaning, intimacy, voice, grammar and grace, of the possibility that

speaking with another’s words could express what you hold within, what you have held within, what you have experienced: the hard-to-say bits. The art of translation is the art of listening across the frightening divide of experience, human and otherwise, and it may be sacred.

When you travel, you become a word in translation—the whole of you in a new semiotic context; seen in strange ways, your habits are read under the light of other ways of life. The self, that word of you, is misheard and rewritten, and arrives day after day at the traveller’s mouth as a foreign phrase. Your feet carry the I across, slowly.

Your travels offer strange ways to speak yourself. Some are horrifying. Some are beautiful, others comical: you rhyme with another person; you find yourself rhyming with a lake; you grasp at yourself with half-words and realise that an old word was wrong. An image, a poem, a body, a creature gathering nouns and adjectives, ways of seeing and memories—cascading into the self you are becoming.

When you arrive back home, you speak and hear your own being with an accent, altered this way and that by the lilt and scents and light and poetry of that other place you travelled through. The village or city in which you grew up may seem inexplicable. Practices you believed were sound may appear flawed. In this way we all journey together into the Anthropocene; we return once again to this, our larger home, already deep in crisis.

Travel, in all its variety (the near and far, the long and the momentary)—and not just in the rough and rambling sort of way, or across oceans—is the pursuit of translation and curiosity. It is a continuous border crossing. From one way of life to another. From one ecology to another. From one nation, village or home to another. This is often where growth begins, between systems.

The humid and thick night air held us totally. On that gravel road illuminated by only my headlamp, amid the monstrous monoculture, we

kept walking. It would be another week or so before we reached Bangkok. On looking back, our journey had a near constant echo of devastation that soon overtook the goodwill of those who helped us: from the rubber plantations, and the cruel tourist trails, to a city destined to be under water in my lifetime. Odd, partial memories resurfaced: the commodified and sacred songbirds in their ornate cages, on front porches, in the centre of towns, in the backs of trucks. A passer-by once told me that this is a tradition that migrated from China generations ago. The birds, I learned later, had been here long before that, living and dying for centuries before being turned into talismans, caged for human ideas of beauty and luck.

My companion, a biologist, shouted from the low brush just off the road: Turn off your light!

It’s too dark. I was afraid.Turn it off! Apprehensively I pressed the button (a part of me

was convinced large predators somehow still ranged here). The road disappeared into blackness.

Soon the moonlight sketched silvery hues on the leaves and my hands. He was crouched to the soil. Look at this … he called quietly. Glowing on his hand was a luminescent worm. My eyes adjusted to the little points of light all around us. Fireflies dipped in and out of sight, the nightscape starry with blueish-green phosphorescent beings. ☐

Conner Bouchard-Roberts is a writer and publisher from Salish, Canada

Jerryrigged machine

I screw youreyes to keep your gaze trainedon me,

beat your mind with a hammer,lock down your breasts and delicateparts,

loop a chain around your arms and lower legs,dress with armor for resisting yourown

recital of dos and don’ts,haram and halal, heretic andsacred,

and infiltrate with metal the flesh, with wire theveins, with algorithm the thought. Jerryrigprotective love.

Tilde Acuña

Translated from the Filipino by Kristine Ong Muslim

P O E M

33

Talking about food in the era of Covid-19, we are seized by how lockdowns have upended the way we eat. Restaurants shut and many may stay

closed forever, driven out of business by the escalating costs of waiting and patience. Takeaways and delivery services surge. Cooking fills the long days at home. Questions about whether or not we will eat and drink in public spaces the same way again hang over many a sleepless night. The collapse of the hospitality industry aside, social relationships forged and lubricated by beers and fried noodles, so precious now yet taken for granted when viewed from wistful hindsight, will be hard-won from now on. What is certain is that we cannot go back to where we were with the way we eat, at least not for a long while. The feeling of grief is palpable: food is a comfort. It is culture and identity. What happens when food, like Malaysian cuisine, is placed at the centre of an entire cultural identity, and faces the consequences of the pandemic?

When I first started writing this essay, during those carefree pre-Covid days, stakeholding on cultural food and the culture of food in Malaysia continued to rage, to the exclusion of any preparation for a major event that could imperil comfort, culture and identity. Not the pandemic, but the climate emergency. There is now mounting evidence that the two are intertwined.

Pandemics of the past originated with animals: rats, pigs, chickens, creatures that live close—dangerously close—to humans. But they were not carriers of pestilence on their own. Other unwitting animal accomplices, whose manner of existence was once remote from human contact, made their presence felt when wild habitats were destroyed for human use. The first Nipah virus outbreak in 1997 and 1998 in Malaysia was traced to bats and the destruction of their food source. Some 265 humans were infected; 105 died. Lessons from this kind virus could have been learned and relearned—that today human and animal foodways overlap in a deadly admixture of environmental degradation, genetic quirk and a pathogenic time bomb.

A shift in the way Malaysian food is talked about, imagined, produced and consumed needs to reflect these pressing concerns. Subconsciously, everyone knows that food is intertwined with the self. But through a Malaysian lens, local food quite literally feeds the national and nationalist self. The furore early this year about a British woman’s disapproval of nasi lemak served on a British Airways flight became another episode in the national pastime of disparaging white people for their gastronomic ignorance. Never mind that it was airplane nasi lemak. The woman made two categorical errors: posting her views on Twitter and castigating the one thing that brings Malaysians together. And together Malaysians heaped scorn on the unwitting diner. Perceived in one way, the episode was the revenge of the natives. The formerly colonised satisfying their vengeance over their oppressor through a medium that is both intimate and political, food. Speak ill of the olfactory challenges of durian and belacan at your peril. But seen in another way, it was a sinister form of gastronomic chauvinism, a way of ganging up against others because there are few other avenues for social cohesion to identify with.

As provocative as the title of this essay may sound, it’s not really about rejecting or disliking Malaysian food in toto. The pleasures of the country’s food are world-renowned. Only people who lack taste buds could object to its cornucopia of delights. Rather, I intend to take a

punt and point out the ugliness and destructiveness that Malaysian food betrays and conceals. Not to put too fine a point on it, the hedonistic emphasis on deliciousness hides the cuisine’s history of colonialism and present-day exploitation and eco-degradation. More than this, the very deliciousness of Malaysian food depends on the omission of its colonial past and present-day exploitation and eco-degradation.

While there is some acknowledgement of the way food is in fact integral to the environmental destructiveness of the Anthropocene, a lot less attention is paid to the human costs of actually producing it. Malaysia is a consummate consumer society. And food is appreciated almost exclusively according to how it tastes and how to consume as much of it as possible. Any visitor will be told about the country’s food and how wonderful it is. To know Malaysia is to eat Malaysia. Malaysians abroad find fellow feeling through locating, preparing and eating the food of home. Often there is little else to bond over. For too long, Malaysians have been divided linguistically, by class, religion and ethnicity, and by an obsession with titles, status and wealth. Food is the common language Malaysians speak to each other. The tedium and superficiality of this shared food language are enlivened by the next trendy food item and destination in a collective partaking of the banality of deliciousness.

The banality of deliciousness, referencing Hannah Arendt’s famous dictum about ‘the banality of evil’, may seem like an odd choice of words when she was talking about the normalisation of genocide. But the kernel of Arendt’s argument finds its resonance in instances when extraordinary harm is made mundane—that moral responsibility for acts of harm can be suspended and displaced in a labyrinthine chain of command and supply. Enjoying delicious food may seem completely harmless when the exploitation of food workers is less visible. Like a Marxian fetish, banal deliciousness is only meaningful when the labouring hands that enable farm to fork are obscured from view. And not just male migrant hands, but also women’s hands in the home.

The ubiquitous mamak food, a cuisine pioneered by the Indian Muslim community, is a reliable site for the banality of deliciousness in Malaysia.

Open twenty-four hours every day of the week, the mamak restaurant is a gift to the national pastime of eating. It is the jewel that sits on the crown of food pride: cheap, cheerful, convivial, convenient. The mamak restaurant is celebrated as a properly multiracial space where different ethnic groups, who are divided otherwise by religion and dietary restrictions, can sit together and enjoy the same meals. But this superficial

image of multicultural cohesion is fundamentally built on a racial hierarchy. Mamak food production relies on migrant bodies, bodies fragmented further into hands that bring to the table fried noodles and strong iced tea in an instant. Those who serve are the transnational an-nehs (‘elder brothers’ in Tamil) from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar who toil round the clock for pitiful wages.

If anything, the love of Malaysian food is the finest expression of the exclusionary trope of nationalism: to secure the happiness of an in-group there needs to be exploitation of an out-group. Round-the-clock mamak food, like other ‘ethnic’ cuisines, is the direct descendant of a colonial culinary heritage. Racialised labour patterns under British rule were a means to manage entry into the colony and to keep ethnic groups apart once they were there. Take one well-known example. Among the last large-scale migrant groups to arrive in colonial Malaya, Hainanese from southern China, were confronted with a saturated labour market and given scant choice in terms of work. And most ended up in commercial cooking and food production. Many Hainanese went on to settle and integrated as citizens of the newly independent Malaysia. But it’s not been so straightforward for postcolonial migrants—from Indonesia, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Myanmar, Vietnam and Cambodia—who don’t even possess the promise of second-class citizenship.

Erasure and exclusion keep the myths of food nationalism alive, until those myths become untenable and destabilised by a catastrophe like Covid-19. Workers who make eating as cheap and cheerful as possible face even more hardship from increased exposure to the virus. This is the lived reality: most stay in totally inadequate accommodation, face unemployment or a cut to paltry wages, and are threatened with detention or worse. They are those who Arundhati Roy calls ‘ghost workers’, the hundreds of thousands of farmers (in India) who have committed suicide to escape punishing debt; the hundreds of millions who live on less than two dollars a day. Ghost workers are the underclass that performs invisible, difficult yet essential labour for next to nothing. It’s an image that’s been picked up by Parthiban Muniandy, who shows how ghost workers in the Malaysian food industry bear the stigmata of impermanence, interchangeability, invisibility and precarity. Life is nasty, brutish and often short.

A fresh awareness and appreciation of our environmental interconnectedness during the global pandemic might just bring us closer to a coming to terms with the real origins of the latest bio-catastrophe. Understanding the genesis of bio-catastrophes could also offer clues to a means of preserving a sense of cultural identity so lovingly defined by food.

There is no better illustration of interconnectedness than the Nipah virus that afflicted Malaysia (and elsewhere) in 1997 and 1998. There is a trail. The virus was contracted from pigs infected by the excrement of bats displaced by anthropogenic forest fires in Indonesia that inhibited the fruiting of forest trees, the source of food for bats. For now, these are simply pieces of an origin story. The connection with how we eat still needs to be made to the collapsing natural world that is not just over there, but here and now.

In her recent book Decolonizing Extinction, Juno Salazar Parreñas shows that displacement caused by dam-building and deforestation in Sarawak forced humans and orangutans into an unwanted collision in their respective searches for food. At risk of extinction and vulnerable

Against Malaysian foodAlicia Izharuddin

F O O D

Charis Loke

34

to wildlife trafficking and starvation, orangutans have been placed in rehabilitation centres for their protection. These centres may be artificial spaces where orphaned orangutans learn to feed themselves as nature intended before being released into their natural habitat. Yet while they mitigate harm, the centres are really only temporary havens from likelihood of extinction. And jobless people need orangutan rehabilitation centres to stay open since other sources of livelihood are few.

In Parreñas’s ethnography, the Ibans who work with orangutans must find ways to cari makan (literally, ‘find food’) or make a living under new circumstances. But here, cari makan takes on a new meaning in the age of mass extinction and environmental collapse. Something is somehow gained from ecological loss. Displaced people and animals form new environmental subjectivities defined by an interdependency of survival. It is anything but a utopian symbiosis. Neither really wants to be so interdependent with the other. Those taking responsibility for their non-human charges become new persons in two ways:

first as environmental subjects who must cari makan, or find food in ways that differ from the past, and second as wage-earning animal handlers who must interface directly with animals that they would otherwise rarely encounter.

The image of live wild animals in wet markets across Asia, made foreboding by the Western media, presents another version of environmental subjectivity. The consumption of animals rarely encountered in globalised factory farming has been linked to the likely source of Covid-19, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, where, belying its name, bats, snakes and civets were also sold. At first glance, it looks like the opposite to the environmental subjectivity in conservation work mentioned by Parreñas. Wild animals were at the market to be eaten not protected. Unsurprisingly, there have been concerted calls for such markets to be shut down.

But beyond a total ban on wet markets and the sale of wildlife for consumption, there is greater complexity at play here once we pause to think about matters of livelihoods and cultural food practices a little more deeply. Nearly everywhere, rural and indigenous populations cari makan through wildlife consumption, by means of both hunting and trading. Rural suppliers and market traders, along with wildlife poachers and smugglers, are part of an industry—sometimes legal, sometimes not—that has supplied different markets for generations: other rural and indigenous consumers, and sometimes affluent consumers of unusual (exotic? traditional?) medicines.

What the pandemic reveals to us is that people working in relatively remote spaces like the rainforests of Sarawak or a wet market in a metropolis of eleven million or in the everyday mamak eateries have become environmental subjects. They too are impacted by an irreversible biosecurity and ecological crisis. Old ways of working should not apply to the never-ending quest to cari makan. Perfunctory hygiene in food production and preparation ought to improve fast. Wages need to increase to account for health and safety risks. You would think that such a necessary future means everything compared to the dire present. But the Huanan market has reopened, as restaurants close or dramatically scale down in Malaysia, and life continues as before in the interior of Sarawak.

So what has happened to the ubiquitous mamak restaurants and their workers through the six-week movement control order imposed by the

Malaysian government in mid-March? It’s been a tale of woe that’s usually camouflaged when times are ‘normal’. Operating hours have been curtailed, and workers have had no choice but to take pay cuts or else they’ve been made redundant. This in turn means a drastic shortfall in precious remittances sent to needy families back home. There are emergency food hand-

outs to undocumented migrants, mainly organised by civic groups. But this takes place clandestinely to avoid encounters with the thuggish official paramilitary group, the People’s Volunteer Corps. Migrant workers aren’t safe from the police either. They risk arrest and detention for breaking the movement control order or a documentation-related infraction while out looking for work and food. And inevitably, at the beginning of May, just when the lockdown was being eased, the Malaysian authorities were systematically rounding up undocumented migrants as part of ‘efforts to contain the spread of coronavirus’. That’s also the new normal: when ‘containing the virus’ becomes the shield for a simple absence of basic humanity.

But then none of this is really all that new. It’s just that in a situation of extreme unemployment and precariousness, people are even more desperate to find ways to cari makan. And this also means embracing mutual but unequal vulnerabilities and risks. Delivery boys on their motorbikes and food producers are ‘essential workers’. But being ‘essential’ does not take away the risk of exposure to viral load in order to keep people fed. ‘Essential’ food workers might be rewarded with public applause, but cheers do nothing to address pre-existing conditions of deep-seated inequality. During these desperate times, choice is often not an option. At the vital anterior of the food supply chain are disruptions that can have a rippling effect on food services and household consumers. Transportation of perishable produce like meat, fish, fruit and vegetables across state lines is an essential service during the partial lockdown. But many workers are quite sensibly concerned about putting their families and themselves at risk. Hidden away and distrustful of the public gaze, factory farming and meat-processing plants were always notoriously dangerous places to work in even before Covid-19. Now, what were previously regular if nasty aspects of the job, like working in large groups in confined spaces, have the makings of a virus hotspot.

A new world of eating after the pandemic passes awaits us. It could be one enriched by a greater awareness of our interconnectedness. It could be one tempered by recognition of the mutual but unequal vulnerabilities between humans and non-human animals alike. Some of that vision has already been woven into our everyday lives under lockdown, through enforced social distancing, contact tracing and staying at home. A sense of connectedness with the non-human, one that embraces a non-anthropocentric perspective, has already begun in our humble acceptance that the human body, the economy and civilisation are no match for an invisible virus. Connectedness with non-human animals may also be all about perspective. As John Berger writes in his essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’, there is a presumption that ‘animals first entered the human imagination as meat or leather or horn’ that neglects to appreciate that they ‘first entered the imagination as messengers and promises’.

The way the pandemic has changed our relationship with each other and with the natural world is no different from a twist in a dark fairy tale. Within a few months, seemingly like magic, every person on the planet has been pushed into tighter spheres of interdependency. In more quotidian terms, there are limits to that interdependency. Long excluded groups like migrant workers and refugees are simply not allowed into the abrupt embrace of interdependency, embedding their ghostly status further.

There is every likelihood that attitudes that overfed the banality of deliciousness before the pandemic will return in full force, like a repressed spring uncoiling with great urgency. There will be feasts after social famine. Food workers in the mamak stalls need to work, food nationalism needs to be reconsolidated. But, I think, not quite in the same way. The chances are inequalities will deepen as people cari makan under newly impoverished circumstances. ☐

Alicia Izharuddin is a research associate at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at the Harvard Divinity School

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PHILIP CORNWEL-SMITHVery Bangkok: In the City of the Senses

River Books: 2020

As someone born and raised in Bangkok, no matter how often I heard outsiders characterise the city a ‘bounty of sensory pleasures’, it always

felt as though they were describing a place that didn’t exist. Despite its many mazes, its contrasting shades and sides, to me Bangkok is simply home, a place where you spend your life navigating the traffic, the humidity and the shopping malls. And the nature of home is that it remains the same. However it might feel to others, my Bangkok was stagnant, impervious to progress. And to live in it was to be bound by its sense of uniformity.

I spent my childhood and teenage years feeling out of place in my own city and yearning to be somewhere else, to belong somewhere else. Other places in the world—whether it be London, Paris, Tokyo, Milan—all seemed rich and intoxicating in comparison. So whenever I heard visitors or friends from abroad rhapsodising about how much they ‘love Bangkok’, I always felt sceptical and detached from their positive sentiment. There are many things about being from Bangkok that these outsiders could never understand—especially the way life is lived here, which, as a young person, I find mundane and stifling. Unless you become an actor or a pop star, your entire ‘ordinary’ life is already laid out before you—a good education, a steady job, a steady income and then a family.

When I first heard of Very Bangkok, Philip Cornwel-Smith’s follow-up to his popular book Very Thai, I felt similarly sceptical. What could a white Westerner tell me about my hometown that I didn’t already know? What could be gained from a book about Bangkok written in English and meant to be consumed largely by non-Thais? The experiment seemed both futile and cliched. Would the book, like so many others about Thailand written by foreigners, be concerned with just the ‘touristy’ elements of Bangkok? If not, then how honest and nuanced could it be when it came to discussing what it’s truly like to be a Bangkokian?

Yet as I started engaging with Very Bangkok, I began to see that there might be some merit to having as its author someone who hasn’t, to quote author Lawrence Osborne in the book’s foreword, ‘absorbed unconsciously as a child’ the things which make Bangkok unique. By taking on the role of an outside observer, Cornwel-Smith is able to provide a more well-rounded view of Bangkok than a Bangkokian who’s lived in only one area of the city. An example of this is the section on Bangkok’s LGBT scene, which has long been unfairly aligned with the city’s seedy underbelly. ‘Bangkok is my church,’ drag artist Nuh Peace says. ‘In any other religion, if you are queer or different you’re out. But Bangkok accepts you how you are.’

True to its title, much of the book is devoted to Bangkok’s ‘sensory pleasures’, and to finding out the causes of the city’s ‘unexplained puzzles’. Filled with photographs of Bangkok and its people, Very Bangkok has three parts: ‘Senses’, ‘Heart’ and ‘Face’. Cornwel-Smith calls Bangkok ‘the world’s most primate city’ and is interested not in simply providing niche knowledge on various historical landmarks but in getting under the city’s skin and making sense of its DNA. Hence these musings, which almost turn Bangkok, a place of ‘very meaty spaces’, into a living, breathing character: ‘a city fretting about the future finds solace in orchestrating the

Bangkok daysPim Wangtechawat

U R B A N

past’, and ‘amnesiac Bangkok is recovering the gaps in its memory’. Many of the observations in Very Bangkok might not be the most flattering to this city of angels, but they are honest and important ones that many Thais haven’t dwelled on or even noticed, partly because they are so ingrained in us.

Thailand’s class system, for example, has always been a harmful but rarely discussed element of our culture. Very Bangkok notes that both of Bangkok’s electric rail systems, the MRT and the BTS, are ‘off limits to the poor or those with meagre incomes’, with stations directly integrated into affluent shopping malls, unlike bus stops. Religion, too, is put under the microscope, with one of the book’s Thai contributors arguing that Thai religiosity ‘has more to do with nationalism … than philosophical aspects of religion’. Our reverence for seniority is also shown to be harmful, especially to the younger generations. ‘Youth movements require spaces and time’, writes Cornwel-Smith, ‘which are not just lacking, but deliberately curtailed.’ We’re seeing more and more of this as young people attempt to take a greater role in politics.

The section of the book that I appreciate the most discusses Bangkok’s attitude towards sexuality. In the West, Thailand is often regarded as somewhere to have ‘a good time’, a phrase usually accompanied by a suggestive wink. But this perception of sexual liberation has always contrasted greatly with reality. To quote Cornwel-Smith, Bangkok is more ‘Sin City meets Prim City’. For many Bangkokians, public displays of affection between couples are unseemly; sex is not a topic that is openly or healthily discussed, either in schools or during one’s upbringing. The book also highlights that Thailand has the world’s second-highest rate of teen pregnancy, and that 44 per cent of men admitted to having assaulted their partners when drunk. Although Bangkok is perceived to be a bachelor’s paradise, many of its locals are actually living in a society which ‘frowns on female sexuality’.

Where Very Bangkok could have done better, however, is in its preoccupation with defining ‘Thai-ness’ and ‘Bangkok-ness’. Certain statements from the author and non-Thai contributors—such as ‘for Bangkokians, nothing matters more than to ‘gain face’, for the self,

this city, or the nation’, and ‘selfies are a way to get your face out there without fear of losing face’—come across as sweeping generalisations. The quote from Wayne Deakin, a Thailand-based British philosopher, that ‘Thai people are searching for identity’, is not far off the mark. But you can’t help reading it and wishing the conversation could have gone on longer, with more in-depth discussions of what might have caused this condition—perhaps with other contributors, especially those who are Thai, taking centre stage. Cornwel-Smith insists that his ‘status as an outsider is somewhat moot after twenty-five years of experience’. But would the book be different if there had been a native at the helm? The answer isn’t straightforward.

Last year I moved to Edinburgh. Living in Europe, I’ve found that Bangkok has taken on another role in my life. In many ways, I am now both the

outsider and the insider; while the city is still my home, being away from it has simultaneously deepened my appreciation for it and opened my eyes to many of its flaws. Like Cornwel-Smith, I have learned to dissect the city and tried to figure out what lies beneath, leading to questions about the way we’ve been conditioned to view the world and, as Bangkokians, each other: Why do I always get compliments on my pale skin? What is life like for Bangkokians whose ethnicity or sexual orientation differs from mine? Will things ever be better for women or those not born into wealth?

But despite these flaws—and the city’s inability to address or confront them—I still find myself missing Bangkok. While I don’t miss the traffic or the humidity, I’ve found myself longing for small home comforts, mainly the food, the shopping malls, the language and the people. Now, whenever friends of mine from Europe or the United States ask for my advice on visiting Thailand, especially Bangkok, I encourage them to go. ‘It will be very different what you’re used to, though,’ I always tell them. ‘Different and overwhelming.’ But perhaps that’s what I’ve come to miss most about my city since I’ve been away: the overwhelming sameness of home. ☐

Pim Wangtechawat is a Thai writer based in Edinburgh

Cafe in Bangkok

Philip Cornwel-Smith

36

WOMADELAIDE 5–9 March 2020

Botanic Gardens, Adelaide, South Australia

W OMADelaide is an awkward hybrid combining the ‘world of music, arts and dance’ with the capital city of South

Australia. It’s the Australian incarnation of a festival staged in various forms around the world since it was started in England in 1982 by former Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel and others. WOMAD in Adelaide opened a decade later and has been staged annually since 2003, part of a festival season the locals refer to as ‘mad March’—incorporating the Adelaide Festival, the Adelaide Fringe and Adelaide Writers’ Week. According to the publicity, last year more than 90,000 people came to lap up music, dance, workshops, talks, art installations and food from more than thirty countries in a bazaar-like atmosphere in Botanic Park.

This year was my fifth WOMADelaide and the third in a row. But while I’m a fan of the event, it’s hard for me not to notice the dearth of performers from Asia, especially from Southeast Asia. In fact, last year there were none. The 2020 line-up seems to have a few more artists than usual from Australia’s regional neighbours. There’s Maubere Timor, fronted by veteran independence fighters from Timor-Leste, and the Orang Orang Drum Theatre from Malaysia. From Taiwan, there’s the impressive B. Dance, and from Japan, the Minyo Crusaders, valiantly seeking to revive a form of folk song they say has become extinct, playing cumbia beats and wearing masks and kimonos. The Crusaders were one of two bands from Japan this year; the other, Kikagaku Moyo, plays psychedelic rock reminiscent of last year’s crowd favourites Khruangbin (a US band with a Thai name).

Despite the rise in representation from Asia, I still feel there’s something missing, perhaps not only in the geographic spread of sources, but also in the festival’s curatorial vision. I’m wondering if there is a philosophical or theoretical framework guiding how the ‘world’ is represented here in music, arts and dance, especially given that one of WOMADelaide’s principal sponsors is the state government. It’s not that anyone expects or would even want to see a perfectly proportional representation of the world, but less than 1 per cent of performances from Southeast Asia over twenty years suggests there might be something missing in how the program is created.

Performances from East Asia (China, South and North Korea, Taiwan and Japan) get a better look-in, at around 2.5 per cent, while artists from South Asia (Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh) have been given 3.5 per cent of performance slots. By comparison, in three of the most recent festivals, while maintaining a consistent representation of Australian artists at around 45 per cent, the representation from the rest of the world was: North America, 14 per cent; Africa (excluding Middle East and North Africa), 11 per cent; Europe, 10 per cent; and the United Kingdom, 6 per cent. Combined, Asian performances—from any of more than two dozen diverse countries between Turkmenistan and Japan—have made up a total of just under 7 per cent over twenty years of festivals.

I want to know how this world music festival is put together, and am fortunate to speak with Angela Tripodi, who has worked on WOMADelaide for two decades,

Missing on stageMina Bui Jones

M U S I C

first as an artist liaison and then for the last ten years as a program manager. Tripodi explains that she and festival director Ian Scobie work closely to balance headline acts and surprising performances with ‘the strongest, freshest and best quality music from around the world’. To do this, they frequently ‘check in’ with WOMAD UK and try to see as much live music as possible. Both travel to the United Kingdom and Europe for the northern summer festival season, between them attending WOMAD UK and others such as Chalon dans la Rue in France and Sziget in Hungary. I get the impression that the European and UK trips are annual. The relationship with its foundation organisation, WOMAD UK, is clearly fundamental to WOMADelaide.

Performances are also sourced through trusted arts agencies and recommendations from world music luminaries such as Annette Shun Wah and Lucky Oceans. Another source is their open applications platform, but Tripodi admits few artists who submit through this channel have the professional support that makes it ‘possible’ for them to be booked. They might be good, she explains, but they have ‘no agent, no management, and there are going to be problems with visas’.

I ask if WOMADelaide has any genre or regional specialists on its team, and Tripodi says no. She and Scobie ‘play to each other’s strengths’, she says. They confer with colleagues in the United Kingdom. Some of the promoters have regional specialisations, like one who concentrates on Celtic folk music, whose suggestions Tripodi says they can ‘trust blind’.

When I ask about a relative lack of Southeast Asian performances, Tripodi cites this year’s Orang Orang Drum Theatre, Kim So Ra from Korea and the Minyo Crusaders. She mentions the esteemed Indian violinist, Dr L. Subramariam, playing WOMADelaide for a second time this year thanks to an ongoing relationship between the WOMADelaide Foundation and the Nataraj Cultural Centre in Melbourne.

Tripodi says that while they would like to have more Asian performers, it’s not always easy to find the right artists at the right time. They are ‘going for the best possible mix … and it’s very organic. We will never go down the path of having a quota or anything like that’.

Later, I wonder about Southeast Asian events Tripodi and Scobie might have scouted for artists. Tripodi replies in an email: WOMAD Singapore, Korea Performing Arts Market and Sound of the Xity in Beijing. Over twenty years, from a country seated on Asia’s doorstep, that’s not a lot.

It seems to me that Adelaide, with its history

of progressive social and cultural movements and ambitious festival season, should be able to curate a world music festival that truly includes the magnificent cacophony of the world, especially the sounds of our region. Are logistical convenience and old habits preventing Asian acts from being included in the annual microcosm of the world that is WOMADelaide?

Adelaide is a city of open skies, flat and wide, its mostly empty streets lying on a plain as if they have thrown themselves down and opened their

arms to the world. It’s the only Australian city I’ve been to where I’ve heard Aboriginal languages spoken on the street and where a passion for cuisine and an interest in art and literature seem genuinely rooted in place.

Somewhat mythologised, South Australia’s history is quite different from the other states and territories in Australia’s federation, most of which were British penal colonies. It was colonised by free settlers and Europeans fleeing religious persecution, and its laws and regulations have often been relatively enlightened. My home town, Sydney, on the other hand, the starting point for Britain’s military possession of Australia, has always been a grasping, smash-and-grab kind of city, where heroes of public good have been few and far between and are too little remembered, too rarely championed. John Birmingham, in Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney, argues that, from the start, officers in charge of prisoners transported to Sydney used every opportunity to dispossess native peoples of their land and profit from the forced labour of the prisoners under their command. Birmingham believes this period set the tone for the development of a competitive and individualistic character in Sydney ever after.

The openness of Adelaide belies, of course, the same histories in South Australia that played out across the rest of the country as colonial power and its opportunists, the settlers, expanded its reach: frontier violence, murderous land acquisition and policies enacted upon Indigenous Australians that are now recognised as genocidal—despite intentions that South Australia would be different.

However, things have been different in South Australia, especially in the 1970s under the premiership of Don Dunstan, who, among many progressive social reforms, championed Australia’s growing familiarity with Southeast Asia. Dunstan’s was just one of many ‘expressions of cosmopolitan receptivity to the East’, in a long agony of existential doubt and debate documented by David Walker in his books Stranded Nation: White Australia in an Asian Region (2019) and Anxious Nation (1999). Walker shows that Australians have regarded Asia as a source of opportunity as much as fear, at least since the 1880s.

After Dunstan, Australian leaders, including prime ministers Keating and Rudd, argued that Australia was—or certainly could be if we all wised up a little—an Asian nation, and that we should look to our region instead of back to old England to develop skills and cultural identities to match our current realities and likely futures.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Walker’s books is their record of more than 150 years of Australian interest in the arts and cultures of Asia and of fruitful cultural exchange. Looking at the line-up of WOMADelaide, it seems its organisers haven’t come as far as its audience and are still taking most of their cues from an old colonial centre. It’s no longer tenable for an Australian view of the world to look so British. ☐

Michael Coghlan/Flickr

37

BRENT GUDGEL AND CHRIS SINCLAIR (DIRECTORS)

Free Burma RangersDeidox Films: 2020

The first time I met American humanitarian missionary Dave Eubank was in 2004 over breakfast in Chiang Mai, where we discussed

mules, powered flight and civil war in Myanmar. Desmond Ball, the late professor of the Australian National University, had introduced us, and for an avowed atheist, Ball took Eubank’s energetic Christian speech in his stride; it was all about the conflict and what they were both doing, in very different ways, to alleviate the suffering of civilians.

Eubank told me that just that day he had ordered two powered paragliders, or paramotoring devices—simply a propeller strapped to your back that blows wind into a parachute—to evacuate landmine victims over the mountains in eastern Myanmar into Thailand. That mules could move supplies through jungle terrain, he had gleaned from reading Bernard Ferguson’s classic memoirs of the World War II Chindit expeditions, The Wild Green Earth, so he got several of them too.

War zones attract a rogue’s gallery of adventurers, fantasists and psychopaths. Eubank and his Free Burma Rangers (FBR) have been called all those and more, but they are distinguished by their effectiveness, as a new documentary treatment of their activities in Myanmar and Iraq makes clear. The Free Burma Rangers have been in operation for over twenty-four years, starting small along the Thailand–Myanmar border to help the Karen people in the longest running civil war in the world.

Eubank was born in Texas and grew up in Thailand, son of a prominent Christian missionary family. After college he joined the US military, serving in the elite Ranger battalions, and then as a major in the Special Forces, or Green Berets, for ten years. Upon leaving, and searching for a mission, he was asked by his father to return to Thailand. Hearing of fighting along the border in ethnic Karen areas, he loaded a truck with medical supplies and adopted a simple philosophy, which the FBR follow today: ‘Go to the sound of guns, go to the sound of need, and trust God.’ On the trail he gave a lift to a Karen medic, called Eliya, who Eubank recalls looked like a ‘pirate angel’, and the Free Burma Rangers were in operation.

That nucleus of Eliya, Eubank and the latter’s wife Karen started training mobile medical teams modelled on Ranger operations that would venture deep into the conflict zones and provide medical support to internally displaced people, guide them away from marauding Myanmar army columns and stay in solidarity. Soon, the FBR was documenting its activities through interviews and film and sending the reports to the outside world. As human rights reporting goes, it was by no means balanced, but it was accurate and impassioned, and it had real impact.

By the time the documentary film-makers for this movie had arrived at the FBR’s main training base, Camp Ta U Wah (White Monkey) in Kaw Thoo Lei (Free Karen state), the FBR had a total of seventy-two permanent teams, and had trained 4,500 teams in total. Much of the work is carried out by committed Karen, Karenni and Kachin specialists, augmented by a frequent flow of serving or retired US military personnel as volunteers. According to Eubank, the FBR have ‘served’

Onward, Christian soldierDavid Scott Mathieson

F I L M

an estimated one and a half million people around the world, a major achievement for what is essentially a small family-run relief operation.

And it truly is a family affair. The Eubanks’ three children, Sahale, Suuzane and Peter, literally grew up in conflict zones, home-schooled and helping with training operations. There is ample footage of the family mountain climbing, horse riding, parachuting and hiking into the middle of war zones with rebel soldiers. Karen Eubank formed the Good Life Club, which organises activities, entertainment and basic goods for displaced children, and it’s in many of these scenes that the real hope is found in the resilience of people amidst carnage.

The front-line conflict footage is the documentary’s core strength: the FBR’s interaction with civilians caught in crossfires and ever present landmines and a relentlessly sadistic Myanmar army. Travelling repeatedly to Myanmar’s northern Kachin state, where more than 100,000 civilians were displaced by widespread fighting following the breakdown of a ceasefire between the central government and the Kachin Independence Army, Eubank hears of the bestial rape and murder of two young Kachin teachers, Maran Lu Ra and Tangbau Hkawn Nan Tsin, in neighbouring Shan state, a crime that remains unresolved.

It’s at this point that, on camera, Eubank gets on his knees and says, ‘I do want to kill all the Burma army, no question in my mind.’ The narrative then introduces a young Karen man, Sah Nay Htoo, who was press-ganged into the Myanmar army, committed murderous atrocities against his own people, fragged his commanding officer and deserted, eventually joining the FBR, and then being baptised. This case, Eubank says, shows that ‘forgiveness is counter-warfare’.

Mid-way through, the documentary pivots to Mosul in Iraq. The FBR opened operations there several years ago, deploying teams to assist civilians trapped by Islamic Front (ISIS). There are scenes of rescue operations that are as harrowing as any the group experienced in Myanmar. Several of the Myanmar members of the FBR deploy as well, and are joined by like-minded Iraqi soldiers such as Shaheen and Muhammed, awed by the Karen and other ethnic minorities coming all that way to help them. An Iraqi general gives them his blessing and protection to operate in the area.

The team meets a large family trapped for three years, who moments after a hopeful liberation scene, are shredded by an ISIS mine. Eubank again has a ‘Kill them all, let God sort them out’ anguished moment. But, as he laments, ‘Vengeance looks like justice, but it’s hate.’ Yet, as one of his team members casually mentions, Eubank did kill three ISIS fighters in combat.

The interviews with Eubank when he agonises over these contradictions of faith would have been as off-putting as a TV evangelist if not for his humanity and honesty. These scenes, and the way the film-makers not just centre on Eubank’s effusive self-examination, but broaden it out with ample interviews with Karen Eubank and the many Karen and Iraqi aid workers and footage of people they encounter, swerve away from what could be an indulgent hagiography.

The centrepiece of the Iraq sections, which the documentary begins with, is Eubank’s dramatic rescue of a young girl trapped among a pile of corpses, including her mother, whose hijab she uses as cover, against a wall, pinned down by ISIS snipers. Using an Iraqi army tank and US military smokescreen airdrops, Eubank runs into gunfire and plucks the girl to safety. He and other team members then return through that same fire and drag two wounded men to safety.

This dramatic footage from 2017 was well covered by the international media. What was not is that wounded, trapped civilians in buildings close by also called for help, and the FBR rescued them, too. Eubank admits fear and reluctance, but citing John 15:13—‘greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’—he did it. Many FBR members have laid down their lives in missions, including the enigmatic Shaheen, and the cameraman Zau Seng, from Kachin state, cut down in Kurdistan doing what he believed in.

The Christian rhetoric and constant referencing of prayer and God’s plan may well put off many non-believers. Some of Eubank’s Western champions also have dubious political leanings, including the notorious Colonel Oliver North and Republican Party congressmen who attended graduation ceremonies at Camp Ta U Wah at the end of 2019. The FBR was also consulted for Sylvester Stallone’s 2008 film Rambo, apparently partly modelled on the FBR’s operations. This makes disparaging the FBR as a right-wing, militaristic, Christian nut-bag cabal easy.

Yet, as the documentary illustrates, the FBR are a committed collective with a drive to help people at the sharp end of armed conflict. They are not the only ones. On the Thailand border there are also Backpack Health Worker Teams, the Mao Tao Clinic and dozens of civil society or insurgent-connected service delivery providers. The FBR is one group within a wider humanitarian milieu. Criticism that their branding—there are FBR T-shirts in every corner of Myanmar now—is simply cynical self-promotion, is facile. United Nations agencies and large international aid agencies and human rights groups all aggrandise their work for fundraising, often with a strained relationship with the truth.

Approaching this film prepared to snigger at God-bothering zealots misses the point. The result should be respect for brave and dedicated people willing to place their principles and faith on the line to help those in desperate need. The FBR’s methods may not appeal to many, but you would be a churlishly judgy atheist to claim they haven’t been effective. ☐

David Scott Mathieson is a writer based in Southeast Asia

Dave Eubank, in Free Burma Rangers

Deidox Films

38

Causeway Bay Books, founded in 1994 in Hong Kong, originally sold and published books critical of the Chinese government. Between

October and December 2015, five employees of the bookshop were kidnapped from the Chinese mainland, Thailand and Hong Kong itself, later reappearing in public to confess to lurid crimes. Their confessions had all the marks of being forced.

The kidnappings had a chilling effect on independent bookshops and publishers in Hong Kong. Lam Wing-kee, the founder of Causeway Bay Books, is currently the only one of the kidnapped booksellers to remain free; he escaped after being temporarily released in Hong Kong by Chinese authorities.

Lam fled to Taiwan last year ahead of the anticipated passing of a bill that would have allowed for Hongkongers to be extradited to the mainland to face charges. This is what led Lam to reopen Causeway Bay Books in Taiwan in April, after a year of preparation—a year in which demonstrations against the extradition bill that caused Lam to flee brought millions onto the streets of Hong Kong in protest.

The original Causeway Bay Books was one of over a hundred independent bookshops in Hong Kong that rented out space on the upstairs floors, rather than at ground level, of buildings in order to avoid expensive rents. This continues with Causeway Bay Books’ new location, a small, unassuming spot on the tenth floor of an office building in Taipei’s Zhongshan District. If not for the sign indicating the existence of a bookshop, one would mistake it for simply another office.

When I went to the bookshop several days after its

opening, it was packed with visitors. There was little standing room and many of the bookshelves were bare. It wasn’t clear to me whether those books had all been sold already or whether the store had yet to be fully stocked.

Lam, sixty-four, was the only employee there that day, standing in front of a simple desk, taking deliveries and ringing up purchases, making calls all the while. Lam had a brisk, business-like demeanour, holding conversations in a rapid-fire manner. A bunk bed behind the desk suggested that Lam was living at the bookshop, too.

Just a few days before Lam was set to reopen Causeway Bay Books in Taiwan, he was splashed with red paint by several attackers. In early photos of Lam from the shop’s opening, red paint can still be seen in Lam’s hair. Taiwan, only recently a post-authoritarian country after a decades-long struggle for democracy, has a history of organised-crime groups threatening political dissidents.

Lam was taking a risk with the bookshop as well, particularly if he was sleeping there. When I asked Lam whether he was afraid of reprisals from the Chinese government in Taiwan, he commented, ‘If Taiwan isn’t safe, where is there to run? I haven’t done anything illegal, so why should I be afraid? Only those who have broken the law should be afraid.’ He added, however, that ‘Taiwan’s democracy itself also has issues. There are people in Taiwan that advocate unification with China.’

Strewn around the bookshop were flowers from well-wishers. I recognised many of the signatures, including that of Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen.

Many of the customers in the store had the distinctive look of Taiwanese youth activists. I could tell from the topics they talked about as they perused the shelves, the shirts they wore or the ribbons that adorned their bags. I also heard a number of Cantonese speakers, who seemed to be Hongkongers.

Banners with slogans such as ‘I Am Taiwanese, I Support Taiwanese Independence’ and ‘Reclaim Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times’ hung in the bookshop. On the shelves I spotted works by philosophers such as Roland Barthes and Max Weber, and by writers such as Osamu Dazai, Carson McCullers and Milan Kundera. There was no sign of the tabloid-style books that the original shop was known for. But I noticed that many books still had Hong Kong prices listed inside. I bought a Chinese-language copy of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from Lam and was surprised that it was less than 200 New Taiwan dollars (US$6.70). Lam didn’t have a register but instead tabulated prices in a notebook. Sometimes he would be unable to break a larger bill and would give a customer extra change.

I asked Lam why he thought it was important to reopen Causeway Bay Books in Taiwan. ‘Many independent bookstores in Taiwan just target hipsters,’ said Lam, though he added that he had nothing against such shops. ‘If you really want to understand something,’ he continued, ‘you need to understand reality. You can only do this through reading. And running a bookstore is with the hope that more people can come to understand our ideals—that this can protect Taiwan.’ ☐

Brian Chee-Shing Hioe is the editor of ‘New Bloom’

Brian Chee-Shing HioeNew cause

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

Janelle Retka