📚 April's best reads from across the region
UFOs, vegan food and packing up rare birds like cats to the vet
Hello friends!
It’s the end of the month so here’s a whole lot of reads I really enjoyed or learnt a lot from or really appreciated in April.
Everything is outstanding so save the ones you’re interested in to your Pocket or whatever and enjoy.
See you Monday for a much less enthusiastic look at the fallout from Singapore’s execution of Tangaraju Suppiah on Wednesday.
Erin Cook
You gotta find time to watch this sometime on the weekend! A great video from the Jakarta Post on Indonesia’s UFO-watching community:
Loved this charming Ramadan read from Ushar Daniele on bubur lambuk, a porridge eaten with glee when ending the fast each day. This tore across Malaysian Twitter immediately after publication with variations of ‘oh! I eat this every day!’ so you know it’s good.
“We have our exact measurements and we just have to follow the same recipe that we have been using for 100 years,” chief cook Adham Abdul Manan told Al Jazeera as he wound down from a busy morning in the kitchen, still wearing his green apron and black cap, and rustling through his checklist for the next day.
The mosque, situated in a village now surrounded by skyscrapers and highways, is renowned for its creamy sweet-savoury porridge. It produces 15 pots a day during Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month.
How vegans are stirring Southeast Asia's food scene (Nikkei Asia)
For Charukesi Ramadurai, raised in a vegetarian Indian family, travelling has been a bit hit-and-miss food-wise. From rude French waiters to sniffing food in the Mekong states where “fish sauce is not just a condiment but soul food,” it’s a gamble. But that trend may be turning across the region, she writes in this colourful one for Nikkei Asia.
In Bali, Indonesia, I sampled delicious nasi campur (a platter of brown rice served with seven different vegetable dishes) at a tiny shack, along with tempeh (fermented soybeans) tacos and mung bean pancakes at an upmarket cafe. In Hanoi, I slurped my way through meatless pho (rice and noodle soup), while vegetables took the place of fish in the amok (a coconut dish) I ate with rice in Siem Reap, Cambodia. And in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I had my fill of crunchy, spicy khao soi -- a popular noodle dish among Thais living near the border with Myanmar.
The Man Behind the Internet’s Favorite Outfits (New York Times)
I am a Dan Q. Dao stan. He writes super interesting culture pieces and in his NYT debut, he chats with Duy Tran, a fashion designer who dropped out of studying fashion in 2018 to focus on building his Fancì Club label. It’s paying off. Bella Hadid, Olivia Rodrigo and Doja Cat have all been spotted in his clothes and, judging by these photos, he might be the most responsible for the Y2K aesthetic.
“Fancì Club embodies femininity — it’s sexy, it’s nightlife with a princess personality,” said Beverly Nguyen, a Vietnamese American stylist in New York City. “It also pairs well with vintage trends that we have been seeing for quite a few seasons now: the oversized Dior glasses, the Fendi baguette bag, the Manolo sparkly sandal.”
Ms. Nguyen said she felt especially nostalgic, and proud, to see her culture reflected in Fancì Club’s outfits. “The silhouettes and colors remind me of my mom’s style in the early ’90s,” she said. “I love that the designs are rooted in nightlife culture that stays true to the city girl of Vietnam.”
Behind the scenes: How Singapore's bird park is moving 3,500 animals to their new home (Channel News Asia)
Jurong Bird Park, home to 400 species of birds, will reopen to visitors next month after moving to Mandai. Click through for some weirdly cool photos. I didn’t know they had Shoebills there so I might ditch Orchard Road strolling for a visit next trip.
Moving the birds is a delicate task, often involving multiple keepers moving the tiniest birds into boxes. The process for taller, leggier birds can be more complex because they risk injuring themselves, said Dr Neves.
“For animals like storks, cranes, because they’re so big and they’re so strong and it’s so easy for them to injure themselves, we use a net to quickly restrain them and then we quickly wrap a towel around them and make sure they cannot flap their wings,” he continued.
“In a way, it’s not different from when you bring your cat to the vet.”
A very dark, very scary report here from VICE. French national Olivier Larroque was accused of the sexual assault of many young boys in Vietnam in 2013. This story looks into how Larroque has managed to evade justice in France and what that means for scores of survivors in Vietnam
What happened next, however, is what several NGOs and lawyers involved in the case have blasted as “baffling.” Despite being an apparent flight risk, a liberty and custody judge released him on judicial supervision. And then he vanished.
The last time anyone has heard from the sex offender was on Oct. 5, 2022, when Larroque checked in with the police as part of the conditions of his release under judicial supervision. Now on the run, Larroque’s fugitive status is a source of anxiety for many of the survivors, and unsettling for those wishing to bring him to justice. The escape also raises questions about the competence and judgment of the French judiciary system. A zoom-out on France’s justice system reveals bigger, broader structural problems that have been criticized by both those caught within the system, and observers looking in.
David Baker Architects was given an ambitious brief: “Produce 145 units of permanent supportive housing at under $400,000 a unit, and have the operation up and running in less than three years,” according to Bloomberg. Last year, all the units were leased to unhoused San Franciscans. A happy story, but relevant to this newsletter for a special reason. The team took a lot of inspiration from the Philippines!
Knowing the building was located in San Francisco’s Filipino Cultural Heritage District, architects met with local organizers from community association SOMA Pilipinas to find ways to bring Filipino cultural influences into the design. That influence starts with the name Tahanan, which comes from a Tagalog word evoking “home,” and recurs in the building’s materials and shapes from base to roof.
On the ground floor, unfinished exterior walls have been lovingly — and imperfectly — textured by pouring concrete into molds lined with traditional Philippine banig grass mats and bamboo rods and letting it dry. The concrete subcontractor was so jazzed about the method that he drove down to Southern California to pick up more banig when they were short. “They said, ‘We’ve been working on parking garages and water treatment facilities — this is so refreshing,’” said Jonas Weber, an associate at David Baker Architects and the firm’s modular lead.
This report is a great example of why I think RoW is one of the best publications in the whole dang world at the moment. It speaks with Kang, a retired environmental safety officer at Samsung, and what he saw at factories in Vietnam. It’s harrowing and the kind of brave whistleblowing and excellent reporting that should exact change from the powers that be. Well done!
Still, despite his years of warnings, conditions failed to change. Complaints against Samsung’s labor conditions in Vietnam began to appear. In 2016, a 22-year-old female worker suddenly collapsed at Samsung’s Thai Nguyen factory, sparking whispers of overwork and occupational poisoning among the worker community. A 2017 survey of 45 Bac Ninh and Thai Nguyen workers indicated they suffered from frequent fainting, eyesight damage, nosebleeds, even miscarriage. In both events, Samsung did not acknowledge a connection to the workplace. The company threatened legal action against the civil society groups that authored the study, sparking “serious concern” from several members of the United Nations’ Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council.
Late last year, Kang finally blew the whistle to South Korean investigative news outlet Newstapa, which published his story in March. In it, he alleged that Samsung’s managers, in both Vietnam and South Korea, regularly ignored environmental and safety regulations, and that in all 14 years of Bac Ninh’s operation, he was not aware of those lapses ever being investigated by the Vietnamese government. Samsung has refuted the news report, saying the company is “strictly complying” with environmental safety laws in the countries where it operates. The company did not respond to Rest of World’s request for comment.
Myanmar's border midwives deliver hope to refugees (Nikkei Asia)
In India, women who have fled Myanmar are giving birth in the most dire of circumstances. With little money, little food and little access to healthcare this is a very bleak story but, as is often the case with Myanmar reporting, full of women doing what they can to help their fellow women.
"If people come in from the Myanmar side, and I have the medicine, I treat them for free, which makes me proud, like God has given me a chance to help them," said Mary, an ethnic Chin. "I want to develop this clinic and build more to take care of my people."
In the absence of an incubator, newborns are wrapped in towels and their mothers are carried by hand, intravenous drips attached, to rest in bare rooms. Some babies are born with jaundice, which Mary puts down to malnutrition and sometimes alcoholism.
"Most women in Chin don't get enough food," she said. "They work all day in cultivation using their bodies, but maybe twice a week they get milk and meat."
The transformation of a creative capital (BBC Travel)
Did you know Cambodia’s Battambang was once an arts and culture hub? I did not and that may be because Khmer Rouge targeted the artists and other intellectuals. It is becoming one again, according to this report, and I think I might swing by next time I visit Phnom Penh/Siem Reap!
In the midday tropical heat, I jumped into a tuk-tuk and headed across town to meet Khchao at her studio, where she arrived in style on her "garden motorbike" – a famous sight on the city's streets, designed with its own modified sidecar planted with a riot of greenery and featuring a miniature gazebo.
"Flowers, trees and nature – they spend their lives giving us everything we need: colour, oxygen, shade and beauty," she said. "They are healing, too. And that's especially important in Cambodia, where trauma is a universal experience."
The less I say about this one, the better. It must be read blind.