By: Phone Min Thant, Arts & Culture Editor
From the protests against corruption happening in the Philippines and Indonesia, to armed struggles for democracy in Myanmar, Southeast Asians are exposed daily to the importance of political expression. In a region where authoritarian forces limit such expressions both physically and online, one way these political expressions have been made visible to the outside world is through books. Although there is a huge variety of such books, as someone who has lived through the region’s many turmoils, here are a few of my favourites.
No Bad News for the King by Emma Larkin
Cyclone Nargis is remembered among the Burmese as one of the country’s most destructive natural disasters. In No Bad News for the King, Emma Larkin, an American journalist operating in the Burmese underground, wrote about her experiences travelling around the country in its aftermath. Using first-hand testimonies of victims, eye witnesses from herself and other concerned citizens, and through collaboration with various aid organizations inside Myanmar following Nargis, Larkin documented the Burmese military government’s heavy-handed neglect towards the suffering of its own citizens. Written against the backdrop of massive censorship inside Myanmar, the book is both eye-opening and saddening, and a lot of painful parallels could be drawn from the book towards how the incumbent military government horribly handled the recent earthquakes in Myanmar.
Blood and Silk by Michael Vatikiotis
Blood and Silk is an underrated gem of a book that, in my opinion, successfully condenses the maze that is modern Southeast Asian politics. Through both scholarly research and his own experiences as a journalist during the region’s many tumultuous periods — from the Indonesian occupation of East Timor to military coups in Thailand — Vatikiotis explores how concepts of power and conflict have been a part of everyday life in Southeast Asia. His analysis is accessible and detailed, looking at historical and cultural processes of conceptualizing power in attempting to explain authoritarian resilience in most of Southeast Asia. He also dedicated a few chapters to explaining how conflict — both intra- and inter-state — works in the region in the 21st century, although I personally preferred his studies on power. I mainly liked how the book did not take a discrete country-by-country analysis but cross-cuts similar themes such as corruption and democracy across multiple states simultaneously.
In the Dragon’s Shadow by Sebastian Strangio
It is almost impossible to talk about Southeast Asia today without taking China into account. A work that inspired my undergraduate Honours thesis in International Studies, the book is the most up-to-date account of how Southeast Asian states interact with their increasingly powerful neighbour. Extremely readable, Strangio’s years of lived experience of correspondence in the region — and its myriad of interviews from village pastors to government bureaucrats — combine masterfully with research and analysis. Strangio shows that diplomacy is not always a simple binary of good vs. bad nor strong vs. weak by looking at the nuances of how smaller Southeast Asian countries manage their relationships with China, each side attempting to take advantage of the other despite objective power asymmetries.
Revolusi by David van Reybrouck
The Netherlands still struggle with coming to terms with its colonialism. If other works have not proven Dutch colonialism’s horrors enough, Revolusi nails them down. Not sparing the details of the violence that surrounded the Indonesian war for independence, van Reybrouck relied on testimonies of survivors of this tumultuous times — both Dutch and Indonesian — to paint a vivid portrait of the human sacrifices that went towards “the birth of the modern world” in Southeast Asia. While its central focus is on the struggle for Indonesian independence, a caveat is that it is inevitably a heavy book that not only explores colonialism and Japanese occupation, but also the history of the Indonesian people from prehistory.
The White Umbrella by Patricia Elliott
A book different from others in the list, The White Umbrella follows the life of the family of Myanmar’s first president through British colonial rule, Japanese invasion, and Myanmar’s path of prolonged military rule. The book dives deep into Myanmar’s conflict-ridden history from the perspectives of the ethnic minority Shan people, from the old palaces of its royalty to government offices of a newly independent nation, to insurgent camps all the way through to Vancouver. While most of the story is based on extended accounts by Sao Hearn Kham, the wife of the first president turned rebel leader and then refugee, The White Umbrella is both tragic and inspiring, offering an intimate outlook on a hopeful nation plunged into an authoritarian disaster bred by colonial legacy. I have spent many evenings following Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, rereading and reflecting on the pages of this book.
