Culture

“For ten years now, I’ve never missed a single Chinese fair,” says Ly Thi Xuan, who is of the Hoa ethnic group from Pho Bang town in Dong Van district, Ha Giang province in north-eastern Vietnam.

 The ‘Chinese fair’ is a weekly one held just five kilometres from this town -- but across the border in Yunnan, China, with which mountainous Ha Giang shares a border. Like Ly Thi Xuan, Pho Bang residents consider this fair in Ma Pung commune in Dong Cac district in Yunnan a big event, akin to a fair.

I saw only elderly people and children when I arrived in Nali village, home to some 200 people of the Tai ethnic group in northern Honghe valley in Yuanyang county, China’s Yunnan province. “Where have the young people gone?” I asked Li Xiaomei, a Tai woman who at 91 was busy making a clay pot in the same way her ancestors have done pottery for generations.

Female employees at a Chinese garment factory. 

PHNOM PENH (Imaging Our Mekong)- The air was choking hot; the sun shone brightly. Motorcycles were weaving their way through the busy traffic of vehicles and pedestrians as dust flew around on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital. Row upon row of establishments flashed by, before we came upon an inconspicuous sign with five Chinese characters: ‘Jia Hua Gong Ye Yuan’, or the Jiahua Industrial Park.

PHNOM PENH - While English remains the most popular foreign language among students in Cambodia, Chinese, Japanese and Korean are fast catching up as young Khmers increasingly view them as a gateway to better jobs in the country’s growing industrial and tourism sectors.

BANGKOK -- Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. What images might these words conjure up in the minds of international consumers of news? Perhaps war, maybe the Khmer Rouge. Or they might say, ‘Oh, it’s that those countries that had that war some time ago. . . they’re near one another, and they’re all the same’. 

 

QUANG TRI, Vietnam – Ho Long’s family farm has 2,000 banana trees, from which they can pick some 20 bunches of the fruit each day. But unlike other families, Ho Long does not sell the harvested bananas in his mountain farm. Instead, twice a day, he hops on his Minsk motorbike and drives some five kilometres to the crossroads to sell their produce.

Last year, four theater groups got together to plan how to make an impact on the Thai contemporary theatre scene. Now, the plan is in operation, and a number of small theatre spaces have emerged around Bangkok. The question is: How big will this impact be? Paul Chen finds out.

Many women in Thailand’s theatre industry have not always stepped up to the challenge of writing and directing their own plays. Paul Chen talks to four of them that have, and are inspiring others to do so through the Women in the Moon Festival. 

PHNOM PENH, Jun 6 (Newsmekong) - It was just 8 a.m. on a Sunday
morning, but 78-year-old farmer You Song had visited almost all the
places inside the Royal Palace here in the Cambodian capital.

 

It was more than a century ago, in 1901, that French colonialists began to build a railway from Hai Phong in Vietnam to Kunming, in China’s south-western Yunnan province. By the time the railway construction reached the terminal in Kunming, it was Mar. 31, 1910.