Beautiful Saigon, Cambodian Girls and Cathay Pacific Airlines
There is a very famous Vietnamese song from the 1960s written by Y Vân called “Saigon is Beautiful” (Sài Gòn đẹp lắm). I remember being in Bangkok a few years…
Orientalism and Postage Stamps in French Indochina
A Vietnamese translation of Edward Said’s Orientalism has apparently just been published. That book became very influential after it first appeared in 1978, becoming a foundational text for the field…
The Khmer Rouge Top Secret Santebal (S-21) Archives
The digitization of historical materials is making research ever more easy, however I still find that I make my greatest “discoveries” by looking around in actual libraries. Today, for instance,…
Pen Ran’s Rusted Bachelor in 1970s Cambodia
Pen Ran (also written Pan Ron) was a famous singer in Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s, during the golden age of Khmer popular music. One of her most famous…
If Herb Albert and Jimi Hendrix had Visited Phnom Penh. . .
If Herb Albert and Jimi Hendrix had visited Phnom Penh in the late 1960s and recorded a song with Ros Sereysothea, it would have sounded like “I Heard Them Say…
Mud on Our Wheels in Cambodia
Several years ago I spent a few years studying Khmer. I eventually started to do some research in Khmer, but then I got distracted by other things. A few years…
Sinn Sisamouth and the Emotional Imagining of National Space
Anh Tây Bụi just left a comment which mentioned the vast number of Vietnamese songs that have been written about ethnic minority peoples who live in the mountains. This reminded…
Multilingual Movies in 1963 Phnom Penh
Having come across the picture of the Hawaii Cinema in Phnom Penh (see the post below), I decided to try to see if I could find any advertisements for it.…
Hawaii in Southeast Asia
In the first half of the 1960s, American singer Elvis Presley made three movies in Hawaii: Blue Hawaii, Girls! Girls! Girls! and Paradise, Hawaiian Style. In at least one of…
Music and Power in Mainland Southeast Asia
Recently I’ve been reading and listening to a new book with accompanying CDs called Longing for the Past: The 78 rpm Era in Southeast Asia. In the early 20th century,…