Transpacific Literary Project's monthly column collects essays, translations, and hybrid works that grapple with language, culture, and translation from Asia.

“The Rainforest Speaks: Reimagining the Malayan Emergency,” gathers writers, translators, filmmakers, artists, historians, and critics to revisit a significant period of Southeast Asian history—the Malayan Emergency.

In time for Nowruz, we share the notebook “Spring Will Come: Writings from East Turkistan”—fifteen poems, short stories, and translations from writers connected to East Turkistan, the contested region in...

On September 23, 1972, Ferdinand E. Marcos, Sr., then President of the Philippines, set up a one-man authoritarian regime. As Noel Pangilinan writes in an essay written for this collection,...

A collaborative notebook between the Transpacific Literary Project and the e-zine chogwa, Channg features a single Khmer language poem translated 17 different ways into English. Guest editor...

Queer time challenges normative history, bringing to light the fragmented narratives, asynchronous lifestyles, and suppressed voices of marginalized subjects. In Taiwan, time has never been straight.

This week marks the one year anniversary of AAWW closing down its New York City office and beginning a period of work-from-home. One year ago, billions of people entered a...

The word "monsoon" evokes enormous nostalgia for me. I remember running up the steep incline of Jiri Mountain with my cousins as kids in a torrential...

In a time of rising authoritarian leaderships around the globe, dismantling the myriad languages of domination—from explicit militarized lexicons to insidious vestiges of colonialism—is vital. The Insurgent Tongues folio interrogates...

The bringing home of prepared food from a kopitiam, restaurant, or cafe is a cornerstone of Malaysian culture. The Ta Pau folio takes this practice as a launching...

Disposable and ubiquitous, this everyday object is also imbued with deep personal and cultural significance and beneath its surface appearance. The Slipper folio gathers six works of writing,...

How much does this cost? This practical question of the marketplace can reach into the deeper waters of vulnerability and capitalist corruption, memory and nostalgia, labor...

This category of little words entwined in big discussions of identity and representation is ripe with possibility when shared across language and culture. The Pronoun folio...

This material substance, its deathless refusal to disintegrate, its poison, its falseness, its relentless production and our growing dependence on it makes for the critical subject of the...

Whether it’s in the strangeness of returning to a place that has so quickly and drastically changed, or as the projection of colonial imagination onto a landscape, or...

How can we trust the evidence of our eyes, when no gaze is ever neutral and images are constructed things, when time alters perspective and everything is always...

The Fluid folio wanders through liquid nature of memory, the continuous shifting of human circumstances and identity, and the wild surges and still waters of language. The pieces of original...

Few things vanish so completely as to leave no trace of themselves. In the Residue folio, a collection of essay, memoir, poetry and prose take a look at...

From migrant workers remitting their wages home, to the burning hell money as a remittance between the living and dead, or the remittance of culture itself under the...

What counts as a mother language?

Kakolór pati kan álang na tulang nin tawó / an pigrunot na bagás asín ginibong puto. |
Especially when you notice the rice flour / that she uses is the color of human bone.

그때 그 상황에 헌병들이 하는 말이 모두 쏼라쏼라 들렸다. | The English words of the police fell senselessly to the ground.

Juyon Lee’s work plays with light and distance.

As my math grades plummeted, my interest in trombone records skyrocketed

Kids Bolo brings Urdu to families living in the West.

With a bottle full of chicken blood, she bathed the Lieutenant in red, from head to toe.

لكن المنـفى ينبت مرة أخرى كالحشائـش البرية تحت ظلال الزيتـون | Exile sprouts anew, like untamed grass beneath the shade of olive trees

A young woman struggles to stay in a loving relationship while being haunted by a past abuser.

Translating Anuradha Sarma Pujari’s My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign

On Joma Sison and Julie de Lima, the Philippines’ most famous leftist couple

A Filipino and a Chinese girl, both comfort women, find friendship in a piece of critical fabulation

How learning a third language became a place of reconciliation for my mother tongues.

How translating the writings of a former Malayan Communist Party member changed me

Transgressing spatial and temporal bounds through the image

An examination of Malayan Emergency fiction’s depiction of Sinophone, Anglophone, and Indigenous points of view

A researcher visits the UK National Archives in search of Malaya.

Three artistic works, recently showcased in Kuala Lumpur and beyond, suggest why it matters that we think about the history of the Malayan Emergency in concert with the contemporary COVID-19 and climate emergencies

但巡迴遊樂園並不害怕，只要再次拆卸自毀，它們換個地方就可以重新活過來。
| As long as the traveling carnival committed self-destruction, it could come alive once more in a different place.

Nine essays and stories from a new generation of writers grappling with the Malayan Emergency | 新世代作家的九篇文章和故事探討馬來亞緊急狀態

Malaysian-born filmmaker Lau Kek Huat grapples with the difficulties of visually representing the Emergency

Malaya’s rainforest in the colonial and military imaginary

Reimagining the Malayan Emergency

Imagining the future through words and through kin

etc.books founder Akiko Matsuo on building a space for feminism and solidarity in Tokyo

On the difficulties of continuing being a translator, and why we persist

A Truku writer on his relationship with his tribe’s traditional craft

우체국을 나서면 아직 태어나지 않은 음악처럼 | When I leave the post office, I’m like unborn music

A familial haunting returns a Palestinian writer to Arabic.

On translators’ labor and invisibility

Mit Jai Inn’s sculptural paintings thrive in abstractions and calculated ambiguity

ئىنتىزارلىقنىڭ سۈبھىدۇر ئىسمى، / زۇلمەتنى چاققان ئەزان كېلىدۇ |
Intizarliqning sübhidur ismi, / Zulmetni chaqqan ezan kélidu. |
The name of longing is Dawn. / Breaking the chains of oppression, the call to prayer will come.

نەقەدەر گۈزەل- ھە / يوللار ئىچىدە / قايتىدىغان يول پەقەت ئۆيىگە |
Neqeder güzel–he / yollar ichide / qaytidighan yol peqet öyige |
of all the paths to take / is it not the most beautiful?

Artist Efvan’s portraits and vignettes of Uyghur life

سۈڭەكلەر قىرىلىپ، ئۇۋىلىپ ھەتتا، / تەجىرىخانىدا ئەگىسە روھىم |
Even as my bones are scraped and rubbed / my spirit circles where this work is done

ئاي يۇلتۇزۇمنى شەپەرەڭلەرگە ساتقان كېچە |
Ay yultuzumni sheperenglerge satqan kéche |
Oh night, you sold the moon and star to the moths.

يۇۋاشلىق.يۇۋاشلىق.يۇۋاشلىق |
Meekness. Meekness. Meekness.

ئېقىپ كەتمەستىڭ كۆكتىن يۇلتۇزدەك، / سەن ئۈچۈن قانات، پەر بولغان بولسام |
Éqip ketmesting köktin yultuzdek, / sen üchün qanat, per bolghan bolsam. |
You may not have dropped from the blue like a star / if I were wings for you

كېرەك بولسا بىرقانچە پاي ئوق، \ ئات مېنى، يۈرىكىم بار پارتلايدىغان |
Kérek bolsa birqanche pay oq, / At méni, yürikim bar partlaydighan. |
If bullets are what you need, / shoot me, I have a heart that explodes.

ياق، توختاڭلار! بۇ بۇغداي سېلىقى توغرىسىدىكى سۆز ئەمەس، مانا بۇ يەردە باشنى يە، دەپتۇ |
“No, stop it! This isn’t talking about a tax on wheat, look, it says bashni ye here, that’s ‘eat your head.’”

Say: I am still alive in the birds flown west.

ئېزىپ باق بۈگۈن يوچۇن يوللاردا \ ھېچكىم يادىغا كەلمىگەن بىر رەت |
Try to get lost today on strange roads / A path where no one is called to mind

ئۈمىدىم بۈگۈن خىيالدىن يۈكسەك |
Ümüdim bügün xiyaldin yüksek |
My hopes are greater than my thoughts today.

Fifteen poems, short stories, and translations from writers connected to East Turkistan to call forth Spring.

Guest editors Munawwar Abdulla and Rahima Mahmut reflect on hope and persistence in East Turkistan, in time for Nowruz.

Аза бойым қаза болып осыған, / Балтаң маған тиердей-ақ шошынам. |
A sparrow if it sprouts, a stick if it falls, / my whole body is tingling.

自分が国民になりたい国家とはどんな国家か? |
What kind of state would I want to belong to as a national citizen?

平和の条がキラキラと輝いている |
O how radiantly the Article of Peace sparkles

Two songs popularized during martial law speak of the time’s sentiments

A notebook on the fiftieth anniversary of martial law being declared in the Philippines

The “New Society” had its own tricks. Billions disappeared from the nation’s coffers, clowns filled legislative positions.

Creating a life in the shadow of the martial law years

Neil Doloricon’s art centered farmers, workers, underground revolutionaries, and those on the margins

The United States would support the Marcos dictatorship disguised as a “constitutional coup d’etat”

It was Imelda as much as Ferdinand who brought about the country’s ruination

Kay hirap maging mahirap, kung hindi ka pa manginig sa galit ay hindi ka pa iintindihin.
| It’s so hard to be poor. If you don’t tremble with rage, they won’t try to understand you.

We walked uphill where tall cogon grasses were already starting to don their silver shade.

The Marcoses have always been the masters of myth-making

How does it feel to watch / the seeds of your destruction / walk away from you?

Rebolusyonaryong panulaan noong panahon ng batas militar |
Revolutionary poetry during the martial law years

I became a full-time community organizer in 1971. The Marcos government declared martial law in September 1972. A month later, the Marcos military came and arrested me.

I wondered if Pia was right, then, if I was seeking something too dangerous to be handled, a bomb that would kill me someday.

A brief history lesson on the fourteen-year military-backed dictatorship in the Philippines

The minute I arrived at the University of the Philippines as a freshman, I joined the marches.

Marcos knew that power rested not just on fear and terror, but also censorship and propaganda.

On the urgency of remembering the fourteen years of Ferdinand E. Marcos, Sr.’s military-backed dictatorship in the Philippines

The editors of Ulirát on creating an anthology of Philippine literature that captures the “multilingual aspect of living in these islands”

“It’s not really about trauma—it’s about what it means to resurrect out of that.”

Without rice, there is nothing. And without the pot, there is no rice. 

The stories in this folio piece together alternate, speculative histories that reflect distinctly queer modes of life: often without a clear resolution, a “moral,” or a sense of “straight” logic

“What’s more difficult? Gay marriage or ghost marriage?”

Not just her former hands, but the whole scaffolding of the skeleton in front of her had become a Jenga tower whose crucial block had been pulled away from the bottom

when does / a door become / a door , as it opens / or when it closes , / revealing an entirety – its face / or a fixed movement / of its hinges , is that smiling / or saying goodbye , / moonlight / or memory.  

“Meth was Trainspotting and Dust of Angels. Taiwanese education had worked like a charm, and he had taken a step back from the idea. What else was out there for him to try?”

As I looked in the mirror, Master flexed His fingers against my skin, as naturally as a handler would lovingly caress their pet puppy.

The concrete tetrapods tempered the waves, and the space between them made room for love between boys.

“Discipline”, “Survey on Female Occupational Injuries in a Fishing Village”, and “Goddess Transformation”

When the epiphyllum buds reached peak bloom, petals everywhere began to fall. They began to fall like rain.

On the “impossible archive,” the historical and future queer imaginary of a “lesbian cultural archive” and Grandma’s Girlfriends 阿媽的女朋友

It didn’t bother him that he attracted, and was attracted to, people of the same gender—all of this felt perfectly natural to him.

An Introduction

Poem by Sơn Ca, translated by Lan Anh and poem by Kai Ng, translated by Thu Uyên

They say singing makes them recall the peaceful time in Arakan, that once upon a time, they used to sing these folksongs freely and proudly

Her grandma had once asked her how you could tell the difference between something that had disappeared and something that had escaped

Kutenun seikat mimpi / dari telapak pemigi | I weave a bundle of dreams / from the palm of the pemigi loom

거울로 들어가는 문을 찾지 못해 / 내게는 오늘의 밤이 계속된다 | Since I / can’t find the door, the night ceases to end

និស្វាសវាត / អស្សាសវាត / បស្សាសនៃ / ខ្យល់ចេញមិនចូល | In, out, held – / so goes the breath. / Winds leave but no longer come

Sudah hampir sepuluh tahun Ambe terbaring di sumbung | Ambe has been lying on top of the casket for almost ten years now

O ngồi đó chờ đợi một linh hồn lạ mặt vẫn còn sống/ như cánh-đồng-tử-cung của bình minh | O sits there waiting for an unknown soul that is still alive / like a uterus-meadow at dawn

They sit surrounded by items they have prepared for the ritual of Jejak Tanah: fine sand, peat soil, pea gravel, petals from seven kinds of flowers, a baby bathtub, and a large terrarium bowl

今夜我抱着我妈 今夜我唱着夜曲 | Tonight I hold my mother in my arms

A gathering of Lullabies that swirl in various transitional spaces and threshold crossings, carried by the voices of writers and translators

But the children are frolicking inside the palace of their mother’s empty stomach. They can’t say whether it’s day or night.

The Transpacific Literary Project is calling for writing from the space between waking and sleep, consciousness and dream, between the living world and the underworld

“What’s the most serious problem? Home lor! Drugs lor! Everyday besides sleeping and playing games you do what? Yes, kill people lor! So the government commercialized the plan lor, scientists spent ten years to research how to store up sleep, so these Juveniles can be useful lor.”

“Big rain, isn’t it?”

You couldn’t claim that you were lost. The footsteps of your comrades dragged you sharply back into the present, no wavering possible.

Snapshots from a South Korean dissident poet

The hagwon director was the most successful woman we knew at the time… Her short hair was perfectly coiffed, her full lips painted red like a Western woman’s.

Perhaps it is now the other way around, / and I have become an almost-perfect lover, / caring little that the Gods love poets less.

“The ecology and economy of the region is under threat. This Transpacific Literary Project folio, Monsoon Notebook is for these essential, vanishing, and unruly waters.”

“Indonesian literature is gaining traction. More slowly than we might want, but it’s an upward trajectory.”

The young author from West Timor who writes dark, deeply irreverent prose that reflects on Suharto-era violence speaks with Lara Norgaard about the figure of storyteller, the role of humor in discussing state violence, and Javanese hegemony in Indonesian historical narratives.

A headline buried deep inside the paper catches my eye. “They’re extending AFSPA for another six months in Assam,” I announce. She nods, and continues to massage the green beans in her bowl.

paperless people / of the earth say,
/ “this place is mine, / can you not see we birthed it?”

perhaps, every day is always a ‘perhaps’, a ‘maybe’, for queer people in Indonesia, since every day is a fight, a faith, a hope

我忽然屏息 / 是風吹開妳襯衫 / 一顆煙彈正微微露餡 || as if with prophecy / wind peels back your shirt / a teargas gives away its shape

no tiene otra ley que / su mismo cuerpo feliz || with no law other than / his own joyous body

Mishima’s Patriotism reveals the drives operating behind political movements and how ultranationalistic ideas become deeply entangled in the personal

One of the challenges in this novel was to figure out a way in which time can be manipulated the way it’s so interestingly manipulated in film.

사람들을 따라갈수록 나는 거짓말이 되어가. || The more I follow people the more I become a lie

sometimes a person’s happiness comes from not owing someone money

When the streets are stained sea blue, they are graven in time

น้ำลายเฟ้อเต็มปากสำรากมนต์ / กลิ่นคละคลุ้งฝูงคนนะจังงัง || Spewing out its gibberish chants / Luring people into rhetorical trance

api tak sempat bertanya: apakah kata-kata bisa / terbakar? || fire didn’t have the chance to ask: can words / burn down?

It is a school for the children with no tongues who were born to tongueless mothers. The school teaches only one subject: patience. “Patience is the greatest virtue in life,” say the fathers who can speak.

不要以為 / 八八十月 過了還會回來 / 除非有十一月 || don’t assume that / October ‘88 will ever return / except in November

It’s not the bullet that makes you bolt, / but the very words /
emerging from the muzzle’s restraint / the classroom in disguise

How does violence blossom // What’s known must be made unknown

Is every english word I pull from my mouth a child screaming / over the soft chants of ma and nanni ma?

a land mistaken for a people is a people / objectified as spoils of the land

I forced myself to tell her to accept it and think of it as entering into a new theater. Turn it into raw material and endure to write about it.

/ Pərˈ(h)aps / preceding us, one ballad to each tongue,
oh, / ‘absəˌlōō(y)tlē /, we refrained from singing

& if the speaker does not know that this language is faulty, then the speaker has been secretly muzzled

it was such a big no-no that I had this impression of dialects 方方言言 being like swear words, or haram

This involves modulating my voice and accent so that I sound more Malay. It’s like having to work for my right to eat there.

We are becoming hardened. I sense a hardness in the so-called liberal circles, artist circles, activist circles.

having grown up using utensils she will never understand the comfort it brings: someone forming little mounds of rice that are pushed by the thumb into your mouth

The questions of who can eat what, and where, and with whom, are facts of Malaysian life, negotiated daily and often subconsciously.

Salah satunya: mengumpulkan sandal dari seluruh Indonesia dan diberikan kepada si polisi. || One such action: collect sandals from all around Indonesia and give them to the police.

A collection of the six works of writing, translation, audio, and photography that nuzzle into different corners of this apparent insignificance

do you know somewhere inside their language, lies something mine?

땀과 핏물과 진물이 뒤섞여 끈적한 그의 맨발이 젖어 번들거린다. || His bare feet, sticky with a mix of sweat and blood and ooze, glisten.

if I extradited myself from my body cleaved into infinite / particles you’d never step all over me at once

The slippers allowed her the pleasure of spatial recognition, an opportunity to go back in time and become the person cared for, rather than the one perpetually burdened with the responsibility of caring.

總有一次不想丟掉 / 太容易丟掉 || Don’t want to lose it this time / It’s too easy to lose

A new folio interrogating authoritarian attempts to control formations of self, family, school, and nation. Deadline October 7

A conversation on Marylyn Tan’s debut poetry collection, Gaze Back, plus a brief interview with the author

the hot air rising from the cooker / has tightening effect on your lovehole

20 Thai Baht = 33 Philippine Pesos = 44 Indian Rupees = x bolt of fabric = y square vuông of rice = 15,000 Vietnamese đồng = 2,600 Cambodian Riel = 2.6 Malaysian Ringgit = 9,100 Indonesian Rupiah = unquantifiable sweat

Sanggup menahan jerit, menukar peluh menjadi ringgit || [we’re] able to swallow shrieks, exchanging sweat to ringgit

slipper/sandal/house shoe/ flip flop: send your best original writing or original translation on this shared (in)significance to TLP by July 14

Sakit lelah aku tidak lain dan tidak bukan harga hidup senang aku kini || My asthma is the cost of the middle-class life I live now

៦០០០០រៀល! មើលទៅបង! បង្កងធំៗណាស់! || 60,000 KHR. Big ones! Look at them, sister!

một cây vải đổi lấy mười vuông thóc || one bolt of fabric for ten vuông of unhusked rice

Grandfather would have bought the Ilish—not wincing at the 1200 rupees per kilogram

รองเท้านักเรียนคู่นั้นยี่สิบบาทเองหรือ || These school uniform shoes are only twenty baht?

Mamsa! Sitenta’ng kilo! || Jack fish, seventy pesos a kilogram.

Not an assumption; not a name you learned to remember, not a fleshy shape or a face you already recognized

In English, you choose to be gender-neutral. In Indonesian, it’s a gift from the language.

Bạn sẽ gọi quê hương bằng một đại từ nào? Tôi sẽ gọi đó là một ám ảnh | What pronoun would you use to call your birthsoil? I would call it a haunting

A changing consciousness within Mu Dan’s poetry stirs a listening in his translator

By what divine aberration did our souls divide into two, unaware of the splitting?

夜來沉醉卸妝遲 || With night you sink drunk slow to undo/ your hair

Can I call my death “I”?

was it a gentle human hand, or black-furred / long-clawed

How the blurring of a relationship may point to a more fertile ground lying between the lines, in which multiple desires can co-exist.

An introduction to the folio, featuring 누가, 네, nhân vật, con, chanh, …, 그 (kû), 님 (nim), 형 (hyeong), tôi, em, chúng ta, một ám ảnh, I, [ ], [who?], 我 (wo), kau, aku, dia, ia, you, and a selfsame similarity

as I bear loneliness in the shrieks of iron, it carved / my residence registration on a hole-punch

This is a rectangular dream / which inevitably brings forth a rectangular waiting / a floating country can’t pillow a broken dream / and I’ve never dared say goodnight

It wasn’t the kind of place you’d notice as a casual passer-by, but one you could only find if you were looking for it.

Tonight, too, there are turning lines…/ I say I do not know, do not know.

love you because i / hate your lovers loving your peripheral love

Taking advantage of opacity, Girl E goes for it and punches indiscriminately.

As soon as they touch your saliva, the filaments dissolve. Their structure can’t sustain the contact. The sweetness is the taste of collapse.

A two-minute stare-down with their father’s deathbed occurs. As though the thing will explain itself.

into such sen / sitivity of it / such sense / could not say

Ultrasound waves / pulse between fluid, tissue, and bone一 / the embryo echoes.

Astra unwrapped her long spindly fingers and weighed his member with a chilling fascination.

I will outrun the smell of wet decay, your Mekong river in a Gatorade bottle.

After a sperm whale sucks in a squid, it will vomit out its beak.

An introduction to the Transpacific Literary Project’s pieces of Plastic through a weaving of voices and questions to come

Mythologies have their way of explaining the basic human condition: that there will always be some where or thing you wish to get to or back to.

The Hong Kong poet talks the Umbrella movement, being an outsider and an insider in Hong Kong, and how she translates the world.

Văn An had neglected ritual, not realizing that this was a land now full of ghosts left too long unmoored. That there might be consequences for forgetting to fear.

Hard to tell from your / Silence where you’re taking me. / But I’m guessing / It’s loin-deep in the place / Where they’re collapsing / Entire cosmologies into pulp and paper.

How do I tell you that I have done this before? / How to build a diorama of what I am not.

I keep the butts of my clove cigarettes in a candy tin. I pound it shut, hide it away. So it stays a secret.

I am the last of them—a woman with her own dreams, not salvaged from the cloud-based data lake that I created.

I remember exactly where I was when I found out Ren Hang killed himself.

The doll stares at its owner, eyes sparkling with cruelty. It wakes the baby up, hands her the toy block. The baby, as though possessed, crams the toy in her mouth.

The usual / drama of chiaroscuro, / how it begins / in medias res for the sake / of the viewer.

For some reason, all of Warhol’s portraits show Mao from an angle that reveals only one of the Chairman’s ears.

but really every word sounds like the sun/ sweltering in the middle of Santacruzan

Having two eyes prevents us from simplifying things, from seeing everything around us two-dimensionally. I guess you could say that seeing through two eyes is what makes us human.

The world held us / In glass circles

My child, we all become white-haired soon enough.

This was the first time he had seen so many exiled Tibetans of his own flesh and blood in a foreign land. Though they were only a few feet away, it was as if they were separated by ranges of mountains.

Think about it: if rain accumulating above someone / resumes descent, where does it fall?

From its very beginning this story is fated to be exposed by the light.

In an increasingly divided world, translated literature brings us closer together. As the year draws to a close, we asked some of our favorite writers, editors, and translators for their recommendations.

‘These were / all the gold coins that he laid by in a life of poverty, / saved up in the vault of his mind’

Animals are strangely perceptive—in their instinct to survive, they find a home

Nobody can stop things if they want to go back to their roots.

When the tide rises, it is easy for the fish to prey on the ant, but when it ebbs, the fish becomes the ant’s prey.

All my early life was tied up in tales of nasi goreng.

That American thing · The good old good

Suppressed sexual violence in the name of revolution lay in the abyss of our consciousness.

Funny how it ends up that you’re the leftovers.

They always had us at hello, the Americans.

Pray tell me, how much
are we paying for the sermon?

One person’s ancestor is another person’s ghost—it’s all a matter of perspective.

showbiz etceteras · commercial spaces · newspapered ideas

We don’t know what we need because we don’t know who we are. We don’t know who we are because we don’t remember who we were.

People judge me by my skin. My skin’s purpose in life is to prove them wrong.

Half a century on, what does it mean to be part of ASEAN?