Innehållsförteckning för November 2016 från Womankind

The thought of losing the tiger to extinction is a real possibility with little more than a few thousand left in the wild. In 2010, officials from 13 countries with tiger populations gathered in St Petersburg, Russia, for the International Forum on Tiger Conservation. In what was essentially a state of emergency, the forum pledged to double tiger numbers by 2022. The program, known as TX2, or Tigers Times Two, is the first time governments have committed to a global target for wild animals. At the 3rd conference held in New Delhi this year, the initiative had already proven results with tiger numbers reportedly up by 690. Marco Lambertini, Director General of World Wildlife Fund WWF (WWF) International, which is the largest contributor, said initiatives such as these prove that…

My first son died when he was nine, in a hit-and-run accident. It was in the early morning of the second day of Lunar New Year. He crossed the street to open the cemetery’s gate for people to visit the graves. I had just seen him sitting on a chair in our house a few moments before neighbours called me out to check whether the body laying on the road was his. At the scene, I could only recognise him by his clothes and sandals, with the key of the cemetery still in the palm of his small hand. In that very same year, I lost two other sons. My second kid was two years old when he was infected with smallpox. Being in the final month of pregnancy with…

When investigating her book Threadbare: Clothes, Sex, and Trafficking, author Anne Elizabeth Moore remembers one woman’s story in particular. A farmer’s wife, she toiled ten hours a day, six days per week in a garment factory. With no one at home she sent her child away, to grow up in the provinces with relatives. Next door, her neighbour wanted desperately to keep her son close “so she padlocked him in her apartment when she was gone during the day,” says Moore. “The woman I was speaking to didn’t want to do that. She was already affected too deeply by that kid’s screams.” Despite her hard work, the only meat she could afford was rotten. Such stories are common across Asia in the factories that churn out cheap clothes for Western…

What’s important in life? Is it the clothes you wear or the house you own? Does it matter what university degree you hold or the exotic places listed on your passport? A good way to assess what matters most in life is to list what you like most in other people. On the following page choose five people you know well and underneath their names list five things that you like most about them. What qualities stand tall as the important ones? This list will give you a good idea of what matters most to you.…

GROWING UP, THE STORIES OF MY FAMILY’S BOAT JOURNEYS TRICKLED DOWN TO MY CHILDISH WORLD IN PIECEMEAL FASHION. My aunt Huong, a gangly thirteen-year-old girl, sat hemmed in by the 109 other bodies aboard the too-small fishing boat. She had been seasick for the whole journey, from the moment the boat - hoping to avoid patrolling navy boats searching for escapees - pushed out from the estuarine reeds. Now the ocean stretched endlessly in every direction, a menacing blue expanse. The food had run out days ago - there had only been enough for 40 people to begin with - and now the water supply was beginning to dwindle too. An old woman was slowly dying. Huong had travelled to the coast with her brother, Dinh, but he had been…

War traditionally conjures up imagery of a specific type of violence. Inevitably, these images are masculinised: men in fatigues, riding tanks, raising flags, assault rifles slung over their shoulders - these are heuristics for heroism. Men are seen to pull the strings and make the decisions, inflicting brutality on to each other on the battlefield. Military defeat is the purest form of emasculation. But the symbolism of women in wartime is subject to different interpretations. Conventional conceptions of gender reign: talk of the ‘motherland’ invokes feminine attributes of innocence and virtue. Womanhood entails sacrifice. But the realities on the ground are more complex. Women are often subjected to war’s atrocities, but they can also be willing participants in it. The Vietnam War is a case in point. “[Women] did everything……

Womankind : You are originally from France, yet you live in Vietnam. What prompted the move? Sylvain Marcelle: Yes, indeed, I live in Ho Chi Minh City. My school friends created a tourism company in Indonesia, and asked me to set up a similar model under the same company in Vietnam. I started to travel around Vietnam for one year, and I fell in love with the country. How long have you lived in Vietnam? I’ve lived in Vietnam for nearly 10 years now. What do you like most about living in Vietnam? The Vietnamese are very curious and like to speak with foreigners. They ask a lot of questions and welcome you with their heart. I appreciate the optimism of the people even when they are poor. It's…

Malik explores the history of moral thought as it has developed over three millennia, from Homer’s Greece to Mao’s China, from ancient India to modern America. It tells the stories of the great philosophers, and breathes life into their ideas, while also challenging many of our most cherished moral beliefs. Engaging and provocative, The Quest for a Moral Compass confronts some of humanity’s deepest questions. Where do values come from? Are there absolute moral truths?…

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It all started on the night of 14 February, 2015, when I hit the ‘share’ button for my very first video on social media, and began the path of a vlogger. I was scared at the time. In our society, a woman being publicly humorous is still considered abnormal, unconventional, even unacceptable. It is quite understandable given that families still persuade their daughters to prioritise marriage over career; pursuing a passion is regarded as a luxury. Friends of my mum sometimes tell her that it is worrying to have a daughter who isn’t married by age 28. But I am lucky to have a mother who believes that happiness is doing what you love, and finding someone who you feel connected to, not just to ‘achieve’ something at a certain…

Please describe for us the view from your window? The characteristic buildings from London with their brick walls, dense trees, and unexpected visitors like foxes and crows that wander around the neighbourhood. I love watching the foxes from my window, especially when the mums and dads go out for a walk with their cubs when the weather is nice. Please describe for us your typical day as an artist. The first thing I do when I wake up... have some breakfast, as I really need some fuel in the morning before I sit at my desk and start working. If I have a lot of work to do, I stay at home all day working on different projects, answering emails, writing letters to send together with postcards as self-promotion. If…

Kathryn Vincent Day one: I spent most of the day in tears today. It rained the whole day, and I took it upon myself to walk up our local mountain, near where I live. I kept crying the whole way up, alarming a few fellow mountain walkers coming the other way. After I while, the rain mixed with my tears, and I didn’t feel like the drops on my cheeks were mine anymore. Kangaroos are hard to spot in scrub like that, melding into the grey landscape until you look left and find yourself literally eye-to-eye with one. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly when, but after some time it felt as though I had left the sad centre that was my mind that day and had become wholly…

  Born in Ho Chi Minh City, realist painter Lim Khim Katy found her wonderland in the creation of landscape paintings of sweet, peaceful places. Please describe your childhood for us? As my father always said, there are several artists among my relatives. Painters and sculptors, they used to work as decorators in pagoda constructions. My father, who is Cambodian, was a skilful cinema painter during the 1950s-60s in Phnom Penh. He continued his vocation for numerous years when he moved to Vietnam and married a Vietnamese woman - my mother. I grew up with the smell of oil colours. I became a painter’s assistant for my father at age twelve, colouring his figure outlines for the cinema, and for advertising posters. We only had gouache colours to draw on…

WINNER The Artist’s Model, by British photographer Sarah Mills. This surreal image taken on a beach in Brighton, UK, is, according to the photographer, “of a man who likes to dabble in the arts in his spare time, drawing his girlfriend.” SECOND PLACE In the Studio, by Canadian photographer and calligraphy artist Laura Lavender. THIRD PLACE Cooperation with the California Desert Sun, by US photographer Stepfanie Aguilar “I followed my mother, 61, who loves to garden. California is going through a drought, in which we have to be mindful about how much water we use... These plants are her babies and they are suffering from the triple-digit desert dry heat and sun. She hasn’t lost all hope. I told her ahead of time that I wanted to take pictures of…

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace is the moving diary kept by a 27-year-old Vietnamese doctor who was killed by the Americans during the Vietnam War, while trying to defend her patients. Not only is it an important slice of history, but it shows the diarist - Dang Thuy Tram - as a vibrant human being, full of youthful idealism, a poetic longing for love, trying hard to be worthy of the Party and doing her best to look after her patients under appalling conditions.…

One of Australia’s elite private schools, Sydney Grammar, has banned laptops and tablets in school, requiring students to handwrite their essays instead. Sydney Grammar’s headmaster, Dr John Vallance, a Cambridge scholar, believes that computers and tablets at school are distracting, inhibit social activity and conversation, and have not brought any measurable benefit for students. Billions of dollars have been funnelled to technology companies in recent years to buy laptops, interactive whiteboards, and digital computers (that regularly break, become superseded, and encourage teachers to slacken off). Effectively, powerful technology lobby groups have siphoned off funds that could have been spent on staff and other resources. Calling it a “scandalous waste of money”, Dr Vallance reportedly said that, in hindsight, this unprecedented surge in funding classroom technology would be viewed as a…

I arrived in Saigon in 1995 in the hope of changing my children’s future. When I left Quang Ngai, my youngest child was just one year old and our four-member family lived in a mud-brick house. Back home we had a small piece of land to grow rice. But storms and floods struck the region, so there were years we couldn’t even yield a grain of rice. My husband went to Saigon first and tried various jobs. We were neighbours who fell in love and got married in 1990. I was 25. Two years later we welcomed our first son. I was born to a poor peasant family with six older brothers and sisters. I am the youngest of seven kids. We were raised to be independent because my parents…

The sprawling, commercial heart of Vietnam always changes so rapidly - but then, I’m always changing as well, altered in some fundamental way by each trip. It’s my fourth visit in five years to what’s officially known as Ho Chi Minh City, otherwise still known as Saigon. On previous trips I’d spent time with my maternal family; but our fragile bond had fractured again, the decades of disconnection impossible to repair. However, there’s an upside to being away from familial connections. I’m freer to wear my different hats now: Australian, Vietnamese, tourist, returnee, foreigner, pilgrim. Minh, my host, collects me from the airport on a white vintage Vespa. We’d exchanged messages in English, but it’s soon apparent that my Vietnamese is better than his English. “Older sister are you hungry?”…

The Buddha remarked on the impact of perspective when he said, “Life is a creation of the mind.” Shakespeare put it this way when he said, “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” And the psychologist William James wrote, “Only those things I notice shape my mind.” Perspective influences everything. What happens in life is only part of the story; perspective accounts for what we see and the meaning we make of it. The more I soak in the psychological atmosphere of our culture today through news, journalism, social media, and conversations with colleagues, patients, friends, and family, the more I grow concerned that we are being shaped to see the world from a negative perspective, through a decidedly cynical lens. We are bombarded with images…

“How did the tiger get its stripes?” asks an old Vietnamese myth. One answer reverberates centuries later, embedded in another country’s, another culture’s, verse: by burning, burning bright. For years, tigers both real and imaginary terrorised the forests of the night, the focal point of countless legends, stories, and fears. But these days, that influence is waning. In recent years, the possibility of extinction has threatened the wild tigers of South East Asia, and in some countries, the possibility of that threat has come true. In Cambodia, the Indochinese tiger was recently, in the spring of 2016, declared functionally extinct; in neighbouring Vietnam and Laos, as few as thirty tigers each may be left in each nation. In total, the entire wild Indochinese tiger population was estimated in 2010 to…

When I discover work I admire - be it a novel, a film, a project, or an installation - I’m obsessed with mapping out the owner’s career trajectory and gathering clues as to how old they were during various life and career achievements. If I have not surpassed that age, I feel elated and inspired. If I have, I experience the inescapable dread of feeling behind in life. Often it’s not just other people’s accomplishments that spur on this feeling that I am lacking in some area of my life, but my own expectations. There is an endless list of goals to be thinner, fitter, happier, kinder, better read, more respected, generous, accomplished, desired, and nurturing. Such traits will ultimately culminate in being special. Women in particular are often at…

SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE Bennelong Point, Sydney, Australia Othello 25 OCTOBER – 4 DECEMBER 2016 A warrior on the fields of war, felled by the sharpness of whispered words, Othello is a man swept up in desire, quickly turned to murderous rage when he is betrayed by his military brother-in-arms, the cynically destructive Iago. Artistic Director Peter Evans will direct the Bell Shakespeare production of one of William Shakespeare’s most famous and passionate tragedies. www.sydneyoperahouse.com/whatson/ bsc_2016_othello.aspx FESTIVAL Melbourne, Australia Mapping Melbourne 1 – 17 DECEMBER 2016 Multicultural Arts Victoria presents Mapping Melbourne 2016, a festival of multi-artform events from 1-17 December 2016 showcasing independent contemporary artists exploring the theme of Asia and identity. The festival encompasses a series of visual art, live art, music, contemporary dance, public programs, and new multidisciplinary…