The Nidhi Model in Our Flattening World
I had a long conversation with a friend yesterday about knowledge, and I woke up today thinking about Thai historian and scholar Nidhi Aeusrivongse. Our conversation yesterday was about the…
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…
Seeing Tai in Nanzhao
The effort of scholars in the People’s Republic of China to discredit the claim that the kingdom of Nanzhao (~8th-9th cents.) had been Thai/Tai culminated in 1990 with the publication…
The Bad Chinese Food that Foreigners Eat in Vietnam
I was looking around in the Texas Tech Virtual Vietnam Archive when I came across an issue of a magazine called “Life in Vietnam.” This was clearly a magazine that…
Demystifying Mainland Southeast Asia
There is an edited volume that was published a year ago called Demystifying China: New Understandings of Chinese History. It contains 24 chapters and the authors of each chapter attempt…
The Water in (Southeast Asian) History
Someone forwarded me a YouTube video that someone made of a commencement speech that the late novelist, David Foster Wallace, gave in 2005 at Kenyon College. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z5TIFr5XMo The speech is…
Filipino Lemon Juice at the Singaporean Lost Horizon in 1973
The previous post brought out some good comments by readers/friends on Facebook. We have been having a little discussion about why it is that Filipino musicians were (and to some…
Going Gay in the Free Chinese World in the 1960s
In 1964, Filipino musician and songwriter Vic O. Cristobal (葛士培) and (I’m assuming Hong Kong) lyricist Ye Lü (葉綠) wrote a song called “Enjoy Yourself Tonight” (歡樂今宵) that was recorded…
Detergent, Sanitary Napkins, Air Hostesses and the Chinese Contribution to Modernity in Southeast Asia
I was looking at an issue from 1959 of a Chinese-language newspaper that was published in Bangkok, the Sing Sian Yit Pao (Xin Xian ribao 新暹日報), and I started to…
Kogyu’s Lost Bride and the Animation of Southeast Asian Folk Stories
I was reading Owen Rutter’s 1922 work, British North Borneo: An Account of its History, Resources, and Native Tribes, when I came across an interesting account about a “native” story…