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  • Grief (1)

    Grief (1)

    1.

    The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

    I first started reading it after I’d transferred out of biology, funnily enough. It helped pass the time while I camped out with my parents or my uncle in my grandfather’s hospital room.

    By then, we already possessed an unwilling familiarity with the basic vocabulary of cancer: the different stages and what it meant for my grandfather’s illness to be at Stage 3; the different grades and what it meant for my grandfather’s tumors to be classified “high-grade”; the different treatments available and what they meant for my grandfather’s chances and quality of life.

    The book helped add context. I suspected, at the time, that reading was a desperate attempt to sustain an illusion of control: understanding more of the mechanisms and history of the disease would be my small part in helping my grandfather confront it.

    In retrospect, it feels more like an oblique approach towards acceptance. None of us actually wanted to articulate the enormity of the disease, because that was tantamount to admitting how paltry our options were.

    So, for the longest time, I let the book do that for me, under the guise of expanding my ability to navigate the situation. It was a clear, cogent map of cancer: the slow evolution of science’s understanding of it; the lulls and wrong turns and significant leaps forward in terms of treatment; and how, ultimately, all of this still fell short of any definitive cure.

    There’s a quote that’s become attached to my memories of this book:

    “The best thing for being sad … is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails.”

    T.H. White, “The Once and Future King”

    2.

    One of my aunts — my godmother — died last year.

    She was my mother’s cousin, one of the daughters of my grandmother’s favourite sister. She was at my grandmother’s house at least once a week, sneaking us Maltesers and See’s Candies, spiriting us off to their house in Batangas to go swimming on the weekends. She had the same travel bug as the rest of that side of the family, jetting off to a new country every year and bringing back suitcases of pasalubong each time. Every Christmas, there would be a pile of gifts by the tree, all tagged with cards written in her firm script.

    The week before my mom’s birthday, I got a message from her saying that my godmother had been hospitalised. Metastases in her intestines; none of us even knew she was sick. She was scheduled for surgery the next day.

    After the surgery, her doctors said, once she had recovered her strength, she would need to undergo chemotherapy.

    After the surgery, she had a stroke. After the stroke, she caught pneumonia. After that, the week of my mom’s birthday, the family gathered for her funeral. They sent me updates on WhatsApp.

    This Christmas, there was more space around the tree because we no longer had half of the gifts that would usually be there. Everyone still tiptoed around it anyway.

    What did I learn between one loss to cancer and the next? Nothing that helps make anything easier, to be honest.

    There have been more in the years between, of course. Different diagnoses, different stages and grades. I can’t recount them all.

    I started re-reading the book again last year, and finished it again just last week, during the first weekend of the new year.

    In the book’s last chapter, when Mukherjee charts the latest efforts to advance targeted cancer therapies by sequencing the disease’s genome, he emphasises the gulf between understanding and treatment: Identifying particular biological mechanisms and pathways that drive the disease is one thing, but translating that knowledge into therapeutic strategies is another challenge altogether.

    More so because each cancer genome, as genetic research has now validated, is unique. Or, as Mukherjee put it, in what probably wasn’t a jab for me in particular but felt like one anyway, “Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.”

    This heterogeneity is part of what makes the disease so intractable. Funny how, emotionally speaking, it’s the apparent homogeneity of outcomes that makes cancer so daunting.

    3.

    One of our friends had been uncharacteristically silent online for weeks. We were all in different countries. The fastest way anyone had to physically check up on him was to book a 1.5 hour flight and cab over to his apartment.

    We had, instead, tried various messaging and social media platforms, but received no response. For a while we thought he was just on some kind of digital “detox,” as some people in our friend group have done from time to time.

    When we eventually got hold of one of his friends who lived in the same country, we found out that he had been in the ICU, in a coma, for over a month. There had been some kind of issue with his brain; he was awake now, but had some speech and vision problems — the details remained hazy.

    He is awake, but slow to recovery, came one of the first few updates. The family will move him to another hospital once he is doing better.

    He’ll get discharged tomorrow, was the next update. He can see better now, but still has some speech delay.

    Do they finally know what the diagnosis is? one of my friends, based in the Netherlands and evidently staying up for news, replied.

    There’s inflammation on his brain, but his mother didn’t get what kind of virus. The doctor isn’t here so I can’t ask the details.

    No problem, our friend replied. As long as it’s not tumour/terminal stuff, I’m a lot relieved. Guess we all are.

    Then, towards the end of November:

    He seems to be healthy enough to use social media again!

    Yes, I can call and talk to him last Saturday.

    Good!

    He reacted to one of my IG stories earlier this week. A heart emoji on a story of me and another mutual friend having ice cream — his favourite food.

    He always has a freezer full of ice cream at home. Famously exercise-averse, he will walk countless city blocks for a good ice cream shop recommendation. One of our mutual friends’ favourite stories is how they spent evenings eating ice cream at various convenience stores in Taipei, in the middle of winter, with him dressed only in shorts and one of his signature hoodies. They were together on a work trip then, visiting other colleagues who had also become friends. When this mutual friend and I visited other such colleagues-turned-friends during one cold spring, we sent him a postcard bought from the ice cream shop in Edinburgh, an Instax from the gelato shop in Amsterdam. We had gelato together when he visited Singapore, a few months before he went radio silent.

    The last time he had reacted to one of my stories was a month before everyone stopped hearing from him, on a photo of me and our mutual friend going pottery painting.

    A heart emoji and: That’s a cute cat!!!

    Thank youuu, I’d replied. Come over again soon so we can make more cat plates together haha

    And now, to his latest heart emoji: HOW ARE YOUUUUU

    I hadn’t expected him to reply. Our mutual friend and I kept talking about our holidays, catching up on how our year had started. When I got the notification that he’d sent a message, we excitedly went to check.

    I just got better, he’d typed back. Ever the optimist.

    I had 5 tumors the past months

    In the brain

    Doctor said it’s Stage 4

    To our question about whether it would be okay to visit, he answered, Maybe once I’m back in Jakarta. Ever the optimist.

    Why do bad things happen to good people? It’s a cliche question, but when you’re in shock, I suppose, nobody has the energy or inclination to be original.

    Another one, this time from our friend in the Netherlands, on a call past midnight our time, as we figured out what to do: Why is growing up so hard?

    I had turned off my Kindle that was still on the last page of the book I’d just finished, the tail end of the index:

    X-rays, 23, 24

    – as carcinogen, 77-78, 347, 349, 389

    – as diagnostic tool, 291; see also mammography

    We were trying to write an index of our own this time, halting, uncertain. What we could do; what we knew and didn’t know for sure about our friend’s condition; what we knew and didn’t know about what he would want, in a situation like this.

    The key conclusion, of course, was that we couldn’t just try to take action for the sake of feeling better about doing something. We had to support in whatever ways (a) were feasible and (b) would actually be helpful and welcome, and wouldn’t stress him out further.

    The reality, of course, was that this made for a dismal Venn diagram.

    “There’s not much we can do right now,” our friend in the Netherlands summed up. “And we are running out of time.”

    There’s a quote from the book itself that has stuck with me on every reading. It encapsulates that gulf between understanding and practice, at least for me:

    “What is certain, however, is that even the knowledge of cancer’s biology is unlikely to eradicate cancer fully from our lives … [W]e might as well focus on prolonging life rather than eliminating death. This War on Cancer may best be “won” by redefining victory.”

    I understand this. The past twelve years have been an education, protracted and difficult, on this.

    But, in practice: How do you wait for the clock to run out on someone you love and call that victory?

  • Coda

    Coda

    This entry is part 7 of 8 in the series Annual Soundtracks

    2023 felt like the longest year.

    Or, more accurately, it felt like speedrunning through several decades in one go. Loath as I am to reference Taylor Swift, of all people, it’s a little fitting that one of the prevailing pop culture moments of the year stands on the concept of eras. Specifically, what sticks out to me is this mental image of eras as a patchwork: each a discrete period not necessarily conceived in direct connection with the others, but threaded together anyway by a common denominator.

    In the case of the past year’s various eras, that would be, well, the person living through them. Though at various points, “living” might have been too strong a word, haha.

    Each quarter of 2023 felt like a different life.

    The version of me that suffered through March is not the same one that hurtled through August. Pick a month, any month; I could say the same about every other month of the year, really.

    That’s obvious in this year’s playlist too. It’s more of a bricolage than any of the playlists that came before, swinging in wider and wilder arcs from mood to mood, genre to genre. These annual soundtracks have always been impressionistic, but on subsequent listens, previous iterations always felt held together by a prevailing theme — something that haunted or hounded me throughout the year, for better or worse.

    I guess there were too many ghosts this time, real and imagined.

    In many ways, 2023 was the year of living through worst-case scenarios.

    In hindsight, this sounds a bit dramatic to say about the same year that saw actual worst-case scenarios happen on a global scale, be it in geopolitics, public health, the environment, or any other vector of devastation imaginable, really. But I suppose it’s human to get lost in one’s personal pain for a while, especially when that pain is at its most acute.

    This was the year of unexpectedly ugly-crying to a friend over the phone on some random weekday; of dissecting any and every record available to try and identify how exactly something that felt indispensable fell apart; of cycling through guilt, resentment, anger, grief, regret, all against the backdrop of an unshakeable sadness; of powering through sleepless nights and short fuses to deliver near-impossible asks; of feeling further and further removed from whatever semblance of home I ever felt like I could go back to.

    It was also the year of learning, through the relentlessness of the day-to-day, that many of the things that terrified me could happen and life would go on regardless.

    Funny how that works, right? The universe can punch you straight in the gut, your reserves can be depleted twice over, but nothing about that will move a project deadline or a dear friend’s wedding date.

    So you keep going.

    Sometimes there’s nothing for it but to look the day dead in the eye, pick out what is absolutely non-negotiable about it, and focus your energies on getting through that — quite like how our bodies, overwhelmed by cold, will dial down peripheral blood flow to ensure the little warmth available keeps flowing to our core organs.

    It wasn’t so much surrender or resignation as a dogged gathering and re-gathering of whatever pieces of my life still felt solid and manageable. And an acceptance, I suppose — easier and more unsentimental each time — of how much or how little each attempt gave me to work with.

    It helped, of course, that this was the year where I put active, continuous effort into identifying, drawing, and enforcing boundaries. Maybe this is my Aquarius moon speaking, but having clearer boundaries helped me make peace with what I wanted or didn’t want, could or couldn’t control, would or wouldn’t get. In aggregate, I guess that constitutes a kind of peace with who you happen to be at any given time, too.

    Here’s what really surprised me about 2023 though: it wasn’t all just soldiering on. The relentlessness of life, it turns out, can be gentle too.

    Funny how that works, right? The universe can punch you straight in the gut, your reserves can be depleted twice over, and flowers will still bloom. Life can bring you hot tea, a walk in a park, a surprise birthday visit — comfort, calm, and even happiness, whether or not you feel equipped to encounter them.

    What is there at the end of it all?

    It turns out “common denominator,” in its most mathematical sense, is a surprisingly apt turn of phrase for the throughline that ultimately threads these eras together, no matter how unrecognizable some versions might have become.

  • Flora Singapura: New finds in GBB

    Flora Singapura: New finds in GBB

    Plants have always been an important part of a good day for me. When I run into plants, that means I’m wandering around outside; and when I’m wandering around outside, that means I’m discovering bits and pieces of the world rather than getting stuck in my own head.

    My aunt over here loves taking walks, and I look forward to accompanying her whenever possible. We marvel over flowers, look out for monitor lizards, try to capture snapshots of the most colourful migratory birds passing overhead. There are some constants in our weekend options: the Botanical Gardens, MacRitchie Reservoir, Gardens by the Bay.

    Today we were at the Gardens, and we ran into a fruit that we hadn’t seen before, even in two years of frequent visits. I realised then that I’d snapped so many photos of plants but hadn’t really taken much time to learn more about them, beyond the ones I was already somewhat familiar with.

    It’s never too late to start taking notes, I guess, so here’s the first set of what I hope will be a long-running series.

    This is the plant that set all this in motion:

    It’s called Mahkota Dewa or God’s Crown. Apparently it’s indigenous to Indonesia, though it’s also found in many other countries across Asia. It can take around 12 months to start fruiting, which probably explains why we hadn’t seen these fruits before. In keeping with the usual rules of biological colouring (lol), the bright red fruit is toxic — especially the seeds.

    Surprisingly, though, the plant also has medicinal uses. The fruit pulp can be dried and turned into a tea that helps control blood sugar, among other effects. The leaves and stems are also used as anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial ingredients.

    Later into our walk, another plant caught my eye:

    These lovely flowers look like tiny origami specimens. They’re called glorybowers, or bleeding-hearts. They’re part of the genus Clerodendrum, which is quite far-reaching: member species are native across temperate and tropical regions, with most of them found in the tropics of Africa and southern Asia.

    The most interesting fact about these plants (to me, anyway lol) is that, apparently, the leaves smell like popcorn and the flowers smell like peanut butter when crushed. So much so that apparently they’re known to a lot of people as “the peanut butter trees.” This might be explained partly by the fact that they’re part of the family Lamiacea, which includes other aromatic plants like lavender, basil, and mint.

    Glorybowers grow as unruly shrubs, but apparently they can be “trained” (as, say, bonsai are “trained”) to stay small, pleasantly ornamental plants. This might just be the word-nerd in me looking for meaning where there is none, but the genus name comes from the Greek words kleros, meaning “chance” or “fate,” and dendron, meaning “tree.” A tree of fate, as it were, that can grow from an encroaching mess into something more beautiful, if tended with care.

    Maybe it was fate to run into these plants today. And maybe, if I’m being optimistic, seeing them in such vibrant bloom is a sign of better days to come.

  • Starting over

    Starting over

    This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Annual Soundtracks

    This is a little over a week late. In my defence, I’ve been to the mountains and then to the sea, where reliable internet connections were hard to come by.

    Not that I tried very hard to get this posted in time. These annual soundtrack posts have always been an excuse to ruminate a bit on the past year, but I’m honestly still processing a lot of what has happened.

    If there’s a throughline for this playlist — and alright, who am I kidding, of course there is — then it might well be the thorny process of figuring out how people fit into your life and how you fit in theirs.

    Or, no, that’s not quite the honest summary, is it?

    This playlist kicks in once that process is over, and you’ve recognised that quite a lot of your life has been reduced to accommodating people who might not even deserve to be there, but you don’t quite know how to undo all the tangled knots yet. A whole other process, as it were; a protracted lesson in pushing back against that reduction, over and over again.

    Life is so much bigger, I keep telling myself. Maybe this year it will finally stick.

  • On Stationery

    On Stationery

    If there are any enduring loves in my life, one of them would have to be stationery.

    It’s simple: I’ve been keeping some kind of paper journal since I was twelve, and this will probably continue until I die. There have been many gaps in those pages over the years, don’t get me wrong; but even then, there was always a journal waiting patiently for me to come back. A whole life without even the option or inclination to reach for pen and paper? Unimaginable.

    Do I write down anything “significant,” worth saving? Who knows. In many ways, keeping a notebook hasn’t been writing so much as thinking, using pen and paper to set out the swirl of thoughts in my head into something tangible, and therefore something easier to make sense of.

    But I’ve already touched on that before. Today I’m here to think about the material aspects of it all.

    Or: It is a truth universally acknowledged that any compulsive journal-keeper with disposable income must eventually develop some degree of pickiness over their tools.

    What I write with

    Take pens, for example. Over the years, I’ve discovered that I care about ink: colour, resistance to feathering1the tendency to get ragged edges in lines due to ink spreading across paper and bleed2the tendency to soak through to the other side of a page, how quickly it dries.

    I also care, as it turns out, about how a pen feels on paper. Is there feedback—a palpable scratching against the paper grain? Is the tip thin enough to make lines feel sharp rather than clumsy? Does it flow, or does it skitter across the page?

    My favourite pens have vibrant colours (even if I usually choose black), don’t smudge or run through a page, and write with precision — crisp and smooth on the paper, so it feels like I have more control over how the lines fill the page.

    It’s a bit like fonts, I guess: each pen has a particular character to it.

    These are the ones I’ve settled on for now. They range from disposable to not-so-much; they cover everything from “handy throwaway pen for everyday use” and “office workhorse” (the first two pens) to “dependable journal companions with archival quality ink that won’t give me a heart attack if I lose them on a trip” (the last two).

    I’ve carried the Mont Blanc one with me for close to 5 years now, and I have enough Zebra Sarasa refills to make sure I will write with one for life.

    They are all gel pens.

    People have asked me why I don’t write with a fountain pen. The simple answer is that fountain pens overcomplicate the process for me.

    I like the whole idea of fountain pens. They’re often great examples of practical craftsmanship, and I’ve lost quite a few hours reading about people’s opinions on ink quality, nibs, etc. But this is exactly the problem.

    The best pen, at least for me, is one that can disappear into the motions of my everyday life without being fussed over.

    Where I write

    I will write on anything I can find, of course. When I was a kid, I’d scribble on everything—the backs of marked papers; receipts; the flyleaf of whatever book I had on hand, in a pinch. Today, I’m lucky enough to have a bit more choice in the matter, and to have tested enough options to have formed Opinions.

    For example: Moleskins are overrated.

    Let’s just get that out of the way. Like most stationery nerds, Moleskines were probably the first name I learned to take note of, when I was just starting to care about paper quality. The thing is that, these days, paper quality is exactly why these notebooks have been stricken off my list.

    For me, a good notebook has to have thick, sturdy pages; if we’re being exact here, the minimum is 80gsm. Anything less than that is too thin. (At this point, I feel obliged to mention that Moleskine uses 70gsm paper.) Gel pens will bleed through, or there will be so much ghosting3when you can see the writing from the opposite side of the paper, even if it doesn’t quite soak through that it won’t be worth writing on both sides of the page — in short, a waste.

    So: The paper must be resistant to bleed and feathering. (Ink quality is only one part of the equation!) It must be acid-free and pH-neutral, because acidic paper breaks down and turns brittle over time. There has to be some texture to it, too — some “tooth” to the surface, so that the pen has some grip while writing, and it doesn’t feel like you have to fight to keep your lines from gliding clean off the page.

    I prefer blank notebooks, with ivory- or cream-coloured pages. Grid ones also have their uses; dot-grid is much more preferable to the usual full-line grids, because the dots are understated enough not to dominate the space. My handwriting is very small, most of the time, so lined notebooks are a waste of space. Whatever the paper type, I’ve found A5 size to be most comfortable. Any smaller and it feels restrictive; any larger and I feel like I’m drowning in the blank space.

    Finally, a notebook has to have a stitched spine, so that it can lay flat when opened. I don’t want to have to keep fighting to write comfortably, and I resent any manufacturer that forces me to break a notebook’s spine to get it to stay put.

    Most other bells and whistles are nice to have, but not essential. Many journals try to pull ahead of the competition with features like pen loops, index pages, expandable pockets on the inside covers. These can improve the journal-keeping experience, sure, but at the end of the day, it still comes down to the paper.

    I’ve tested quite a few notebooks over the years. Some of the ones that have stayed with me:

    These are actually refills for the Alunsina Kislap journal, which uses the same system as the popular Traveler’s Notebook journals. Essentially you get a leather cover that can be filled—and refilled!—with your notebook(s) of choice: blank, lined, dot-grid.

    The full journal I used to carry was a sturdy, full-grain leather cover that housed three notebooks: two blank ones and a dot-grid. It got a bit too heavy to carry around once I’d filled all three notebooks, so the last time I was organising my things at my parents’ house, I decided to carry a few loose refills back to Singapore and just come back for the full journal next time. That was in March 2020. 🙂

    Anyway, I love the Alunsina team, because they’re a small business and they handcraft all their journals with such obvious care and skill. The paper is 85gsm4Take that, Moleskine! Though there is a fair bit of ghosting on this page, since I wrote too heavily on the reverse, acid-free, and made of ecological pulp, sourced from Italy. They hand-cut all the pages and bind the refills themselves. Likewise, they treat and cut all the leather themselves, too. I exchanged some emails with them about their journals years ago, when I first got mine, and they struck me as lovely people wholeheartedly committed to their craft.

    Rhodia notebooks have always received praises from most journal communities I’ve checked out, largely because of the paper quality: 90gsm, acid-free, resistant to bleed and feathering. The one I have is a softbound one with dot-grid pages, and it’s a fantastic notebook for language learning notes. Since I’m studying Mandarin Chinese and Korean (and have divided the notebook into different sections for these), the dot-grid is especially helpful for writing characters.

    Midori notebooks are also widely regarded as one of the best options when it comes to paper quality, so it’s up next in my notebook queue. I don’t have much to say about this one yet, but I’m really excited to try it.

    Why? Partly because of this, my current journal: a Leuchtturm1917 that’s been a bit of a letdown.

    To its credit, this journal has withstood a lot — being carried in the rain, knocked around in luggage, scratched by cats, etc.

    From what I can tell, Leuchtturm1917 is, like Moleskine, one of the more well-known journal brands, especially for bullet journal enthusiasts. I can see why — there are a lot of small touches here and there that make this a handy notebook to carry around. Expandable pockets, numbered pages, a table of contents/index page up front, ribbon bookmarks, even little stickers to label the spine.

    The construction is impeccable. The paper quality is not.

    And like I said, in the end, it all comes down to the paper. Despite supposedly using 80gsm paper, the notebook I got suffered from a fair bit of ghosting, to the point that I decided not to write on the reverse of each page. The texture of the paper itself was also a bit off—smooth and somewhat “damp,” in that it seemed to resist ink absorption and felt turgid to write on.

    Here’s What Our Parents Never Taught Us by Shinji Moon. The full poem is lovely and can be read here

    Strangely enough, because I didn’t like the journal quite as much, I’ve found myself using it more — or at least, being freer about pasting in bits and pieces of tickets, photos, etc to go with what I’m writing. It’s a bit like my aversion to fountain pens, I guess: when I like a journal too much, I fuss over the material to the point that I hold back from using it to the fullest. The Leuchtturm, in this case, can get carried along in the bruising currents of everyday life precisely because I’ve found it so dismissible, lol.

    The only good tools are the ones you’re using

    The Leuchtturm, I guess, has been a lesson in the limits of pickiness. Paper quality, ink resistance, and other preferences aside, the real bottomline here is drawn by practicality — or, if it’s fine to sound loftier, purpose.

    How useful are these tools to you?

    Do they allow you to do what you want to do?

    These are the only questions that really matter. I can write several hundred words about what I’m looking for in a pen or a notebook, but if the ideal journal can never be carried with me and is absent when I need to write something down, then what’s the point? Even matters of quality ultimately bow to expedience.

  • Sunday Share: Social Selling in Southeast Asia

    Sunday Share: Social Selling in Southeast Asia

    Earlier this year, a friend and I challenged ourselves to write more. We were blindsided by 2022 — these first few months have been tough on multiple fronts — but I figured I’d try to revive that modest aim anyway.

    We’d previously set different themes for each month. I’ll try to post at least once a month then, though I’ll be shuffling the themes around as I go. For March, though, we’re sticking with the original one: unpublished drafts.

    This was a short piece I was asked to write for a job application to a branding and research agency that specialises in ethnographic and culture-focused approaches to market strategy. There are more thinkpieces coming out these days about social commerce / social selling, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to put another one out there.

    The prompt was: “An important shift in society / culture, and what it will mean for related brands / industry.”

    With livestreaming, Southeast Asia’s new e-commerce frontier revisits old territories

    There’s no denying the e-commerce boom in Southeast Asia, where an estimated 310M people  are expected to spend as much as US$150B online by 2025. In the race to win over the region’s consumers, however, one sales format is emerging as a frontrunner: shopping livestreams.

    At their simplest, shopping livestreams entail nothing more than a seller standing in front of a camera, hawking products, answering questions, and offering deals over the course of a real-time video broadcast. Yet in China, mega-platforms like Taobao and Tmall have transformed this approach into an e-commerce model that racked up more than US$61B worth of transactions in 2019 alone. 

    Now, platforms like Shopee and Lazada are striving to adapt this approach to Southeast Asia. Both platforms have notched considerable successes since launching their respective livestream features in 2019: In less than a year, Lazada had reported 27M active viewers on LazLive, its in-app channel; Shopee Live, meanwhile, boasted 30M hours watched in just one quarter of 2020. With competitors like Indonesia’s Tokopedia, Thailand’s Pomelo, and even TikTok offering their own versions of the feature, livestreaming seems poised to dominate e-commerce in the region.

    The question now is: Will it stick?

    Circumstance has expanded the potential audience for shopping livestreams. Across the region, the Covid-19 pandemic led to many countries imposing lockdowns, forcing the closure of many physical stores and services. Seeking out alternatives, forty million people took to the internet for the first time, boosting Southeast Asia’s count of internet users to 70% of the region’s combined population. In 2020, such new users accounted for a third of all e-commerce sales, according to a report by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company; more importantly, this shift to e-commerce is set to last, with 8 out of 10 new users intent on continuing to buy online.

    In this rapidly growing pool of online buyers, social media, videos, and messaging are currently the main channels for discovering new brands or products. Livestreams offer a venue to knit these together into one experience. Viewers get the immersiveness of online video, as well as the social dimension of interacting with both the seller and fellow buyers through real-time chat. 

    This immediacy and simultaneity of experience lies at the heart of livestreaming’s potential appeal to Southeast Asian audiences: the digital approximation of offline marketplace interactions. Rather than clicking through algorithm-driven recommendations by themselves, users who tune into a livestream can ask the seller questions, trade opinions with fellow buyers in chat, or even participate in activities to score limited-time deals. All of this fosters a sense of intimacy and community, akin to visiting a bustling market with friends. 

    At the same time, the livestreaming format taps into familiar trust-building dynamics. In the Philippines, for example, the suki system abounds: over time, buyers adopt certain sellers as their mainstays, trusting them to give personalised recommendations and exclusive discounts. With the introduction of livestreams, online platforms come closer to approximating this relationship, as sellers are no longer faceless, and viewers can develop trust over multiple direct interactions. 

    Likewise, livestreams are accessible to all kinds of sellers, from established brands to one-man side hustles. In fact, everyday app users made up 40% of new LazLive registrations in April 2020. While the biggest channels may involve significant production costs, then, a significant number of streams remain simple, unvarnished affairs. Combined with the format’s inherent resistance to extensive editing, this imbues livestreaming with a sense of authenticity that can also help foster trust. As one Shopee seller notes, “Viewers appreciate genuinity and truly want to know what you have to say about the product and service.”

    These resonances with longstanding purchase behaviours and expectations indicate that shopping livestreams can keep pulling in viewers post-pandemic. For brands, the format’s growth presents several opportunities to build stronger connections with potential customers, as well as deliver rich, immersive user experiences that can capture the attention of increasingly information-savvy, sophisticated shoppers.

    With the relatively low cost to conduct livestreams, brands can consider running a range of broadcasts aimed at various niches or communities. Livestream hosts, as well as the style and structure of the broadcast, can then be tailored to specific audiences, giving brands more flexibility in how they communicate with different segments. This can be especially promising in countries where strong regional or demographic differences make for a fragmented audience. In the Philippines, for example, brands could consider running separate livestream channels to cater to Tagalog-speaking audiences in the Metro Manila area and Cebuano-speaking audiences in the southern urban centres.

    The dynamic, interactive nature of livestreams also offer a space to solicit rapid feedback from consumers. For brands, then, livestreams can also serve as a space to gauge uptake of new products or experiment with promotions before rolling these out on a larger scale.

    Brands can also consider stretching the use of livestreams beyond direct selling. As a recent example, the British Museum partnered with Alibaba to showcase various galleries via livestream for 300,000 Chinese viewers. The livestream format lends itself well to more experiential offerings which can help cultivate brand awareness and loyalty. By investing in this potential and crafting creative experiences tailored to specific audiences, brands can stand out in crowded e-commerce spaces.

    To make the most of livestreaming’s promise, however, brands must also look into developing an ecosystem that can sustain the engagement sparked by livestreams. Robust fulfilment processes, post-purchase engagement strategies, and insight collection systems can help create a seamless flow from initial conversion to retention. 

    All together, livestreaming has both circumstance and context working strongly in its favour in Southeast Asia. The format presents an opportunity to bring dynamic, social aspects of offline shopping experiences to digital spaces. Brands who lean into the format may find it a valuable tool for winning over users by imbuing e-commerce with a vibrant, familiar touch.