#YISHREADS April 2025

by Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

Around the world, everyone’s been buzzing about Trump’s topsy-turvy tariffs. Within the space of this column, however, we’re focussing on the literature of mainland Southeast Asia, i.e. Thailand (36%), Laos (48%), Cambodia (49%), Myanmar (44%) and Vietnam (46%)—a region I’ve often neglected in favour of Singapore’s (10%) more immediate neighbours: Malaysia (24%), Indonesia (32%) and the Philippines (17%).

The reason is the season: April’s the month of Songkran, the traditional New Year’s Day of the Thais, also celebrated by Laos as Pi Mai, the Khmers as Choul Chnam Thmey and the Burmese as Thingyan—and admittedly co-opted by gay guys as an excuse to spray each other with Super Soakers. The shared rituals of splashing water are meant to symbolise the washing away of sins and bad luck. Lord knows, we could all use a bit of that.

As for the five works I’ve assembled, most are translated classics: a Thai-Lao epic, realist works from Myanmar and Cambodia, and a renowned text on Buddhist mindfulness composed during the Vietnam War. Still, I couldn’t pass up the chance to close with a new American novel, using Thai myth and magic as the inspiration for secondary world fantasy, something I haven’t seen before in long-form fiction.

So, here’s wishing you all the best in this season of purification and renewal! (On an unrelated note, Singapore’s General Elections are approaching. What revolutions may they bring, and in whose favour?)

Sinxay: Renaissance of a Lao-Thai Epic Hero, by Peter Whittlesey and Baythong Sayouvin Whittlesey
Sinxay Press, 2015

For a while now, I’ve been itching to read a translation of Pang Kham’s Sang Sinxay (c. 1600), the national epic of Laos. Turns out this coffee-table work, written and self-published by an American lawyer and his Lao wife, is the only book-length edition available—but it’s pretty impressive.

It’s chock-full of illustrations, many of them recreations of murals, based on multiple manuscripts (apparently most Lao readers would only refer to the 1991 modern Lao prose adaptation by Mahasila and Outhine Bounyavong), and incorporates substantial chapters on its relationship to Buddhism and the Jataka tales, plus how it’s deeply important to the Isan people of Thailand—the city of Khon Kaen's done a whole heritage rebranding around it!

The story itself is wild. Taking place in the sacred mountains of Himavanta, it centres on the rescue of the beautiful princess Soumountha from her captor, the fearsome ogre king Nyak Koumphan... shades of the Ramayana, right? But our hero isn’t her lover but her nephew: the heroic boy-prince Sinxay, exiled at birth from his kingdom together with his twin brother Sangthong (who’s half-conch shell) and his half-brother Siho (who’s half-lion, half-elephant).

Echoes of loads of other Asian myths in the course of the narrative: the princes’ original exile into the forest recalls the Mahabharata; Sinxay's battle with a giant snake evokes Krishna's battle with Kaliya; his voyage under the sea to retrieve his aunt's daughter Sidachan from the naga king Nak Valoonarat reminds me of Sun Wukong storming the Dragon King’s palace in Journey to the West. Plus random episodes of Sinxay hooking up with kinnaris and nariphon tree girls and rejecting demonesses (parallels to Shurpanakha!), evil queens deceiving the king Phanya Kousarat by putting magic powder in his bath, and Sinxay’s treacherous six half-brothers throwing him down a waterfall to claim his glory.

But honestly, the most fascinating character of all is Soumountha. You’d think she’d be as chaste as Sita, refusing to give in to her ogre captor... but no. After shedding a few tears, she goes ahead and marries him. She even tries to wake him up when Sinxay comes to “rescue” her (she keeps turning back, pretending she’s left hairpins in the palace), and mourns him when he dies in battle.

Is this misogynistic? Maybe not: an unfaithful, vacillating woman can be a heroine too, as seen in Phim in the Thai epic Khun Chang Khun Phaen. Furthermore, Soumountha’s portrayed as a figure of pathos: when she returns to the kingdom of Muang Pengchan, she’s feared and discredited, due to lies that she’s turned into an ogress herself—preventing her from revealing the treachery of the half-brothers. The Whittelseys have included a variant ending where Nyak Koumphan is resurrected and steals her away again... and this time, everything’s resolved by making sure their marriage is performed according to proper customs, with the ogre city of Muang Anolat and the human city of Muang Pengchan joined by a golden bridge. (Shades of the Malay tale of “Puteri Gunung Ledang”!)

Lots more details—the strange way garudas (khut) and nagas (nak), traditionally enemies, join forces to protect them in the forest; how President Kaysone Phomvihane harnessed the epic for Communism, telling youngsters to be “Sinxay of the New Era”... which kinda makes sense in the battle against capitalism, since Sinxay was a tiny kid facing down a giant, until you remember he was literally a reincarnated son of Indra with ridiculous divine superpowers. Metaphors only go so far!

Not Out of Hate, by Ma Ma Lay
Translated by Margaret Aung-Thwin
Silkworm Books, 2006

This 1955 novel isn’t the most sensational read—it’s one of those realist classics about a tragedy in a middle-class rural family, complete with two cases of tuberculosis—but it’s pretty damn interesting as a work of feminist anti-colonial fiction. (By the way: yes, the author is a woman.)

The tale centres on Way Way, the beautiful and intelligent 17-year-old daughter of a rice broker, who’s sacrificed her chance of higher education to look after her ageing father, since her mum ran off to become a nun: a decision that’s at first presented as a selfish, thoughtless act. Enter U Saw Han, a 37-year-old rice trader who’s Anglophilic to the point of absurdity: everyone assumes he’s a white man when they hear he’s come as a representative of a British firm and are astounded at his manners (shoes indoors, knives and forks at the table, whiskey for drinks instead of orange squash) even though he’s never even been to the UK.

The two of them fall for each other (the age gap is actually concerning to the traditionalist Burmese characters), but it turns out that U Saw Han’s love is one based on domineering, love-bombing control: he stuffs his bride full of dairy products and bread instead of the rice and spice she craves, frowns on her applying chanthaka (sandalwood facial powder) and most importantly, insists on the utter efficacy of Western medicine (expensive cod liver oil and painful injections) as opposed to Burmese medicine (dietary regulations)—with the effect that both Way Way and her dad end up dying from TB.

Way Way’s honestly a terrible pushover during most of the story, weeping and submitting to everything her husband wants, which at first felt pretty disappointing—though I get that stories of victimhood are important, can’t she demonstrate some resistance? But then, in the wake of her father’s death, she meets her mum, who realises how much she’s suffering in her marriage and whisks her away to the Buddhist sanctuary. And it’s here that she actually encounters peace, while her husband rages drunken and alone at home. As a woman, Way Way’s liberated not through modernity, but through a religious retreat from the patriarchal household—though she feels dutybound to return, once she realises she’s pregnant.

This is a perspective we don’t get much in Singapore, where feminism’s so often presented as a Western import; a positive externality of colonialism. But it’s not just about gender: when Ma Ma Lay communicates the intense somatic suffering of being denied your favourite foods and contact with your loved ones, there’s a simultaneous patriarchal and colonial cruelty going on that’s super-relatable to all genders; this horrific effort to shape oneself into what one is not in the name of civilisation. All of which falls apart at the end, as Way Way expires amidst the Japanese Occupation of Burma, her fool of a husband exhausted and weeping, her family members debating Communism in the background.

A New Sun Rises Over the Old Land: A Novel of Sihanouk’s Cambodia, by Suon Sorin
Translated by Roger Nelson
NUS Press, 2019

Here’s an early Khmer novel from 1961, detailing the repeated woes of Sam, a cyclo driver, as he faces economic oppression and abuse in Phnom Penh—heartless cyclo owners who overcharge on rental, a rich man who molests his wife and gets him imprisoned when he seeks revenge, bullies behind bars, a doctor who won’t treat his wife, capitalists who discriminate against Khmers when he’s a factory worker, politicians who win his trust and then give nothing back to the proletariat when he’s a labour organiser, etc, etc.

In short, it’s a picaresque bummer cycle, with him enduring one thing after another, in the style of Zhang Leping’s Sanmao comics—or, if we’re specifically referencing narratives about transport, Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy and P. Ramlee’s Penarek Beca, both of which the translator references in his intro. Where this novel differs, however, is that it ends on a high note, with an enlightened government official, just back from Paris, crashing into Sam and then hiring him as a house boy, whereupon he gets enough savings to become a successful farmer, aided by the newly independent government’s irrigation policies. The story actually opens and closes with him in a neat shirt and trousers, travelling by train to and from the Ninth National Congress, pleased with all the progress his country has made, hence the optimistic title.

What’s a bit of a bummer is the fact that the story also happens to be incredibly xenophobic: many of Sam’s oppressors are ethnic Chinese, and there’s repeated reference to the idea that Chinese and Vietnamese make better workers than Khmers. What’s an even huger bummer is how the tale inadvertently becomes a snapshot of urban life before the devastation of the Khmer Rouge, during which, Nelson notes, 90% of Cambodian intellectuals were slaughtered, probably including the author—records are so obliterated, it’s hard to be sure.

And there’s a grim foreshadowing of this doom even amongst this story of hope—the knowledge that in spite of reforms, the capitalist system is still in place, and democracy’s turned out to be difficult, with rival factions claiming power at the Congress. And also glimmering fragments of the culture that would be lost in the genocide—the lady driving a Peugeot, a thief boasting that he can afford cinema tickets, the evasion of capture by fleeing into the National Museum. Weimar Republic vibes. Feels relevant these days.

he Miracle of Mindfulness, by Thich Nhat Hanh
Translated by Mobi Ho
Penguin, 2021

I’ve heard a bunch about this monk and his teachings—he was arguably the most influential Southeast Asian author in his lifetime. But this is the first time I’m actually hunkering down and reading this classic, which he first wrote in 1974 as a long letter from exile in France: a manual on meditative living for Brother Quang of the School of Youth for Social Service in South Vietnam.

Here, you’ve got all the standard mindfulness exercises: counting breaths, washing the dishes to wash the dishes (i.e. not with other motives in mind), contemplation of pebbles, of loved ones, (also, interestingly, of enemies and of one's skeleton after death), treating every act as a rite. Also metaphors of the mind as a monkey vs. its shadow, one hand clapping, a cypress tree representing the wonder of reality, the five aggregates, the heart flooding with a bodhisattva’s compassion.

What's also interesting is to see how this work is a product of its time. Nhat Hanh doesn't just cite the sutras, but also Tolstoy and Hermann Hesse—even this pseudoscientific study that found that flowers grow better listening to Mozart than Chopin. And of course the horror of the war: his meditations on filling in adoption forms for orphans; his compassion for children who’re destined to fall as soldiers—plus the addendum by his friend James Forest, noting how he had to use breath to contain his rage when preaching for peace in a church in the American South. (Resonances with today: why is it so much more controversial now to protest against US funds for bombing civilians?)

All of which is to say this is a work cosmopolitan in its formation, created in a time of conflict and exile, and thus understandable as a global classic today. Unfortunately I read most of it while playing Pokémon on the bus. I've heard mindfulness preached, but I still need practice.

The Last Phi Hunter, by Salinee Goldenberg
Angry Robot, 2024

I got this at Worldcon last year and met the author at our Southeast Asian Fans meetup! It’s a Thai-inspired secondary world swords-and-sorcery fantasy, set in the land of Suyoram, where people are abandoning the old magic (shades of Chulalongkorn's modernisation), featuring the demon hunter Ex, the reformed phi krasue Narissa and the muay thai fighter-turned-concubine Arinya, plus a mystical landscape of kongkoi, kumanthong, naga, deva, moopop, vanara, pret. Seriously cool, well-informed worldbuilding—and perhaps the first I’ve seen so unabashedly based on mainland Southeast Asian folklore. (A qualification: aside from all the Vietnamese-inflected work of Aliette de Bodard and Nghi Vo.)

Still, there's something a little whitebread about the plot. Though Ex is a cinnamon roll of a character, his tale remains the epic quest of a young cishet man to slay a monster and save a kingdom and the woman he loves. (Granted, she saves him a bunch of times first.) Plus, even though Goldenberg identifies herself as bisexual and biracial in her “About” page, there’s zero queerness or gender diversity represented in the story. Not saying this as a complaint: it’s just that as a researcher of Southeast Asian SFF, I've noticed consistent queer rep in the 21st century genre, by Neon Yang, Zen Cho, and the aforementioned de Bodard and Vo, to the extent that I wonder if Goldenberg made a conscious choice to buck the trend. Plenty of kickass women in the tale, though.

I've also been wondering how decolonial it is to do “diverse” secondary world fantasy—are we just redoing Tolkien/Gygax in different ethnic flavours? But I’ve gotta say, Goldenberg’s really gone back to genuine cultural roots for her magical systems, with their dependence on trials of endurance and meditative states, with the occasional help from a sak yant tattoo. Very much recommended, and I’m glad I got to promote it at my Singapore Writers Festival “Magical Beasts of Southeast Asia” panel! Let’s get more of our region’s culture into the public imagination!

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Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.

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