Showing 1-10 of 42 results
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Staying afloat on a sea of despair
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 13/12/2019
» Chakra (Sarm Heng) is a Cambodian peasant boy who wants to escape a rural existence that offers him no future. "How's Thailand?" he asks a friend who returns from working at a construction site in Bangkok. "If you work hard, there's no problem," his friend assures him. Through trafficking agents, Chakra is smuggled across the border, but instead of being sent to a factory or a construction site, the boy is thrown onto a fishing trawler and forced to work without pay in conditions resembling a floating prison.
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A shady underworld
Life, Sawarin Suwichakornpong, Published on 03/05/2019
» We, The Survivors, the fourth novel by the Malaysian-British Tash Aw, is a compelling account of the life of a working-class lad named Lee Hock Lye, or known among friends as Ah Hock. It's a vivid tale of an imaginative young man with ideas of setting foot in a better place than a ramshackle village where livelihood depends on fishing and harvesting cockles from the polluted mudflats. Ah Hock isn't an angry young man, nor is he an idler who accepts whatever comes his way as fate. He tries hard with life, changing numbers of jobs to make ends meet, hoping one day he'd move to settle down with a house and family in Kuala Lumpur or Singapore or even farther afield. The world that he inhabits, however, is a microcosm of the much larger equilibrium, where society permits a select few to climb the ladder, and the majority -- the ilk of Ah Hock -- remains stuck in poverty, leading a life that's going nowhere.
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Amy Schumer, Ashley Judd join calls to free US child sex trafficking victim
Life, Published on 19/12/2018
» Actors Amy Schumer and Ashley Judd have backed a campaign for an American woman convicted of killing a man who paid to have sex with her as a child to be given clemency.
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Big in Japan
Life, Melalin Mahavongtrakul, Published on 09/11/2018
» The 31st Tokyo International Film Festival wrapped up last weekend, with French drama Amanda taking home the Tokyo Grand Prix and Best Screenplay awards. Director Mikhaël Hers' third feature, Amanda tells the story of a young man who cares for his orphaned niece following his sister's death in a delicate tale of familial love and how people cope with tragedy.
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It's a mean old man's world
Life, Published on 16/07/2018
» Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly has been reducing audiences to puddles of tears for over a century. Opera Siam's recently concluded two-night performance of the beloved opera was no exception.
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Madame Butterflyin the age of human trafficking
Life, Published on 10/07/2018
» Tomorrow and on Thursday, Opera Siam's 17th season will close with two performances of one of the "top 10" operas, performed over 2,000 times around the world this year alone, Madame Butterfly. It's a tear-jerker, a relentlessly romantic piece full of famous melodies and a can't-lose formulaic plot: boy meets girl, boy dumps girl, girl kills herself.
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Making an artistic splash with a social conscience
Life, Ariane Kupferman-Sutthavong, Published on 29/11/2017
» Kawita Vatanajyankur's video performances, set against candy-coloured backdrops, are both alluring and thought-provoking, as the artist is far more concerned with what's going on inside the candy factory than with bright and shiny wrappings, of the kind that has come to define our modes of consumption. With several major international exhibitions in 2017 -- including a stint at the Venice Art Biennale as part of the Alamak! Pavilion -- Kawita has been busy packing and unpacking, installing her works in locations around the globe.
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Human traffic
Life, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/11/2017
» Edmund Yeo started writing the film Aqerat before the word "Rohingya" would make world news headlines -- entirely for a distressing reason. Now the Malaysian film, which had its premiere in the main competition of the 30th Tokyo International Film Festival this week, has proved prescient as over 500,000 of Myanmar's Rohingya minority have fled violence for Bangladesh in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in years.
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A Druid victory
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 13/10/2017
» I didn't realise how many contemporary historians there are until I began reviewing their books. However, their interests don't vary greatly. Ancient Rome and the Tudor periods are predominant. Followed by World War II and the Templar knights. Then Ancient Egypt and the Napoleonic Wars.
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Vatican thriller
Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 25/08/2017
» Christianity hasn't been around long, its two millennia shorter than Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism. The God-Mary match captured the public's imagination and Holy Mother Church has been matched with God ever since. It survived its encounters with the Saracens and the Reformation, and now has an estimated following of 1 billion.
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