I find I can't stomach most fiction anymore, especially anything written since about 1990. But Vanessa Chan's "The Storm We Made" is a powerful exception. Minutely and lovingly observed and the emotional punches it delivers are all earned and deserved.
It's set in #Malaysia in the 1930s during the British colonial period (when it was still called "Malaya") and the #Japanese wartime occupation of the 1940s, and its principal characters are Malay and Japanese. So right away that sets it apart from anything I've ever read before.
What's more, most of the principal characters from whose points of view we see the story are women and girls.
It is so rare, in #English language fiction, to have a glimpse into the dynamics of #Colonization when it's not practiced by a Western state.
The #Audiobook is beautifully narrated by Samantha Tan, a woman of #Asian ancestry.
Would love to hear #TootSEA thoughts on this book.
@rabia_elizabeth@bookstodon yes a very dark story, Hadji Murat is a shorter work that would be up your street. His last writings are a collection of shorter stories and much deeper in quality.
War and Peace took me months to read lol
A vessel from China’s coastguard has blocked two Philippine government ships for hours a short distance from the #SouthEastAsia country’s coast, in a further escalation of tension between the two nations in the disputed #SouthChinaSea.
Rebels claim they drove out last junta battalion in Myanmar border town
> Anti-junta rebels and allied forces on the #Thailand-#Myanmar border have driven out the military’s last battalion from a major trade hub in Myanmar’s Kayin state,
@Helgi If you mean that the U.S. is stationing their military in Okinawa to prevent some sort of Hong Kong incident where Japan forcefully suppresses calls for sovereignty in the prefecture, then I highly doubt that. The U.S. needs a reliable ally in East Asia a bit behind the frontlines, and Japan fits that role perfectly. I don't think they'd sacrifice their relationship with the Japanese government for (in their view) a bunch of noisy Okinawans. If Okinawa wasn't just a strategic location they would've gladly returned full sovereignty of the region back to Japan and turn a blind eye to any future human rights abuses that would be committed by Japanese authorities.
Anyway while I personally think that Okinawa and Hokkaido don't really belong to Japan in the end (the anti-Japaneseism movement within Japan comes to mind), it's a whole can of worms and I'd rather not have any Western intervention on this matter.
@mima@philippines@palestine@Philippines need to ask Japan, maybe they don't want those US bases removed. Exactly like Germany, they had US bases, then Trump decided to remove those bases. And Poland immediately proposed to pay for stationing them in their country, to protect Poland against Russia