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Jeongnyeon: The Star Is Born on Disney+ may be one of 2024’s best K-dramas. The intense and melodramatic historical drama centers around Jeongnyeon, a young and talented woman who wants to join a “Gukgeuk” theater troupe. “Gukgeuk” is a traditional Korean all-female theatrical performance that combines traditional “pansori” with drama and dance to create an enigmatic live theater experience. Jeongnyeon is, from the start, a genius “pansori” singer, but her mother makes her promise she’ll never sing in front of a crowd. Talent isn’t something you can lock away in a closed drawer and forget about; it grows passionately within you, and Jeongnyeon can’t help herself. When she sings in the local market because a group of thugs are trying to harass the hawkers (including herself) as usual, the “prince” of the Maeran theater asks her to come see one of their performances. From a small village,...

This is courtesy of British-Australian teacher, rights activist, author and cartoonist Colin Cotterill, who, with his Dr Siri series set in Laos of the mid-1970s-early 1980s, evocatively brings out the life, social mores and norms, and politics of this sole landlocked Southeast Asian country.

The time period is equally important in depicting Southeast Asia when it was far from the tourist paradise of today and impacted by superpower rivalry – particularly, Laos, then in the throes of revolutionary change too.

While people usually remember 1970s in Southeast Asia for the Vietnam war – and then the Khmer Rouge’s depredations in Cambodia, Laos was also impacted. Like its eastern neighbour’s Viet Cong, it had a Communist movement (Pathet Lao), also born in France in the 1930s, and active since the end of World War II when colonial ruler France returned to take control. Dragged willy-nilly dragged into the Vietnam conflict,...