Non-pandemic reads from Asean

Laotian cinema, Timorese music and Saudi soft power

Bali, I miss you

Hello friends!

Let’s take a break from the doom and gloom of the pandemic. This week’s collection of long reads and features is shorter than usual which just goes to show how hard at work the region’s media is at covering COVID-19. Still, we all need some respite and I hope you find a couple of links that will give you something else to read for a few minutes.

This read is free for anyone and everyone, so please share!

I also recently read this piece from The Atlantic about the BP oil spill and resulting damages case for fishermen in the area. I finally decided against including it properly, but thought I’d note it regardless. It’s about the messy mass-injury torts case but features the Vietnamese diaspora prominently. It’s got some phenomenal lines too, so if you’re interested in reading 30 minutes of legal long from I highly recommend it. 

And catch up with the status of COVID-19 in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines with me and the Herald Sun here. 

Thanks everyone and stay safe out there,Erin Cook

I got my notification from Book Depository that my copy of The Call is on its way! But, to tide me over, here’s an adapted piece from the author, Krithika Varagur. We’ll be getting much deeper into the book soon, but for now, keep up with Krithika here for all her events discussing Saudi soft power in the region and beyond. 

As the largest Muslim-majority nation and a developing, postcolonial state, Indonesia has been a prime recipient of the full spectrum of Saudi proselytisation – known as dawa, the call to Islam. And while investments peaked in absolute terms at least a decade ago, as they did in most of the Muslim world, their effects continue to reverberate. Saudi investment in Indonesia has at turns fuelled jihadists, helped consolidate the country’s leading Islamist political party and produced dozens of influential ideologues. The Saudi soft-power apparatus in Indonesia is unrivalled, including Lipia, a large embassy and a powerful, standalone “religious attache”. Saudi charity has also paid for thousands of poor students to go to school and university, and helped rebuild devastated regions such as Aceh after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.

This was a tough one for me. I’m bunkering down at my parents’ house, but my childhood bedroom got turned into a ‘fill it with shit no one uses anymore’ room the second I moved out so I’m in my sister’s bright pink room instead. And then I look at these snaps of new homes designed by Vietnam’s best architects and think ‘wow, did Canberra even try in the late-60s?’ The below description is from my fave on the list.

In Vietnam, bricks have been used for at least a millennium. Doan Thanh Ha, who recently won the Turgut Cansever International Award, constructed the Brick Cave in the suburbs of Hanoi with an additional exterior wall to form a narrow atrium around the house. This perforated exterior casing with large windows invites natural light into the family home while keeping it cool during Hanoi’s scorching summers. The rooftop features a vegetable garden.

This is Timor-Leste’s soundtrack to the revolution. Berliku, a FALINTIL veteran, is now the lead singer of Maubere Timor, a band of veterans who play music composed back in the early days of the fight for independence. 

Named after a bird that sings every morning, Berliku was given the nickname by the resistance leader because he liked to sing and compose songs during lulls in fighting.

Berliku was encouraged to start writing music and poems to be distributed among the population, as he explained, in order to use "music or any tools that we can get to fight against the Indonesians".

Up in the mountains, there were no music studios, so they recorded on portable tape recorders in the caves they were living in.

🇮🇩 Bought for a song (New York Times)

Jakarta and birds, there’s nothing like it. I always forget how rare seeing a bird flying around in the wild in the city is until I go somewhere else and realise I hadn’t heard annoying squawking for awhile. But, birds are everywhere. Young blokes pegging pigeons into the sky, old blokes lining up cages along the street to be washed out. This story isn’t really about that but does add to the fascinating (and sometimes dark) exploration of a city in love with birds without really having them. 

Especially sought after is the murai batu, known in English as a white-rumped shama, which can mimic the melodies of other songbirds. It is a species favored by Mr. Joko and many other collectors, and one that is fast disappearing from Indonesia’s forests.

In 2018, Mr. Joko entered his own murai batu in the President’s Cup, but lost to Dede Alamsyah, a car wash owner from Central Java.

The president told reporters that he’d offered to buy the winning bird, but that Mr. Dede had declined to sell. Mr. Dede put the bird’s value at $47,000, enough to buy a large house.

There’s maybe half a dozen Classic Indonesia Stories that no matter how frequently they appear, I cannot get enough of them. One is the boy jockeys of Sumbawa. This video is beautifully shot, absolutely stunning. And a hell of a story. 

Seven-year-old Sila is a child jockey supporting his family financially on the remote island of Sumbawa, Indonesia.

With the high unemployment rate on Sumbawa, Sila's parents no longer work because the money their young son earns takes care of the whole family.

Each race poses an enormous risk to Sila and the other young jockeys who spend up to 10 days competing in several traditional horse racing tournaments each year. Injuries are common, deaths occur, and Sila is one of the most in-demand jockeys of all the young riders.

Seen through the eyes of Sila and a local photojournalist, the film Riders Of Destiny is a rare insight into how some of Indonesia's most remote communities reconcile tradition with the need to survive.

🇱🇦 Laos goes to the movies (Nikkei Asia Review)

Obsessed with this. Laos doesn’t have a cinema tradition and is currently home to just four cinema theatres — two of which are owned by Thai firms. Things are starting to change. A few homegrown releases last decade courted both critical acclaim and local interest in developing an industry. Will Thailand soon lose its stronghold?

"The biggest change is that now we have more Lao movies, that are produced by Lao people and consumed by Lao people," said Vannaphone Sitthirath, an LNWCP producer and co-founder who studied film and TV production in Australia. "Before that, we didn't even have any image of what Lao film would look like, or what a Lao film would be," she said.

🇲🇾 The Malaysian Job (Harper’s Magazine)

There’s nothing particularly new for those who have followed the 1MDB story in this piece from Harper’s, but doesn’t it just make your jaw drop anew every time! What is interesting here is the look at the fetid swamp (hey, I thought they were meant to drain that thing) the case finds itself in the US. It also gives Clare Rewcastle Brown her due, which I always love to see. 

“Everyone has always told me,” Rewcastle Brown remarked when we spoke, “that there’ll never be any action taken against Goldman Sachs. I would find that sickening, because it proves the corruption in America is every bit as bad as what I was sneering at in covering Najib.” The 1MDB criminals who poured so many millions into totemic American institutions, from Hollywood to Wall Street to the White House, evidently came to the same conclusion. It’s a big swamp.

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