WINTER 2017
Pyung-In Dance Company, Asia House June 2014
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08/11/2017 16:49
No. 34, Winter 2017
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No. 34, Winter 2017
Publisher Greater Talent Limited Managing Editor Phillip Kim Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Senior Editors Kavita A. Jindal, Anurima Roy, Michael Vatikiotis, Zheng Danyi Special Acknowledgement Ilyas Khan, co-founder of the Asia Literary Review Production Alan Sargent Front cover image ‘Holy Man’ © 2017 Sundeep Keramalu www.keramalu.com Back cover image ‘The Guard’ © 2017 Sundeep Keramalu www.keramalu.com The Asia Literary Review is published by Greater Talent Limited asialiteraryreview.com Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Submissions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Subscriptions and Advertising: Admin@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Charlesworth Press ISBN: 978-988-12155-8-1 (print) ISBN: 978-988-12155-9-8 (e-book) ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual contents © 2017 the contributors/Greater Talent Limited This compilation © 2017 Greater Talent Limited ‘A Dignified Existence’ and ‘Where Do You Want to Go?’ were provided to the ALR through the generous support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea ltikorea.org ‘The Court Martial’, ‘The Poisoned Future’, ‘A Flight Path for Spiritual Birds’ and ‘The Right Answer’ are extracted from Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds with kind permission of the British Council Extract from Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim ‘Other’ is published with kind permission of Zed Books Extract from Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia is published with kind permission of Weidenfeld & Nicolson Extract from A State of Freedom is published with kind permission of Penguin India
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Contents Editorial
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Fiction The Messenger
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Georgie Carroll
A Dignified Existence
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Kim Ae-ran translated by Jamie Chang
Where Would You Like to Go?
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Kim Ae-ran translated by Jamie Chang
The Court Martial
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Letyar Tun translated by the author
The Poisoned Future
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Myint Win Hlaing translated by Dr San Hla Kyaw and Letyar Tun
A Flight Path for Spiritual Birds
84
Ah Phyu Yaung (shwe) translated by Khin Hnit Thit Oo
The Right Answer
89
Ahpor Rahmonya translated by San Lin Tun
Miss Space
103
Prabda Yoon translated by Mui Poopoksakul
At Loose Ends
122
Vrinda Baliga
from A State of Freedom
158
Neel Mukherjee
The Angel Tiger
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Barrie Sherwood
The House by the Giant Teak
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Ritu Monjori
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Non-fiction Interview: Lucas Stewart
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Asia Literary Review
from Myanmar’s Enemy Within
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Francis Wade
from Blood and Silk
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Michael Vatikiotis
Full Everything
135
Sandip Roy
Labyrinths of Memory
147
Alec Ash
Paper Alien
190
Wen Yourou translated by Polly Barton
Poetry arnoldii | rafflesia
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Joshua Ip
It Doesn’t Get Better Than an Apricot in Damascus A Botanist Grows Home
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Ellen Zhang
A Conference of Crows The Lesson In Praise of Persimmons
118 119 121
Saleem Peeradina
Swimming Reindeer Flight Distance The Dark Hours
143 144 145
Shanta Acharya
from João
175
John Mateer
There They Blow Disenfranchised
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Yogesh Patel
Contributors
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Editorial Edit orial
Edit orial
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his issue of the Asia Literary Review explores lives on the fringes of Asian societies. A number of our authors write about ethnic minority groups who toil against discrimination (or worse) by a dominant majority. Myanmar features prominently: the British Council and curators Lucas Stewart and Alfred Birnbaum compile stories that illuminate the lives and frequent conflicts involving some of the 135 ethnic groups that comprise the jigsaw puzzle of this nation, while Francis Wade plunges directly into reporting on the ongoing violence involving the Rohingya. Away from Myanmar, we feature an essay by Wen Yourou, a minority (Taiwanese) resident struggling for acceptance in one of the world’s most homogeneous countries – Japan. But the lives that we depict on the fringes are not simply about ethnic or geographic delineations and the victimisation of certain populations. We at the ALR recognise that, in our post-modern world of atomised information and perspectives, many individuals find themselves on society’s fringes through personal choice or action. Avant-garde artists, revolutionaries and innovators constantly strive to challenge social norms and express their individuality by unshackling themselves from anodyne conventions. Some people dash off to foreign lands – in certain cases to seek cultural adventure, in others to start life afresh after a personal tragedy. Author Alec Ash reminisces about his life in Beijing’s labyrinth of hutong alleys, inhabited by an unlikely mix of young foreigners and old-timer locals who collectively cling to nostalgia. Kim Ae-ran’s Korean protagonist in ‘Where Would You Like to Go?’ finds isolated refuge in faraway Edinburgh following the sudden death of her husband. Neel Mukherjee narrates a story of alienation and tragedy that befalls an emigrant father who returns to India as a tourist
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Editorial
in his own country and realises too late that ‘making a life in the plush West had made him skinless’. By far the most disturbing fringes are those consumed by darkness and violence. In too many places around the world – the Middle East, the US, Indonesia and Europe, to name a few – marginalised and vulnerable young lives are seduced by radical ideologies. Al Qaeda’s foothold in Indonesia is one such troubling case, as Michael Vatikiotis describes. More often, however, the unrelenting tide of modern life creates shadowy eddies – some squarely in the mainstream – that swallow individuals who are lonely, abandoned or mentally ill. Georgie Carroll narrates the chilling story of a psychopath who conflates romantic notions and violent acts, and who can’t help but see desire as something ‘to be pickled in generous jars, sticky, full and seedy’. In a technological age where ubiquitous social media are ostensibly meant to connect people (but perhaps achieve the opposite), the proliferation of these isolated fringes is deeply disquieting. But fringes are phenomena that are seldom immutable. The most powerful of them defy the bounds of space or time. In fact, it is difficult to point to any significant human advancement throughout recorded history – whether in philosophy, science or art – that did not involve the shattering of an accepted reality or tradition by a revolutionary fringe idea. That idea then became the mainstream, encouraging other disruptive seedlings to germinate around the edges. From humble Palestine, Christianity came to supplant the mighty Romans’ polytheism and dominate Western civilisation. Unconventional writing voices such as James Joyce’s and Hemingway’s shook up and redefined how writers everywhere approach their craft. More recently, non-heterosexuality, which has long and broadly been considered a taboo, is gaining wider global understanding. In this issue of the ALR, Sandip Roy, an India-based writer who lived for twenty years in gay-friendly San Francisco, writes about this openness as he makes an unexpected friend in the conservative Indian Muslim community. Naturally, there has been a price to pay for such ‘progress’. Some long-enduring traditions and forms have tumbled out of the mainstream and been relegated to history’s dustbin or, ironically, to the domain of fringe enthusiasts. In Vrinda Baliga’s poignant story, for example, an Indian katputli puppet laments the slow death of its art form, as puppeteers face a
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shrinking audience and have little choice but to perform for peanuts in remote villages at the edge of the desert, exiled by Bollywood’s glitz and glamour. ‘Tell me, O Puppet, to whom should your strings be tied? Who will you dance for?’ It would be a shame to see such subtle and timeless crafts disappear forever. Through vehicles such as this magazine, the editors of the ALR urge constant dialogue between the fringe and the mainstream. We don’t view the fringe as the kind of disturbed world imagined by David Lynch or Park Chan-wook, populated with weirdos, misfits and malevolents. Rather, the fringe is a realm where genius, originality, and transcending beauty also abound. Its face is honestly human – by turns determined, complex or frail. Its ground is fertile with fresh, if sometimes prickly, ideas. By not engaging with it, the mainstream misses opportunities to avoid stagnation and revitalise itself. A close-minded mainstream also imperils itself by living in a space that might be resource-rich but is starved of diversity and self-awareness. To fail to examine Otherness, to ignore the perceived ‘enemy’ is to exist in a poorer, more fragile place, one destined to shrivel at its core. To paraphrase a wise axiom from a classic film, we serve ourselves well by ‘keeping our friends close and the fringe closer’. The ALR Editorial Staff
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Poetry
Joshua Ip
Joshua Ip
arnoldii | rafflesia arnoldii rafflesia over there, where my local servant in the bloody heat pants – do you not see do you not smell it is past obscene a decaying corpse his expression is disdainful – unfounded
adventures lie in the forest awaiting us intrepid explorers and our unearthly ways, namely over there how vast it is its breath taking ly beautiful, smells better after time. majesty will be – the mightily impressed, not of its size alone
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Joshua Ip
i feel have a head ache oh – i feel a fever
i find, we are directed for history, i have a heart to report this to the Royal Society: this summer thrill, the throbbing of discovery
Note: This twin cinema poem (which can be read either as two discrete columns vertically, or one unified column horizontally and then vertically) recalls the discovery of the Rafflesia flower by Sir Stamford Raffles and Joseph Arnold in Sumatra. Only the former’s name is remembered now.
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Poetry
Ellen Zhang
Ellen Zhang
It Doesn’t Get Better Than an Apricot in Damascus My father recounts memories of swollen blossoms hardening into surface, secret core, hills laced with gold, assuring amber aroma feeding on the sun. Now, my father sells apricots by the alleyway. Constant construction: words painting over images tracing over questions spilling over crevices of sidewalks walking over my father breaking English – he is the gentlest person I know. When he comes home his hands are stained. Sure, he cleans his fingernails every night but some things do not wash away with the evening rain. Sometimes I watch his neat shoulders,
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slanted wrists, manoeuvring new familiarity. Spine arching under crates, fruits, time; he jokes I eat as much as he sells, slipping me the ripest. Ah! – the sweet taste of summer gathering, tautness of fine skin break, burst. Never mind cavities deepening, I still dream of apricot kaymak. My father dreams in Technicolor, reminding me that we live in some while others are planted. He carries patient yearnings in this city of soft velvet, so easy to bruise. The meat of the fruit – chew, suck, swallow all the way to the heart. Father, it is for you. I wish that it were enough – trees do not grow far nor fast.
A Botanist Grows Home My mother’s lungs exhale her language, its syntax leaking into her dreams. Here, her home: tower block with time climbing, oak tree scars deepening into ash, lengthening branches in an infinite waltz with air, rousing kobresia and all the plants she could list because she did more than weave flowers into her hair. Candle light liquefying lines of text: she wanted to plant, so she did: flowers, trees, crops, and herself – uprooted to some new land.
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Interview: Lucas Stewart Interview: Lucas Interview: StewartLucas Stewart
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yanmar has been very much in the news throughout 2017. Conflicting and contradictory narratives vie for authority, and the result is a good deal of confusion about an already poorly understood country. Lucas Stewart has been working for years in Myanmar with the British Council and with Burmese writers and translators. Through examining the work both of established authors and of little-heard writers from the country’s ethnic regions, the aim was to reveal some of the country’s complexities of culture and identity. This resulted in an anthology of stories, many written in scripts that, until recently, were outlawed. The voices presented are authentic and universally human. We spoke to him about the project that produced Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds.
Hidden Words Hidden Worlds Contemporary Short Stories from Myanmar
R Edited by Lucas Stewart and Alfred Birnbaum
What was your motivation in spending five years travelling around Myanmar and interviewing people about its literary heritage and the state of the art? I’m a big fan of short fiction. When I moved to Myanmar in 2011 it was difficult to find local literary works available in English translation, other than Nu Nu Yi Inwa’s Smile as they Bow and a few books from the 1960s. Once I was in Yangon, a few more locallypublished translated collections surfaced, notably the excellent Selected Myanmar Short Stories, published by
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Seikku Cho Cho, and The Sixth Enemy and Other Stories by Ma Sandar (on the other hand non-fiction in translation is much more widely available). A post-censorship time made it easier to be in contact with Burmese writers and poets, and I came across a good friend of mine reading a Shan-language book. In Yangon, I would ask writers and publishers if there were any works available in the ethnic languages and they would often say that no such writers or writing existed. This is no fault of those in Yangon; censorship, travel restrictions and no Internet or mobile phones made it extremely difficult to know what was happening in other parts of the country. But, I couldn’t forget that Shan book with the tiger leaping off the cover. If this existed, surely others must? Are there any other context points that you’d like to make in undertaking this Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds project in Myanmar? The anthology is one of many interlaced components that make up the Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds programme. Since 2012, the programme has attempted to engage with ‘talents’ across the literature community, in short story and translation workshops, public speaking, editing and proofreading, publishing in the Myanmar edition of the anthology, and so on. Together they all form part of a broader notion of giving a voice in some meaningful way to all those involved in literature in Myanmar. As I look back on the last five years, one thing that does surprise me is how at no point did the programme unravel. Everything the British Council was doing was in some way unprecedented. There was no blueprint to refer to. If the programme were to be run now, it would certainly benefit from the increased mobile coverage and internet connectivity, conditions that didn’t really exist when we started. At one point, I was communicating with writers in Kachin state to the north via handwritten messages passed along by students returning home on the train to Myitkyina. What themes have the authors and poets been grappling with as the country attempts a transition to a more open society? It would be fair to claim there are two literary realms in Myanmar. The Burmese-language writers in Yangon and Mandalay (though formal writers’ groups exist in many other towns across the country), and the ethnic language writers. For Burmese language writers, the abolition of pre-publication
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censorship in August 2012 and the dismantling of the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division in January 2013 certainly allowed more freedom in terms of what could be written. But I am sure many writers are unsure of how far they can push these new freedoms and will select their words with caution. Self-censorship is just as unremitting as state censorship. I guess there is also a concern about what will happen should the transition prove unsuccessful. Would a future censorship board look back and start taking account of those who were critical? For ethnic writers, the challenges are far more prosaic. Not being allowed to read and write in their own languages has caused a generational deficit in reading and writing skills. During the editing process of the multi-lingual Myanmar edition of the anthology, which featured twelve languages and eleven scripts, it was difficult to find proofreaders who could not only read the text in their language but also correct any errors using a computer. Many of these ethnic languages have yet to be standardised. Unfortunately, very little fiction is produced, but consistent themes can be found around poverty, conflict, drug abuse, community ties and cultural rites of passage. Ethnic language literature also suffers from logistical barriers in terms of access to bookshops and printing facilities. The eBook revolution, at least the ePub format, has yet to make a mark in Myanmar in either realm. What role do you think a multi-ethnic anthology like this one can play in nation building or national reconciliation? What’s your hope? One quirk of fiction is how a personal connection can be made between the writer and us readers in which we feel the narrative speaks to elements of our own lives; and yet the same story can also touch a wider, collective audience. This is especially true of fiction that explores seemingly unrelated worlds from multiple perspectives and in different languages within a single nation, such as Myanmar. What begins as an enclosed sense of shared identity among those who only belong to that world is affected by the universal similarities between communities and peoples – those values, attitudes, experiences and beliefs that are common to us all. I hope that exposure to these affinities, through anthologies such as this, can contribute in a small way towards shaping a culture of understanding and respect. Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds is published by the British Council (2017).
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The Court Martial The Court Martial Letyar Tun
Letyar Tun translated from Burmese by the author
T
he soldiers sat knee to knee in the back of a patrol truck heading into the capital. ‘How did the rebels get to Yangon?’ asked one of the privates. ‘Who are they?’ muttered another, nervously picking at his newly starched uniform. The platoon leader looked at his men. ‘BCP. Burma Communist Party, that’s what we used to call them.’ A private next to Nyo Maung poked him in the ribs, interrupting his thoughts. ‘You really think these guys are BCP?’ Nyo Maung didn’t answer; neither did he listen to the chatter as the convoy continued downtown. The name Burma Communist Party took Nyo Maung back. All things pass, but not the past. Throughout his thirty years of service in the ‘Exalted Military’, Tatmadaw, he’d been indoctrinated against the BCP, more than enough to hate them. He’d heard all about their unbelievable atrocities and the bloody purges in the Bago Highlands – or what historians called the ‘Three Ds’ of denunciation, dismissal and disposal – where they had beaten condemned comrades to death with bamboo sticks. And now, so close to retirement, he had to face them once again. He’d enlisted at sixteen and had been sent to Basic Military Training School No. 1. He and his fellow cadets were given serial numbers, grouped into companies and issued uniforms and kit. One morning, the whole troop
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The Court Martial
was wakened by a loud whistle before the usual predawn reveille. The drill sergeant strode over to Nyo Maung and bellowed, ‘In front of your barracks I found a pile of shit. Which one of you bastards did it?’ Nyo Maung felt the veins in his temples throbbing and his chest pounded. He answered obediently, without thinking, ‘About 3 a.m., I heard footsteps outside. I looked out the window and saw you, sir—’ Before he could finish, he felt two hard slaps across his cheeks. He staggered back, knees trembling, though his mind remained clear and calm. The sergeant leaned in close and spat in Nyo Maung’s face. ‘Now listen up, missy. This isn’t your mum’s house; this is military training! Why would a trainer get up in the middle of the night and shit outside your barracks? So shut your fucking mouth, you lying son of a bitch, got me?’ Nyo Maung stood to attention and shouted as loudly as he could, ‘Yes, sir!’ The drill sergeant backed away and looked across the room. ‘Fall in and count off!’ The recruits called out their serial numbers one by one. ‘One, two, three, four. . . .’ and the group leader reported back to the sergeant, ‘Aungzaya Company standing ready for orders, sir.’ The drill sergeant carried on. ‘Every one of you crybabies, clean up the shit with your fingers and dump it in the latrine. Do I make myself clear?’ The recruits dared not disobey. Years later, Nyo Maung could still smell the shit on his fingers. He remembered the inauguration speech given by the head of the military training school to the new recruits. ‘If my sons enlisted, I’d tell them a soldier becomes a true man only through the discipline of following orders.’ Obedience became the mantra of Nyo Maung’s life in the army. Every day, his company was drilled to follow orders. Through strict discipline and corporal punishment, they soon learned that obedience was more important than survival or conscience or brotherhood. Order was to be valued above mercy or compassion or any other civilised human quality. Upon completing basic training, he was assigned to the 2nd Infantry Battalion and stationed in the remote Lwal Pan Kuk and Khan Lon regions of
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northern Shan State to fight alleged communists – ethnic brothers now become enemies. The brainwashed mind pushed to extremes develops mysterious faculties. Nyo Maung sometimes wondered whether he felt and remembered things more than the others. He still had nightmares about places in the hills, villages razed in ‘scorched earth’ manoeuvres. Fogged-in trenches on the Shan Plateau, the smell of blood, the air thick with dust and smoke. From day one, he was drilled in the ‘four cuts’ – deprive the enemy of food, then finance, then intelligence and finally recruits, by driving village elders, women and children from their homes – yet even in his nightmares, even when he was ill and weak, there was in him a seed of happiness. In his first years in Northern Shan State, Nyo Maung was stationed in all three zones – ‘white’ zones under government control and ‘brown’ zones of contested authority, but most of his time he fought in BCP-held ‘black’ zones where any man, woman or child was a potential enemy to be shown no mercy. In black zones, soldiers went ‘code red’ – cruel as sun and fire – though they needed to distance themselves from their targets in order to harden themselves to their inhuman purpose. A commanding officer gave orders to level a village in Lwel Pan Kuk. Nyo Maung’s 2nd Platoon blocked off the southern part of the village, while the 1st Platoon herded the villagers north like animals. Suddenly a woman with heavy breasts ran up from the south, and Captain Myint Zaw ordered Nyo Maung to shoot her down. ‘My daughter is still in the village!’ cried the woman. ‘Get down!’ shouted Nyo Maung. The captain repeated his order, ‘Fire!’ Outright disgust sent a burst of adrenalin rushing through Nyo Maung’s body. It happened so very quickly; he hardly realised he’d scrambled out of the foxhole, grabbed the woman and rolled onto the ground. His chest was soaked with her breast milk. Captain Myint Zaw ran after him, saying, ‘Nyo Maung, take her to the family barracks. After the operation, you can have her if you want.’ And so it was that Nyo Maung married Ma Nan Nwel and made a family.
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The Court Martial
The truck halted with a jolt at Sule Pagoda and shook Nyo Maung from his thoughts. In the fading evening light, he saw students the same age as his grown children out in front of Yangon City Hall waving red flags emblazoned with the fighting peacock, wearing red headbands, holding up framed photos of the Father of Independence, General Aung San. The whole squad shuffled into a line formation, linking arms shoulder to shoulder. They aimed their loaded guns at the students before them. Nyo Maung didn’t like it: the targets were too close. The enemy was unarmed. He was sure they weren’t members of the Burma Communist Party. Perhaps he could shoot above their heads in the dark and no one would know. He didn’t need any more nightmares so close to retirement. His prayers, however, went unheard. At a secret signal, the headlights of the army trucks were switched on, full-beam. The students’ faces went white, squinting into the glare, perhaps realising their fate. Staring at each other in silence, the students wondered when the soldiers would shoot. The soldiers waited for orders to do so. A matter of seconds, but to Nyo Maung it was a lifetime. A bird chirped, then ‘Fire!’ resounded – and the soldiers mowed down the students. After several months in Insein Prison, Nyo Maung was summoned from his cell and handed a sheaf of typed papers detailing his criminal breach of the military code – disobeying a superior’s command in the field. He barely glanced at the indictment before signing his name to the last page. He didn’t care what it said; he just wanted to know what they’d do to him now. As he walked into the courtroom, he told himself, ‘I don’t kill innocent people. If I’d pulled the trigger, their faces would have haunted me. I was taught to obey orders and eliminate targets, but I’ve changed. I’m no longer the young recruit I was. I’ve seen too many targets who weren’t enemies. I disobeyed orders and failed the Tatmadaw but, had I obeyed, I’d have failed myself. What is disobedience? Disobeying the rules to appease myself may be a crime, but failing to obey my conscience only gives me nightmares.’ The ceiling fans whirred a slow rhythm. Mould crept into the corners of the whitewashed walls; the wide windows looked out onto the barren prison yard. Nyo Maung was marched up to a low, wooden dock flanked by two long tables. His feet scraping across the broken floor tiles echoed angrily
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Letyar Tun
through the colonial hall. Before the Burma Socialist Programme Party emblem sat three court martial judges – two majors and a colonel – neat and robotic in their crisp green uniforms, with pomaded hair, wire-rimmed glasses and gold stars on their shoulders. Nyo Maung knew obedience had raised them in the ranks to where they could sentence any soldier to death.
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Poetry
Saleem Peeradina
Saleem Peeradina
A Conference of Crows It is Nature’s charcoal sketch of a bird. Although it sports no colourful plumage, has a raucous cry, dines on garbage and makes a picnic out of a roadside carcass, the bold intelligent, clever crow is worthy of great respect for having flourished despite human efforts to decimate its numbers. Like the House Sparrow the Common Crow is everywhere – along coastlines, on mountain tops, in deserts and even in the arctic regions. Possessing an uncanny talent to adapt to any habitat the reputation it has earned is decidedly mixed: glorified as a trickster in one place, the all-black Raven is feared elsewhere as a bird of ill-omen. If a crow caws insistently on your window sill or balcony, you can prepare for the arrival of a guest. For the mockers of superstitions it is just a spoiler of sleep. Like the parrot, the crow is an impressive mimic able to whine like a dog, squawk like a hen or cry like a baby. It shows its playful side
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Saleem Peeradina
sliding down a slippery surface or harassing a flock of gulls. It struts like a klutz fancying it can waltz. Like a monkey, it watches for an opportune moment to steal scraps from campers. Crows gather in the hundreds to hold noisy rallies. A congregation raises a parliamentary din, now recognised as a murder of crows. Yet, this pragmatic, even opportunistic bird has an almost sacred personal ethic: crows maintain loyal, lifelong pair bonds, enduring food scarcity and harsh weather to raise their young. They live in close domestic proximity to us, but wary of human intentions, they will not befriend us. Because their ties with us are ageless, they let us eavesdrop on their conference, so we may learn to heed the call of the crow.
The Lesson Take a sheet of paper the size of a drawing pad. The universe, as we perceive it, must be accommodated within the borders of this rectangle. Draw a circle the size of a marble to represent the earth, then hitch the moon to it. This travel companion will never leave the earth’s side. Now surround them with planets in their proper elliptical positions. Reserve a central place for the sun. Cram the entire backdrop with stars, thumbing in a smudge to mark the Milky Way. Now set the whole facsimile in motion, in perpetual Rotations and revolutions.
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Full Everything Full Everything Sandip Roy
Sandip Roy
M
y mobile phone rang. A man said, in Hindi, ‘Sir, this is your driver. From Lucknow.’ ‘Lucknow?’ I said. ‘But I am in Sultanpur.’ Lucknow was the state capital, some three and half hours away. I was having breakfast at my ‘luxury’ hotel. It had a fanciful name like GreenView or GardenView, though the only green garden to be viewed was a ribbonlike strip of lawn in front of the hotel that looked more like a patch of bedraggled AstroTurf. I was assured that I’d been given one of the best rooms. My ‘royal suite’ came with two slightly ratty armchairs, a couple of wobbly plastic chairs and some nondescript artwork on the walls. Their placement made me suspect they were hiding damp patches. There was a dining room that seemed to open only for breakfast, but breakfast itself came with no choices. That day was ‘butter toast and omelette’ day. I had assumed I would get some buttered bread but I did not realise in these parts butter toast was an entity in itself – a piece of thick, slightly charred toast on which someone ladled an artery-clogging splash of melted butter from a big saucepan. All this to say that by the time I got that call I was not in the best of spirits. I was reporting on India’s 2014 general election, the one that would bring a tough-talking man named Narendra Modi to power. Sultanpur was a dingy, noisy town with narrow streets, filled with honking motorcycles and stray cows and donkeys eating garbage. Outside the congested lanes of the town, the country roads were potholed and meandered through villages
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Full Everything
with names like Teergaon and Isouli. Men here wore white turbans and women arranged their saris to veil their faces and buffalos dozed placidly in village ponds. This was what journalists always called the ‘heartland of India’. It was my first time in the heart of the heartland. Born and raised in metropolitan Kolkata, I already felt like a fish out of water here. But this was also where the election promised the greatest fireworks. This was the region from which India’s old political royalty had stood for election for generations. Rahul Gandhi, great-grandson of India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was the candidate in neighbouring Amethi. Running against him was a television star given to fiery rhetoric. Rahul’s cousin Varun, another great grandson of Nehru was the candidate of the opposition party in Sultanpur. Their fathers had also once stood in these parts. Hospitals and petroleum institutes had popped up bearing the names of generations of Gandhis but little else for the people who actually lived here. A little dot on the map, this region now had seven national highways thanks to its VVIP members of parliament. But it had no movie multiplex, no malls, no air-conditioned coffee shops, all part of the checklist of aspirational India. This was where that India collided with an older country where little seemed to change. Now, as it got ready for another election, the town was filled with jeeps blaring propaganda. Candidates drove down bone-shaking rutted roads, past close-cropped brown fields and sudden green thickets of banana trees, sometimes startling a herd of nilgai antelope into flight. Agitated stray dogs chased the passing cars, barking excitedly, all the way to meetings where a local minor VIP who had been waiting for hours put a fat marigold garland around the candidate’s neck. The few passable hotels in town were all full. My hotel’s entrance was jammed with cars mostly with licence plates from Delhi and Lucknow. Everyone wanted a local driver but the truly local ones were already booked. And that’s how I landed up with Salim from Lucknow. Salim – that’s not his real name – was at least fifteen years younger than me. But it was quite clear very early on who was the top dog in our relationship. He needed to go shopping for underwear, he said as soon as I got in the car. ‘I did not realise this was for a week. I didn’t pack enough.’ ‘What do you like to do?’ he asked me on our first day together.
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‘Sometimes I like to have a beer after a day’s work,’ I replied. This was my first time covering a big Indian election. I rather fancied myself an intrepid reporter out in the field and thought my driver, a local hand, would be my Man Friday. We could bond across class divides over cold beer and warm kebabs at the end of a hard day in the heat and dust of the campaign trail. At least that’s what I thought a correspondent’s life was supposed to be like. Salim responded flatly, ‘I am an observant Muslim, sir. I don’t drink. I also don’t like to drive anyone home in my car who has been drinking.’ My first bonding idea just went for a toss. I was taken aback. Salim was a clean-shaven man in jeans and a white T-shirt, his hair brushed back, his teeth stained with betel nut juice, hardly the stereotype of an observant Muslim. ‘What do you like to eat?’ he asked. ‘Anything,’ I said expansively, eager to move on from my beer faux pas. ‘I like kebabs,’ I said. ‘I hear Lucknow is famous for its tundey kebabs. What’s good in this area?’ I figured that as an observant Muslim he must know his kebabs and that might be a way to break the ice. If there was to be no beer at least let there be biryani. ‘I can’t eat anywhere that is not halal,’ he replied. Salim, it turned out, didn’t even want to touch vegetables and dal in a restaurant (though in these parts we called restaurants ‘hotels’) if the kitchen also cooked non-halal meat. He told me he had a good Hindu friend who cooked wonderful biryani. But Salim would only eat it if he himself had bought the meat. On our first day together we drove for miles along dusty highways dodging trucks and cows looking for a pure vegetarian eatery that passed muster. Starving and thirsty, I pointed at one that looked reasonably clean and served a simple menu of chicken curry and rice and dal. ‘You can eat there,’ he sniffed. ‘I’ll just wait in the car.’ We kept going. Salim also had an MBA degree, he informed me. But he liked driving because he liked to get away. He didn’t tell me at that time from what. When I told him I had lived in America for many years, he shook his head disapprovingly. ‘They don’t like Muslims in America. America is antiMuslim,’ he said sharply. This was still Barack Obama’s America but Salim said he had read enough on the Internet.
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The campaign trail often throws up surprises but I had not reckoned on being saddled in a small town in the Indian heartland with a deeply conservative yet vociferously outspoken Muslim man who had an opinion about everything. But drivers were in high demand, much more than journalists were, and I had little say in the matter. Though I considered myself as having had a liberal upbringing, my friends had largely been homogeneously upper-middle-class Hindus like me. India has some 170 million Muslims, second only in numbers to Indonesia. But my exposure to Muslims had been limited to their biryanis and kebabs. In the US, I’d spent two decades in San Francisco which, for all its diversity, was its own liberal bubble as well. I’d never spent a day, let alone a week, in such close quarters with a Muslim man, especially one from such a traditional family. My Muslim friends were like me, nominally religious, many of them gay. They avoided bacon but that’s as far as their religious life went. We bonded over potluck dinners and Bollywood films, often forgetting that we came from different religions. Religion played little role in our lives. I felt singularly ill-equipped to deal with Salim. If I had been a more observant Hindu, there might have oddly been more common ground of sorts. Instead, I just felt lost, my old-school secularism amorphous and fuzzy against the hard-edged contours of his faith. The next few days with Salim were a tightrope walk. He shared fevered conspiracy theories about villainous Hindu plots and Muslim persecution in India. I nodded, occasionally demurred politely when it got too wildly fantastical but I did so nervously because he was the one at the wheel. The rallies we went to were often filled with his mirror images – Hindu patriots waving saffron flags who had come in their tractors and Bolero cars, bristling with paranoia about a ticking Muslim population bomb waiting to overwhelm India. Narendra Modi landed in a helicopter at a rally, holding up traffic for miles on the highway. A local politician who was his warm-up act read out a poem about how he would tame the Chinese dragon and teach Muslim Pakistan a lesson. A wrestler, his body painted in Modi’s party colours told me he liked Modi because he would be a strong man who would keep uppity minorities in their place. India, he said, was the Hindus’ homeland. Another man told me he liked Mr Modi because he would protect India against enemies from neighbouring countries who cut off our
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soldiers’ heads. Later as Rahul Gandhi’s motorcade passed through the streets of Amethi, a Muslim man watching asked me if it was true the media had all sold out and become anti-Muslim en masse. The religious politics of the Indian heartland are deeply entrenched, and Salim was a good example of that entrenchment. He would no more budge from his belief than he would have dinner at a random non-halal eatery. Every time I interviewed rally-goers and Salim ambled over to join the conversation, I could feel myself tensing. But over our week together I finally started to relax around him. I stopped riding in the back seat and started riding in front with him. I even teased him about his music choices. He loved a Bollywood hit song about a four-bottle vodka habit. Chaar botal vodka Kaam mera rozka Na mujhko koi roke Na kisine roka. . . . I wanna hangover tonight I wanna hangover tonight (Four bottles vodka That’s my daily habit No can stop me And no one ever has.) This was his song to start the day. ‘You don’t drink alcohol and you like this song first thing in the morning?’ I teased him. He grinned, his teeth stained red with paan masala. That was his only vice – sachet after sachet of paan masala that filled the car with its sickly perfume. He too relaxed around me. ‘I want to be like you,’ he said. ‘Going places, writing things. That’s the life.’ ‘But you go places all the time, more than I do,’ I replied. He laughed. ‘It’s not the same,’ he said.
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He gave me career advice. He said I needed to get into television. That’s where the action was. He offered post mortems of my interviews. He argued with eatery owners when he felt they overcharged us for a plate of dal and some hot tandoori bread. He bought me a cup of tea when I was short of change. He sometimes gossiped with other drivers and told me who I needed to interview. Sometimes he even found me candidates to interview. ‘This man works for a non-governmental organisation doing voting registration,’ he told me. ‘I don’t think I need to interview him,’ I replied. ‘But you must,’ he said, looking aggrieved. ‘I told his driver you would. Now I will lose face.’ When I looked unconvinced, he said, ‘Just do it. You don’t have to use it.’ One night as we were coming back from yet another rally and yet another roadside dinner of dal, vegetables and roti, he said he was feeling bad about my dietary restrictions caused by his religious beliefs. ‘Next time you come to these parts, you must come to my city, Lucknow,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a friend drive you,’ he promised. ‘He will take you to bars where you can drink to your heart’s content. And we will go have the best tundey kebabs, so soft they will just melt in your mouth.’ I assured him I was doing just fine without going to a bar. But I have to admit as our last day together dawned I was relishing the thought that I could have a guilt-free cold beer that night. Salim seemed a little pensive as he got behind the wheel. He didn’t even put on his four-bottle-vodka song. ‘I wish I could keep going with you,’ he said, as we started driving towards my next stop, the city of Varanasi, five hours away. He’d insisted he’d drop me off there though I had offered to take a bus. ‘Sir,’ he said as we sped down the highway dodging groaning trucks with their ‘Horn Please’ signs. ‘Do you have someone special in your life, a girlfriend?’ ‘No,’ I said shortly. He looked at me quizzically. I was too middle-aged to be single in the Indian scheme of things. Just to be polite, I asked him if he did, and the floodgates burst open. With one hand on the steering wheel he told me a star-crossed ripped-fromBollywood love story. She was from a richer Muslim family but they had
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fallen in love in Koran class. They had done it all, he said much to my shock, from ‘oral’ to ‘full everything’. But when her family started looking for a husband he didn’t know what to do. Her brothers, he said matter-of-factly, had ‘done a few murders’. His own brothers weren’t too shabby either. One had taken his examinations in jail, where he was being held on a murder charge. Salim explained that he didn’t want a Montague-Capulet bloodbath. He said he’d given her a silver anklet and watched her walk out of his life. Then he quit his job, chucked away his MBA career and became a driver to get away from it all. By the time he had finished his story his eyes were brimming with tears. A little alarmed because we were racing down the highway, I patted him awkwardly as he sniffled. He shook his head. ‘I am sure she will come back one day. That day, whether I am married or not, even if she comes with her children, that day, I promise you, I won’t let her go.’ We drove in silence for a while as I fiddled with my phone. But then I felt I had to match up to the rawness of his confession. ‘Salim,’ I said, staring straight out at the road unspooling in front of us. ‘I was not quite honest with you. I don’t have a girlfriend, it’s true. I have a boyfriend.’ ‘A boyfriend? A man?’ He stared at me in silence. I wondered nervously how far we were from Varanasi in case he decided I needed to get out of his car right then and there with my bags. Then he shook his head and said, ‘I would never have guessed, sir. Chalo, at least you have someone in your life. That’s what matters.’ He said little more for the rest of the drive. Occasionally he’d look at me and just smile reflectively. As we drove into Varanasi, where we would part ways, he remarked, ‘You don’t hurt anybody by loving someone, no? Why don’t they just let us alone?’ We parted on the banks of the river Ganga where buffalos dozed contentedly in the muddy waters overlooked by centuries-old Hindu temples. My hotel was on the water’s edge. They were sending a boat to fetch me because cars could not come up to the hotel entrance through the snaking narrow streets of the old town. Salim insisted on waiting with me until the boat arrived. As we walked around the water’s edge, he said, ‘If I come to Calcutta, will you introduce me to your friend?’
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‘Of course I will,’ I assured him. When the boat arrived, he quickly assumed a proprietary air and told the hotel porter, ‘Make sure you take very good care of this man. He is my friend.’ He did not even glance at the money I paid him. He just slipped it into his wallet. When I put out my hand to bid him goodbye, he suddenly clasped me to his chest and said, ‘You won’t forget me, will you? Save my number.’ Later that night, sitting with a much-anticipated bottle of cold beer in front of me, I called him to find out if he had reached home safely. ‘I am at a dhaba eating alone,’ he said wistfully. ‘I miss our time together, sir.’ And I realised to my utter astonishment I missed him too. I looked at his number on the phone. To my embarrassment, I had saved it as ‘Driver’, my usual code for short-term drivers for hire. I changed it to his name and saved it. Then I drank my beer.
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Poetry
Shanta Acharya
Shanta Acharya
Swimming Reindeer After Swimming Reindeer: Sculpture carved from mammoth tusk, found in Montastruc, France and dated 11,000 BC. British Museum, London.
Slim, compact, slightly curved, carved from the tapering end of a mammoth’s tusk – a female reindeer decorated with incised lines, the male with an imposing set of antlers folded along the length of his back. Chins up, antlers tipped back, they swim legs stretched, bodies streamlined, bones breathing unable to sleep for being alive – their pristine presence a shaft of light. Not created for any religious ceremony, not a love charm, this sculpture with no known functional purpose conjures an image of a herd of reindeer, roaming across colourless, treeless plains in an Ice Age where time does not stand still,
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sprints like a hunter intent on surviving on an unforgiving planet. The skill of the toolmaker turned artist – was it one or many? – evokes a vision of grace, of faces rapt in wonder, fingers chiselling, bone folded on bone, in prayer, a desire to be at home in the universe – a reaching out when nature rewired the brain and the world lit up like aurora borealis.
Flight Distance With acknowledgment to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.
Flamingos in the wild won’t mind our presence three hundred yards off. Cross that boundary and they sense danger. Get closer, and you trigger a flight reaction from which they will not cease until that safe distance is re-established or their lungs and hearts fail. Giraffes will allow you to come within thirty yards of them if you are in a vehicle, but will retreat rapidly if you come within a hundred and fifty yards on foot.
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John Mateer
John Mateer
from João On another day in Macau the poet was nearing A-Ma Temple. Actually, he was stopped outside a Macanese restaurant, was contemplating the menu, wondering if he had ample time for lunch. One of the approaching passers-by can’t be Weinberger of Manhattan. . . ? There’d been a poetry festival in Hong Kong. Indeed, beside him: Gary Snyder, Bei Dao! They were going for lunch. Would João like to join them? He can’t remember the food, but João has, verbatim, some of the poets’ conversation. Unfortunately, clearest when Snyder asked if he was Australian and he answered, ‘Do you want my passport?’ mistakenly and terribly brusque. João regretted that. Yet Snyder afterwards, outside the restaurant, in the talk of farewell, smiling: ‘Real great to meet you here, on the Macau sidewalk!’
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Yogesh Patel
Yogesh P atel
There They Blow there they blow words as fountains a chalk mountain blown to pieces night’s blackboard stunned, speechless like my language in Uganda in February 1972 there they go click-cluck-cluck tribal drumbeats mountain to mountain a language thread as an undercurrent in the liquid air The King of Scotland’s joke such cultural claims!
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who are you, chameleon? why are you a whale? there they are the wild ones the guitar plucks dancing on the water currents the liquid strings whose tunes are they playing? they breached once to say namaste to welcome me home there they blow now indifferent to an alien
Disenfranchised a near miss not one of Midnight’s Children an African, an Indian and the British citizen the all-in-one child orphaned by the Nile forsaken by the Thames abandoned by the Ganges sings in a school assembly asserts he is loved by history he salutes the flag muttering, ‘And who are you exactly?’ Blyth’s reed warbler and olive-backed pipit
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Contributors Contribut ors Contribut ors
SHANTA ACHARYA, born and educated in Cuttack, India, won a scholarship to Oxford, where she was awarded a doctoral degree in English. She was a visiting scholar at Harvard University before joining an American investment bank in London. Author of eleven books, her latest is Imagine: New and Selected Poems. Founder of Poetry in the House, Shanta hosted a series of monthly readings at Lauderdale House, London, from 1996–2015. www.shantaacharya.com.
ALEC ASH is a writer and editor in Beijing, author of Wish Lanterns (Picador, 2016), literary nonfiction about the lives of six young Chinese. His articles have appeared in The Economist, Dissent, The Sunday Times and elsewhere. He is a contributing author to Chinese Characters (UC Press, 2012) and co-editor of the anthology of China writing While We’re Here (Earnshaw Books, 2015). He is Managing Editor of the China Channel at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Twitter: @alecash.
VRINDA BALIGA is the author of the short-story collection Name, Place, Animal, Thing (2017). Her work has appeared in the Himal Southasian, New Asian Writing, Commonwealth Writers’ adda, Muse India, Reading Hour, Out of Print, India Currents and Temenos, among others. She is the winner of several prizes, including the 2017 Katha Fiction Contest. She is a 2014 Fellow of the Sangam House International Writers’ Residency. Vrinda lives in Hyderabad, India, with her husband and two children.
POLLY BARTON, translator of Wen Yourou, is a translator of Japanese literature and nonfiction from London. She holds an MA in the Theory and Practice of Translation from SOAS, and was awarded first prize in the inaugural JLPP Translation Competition for her translations of Natsuki Ikezawa and Kobo Abe. Recent translations include Naocola Yamazaki and Misumi Kubo for the Keshiki chapbook series from Strangers Press. Her translation of Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden was released by Pushkin Press in 2017. pollybarton.net.
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GEORGIE CARROLL is a PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London. Her research investigates eco-aesthetics in Indian poetry. She is author of Mouse (Animal) (Reaktion Books 2015). Georgie writes short stories, as well as nonfiction for magazines in the UK and South Asia. She is a lover of Indian cinemas.
JAMIE CHANG, translator of Kim Ae-ran, is a literary translator based in Seoul, who teaches at Ewha Womans University Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation, and the Translation Academy at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Her works include The Great Soul of Siberia by Park Sooyong and The Summer by Choi Eunyoung.
MYINT WIN HLAING is an ethnic Rakhine writer and teacher born in Pan Ni La village, Rakhine State. He is a leading member of an influential Rakhine literature circle organising talks and live literature events for his remote community. He has published short stories both in Burmese in Shwe Amyutae and Yote Shin Tay Kabyar magazines and in the Rakhine language in Rakhine Journal. He writes under the pen-name Green Maung.
JOSHUA IP is a poet, editor, and literary organiser. He has published four poetry collections and edited seven anthologies. He has won the Singapore Literature Prize, Golden Point Award, and received the Young Artist Award from the National Arts Council (Singapore) in 2017. He founded Sing Lit Station, an over-active literary charity that runs community initiatives including SingPoWriMo, Manuscript Bootcamp, poetry.sg and several workshop groups. joshuaip.com.
KIM AE-RAN’s literary debut, ‘No Knocking in This House’, a short story published in 2003, won the Daesan Literary Award. Her 2011 novel The Youngest Parents with the Oldest Child was made into a film by E J-yong as My Brilliant Life. Kim’s other publications include two short-story collections, titled Vapor Trail and It is Summer Outside. Her novels have been published in France, Germany, Russia and China.
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Contributors
JOHN MATEER is a poet, curator and writer. Among his books are the prose Semar’s Cave: and Indonesian Journal, and The Quiet Slave: A History in Eight Episodes, a fictional retelling of the arrival of the Malays on the Cocos-Keeling Islands. He has published many books of poems and has been translated into Japanese, Indonesian, Malay and a number of European languages. His latest book, Unbelievers, or ‘The Moor’, was published simultaneously in the UK and Australia, and has appeared in Portuguese and German editions.
RITU MONJORI was born and brought up in Assam, India, and now lives in Pune with her husband and five-year-old son. ‘Greetings from a Violent Homeland’, published in Commonwealth Writers’ adda, was her first work of published fiction.
NEEL MUKHERJEE is the author of two novels, A Life Apart (2010), which won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for best novel, and The Lives of Others (2014), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Best Novel Award, and won the Encore Prize for best second novel. He lives in London.
KHIN HNIT THIT OO, translator of Ah Phyu Yaung (shwe), is a translator, tour guide and social entrepreneur. She is a graduate of the 2015 Link the Wor(l)d’s literary translation programme. She was recently invited to France to collaborate on a two-month long memoir translation project. She is currently writing a bilingual novel about Burmese society.
YOGESH PATEL runs Skylark Publications UK and the Word Masala project to promote writers and poets of the South Asian diaspora. He also edits eSkylark. He has been awarded the Freedom of the City of London and, as a trilingual poet, has four LP records, two films, radio programmes, a children’s book, fiction and non-fiction books, including poetry collections, to his credit. Widely published, he has received many awards. www.patelyogesh.co.uk.
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SALEEM PEERADINA is the author of five books of poetry, of which Final Cut (Valley Press, 2016) is the most recent. He has also published a prose memoir, The Ocean in My Yard (Penguin, 2005), and a long-running anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry in English (Macmillan, 1972). His latest book is Heart’s Beast: New and Selected Poetry (Copper Coin Publishing, 2017). He is Professor Emeritus of English at Siena Heights University, MI, USA.
MUI POOPOKSAKUL, translator of Prabda Yoon, is a lawyer-turned-translator. She grew up in Bangkok and Boston, and practised law in New York City before returning to the literary field. She recently graduated with an MA in cultural translation at the American University of Paris and previously studied literature as an undergraduate at Harvard College. The Sad Part Was (Tilted Axis Press, 2017) is her first translation.
AHPOR RAHMONYA is an ethnic Mon writer and rubber trader from Thoung Pha Lu village in Mon State. His articles and poems, published in underground Mon language journals, explore the dynamics between national politics and the Mon people, often depicting Western and Asian intellectuals and thinkers. He currently lives in a Mon-speaking village in Karen State where he stood in the 2015 general election for the Mon National Party. Ahpor Rahmonya is a pen-name.
SANDIP ROY’s award-winning debut novel is Don’t Let Him Know. His work has appeared in different publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economic Times, Salon.com, The Independent, Mint, the Indian Express, Firstpost and Huffington Post. His radio commentaries air on National Public Radio and the BBC World Service. He was a long-time editor of Trikone, the world’s oldest LGBT magazine for South Asians. He currently lives in Kolkata.
BARRIE SHERWOOD is assistant professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His publications include The Pillow Book of Lady Kasa (DC Books, Montreal), and Escape from Amsterdam (Granta, London; St Martin’s Press, New York). He has published short fiction and non-fiction in various magazines.
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Contributors
LETYAR TUN is a writer, editor, photojournalist and former political prisoner. He spent eighteen years in prison (fourteen on death row) for political activities. Since his release in 2012, his photography has been exhibited in Myanmar and he has spoken on freedom of expression at events across Southeast Asia. He is a graduate of the 2015 Link the Wor(l)d’s literary translation programme and recently gained a scholarship to study at the inaugural School for Interpretation and Translation in Yangon. He currently works for Fojor Media Institute in Yangon.
SAN LIN TUN, translator of Ahpor Rahmonya, was born in Yangon from Mon-Burmese parents. A graduate of the 2015 Link the Wor(l)d’s literary translation programme, his fiction has appeared in numerous local and international publications including the New Asian Writing Anthology. He is the author of ten fiction and non-fiction books in English, including his latest collection of short stories, The Enigma of Big Bunny’s Arrival, published in October 2017.
MICHAEL VATIKIOTIS is a writer, journalist and private diplomat who has been working in Southeast Asia since 1987. He was formerly editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He has written two novels set in Indonesia and his new book, Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in June 2017.
FRANCIS WADE is a journalist specialising in Myanmar and Southeast Asia. He began reporting on Myanmar in 2009 with the exiled Democratic Voice of Burma news organisation, based in Northern Thailand, before going on to cover in-depth the transition from military rule and the violence that accompanied it. He has reported from across South and Southeast Asia for the Guardian, Time, Foreign Policy Magazine and others. He is now based in London.
AH PHYU YAUNG (SHWE) is the author of two short-story collections, Sounds of Knocking (on the door) (2013) and The Drowning of a Fairy Horse in Dirty Salty Waters (2014). She has published forty-four stories and essays in a wide range of journals including Mahaythi, Kalyar, Mahaw Thadar, Pann Alinka, Yanant Thit, Pay Phoo Hlwar and Rati. In 2006, she was a recipient of the People’s Choice Award and winner of the Shwe Amyutae Award for Short Stories in 2016.
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PRABDA YOON is the author of The Sad Part Was (Tilted Axis, 2017). The author of multiple story collections, novels and screenplays, Prabda Yoon is also a translator (of classics by Salinger and Nabokov), independent publisher (of books both originally written in and translated into Thai), graphic designer, and filmmaker.
WEN YOUROU was born in 1980 in Taipei, Taiwan. At the age of three, she moved to Tokyo with her family, graduating in 2006 from Hosei University. In 2009, her story ‘Kokyokorai-uta’ (‘Send-off Song’) received an honourable mention in the Subaru Newcomers’ Award. Her novel, Mannaka no kodomotachi (The Children in the Middle) (Shueisha, 2017), was nominated for the 157th Akutagawa Prize.
ELLEN ZHANG is a sophomore at Harvard University. As a Chinese-born American, she treasures discovering more about her Asian heritage. She works as an editor and contributor for The Harvard Crimson and Tuesday Magazine in addition to being the editor in chief of Prescriptions. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Albion Review, The Metaworker, Cuckoo Quarterly, Shades of the Same Skin, and The Quotable, among others.
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Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing The Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing is the first and currently the only one of its kind in China for teaching and promoting creative writing in English as a second/foreign language. It combines the teaching of English with creative writing techniques to enable students to write about China from an insider’s perspective. Under the Sun Yat-sen University Creative Writing Education Program, the Center organizes readings by international writers and a book club to promote the reading and writing of world literature. From October 2015, it will start the Sun Yat-sen University International Writers’ Residency, which moves from the campuses of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Zhuhai to Jiangmen in Guangdong Province and Yangshuo in Guangxi Autonomous Region, and gives between ten and fifteen writers the time and space to write as well as providing them with the opportunity to get to know Chinese people and culture. Contact: daifan@mail.sysu.edu.cn
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For more than 40 years, Index on Censorship magazine has published the world’s leading writers, journalists and thinkers, as well as the most censored voices. Past and present contributors include Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Gabriel García Márquez, Ariel Dorfman, Elif Shafak and Margaret Atwood. Each quarterly issue contains in-depth global analysis and reporting, plus fiction, poetry and cartoons. Every subscription helps fund Index’s work to protect and promote free expression worldwide.
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The Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea) runs a wide range of programs to help Korean literature reach more readers across the globe. We provide grants to translators and publishers, support international literary exchanges and provide training programs for literary translators. Our doors are wide open to everyone interested in Korean literature. We welcome participation and suggestions from all quarters. Translation & Publication Grants Translators and overseas publishers can apply for the Translation Grants and Publication Grants online. Applications may be submitted at any time and will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
International Events LTI Korea hosts various international events, including LTI Korea Forums, Overseas Residency Programs, International Workshop for the Translation and Publication of Korean Literature, the Seoul International Writers’ Festival, and more.
Translation Academy The Translation Academy is a specialized translation education facility that focuses on nurturing upcoming generations of translators with a passion for Korean literature and culture.
More informaƟon available at lƟkorea.org (English), lƟkorea.or.kr (Korean) Yeongdong-daero 112-gil 32(Samseong-dong), Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea (06083) Tel: +82-2-6919-7714 / Fax: +82-2-3448-4247
This issue focuses on lives at the fringes of Asian societies. With the region’s extraordinary ethnic diversity and modernisation’s fraying of rigid, long-held traditions, there are fringes everywhere. Conflict seems inevitable. Ethnic minorities are discriminated against, or worse. Rapid social change has led to dislocation and alienation. And yet, without the creativity and innovation that blossom at society’s edges, the mainstream would be a dull, stagnant place.
Asia Literary Review | Essential Reading Featuring: Writing from Myanmar and its complex ethnic identities Kim Ae-ran’s young professionals’ struggle for meaning in their lives A tragic homecoming to India for an emigrant father – Neel Mukherjee Michael Vatikiotis investigating Al Qaeda’s appeal in Indonesia A thin line between desire and violence – Georgie Carroll Sandip Roy’s unlikely friendship with a conservative Muslim Indian Taiwan-born Wen Yourou on being not-quite Japanese in Japan ‘For decades, Asia’s modern literature, even to us in Asia, was a dark continent. If all this is now changed or changing, ALR has had a lot to do with it.’ – Arvind Krishna Mehrotra asialiteraryreview.com