Briefing MONTHLY #79 | December 2024
Year in review | Poll shocks from Japan to Sri Lanka | Pacific powerplays | Back to the future in ASEAN | PLUS: Holiday reading
Illustration by Rocco Fazzari.
LOOKING BACK
The stunning upheaval in South Korea over martial law this month had its origins in an earlier development that was little appreciated at the time: the big leftwing backlash from voters in the April National Assembly election that unsettled conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol.
Indeed, the pushback by opposition forces against established incumbents has been a feature of Asia’s big year of voting from the Solomon Islands to India. In a brief review of the year across our three main sections we examine this opposition electoral renaissance in NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH. In ASIAN NATION we look at the state of play in Australia’s own new Great Game – rebuilding trade ties with China while simultaneously trying to freeze it out of the Pacific backyard. And in DEALS AND DOLLARS we look at the latest push to build more economic ties with Southeast Asia.
And now for another look at the year that was, former foreign policy makers Heather Smith and Ric Smith took quite different tacks in big speeches this year on the Albanese government’s efforts to wrap itself in the rhetoric of statecraft to deal with regional tensions. They are worth a read. See: DIPLOMATICALLY SPEAKING
Our holiday reading this year takes a slightly different tack with separate selections of fiction and non-fiction writing over roughly the past year by Australians touching on Asia. It ranges from an ethereal take on the idea of a Chinese “ghost city” by emerging novelist Siang Lu, to a fascinating biography of the little-known Australian adviser behind Indonesia’s former President Soeharto. It is notable how the non-fiction tends to be written by Anglo-Australians and the fiction is dominated by people from an Asian diaspora background. See: HOLIDAY READING
Finally, something to ponder in the airport departure lounge, greenhouse gas emissions from travel are rising faster than the overall global economy. See DATAWATCH
Thanks for reading this year.
Greg Earl
Briefing MONTHLY editor
NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH
ELECTIONS: fighting back
India’s Narendra Modi adjusts to coalition life after the country’s election. Picture: PMO
With Donald Trump almost back in power and Emmanuel Macron hanging on by a thread in France, it is easy to overlook how opposition political forces have also had a remarkably successful electoral year across Asia. Despite the lingering influence of family dynasties, the rise of money politics, and growing social media manipulation, Asian voters have shown a capacity to look through those powerful forces and reject the ruling old guard.
In some cases, it has been a two-step process. In Bangladesh former prime minister Sheikh Hasina might have scripted yet another victory against a largely non-competing opposition in January. But the frustration and ill-feeling that this left behind meant she had to abandon the country within seven months. A new election is pending under caretaker Prime Minister Mohammad Yunus.
In others, like Japan, new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba remains in power at the head of a Liberal Democratic Party minority government after ineptly calling an early election in October. However, he is dependent on newish centrist parties to help fend off the leftwing mainstream opposition Constitutional Democracy Party and voters have more interesting choices than for many years.
Candidates associated with ousted jailed prime minister Imran Khan's relatively new Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) ran as independents in February after the party symbol was excluded from voting papers, but still won a third of the seats, embarrassing the army-favoured and once dominant Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz and the Pakistan People’s Party. The protests against the government are continuing.
In perhaps the most important voter backlash of the year in Asia, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was forced in June to govern in coalition for the first time in more than two decades as a state and federal leader, alongside two regional parties with a history of changing sides. Attention is now turning to what happens after Modi.
In September, a once obscure former Marxist Anura Kumara Dissanayake snared the Sri Lankan presidency pushing aside various family-based establishment forces, most notably the Rajapaksas. In November, his National People’s Power coalition won the biggest legislature landslide in the country’s history with 159 out of the 225 seats in parliament.
By December, the relatively overlooked backlash against conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol in the April National Assembly election produced the region’s most remarkable anti-democratic event this year with Yoon suddenly declaring martial law. Yoon had become a lame duck President when the notionally left-wing Democratic Party won 180 out of 300 seats in an unprecedented backlash against a sitting President.
The unpopular Yoon was forced to retract his martial law declaration within hours by the National Assembly and has now been impeached by the National Assembly and is facing both a corruption investigation and an impeachment trial in the Constitutional Court. The Democratic Party seems likely to win a new presidential election.
INDONESIA: polite democracy
There have, of course, been countervailing forces during Asia’s big year of voting. But even then, from Taiwan to the Solomon Islands, entrenched incumbents have faced challenges.
Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party won the presidency for the third time in a row in January reinforcing Taiwan’s separation from China. But it failed to win a majority in the legislature where the once ruling, but now opposition, Kuomintang and emerging Taiwan Peoples Party have been exerting their power. In the Solomons, the long time Prime Minister Mannaseh Sogavare stood down after the March election to help keep his party in power.
But Indonesia – once the region’s standout new democracy – presents the greatest conundrum in a year when oppositions have been making progress across the region. New President Prabowo Subianto is more part of the country’s ruling elite than his predecessor Joko Widodo after about five attempts at the presidency along with both a father and grandfather playing roles in the country’s governance back to colonial times.
When Prabowo called for a “polite democracy” in his inauguration speech after settling into power he raised the stakes for the country’s political future. Like his predecessor, he seems intent on building a grand coalition of parties to squeeze out alternative ideas and restrict capacity for alternative leaders to emerge. He has now raised the prospect of ending the direct election of provincial governors which has become a pathway for outsiders to challenge the Jakarta elite. The defeat of Prabowo's favoured candidate to be Jakarta governor in the November regional elections might be a line in the sand. Amid this hardening of the institutional arteries, Indonesia’s democratic future will depend more on continued elite rivalry, civil society resilience, and occasional pockets of judicial independence in an often corrupt and manipulated legal system.
ASIAN NATION
YIN AND YANG
A try … James Marape and Anthony Albanese on the Kokoda Track. Picture: PMO
It is now just under three years since the then Labor Opposition managed to prosecute an unusual foreign policy strand to the 2022 election campaign by arguing the Morrison government had “lost” the Pacific to China. With a new election looming, it seems highly unlikely the current Liberal Opposition will attempt a repeat.
That’s because the Albanese government has ended the year with a frenzy of initiatives to secure the Pacific, increasingly drawing its member nations into some form of compact with Australia without acknowledging what might once have been called neo-colonialism.
And all this has occurred as the government has painstakingly rebuilt official relations with China and removed the 2020 trade impediments with its biggest trading partner without conceding much apart from an absence of spiky rhetoric. The seafood industry is expecting Australian rock lobster to be back in China in late January in time for Chinese New Year finally ending the four year-long impediments to Australian mostly rural exports valued at about $20 billion a year. It says a lot about the overall scorecard from this trade row that the trade is flowing again but the Albanese government has not reversed any formal China policy decisions of the past two conservative governments and Chinese officials are still pushing for some signal of better treatment for Chinese investment. single
With the two competing policy objectives of maintaining Australian influence in the Pacific and regaining access to the Chinese export market substantially in place by the middle of the year, perhaps the most significant public admission from Foreign Minister Penny Wong was that competition with China in the Pacific was now a locked-in feature of Australian policy.
“We are now in a position where Australia is a partner of choice (in the Pacific) but the opportunity to be the only partner of choice has been lost by Mr Dutton and his colleagues. We are in a state of permanent contest in the Pacific. That is the reality,” she said in June between the first visit to Australia by a Chinese Premier in seven years and a major Australian ministerial visit to Papua New Guinea to expand cooperation in sectors such as policing.
RUGBY DIPLOMACY
One of the key changes the Labor government has made to the people-to-people aspect of diplomacy has been to reshape its notionally independent bilateral foundations and institutes into better funded centres. The Centre for Australia-India Relations, in Sydney, and the ASEAN-Australia Centre, in Canberra, were each launched this year joining the National Foundation for Australia-China Relations.
These bodies have annual budgets of respectively around $4 million, $6 million, and $7 million, according to the Budget. But the overarching priority for the Pacific is underlined by the way about $600 million a year over a decade alone is being devoted to bringing a PNG team into the National Rugby League competition, which was announced last week, and other Pacific sports diplomacy.
There is sometimes now a murky dividing line between the more than $2 billion a year of official development aid spending in the Pacific and the spate of non-aid strategic initiatives like the rugby team which have been built on the Pacific labour import program to fend off Chinese influence seeking in the region. But by any measure this year has seen a remarkable “step-up” in the Pacific, almost a decade after that phrase started coming into use. The list below shows how Australia’s historical and cultural links in the Pacific can provide a basis for fending off China’s greater financial, population, and military power.
Sport: PNG team in the NRL by 2028 in return for a new security agreement
Banking: ANZ Bank deal to keep Pacific offices open
Nauru: Treaty provides banking services, $100 million Budget support and $40 million policing support over five years
Police: $400 million initiative to train Pacific police in Brisbane and create a mobile police support group for emergencies.
Tuvalu: Falepili Union allows immigration to Australia due to climate change.
Diplomacy: $200 million for new consulates over four years.
PNG Budget: PNG has received $2.5 billion in direct Budget loans in the past four years.
Solomons: Australia to help double the police force to 3000 officers.
Fiji Budget: $87 million in grant support for financial reform.
Broadcasting: Indo-Pacific broadcasting strategy channels ABC and other programming to the Pacific.
Telecommunications: QUAD cable centre gives Australia more influence over sub-sea cable evolution.
DEALS AND DOLLARS
CHAMPIONS OF CHANGE
Penny Wong speaking at the Asia Summit Picture: AFR
It says a lot about the Albanese government’s biggest single Asian business policy initiative – in Southeast Asia – that Foreign Minister Penny Wong has increasingly marked the year with regular criticism of apparent business disinterest.
With a captive audience of the very people she thinks have not been listening, her speech to The Australian Financial Review/Asia Society Australia Asia Summit in September took this frustration to a new level.
“We have a good foundation in our free trade agreements across the region, but Australia's trade and investment has simply not kept pace – and we need to turn this around,” Wong said. “I feel like I say this over and over again and people look at me and nod and move on … Our trade is not keeping pace with growth, and it is insufficiently diversified to maximise benefit. Our investment is similarly underweight … We're simply not keeping up.”
After various government spending initiatives on infrastructure and diplomatic presence in the government’s early months ahead of the long-planned Summit of Association of Southeast Asians Nations (ASEAN) leaders in March, this year has been about a detailed new economic engagement framework. The key elements include:
- Investment: The $2 billion Southeast Asia Investment Finance Facility run by Export Finance Australia to support trade and investment, especially in clean energy and infrastructure.
- Business: Ten “champions” to improve public and private sector links into the region. Landing Pads in Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh City, and Singapore to boost technology exports and digital commerce. New Business Exchange missions with better follow-up.
- Visas: Business Visitor Visa extended from three to five years. New Frequent Traveller stream providing 10-year visa for eligible countries.
Wong’s criticism of business for not taking up this new government focus on Southeast Asia reflects a somewhat ahistorical quality to the government’s whole approach which fails to acknowledge how Southeast Asia has been talked up in the past. But the Asia Summit discussions provided three insights into how the current business zeitgeist may have evolved on Asia engagement.
- There has been clear generational change from those burnt by the Asian financial crisis so soon after the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation group/Paul Keating era of business enthusiasm for the region which has dampened the mood ever since.
- There also seems to be more preparedness for sharing experiences on the ground in the region across a wider range of countries and business sectors than was seen in past periods of engagement stretching back decades.
- And the maturing of the Asian diaspora here with the Australian-educated children of the diaspora sometimes returning to their families’ countries of origin as businesspeople is another fundamental change.
DIPLOMATICALLY SPEAKING
The best of statecraft derives from ideas – and ideas come from individuals with energy who are not only empowered but also in a personal sense are wired to think. The fact is that when it comes to policy making and advising, what matters is not the number of people engaged in it, or whether the agency responsible has a functioning policy planning branch – but whether enough of those people are endowed with imagination, and the courage and wit to express it.
- Former Defence Department secretary and China ambassador Ric Smith delivering the Allan Gyngell Lecture (June 14)
The key lesson from history, and the first necessary challenge for Australia to navigate in a fragmenting world, is that for industrial policies to be potentially effective they must be accompanied by a suite of smart polices and enablers – a strong private sector and a credible macroeconomic framework. As Australia also engages in interventionist industry policy, we must be ever vigilant about whether we are backing long-term economic winners and building competitive advantage or entities that, while strategically critical, may never be economically viable.
- Australian Institute of International Affairs national president and former Industry, Innovation and Science Department secretary Heather Smith delivering the AIIA annual address (November 16)
DATAWATCH
TRAVEL HOTSPOTS
Carbon emissions from tourism are growing twice as fast as the global economy reflecting low green technology efficiency in that sector and rising travel. Asia’s most populous countries are big contributors to this dimension of global warming but so are popular destination countries such as Thailand.
Residence-based accounting (RBA) measures emissions resulting from residents’ domestic and outbound travel, while destination-based accounting (DBA) measures emissions from domestic and inbound tourism activities occurring within a country. The domestic travel footprint is presented in grey, the inbound tourism footprint in green, and the outbound tourism footprint in blue.
Source: University of Queensland/Nature Communications
ON THE HORIZON
Donald Trump with Kim Jong-un in 2019
Donald Trump will be sworn in for the second time as US President on January 20 paving the way for a spate of first day measures which will likely include new tariffs on Chinese imports.
Most of the other promised early measures don’t have a direct relevance to Asia. The threatened additional 10 per cent tariff on Chinese goods may be specifically linked to demands that China implements the death penalty for all drug dealers trafficking fentanyl, rather than broader balance of trade issues which appear likely to be taken up later.
- At Nikkei Asian Review, Toru Takahashi says Asian nations are mostly focusing on the new Administration through the prism of whether they have a trade surplus with the US.
- At East Asia Forum, Gary Hufbauer says Trump will undermine US global leadership for short term trade gains.
- At The Diplomat, Christopher Featherstone says Trump will try to challenge China and North Korea.
Non-fiction
GREAT GAME ON by Geoff Raby (MUP)
Inspired by the chaotic United States withdrawal from Afghanistan, the former Australian ambassador to Beijing delves into the return of Eurasia in global power politics as China increasingly fills the role once occupied by Britain, Russia (then the Soviet Union) and the US. He argues that reduction of China’s longstanding security constraints and anxieties in Core Eurasia has freed it up to pursue becoming a global maritime power with enormous global consequences. “The Great Game has shifted from being a contest within the heartland, to a struggle between the heartland and the rimland,” he says.
OCCIDENTAL PREACHER, ACCIDENTAL TEACHER: The enigmatic Clive Williams, Volume One, 1921-1968 by Shannon Smith (Big Hill Publishing)
When much of the contemporary discussion about Australia’s relationship with Asia often involves laments about “lack of depth”, this book reveals one of the deepest personal links in the latter part of the twentieth century. Geelong-born Clive Williams’ relationship with Indonesia’s authoritarian President Soeharto could have almost been lost to history but for a couple of references when he died in 2001. Since then, Smith has done a remarkable job uncovering the origins and then life in Indonesia of the erstwhile gay Jehovah’s Witness missionary who became an English teacher, business adviser, and diplomatic interlocutor for Soeharto’s family. His role was kept quiet by Australian diplomats, and Smith writes: “Beyond that, to every single person who ever came across Clive Williams, he was a puzzle, a riddle, a mystery, an enigma.”
GIRT BY SEA: Re-Imagining Australia’s Security by Rebecca Strating and Joanna Wallis (Black Inc)
The gradual redefining of Australia’s strategic domain from Asia-Pacific to Indo-Pacific has focused more attention on the country’s maritime character amid three oceans and with three (Timor, Arafura, and Coral) seas to the north. This book by two scholars contributes to this shift in thinking by asking questions about challenges including a less siloed approach to defence; the country’s real strengths and limitations; and how to view other countries from this maritime perspective rather than simply by raw power or size.
GROWING UP INDIAN IN AUSTRALIA edited by Aarti Betigeri (Black Inc)
The latest edition of Black Inc’s now quite diverse series about growing up in Australia provides a window on the experiences of what is now the country’s largest single diaspora by country of birth. This book takes a slightly smaller slice of the Indian community by focusing on those who were at least partly educated here but it nonetheless provides an insight into this community which is now making an impact on electoral politics. With humour and pathos, the various contributors provide diverse alternatives to the idea of there being one unified politically influential Indian community.
THE AUSTRALIAN EMBASSY IN TOKYO AND AUSTRALIA-JAPAN RELATIONS. Edited by Kate Darian-Smith and David Lowe (ANU Press)
The deepening of the Australian relationship with Japan over recent years has often been seen through the prism of various changing Australian prime ministers keeping up with the long-serving late Shinzo Abe. But this book goes behind the role of political leaders over the post-Pacific War period to examine the role of diplomacy through the prism of the Australian embassy. It draws on former ambassadors and current academics to examine the institutional role of the embassy in many spheres of life. They range from the design of the buildings themselves to the cultural connections between the two countries that have often grown from Embassy initiatives, in addition to the mainstream diplomatic work of trade and treaties.
HOW TO LOSE A WAR: the story of America’s intervention in Afghanistan by Amin Saikal (Yale University Press)
While ANU academic Amin Saikal draws parallels between the British experience in Afghanistan in the 1880s and the US withdrawal in 2021, he argues that while the western occupation changed the country’s political landscape it didn’t deal with its underlying modern problems. He says the constitutional structure adopted in 2004 had huge flaws because it created a system of government that was too centralised. The strong presidency which dominated the legislature created a winner-takes-all mentality that meant regional strongmen had little formal power but plenty of capacity to spoil the western dream of a changed country.
THE DIGGERS OF KAPYONG: The story of the Aussies who changed the course of the Korean War by Tom Gilling (Allen and Unwin)
In early 1951, after ten months of fighting in the Korean War, a single Australian battalion in stood between the invading Chinese Communist army and the South Korean capital of Seoul. This new account of a crucial battle in the Korean War, by novelist Tom Gilling, helps flesh out the Australian role in defending South Korea’s independence during the Korean War and thus putting it on the pathway to becoming one of our biggest trading partners. While the navy and air force played roles in the conflict, most of fighting was done on the ground by soldiers of the Royal Australian Regiment with Australian soldiers twice as likely to die compared with the Vietnam war.
ON XI JINPING: How Xi’s Marxist Nationalism is Shaping China and the World by Kevin Rudd (Oxford University Press)
The former prime minister, former Asia Society president, and current Ambassador to Washington argues that the Chinese president’s worldview is quite different from the leaders who came before him and that ideological shift is being seen in the way modern China interacts with the world. He frames this worldview as “Marxist-Leninist nationalism” and details how this has taken economic management further to the left compared with his predecessors, but foreign policy has shifted more to the nationalist right.
THE ODD COUPLE by Alan Behm (Upswell Publishing)
Behm, a former diplomat and political adviser, veers away from seeing himself as an historian of the US-Australian relationship but nonetheless has provided a timely framework for thinking about the relationship amid the uncertainty surrounding how incoming president Donald Trump will deal with allies and the world. He asks who Australia would depend on if it did not have America; and argues this is a question few are prepared to ask or try to answer, leaving Australia “adrift on its continent in a region that it does not understand”.
MODEL MINORITY GONE ROGUE by Qin Qin (Hachette)
In this self-described story of how an “unfulfilled daughter of a tiger mother went way off script”, the author, who was born in south-west China and grew up in Canberra, explains how she adopted the “model minority stereotype”. This trope is often used to explain Asian migrant success stories, but Qin Qin says it is a dangerous myth that can be used to pit non-white communities against each other. After starting out as an unhappy over-achiever, Qin Qin explains with good humour how she changed her life from the cultural pressure to succeed at all costs.
TONY TAN’S ASIAN COOKING CLASS by Tony Tan (Murdoch Books)
Growing up on the east coast of Malaysia as the son of Hainanese immigrants, Tony Tan learnt to prepare food from a neighbourhood diaspora of Peranakan Chinese, Malay and Tamil Indian cooks. During his subsequent life in Australia, Britain, and France, he built on that knowledge and now teaches cooking. This book shares for the first time more than 150 of his most cooked recipes embracing both contemporary and classic dishes from Malaysia, China, Vietnam, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and more.
Fiction
SAFE HAVEN by Shankari Chandran (Ultimo)
This successor novel to the Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens from 2022 continues with the uncertainties of refugee life in Australia after having escaped the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka. The book tells the story of a nun escaping the war for detention in Australia. It is in turn a polemic about the war and Australia’s treatment of refuges, a political thriller about misuse of power, and an examination of friendship as a rural community come to the aid of the nun.
DIRT POOR ISLANDERS by Winnie Dunn (Hachette)
In an ironic echo of the groundbreaking Crazy Rich Asians, Winnie Dunn has produced the first novel about the Australian Tongan community, adding to the now substantial body of fiction by second generation migrants combining elements of fiction and autobiography. This book is also a passionate corrective to the image of Tongan migrants provided by that other major Tongan popular culture figure in the firm of Jonah in the Summer Heights High television series. The main character Megan is a writer also trying to negotiate life between modern Australia, a Scottish heritage, and a Tongan domestic life.
THE WHITE COCKATOO FLOWERS by Ouyang Yu (Transit Lounge)
The yellow crest of the iconic Aussie white cockatoo on the cover of this collection of short stories hints at the tensions over the mostly Chinese migrant experience in the writing inside. Yu’s first collection of such stories in English mostly delves into experiences in individualistic in Australia but also contains reflections on collectivist life in China. For example, he ponders how Australians go away for the holidays, but Asians tend to come together; each different sorts of migration. The stories are tender, but cynical, with quite a literary flavour given some of the characters are writers.
GHOST CITIES by Siang Lu (UQP)
Siang Lu has established himself in the Australian literary world for using absurd humour to explore racial issues with his first novel The Whitewash (2022) set in Hollywood, and other platforms to explore the ethnic makeup of this world. Ghost Cities is inspired by the vacant, uninhabited megacities of China but uses multiple narratives, including one in which a young man is fired from his job as a translator at Sydney’s Chinese Consulate after it is discovered he doesn’t speak a word of Chinese and has been relying entirely on Google Translate. His relocation to a ghost city as part of a movie team intersects with the life of a mythical self-destructive ancient emperor.
THEORY AND PRACTICE by Michelle de Kretser (Text Publishing)
This seventh novel from the two-time Myles Franklin Award winner is set in St Kilda exploring both the literary and personal lives of the main protagonists. But it nevertheless contains influences from Sri-Lankan born de Kretser’s origins and more substantial reflections on the impact of colonialism in Australia.
36 WAYS OF WRITING A VIETNAMESE POEM by Nam Le (Scribner)
Fifteen years after his best-selling book of short stories The Boat, Nam Le has broken through another frontier with a book length debut as a poet after publishing poems in other places. The poem, or perhaps poems, shift between seering criticism of war and treatment of refugees to more lyrical passages reflecting on diaspora life and drawing on different literary approaches.
CHINESE POSTMAN by Brian Castro (Giramondo)
Hong Kong-born Brian Casto’s novels often deal with the intersection of borders and home and this one does the same through the lens of Abe Quin who bears a passing resemblance to Castro as the author of many books, a Chinese Jewish retired university teacher, and a former postman. Abe lives a quiet life in Adelaide, sifting through various aspects of his existence through letters read or discarded which gives the book the feeling of autofiction although Castro has questioned this term.
ANAM by Andre Dao (Hamish Hamilton)
The unnamed central character in this novel is child of Vietnamese refugees. He moves from Melbourne to study at Cambridge but becomes caught up with tracing his family past amid 20th century Vietnamese history. This narrator uses oral history, historical facts and bits of family memory reclaim the family’s life from the colonial era conflicts but in turn leaves the reader pondering different ways of thinking about the past.
THE BURROW by Melanie Cheng (Text Publishing)
Perhaps more pandemic literature than diaspora writing, Melanie Chen’s new book nevertheless reflects her bi-cultural part-Chinese background. But the references to instances like Chinese taxi-drivers speeding away from houses with unlucky numbers are delivered as very much part of mainstream Australia rather than examples of isolation from that Australia. This is a story about how the adoption of a rabbit during a Melbourne lockdown helps a family recover from past trauma.
ONLY SOUND REMAINS by Hossein Asgari (Puncher and Wattman)
This is the first novel from Iranian-born Asgari, who worked in Malaysia as a physicist before becoming an Adelaide-based writer steeped in the diasporic literature of his birth country. So, to some extent it appears to reflect his personal story as the protagonist, an Adelaide-based Iranian writer reluctant to return home, welcomes his father coming to visit him. The dual narratives that unfold are about fathers and sons, changing Iranian culture, and the difficulties of truth telling.
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