Lý Toét in the the City: Coming to Terms with the Modern in 1930s Vietnam – Part 1

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GEORGE DUTTON

ABSTRACT

   The emergence of popular journalism in 1930s Vietnam allowed for new formsol commentary on a transformed urban life, among them caricatures featuring Lý Toét, a villager bewildered by his encounters with the modem city. This article uses the Lý Toét cartoons that appeared in the weekly jour­nal Phong Hóa [Mores] as a window on urban attitudes toward the modem. It suggests that the illustrations reveal a considerable ambivalence toward modernity on the part of Phong Hóa’s editors, despite their rhetorical com­mitment to the new and the modern.

   The 1930s saw a transformation of Vietnamese journalism, a change manifested most dramatically in a veritable explosion of new print media. In 1936 alone 230 new journals appeared, the culmination of a steady rise that began in the 1920s.¹ The expanding press was a response to numerous changes in Vietnamese society, not the least of which was a growing urban population with the income to purchase these new publications, the time to read them, and the requisite literacy in the new romanized form of Vietnamese, quốc ngữ. David Marr has estimated that by the late 1930s as many as 1.8 million Vietnamese (probably the vast majority of them urbanites) were functionally literate in quốc ngữ.² This new reading public represented the core audience for these newspapers, which were shaping the urban milieu and were in turn influenced by it. Among the prominent contributions of these new journals was that they underscored the idea that the Vietnamese were living in a new and dynamic era, one in which the past and “tradition” stood in dramatic contrast to the present and “modernity.”

    One of the most notable representations of this contrast was a humble cartoon character, a rural visitor to the big city by the name of Lý Toét. In a narrow sense this figure represented the clash between old and new, and in a larger sense he served as the reverse mirror image of an emergent urban Vietnamese identity. Specifically, Lý Toét was a caricature of the lý trưởng [the traditional village chief], an archetype representing what Philippe Papin has called the “good peasant half-wit” and Marr has characterized as the “anachronistic village elder.”³ Toét, who may have first appeared as a character in reform operas [chèo cải lương] of the very early 1930s, took on a more sustained and visible form in the print media, most notably in the Hà Nội weekly Phong Hóa [Mores].⁴ It was on the pages of Phong Hóa and those of its sister publication Ngày Nay [These Days] that Lý Toét came to emblema­tize the Vietnamese villager lost in the onslaught of urban transformation.

     This article will consider Lý Toét as he appeared in Phong Hóa, examin­ing the ways in which he was used to represent the clash of past and present, rural and urban, and “tradition” and “modernity.” In his encounters with urban life, Lý Toét revealed the bewildering complexities of urban modernization. Lý Toét was an uneducated villager who struggled (usually unsuccessfully) to comprehend the modern, and in watching his struggles, urbanites could congratulate themselves on their own sophistication, a sophistication that rested on a knowledge and experience that Lý Toét did not possess. Yet, at the same time, Lý Toét’s encounters with city life revealed the ambivalences of this new modernity, including its physical dangers and its often abnipt departures from long-established patterns of daily life.

     My close reading of Lý Toét cartoons suggests some modifications to con­ventional interpretations of the outlook of Phong Hóa‘s editorial team, the Self-Strength Literary Group [Tự Lực Văn Đoàn]. This group, established by Nhất Linh and a small number of like-minded writers in 1934, revealed its outlook in a ten-point manifesto that spoke of producing literature to enrich the country, and of doing so in a style that was accessible, direct, and easy to understand. It also announced the group’s commitment to an unwavering struggle for progress and an ongoing effort to expand public awareness of scientific knowledge.⁵ The Self-Strength Literary Group’s members have often been viewed by later historians either as apolitical romantics, with a vaguely procolonial outlook, or as relentless proponents of a superficial modernity, mimicking the forms but not the substance of new technologies, social orders, and cultural vehicles. Despite the group’s forcefully stated objectives, I argue that their journals, particularly Phong Hóa, revealed a much more ambiguous view of the rapid changes occurring all around them. As I will elaborate below, the caricatures in particular reflected not simply scornful critique of the “backward,” nor did they suggest an apolitical romanticism. The groups stated “struggle for progress,” for instance, was repeatedly eroded by the ways in which its publication’s cartoons revealed “progress” both as benefit and threat. As such, Phong Hóa was a reflection of the urban social transformations that were labeled “modernity” and at the same time a running commentary on them that frequently undermined the unambiguous declarations of the Self-Strength Literary Group.

    The modernity on display in Phong Hóa was marked by rapid change, tech localization of society, a transformation of social connections, and urbanization itself. It revealed a European-dominated “now” contrasted, at least implicitly, with a backward-looking Vietnamese “then.” Whether Vietnamese readers of these journals were familiar with the newly coined term for “modem”—hiện đại—is not clear. They would have been more likely to encounter the concept of change in the words mới” and “tân,” both of which might best be translated as “new.”⁶ What is clear is that Vietnamese urbanites were aware that they lived in times of dramatic transformation in which modes of communication and transportation, as well as of interaction and expression, were all changing. Moreover, there was a strong sense of being on a journey of transformation in which the ultimate destination was unknown. People felt that they were participants in these changes, a feeling nowhere more strongly held than within the community of writers and illus­trators contributing to the new journals appearing during the 1930s.

… CONTINUE …

NOTE:

1. David Marr, “A Passion for Modernity: Intellectuals and the Media,” in Postwar Vietnam: Dynamics of a Transforming Society, ed. Hy V. Luong (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 261.
2. David Marr, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial: 1920-1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 34; also Marr, “A Passion for Modernity,” 261. According to Marr’s estimates this figure may have repre­sented a doubling of the number of literate Vietnamese from just a decade earlier.
3. Marr, “A Passion for Modernity,” 261; Philippe Papin, “Who Has the Power in the Village?” in Vietnam Expose: French Scholarship on Twentieth-Century. Vietnamese Society, ed. Gisclc L. Bousquet and Pierre Brocheux (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 29; Neil Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 102.
4. Maurice Durand and Nguyen Tran Huan claim that Lý Toét was the invention of the poet Tú Mỡ and was developed in 1927, a claim difficult to substantiate. See Maurice Durand and Nguyen Tran Huan, An Introduction to Vietnamese Literature, trans. D.M. Hawke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 119. Lý Toét also made frequent appearances in Phong Hóa’s sister journal Ngày Nay [These Days), though for the purposes of this essay I will focus only on his occurrences in the former.
5. The full ten-point ideological statement of the group can he found in “Tự Lực Văn Đoàn,” Phong Hóa, March 2,1934, p. 2.
6. Nguyễn Văn Ký, La Societe Vietnamienne face A La Modemite: Le tonkin de la fin du XIXe siecle de la second guerre mondiale [Vietnamese Society Faces Modernity: Tonkin from the end of the Nineteenth Century to the Second World War] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 139.

(Source: Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Vol. 2. Issue 1. pps. 80-108. ISSN 1559-372X, electronic ISSN 1559- 3758. © 2007 by the Regents of the University of California. http:/Av\vw.ucprcssjournals.coin/rcprintlnfo.asp.)

SEE MORE:
◊  Lý Toét in the the City – Part 2
◊  Lý Toét in the the City – Part 3
◊  Lý Toét in the the City – Part 4
◊  Lý Toét in the the City – Part 5