THE MODERN THAT IS NOT WESTERN: MEDIATED INDIVIDUALISM IN KHÁI HƯNG’S NỬA CHỪNG XUÂN AND YU DAFU’S “SINKING” - Full 10 điểm

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Volume 3 Article 85

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2022

The Modern That is Not Western: Mediated
Individualism in Khái Hưng’s Nửa Chừng Xuân
and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking”

Camellia (Linh) Pham

Dartmouth College

Recommended Citation
Pham, Camellia (Linh) (2022). “The Modern That is Not Western: Mediated Individualism in Khái
Hưng’s Nửa Chừng Xuân and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking.”” The Macksey Journal: Volume 3, Article 85.
This article is brought to you for free an open access by the Johns Hopkins University Macksey
Journal. It has been accepted for inclusion in the Macksey Journal by an authorized editor of the
Johns Hopkins University Macksey Journal.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022

The Modern That is Not Western: Mediated Individualism in Khái Hưng’s Nửa
Chừng Xuân and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking”1

Camellia (Linh) Pham
Dartmouth College

Abstract
Literary modernisms in East and Southeast Asia, though constituted by cultural and

linguistic exchanges between various nationalisms and colonialisms, are habitually seen as a
unidirectional transfer from Western imperial ideologies. West-to-East transference of
modernity usually considers literary history as a point where translation emerges as a linear
movement between source and target language, and colonial subjects as an unquestioned
replica of the Western consciousness. However, when examining literature subject to
competing nationalisms, imperialisms, and colonialisms, specifically in early twentieth-century
Vietnam and China, we must consider translation as both a conventional technique and
transcultural metaphor of interpellating the foreign “other.” This presentation applies David
Der-wei Wang’s metaphorical sense of “carving modernity” and Lydia H. Liu’s conceptual
framework of “translated modernity” to emphasize a discursive understanding of literary
modernity in its constructed nature through “performative/constative narratives.” Modernity
transpires by way of “translated performance” until the modes of representations “acquire
legitimacy within the host language.” In Yu Dafu’s short story “Chenlun” 沉淪 (Sinking) and Khái
Hưng’s novel Nửa Chừng Xuân (In the Midst of Spring), individualism as an imported ideology is
made manifest not as a revealing orientation inherent to the literature of modernist writers in
colonial Vietnam and semi-colonial China. Rather, individualist zeal, evocative of embodied
actions and self- and class-consciousness, is continuously performed in the discourse of East
Asian modernism as mediated individualism, allowing for comparative analysis of how the
“self” contests the conventionally-accepted and binary tropes of modernity––the “new” being
equivalent to the “singular,” the romantic-self, and the powerful West.
Keywords: Chinese literature, Vietnamese literature, comparative modernism, modernity,
translation studies, Tự Lực Văn Đoàn, New Culture Movement

1 In this paper, I use the translated English name for Yu Dafu’s “Chenlun” 沉淪 [Sinking] while retaining the original
Vietnamese title for Khái Hưng’s Nửa Chừng Xuân [In the Midst of Spring]. This deliberate decision stems from the
fact that there has not been any officially published English rendition of Nửa Chừng Xuân, whereas “Sinking” has
been translated in full into English by Joseph Lau and C. T. Hsia in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese

Literature. See Khái Hưng, Nửa Chừng Xuân [In the Midst of Spring] (Sài Gòn: NXB Văn Nghệ, 1934); and Yu Dafu,
“Sinking,” in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt,
trans. Joseph S. M. Lau and C. T. Hsia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 44-69.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 1

September 1915 marked the founding of Xin Qing Nian 新靑年 [New Youth], the
magazine that would eventually feature two seminal manifestos: “On Literary Revolution” 文學
革命論 by Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 (1879-1942) and “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of
Literature” 文學革命論 by Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962). These manifestos, harbingers of literary
revolution in China, were heralded by Li Zehou 李泽厚 (1930-2021) as the double tune of
“national salvation and human enlightenment.”2 The magazine hallmarked an important
change as Xin Wenhua Yundong 新文化運動 [The New Culture Movement] (the 1910s-1920s)
inaugurated the formal birth of modern Chinese literature. The Movement’s thematic goals of
“modernizing people through language, modernizing language through literature, and
modernizing literature through Western thought” found camaraderie with a peripheral nation
of the Sinosphere––Vietnam––where literary modernization reached its peak with Tự Lực Văn
Đoàn [The Self-Reliant Literary Group; hereafter: TLVĐ].3 It was not until the beginnings of TLVĐ
and the Thơ Mới [New Poetry] Movement that the process of literary modernization in Vietnam
could be compared to that of mainland China, vis-à-vis the magnified and nation-wide scale of
professionalism, formalism, and structuralism.

In this paper, I call into use the understanding of “modern” by David Der-wei Wang and
Lydia Liu. Regardless of how modernism as an aesthetic movement is quickly deemed futile,
vitiated, and bereft of formal coherence, I invoke Der-wei Wang’s metaphorical sense of
“carving modernity” and Liu’s conceptual framework of “translated modernity,” not to define
what is constituted as “modern” in literature, so much as to emphasize the discursive way we
understand literary modernity in its “constructed” and “transcultural” nature through
“performative/constative narratives.”4 Modernity transpires in Vietnam and China by way of
the modernists’ new and revolutionary paths, infiltrating through a conduit of “translated

performance” until the modes of representations “acquire legitimacy within the host
language.”5

Specifically, I apply the theoretical framework of modernity to “Chenlun” 沉淪 [Sinking]
by Yu Dafu 郁達夫 (1896-1945) and Nửa Chừng Xuân [In the Midst of Spring] by Khái Hưng
(1896-1947). Born in the same year against the backdrop of a volatile period of revolutionizing

2 Quoted in Gu Ming Dong, Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature (London; New York: Routledge,
2019), 19.
3 It may seem contentious for contemporary scholarship about modern Vietnam to include the country as part of
the East Asian cultural sphere, or the Sinosphere, instead of regarding Vietnam in postcolonial discourse as a
Southeast Asian nation. By including Vietnam in the realm of Sinitic influence, I highlight the puzzling
characteristics of “claiming modernity,” as a result of the understanding that “modernity is an absent figure, an
unattainable state.” Since the status of modernities in both countries is rather ambiguous, it would be arbitrary to
decisively cut Vietnam off from its thousand-year Sinitic root. This classification highlights the comparative analysis
between China as the epicenter of the Sinosphere and Vietnam as China’s peripheral entity and casts light on the
previously ignored similarities between the two modern nations. For more discussion on the ambiguities of
modernity, see Lingchei Letty Chen, “Reading Between Chinese Modernism and Modernity,” Chinese Literature:
Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 24 (December 2002): 179.
4 Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900-1937
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 15; and David Der-wei Wang, “The Literary Mind and the Carving of
Modernities,” Der-wei Wang, David. “The Literary Mind and the Carving of Modernities.” Journal of Chinese
Literature and Culture 3, no. 2 (2016): 203. DOI:10.1215/23290048-3713779.
5 Liu, Translingual Practice, 26.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 2

literature, Khái Hưng and Yu Dafu were impassioned firebrands of their generations before they
died at around the same age. Khái Hưng, Vietnamese-born and French-educated, and Yu Dafu,
Chinese-born and Japanese-educated, shared the juxtaposition of backgrounds representative

of the transcultural tensions faced by their native countries at that time––the competing
powers of colonial imperialism and cosmopolitan nationalism, and foreign modernization and
national backwardness.6 Drawing from the post-structuralist reading by Lydia Liu––dealing with
translation, not in its “ordinary sense of the word,” but considering the so-called “sinification”
and “Vietnamization”7 of concepts––I claim that individualism is not something inherent to the
writing of TLVĐ and New Culturalists8 to inculcate interpretive reading; rather, individualist
zeal, evocative of embodied actions, is continuously performed in the discourse of East Asian
modernism as mediated individualism. This treatment of the two texts allows for comparative
analysis of how the “self” contests the binary and conventionally accepted tropes of modernity:
the “new” is equivalent to the “singular,” the romantic-self, and the powerful West.

TLVĐ was a left-wing literary association in Tonkin and was arguably the most important
intellectual collective during the interwar period (1932-1945). The group’s writers had a
profound influence on the nascent yet powerful and tempestuous development of modern
Vietnamese society, covering a myriad of fields like literature, journalism, publishing, and art.9
They published extensively in their two journals––Phong Hoá [Mores] and Ngày Nay [Today]––
which later became the highest-circulating journals in all of Indochina that advocated for social
reform and public proselytization of “gradual decolonization.”10 Khái Hưng and Nhất Linh
(1906-1963), TLVĐ’s co-founders and the group’s backbone, were prolific and significant

6 Martina Thucnhi Nguyen, On Our Own Strength: The Self-Reliant Literary Group and Cosmopolitan Nationalism
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2021), 6-10; and Gu, Routledge Handbook of Modern Chinese Literature, 19.
7 “Vietnamization” [Việt Nam hoá chiến tranh] is usually used to denote Richard Nixon’s doctrine on withdrawing
American troops to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1955-1975). My understanding of “Vietnamization,”
however, deflects from this notion and strictly relates to translation studies based on Keith Taylor and Nam
Nguyễn’s usage of Vietnamization as transliteration––to adapt foreign words by way of Vietnamese spelling and
pronunciation. See Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 53; and Nam
Nguyễn, Phiên Dịch Học Lịch Sử - Văn Hoá: Trường hợp Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục [Historical and Cultural Translation
Studies: The Case of Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục] (Ho Chi Minh City: Vietnam National University Press, 2002).
8 I used the term “New Culturalist” instead of “May Fourth writers” based on Ziqi Yuan, “‘Isms’ and the Refractions

of World Literature in May Fourth China” (Master’s thesis, The Ohio State University, 2005), 7-8. Yuan says:
“According to the convention in Chinese studies in the English-speaking sphere, ‘New Culturalist’ usually refers to
the intellectuals who were supporters and promoters of the New Culture Movement. Usually, native Chinese
speakers do not distinguish between ‘the May Fourth Movement’ and ‘the New Culture Movement.’ For my
purposes, the term ‘New Culture Movement’ emphasizes the culture-related content of the historical period,
which centers on ideas and practices regarding the construction of a modern national culture and literature (as
opposed to the traditional, imperial Chinese culture and literature), linguistic reforms, education reforms, and so
on.”
9 For discussion of TLVĐ’s literary contributions and their highly-commemorated standing in the process of literary
modernization of Vietnam, see Phan Cư Đệ, Tự Lực Văn Đoàn: Con người và văn chương [Tự Lực Văn Đoàn:
Writers and Literature] (Hà Nội: NXB Văn học, 1990); and Trần Đình Hượu, “Tự Lực Văn Đồn nhìn từ góc độ tính
liên tục của lịch sử qua bước ngoặt hiện đại hố trong lịch sử văn học phương Đơng,” [Tự Lực Văn Đoàn from the
Perspective of Historical Continuity Through the Turning Point of Modernization in the Literary History of the East]
Tạp chí Sơng Hương (2021). />do-tinh-lien-tuc-cua-lich-su-qua-buoc-ngoat-hien-dai-hoa-trong-lich-su-van-hoc-phuong-Dong.html.
10 M. Nguyen, On Our Own Strength, 12.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 3

writers; entirely Western-educated, they pioneered a number of artistic initiatives and showed
a deep commitment to the modern ideals of humanistic progress and individual freedom.11
Across the nation’s border, to the north, TLVĐ was preceded by the New Culture Movement, a
group of writers in China during the 1910s and 1920s. However, compared to TLVĐ, the New
Culture Movement is much more internationally known, acknowledged, and studied. The New
Culturalists promoted a new Chinese culture grounded on Chinese liberalism and language
reform.12 Unlike TLVĐ’s formal self-organized structure, the Movement was constituted of
rather diverse literary voices which founded smaller literary units, like Yu Dafu’s Chuangzao She
創造社 [Creation Society], Lu Xun’s Zhongguo Zuoyi Zuojia Lianmeng 中國左翼作家聯盟
[League of Left-Wing Writers] , and Xu Zhimo’s Xinyue She 新月社 [Crescent Moon Society],
among others.

The literary modernizations that emerged in Vietnam and China, two adjacent countries
that exerted a pronounced influence on each other throughout over a thousand years of
history, featured compelling comparative literary attributes, the study of which has largely been
neglected since the French colonization of Vietnam and the crumbling of the Qing dynasty as
China’s last imperial rule.13 Both movements feature the fascinating insistence of the “new” to
lambast the “old.” The cultural and literary reformations, of which Yu Dafu and Khái Hưng were
trailblazing writers, foregrounded the keyword “new” [mới or 新], which emboldened an era of
rebels and non-conformity. The iconoclasm of the epochal reformations proposed a “new
nation” with “new youth,” “new language,” “new literature,” and “new poetry.” The multi-
layered and multi-directional discourse of non-conformity applauded Western ideals and
scientific methods, and simultaneously rejected the domineering status of Confucianism in both
societies.14 Wenyan 文言 [Classical Chinese] and chữ Nôm 𡨸喃 [Classical Vietnamese] were
brought into confrontation with the written Baihua 白話 [Vernacular Chinese] and chữ Quốc
Ngữ [modern Vietnamese alphabet, or national script] and colloquial Annamese. Likewise,
traditional Chinese and Vietnamese-regulated verse clashed against free verse composition,
Confucian patriarchal society against democratic individualism, and high-brow literature against

11 For discussion of the prominent status of Khái Hưng and Nhất Linh within TLVĐ, see Lê Thị Đức Hạnh, “Thêm
mấy ý kiến đánh giá về Tự Lực Văn Đoàn” [More Evaluations of Tự Lực Văn Đồn], Tạp chí Văn học, no. 3 (1991),
78; and Phạm Thế Ngũ, Việt Nam văn học sử giản ước tân biên [Literary History of Vietnam–A New and Simple
Edition], vol. III, Quốc Học Tùng Thư, 497.
12 Arthur H. Hummel, “The New-Culture Movement in China,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 152 (1930), 55.
13 For discussion on the interaction between twentieth-century Vietnamese and Chinese modernism in the context
of translation, see Nguyễn Thu Hiền, “Dịch thuật văn học Trung Quốc từ thế kỉ 20 ở Việt Nam dưới góc nhìn văn
học sử” [Translation of Chinese Literature from the Twentieth-Century in Vietnam with a Literary History
Approach], Hanoi: Faculty of Philology, Hanoi National University of Education (2020).
/>nam-tu-goc-nhin-van-hoc-su-1323.
14 For “new poetry,” specifically in the case of Vietnam, I want to highlight Phong Trào Thơ Mới [New Poetry
Movement] (1932-1945), a movement that is contemporary, interlocking, and mutually interdependent with TLVĐ.

We must recognize how the movement is called “Thơ Mới,” a compound of two vernacular Vietnamese words,
instead of its synonymous “Tân Thi,” a Sino-Vietnamese word formation.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 4

literature for the popular masses.15 TLVĐ and New Culturalists both viewed heightened “self-
reliant,” “self-sustaining,” and “self-sufficient” awareness as a continuity of nationalism, or
rational patriotism.16 In addition, they single-handedly directed the promotion of modern
literature for the working class––the keyword “popular literature” appears within both Vietnam
and China’s discourses of modernity.17 And lastly, these groups of writers envisioned their
modernization as an act of propagandization––enlisting the general public in the process of
reading journals and newspapers.18 In this way, writers participated in the activism of
modernization by mobilizing the knowledge of the masses and making the groups’ members
not only consumers of literature but also producers in their own right.

Within the bounds of modernity, the common premise that looms over the
characteristically Vietnamese and Chinese developments of poetic and novelistic genres is the
individual’s embrace of the modern––the construction of a new subjectivity and the sense of
individualism. The most widely-accepted understanding of the “new”––the “singular”––can be
explained by Chen Jia’ai’s statement on the inaugural issue of the journal Xinchao 新潮 [The
Renaissance]: “The [new] is singular for being absolutely unique, whereas the [old] is plural for
being open to infinite multiplication.”19 The new self-reflexive and self-articulated perception
speaks to China’s modern selfhood, and in turn, it becomes an indication of China’s possession
of modernity.20 Likewise, Neil Jamieson also attests to the tensions of modern literature in

15 For detailed manifestos of the two movements, see the translation of TLVĐ’s ten major objectives in Martina
Thucnhi Nguyen, “The Self-Reliant Literary Group (Tự Lực Văn Đoàn): Colonial Modernism in Vietnam, 1932-1941,”
(PhD diss., Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 2012), ix. The original text was published in Tự Lực Văn
Đoàn, Phong Hoá [Mores], no. 87 (1934), 2. For one of a few examples of the New Culture Movement writers’
mission statement, see Hu Shi, “Wenxue gailiang chuyi” 文學改良芻議 [Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of

Literature], trans. Kirk Denton, in Modern Chinese Literary Thought (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
1996), 125; Chen Duxiu, “Wenxue geming lun” 文學革命論 [On Literary Revolution], trans. by Timothy Wong, In
Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893-1945 (Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press, 1996), 141; and Timothy B. Weston, “The Formation and Positioning of the New Culture Community 1913-
1917,” Modern China 24, no. 3 (1998): 274.
16 Hu Shi’s second rule in “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature” states: “Do not imitate the
ancients.” Since “there is no literature to speak after the Six Dynasties,” we should “free ourselves from this kind of
slavery and no longer write poems of the ancients and only write our own poems” to cure “our sick nation in such
a perilous state.” TLVĐ in their canonized manifesto also pronounces that modern Vietnamese writers should “use
one’s own ability to produce literary works of value” to “truly embody Annamese character.” See Hu, “Some
Modest Proposals,” 125.
17 Chen Duxiu’s third rule in “On Literary Revolution” states: “Down with obscure, abstruse eremitic literature; up
with comprehensible, popularized literature!” TLVĐ, on the same note, dedicates two of their ten goals to
champion popular literature: “Praise the beauty of our homeland as it reflects the common people, which in turn
encourages others to love their country in a populist way” and “Follow populism, produce only works about the
common people, and encourage others to love populism.” See D. Chen, “On Literary Revolution,” 141.
18 Notable initiatives include Chen Duxiu’s Xin Qing Nian 新靑年 [New Youth], The League of Left-Wing Writers’
bibao 壁报 [wall newspaper], and TLVĐ’s Phong Hoá [Mores] and Ngày Nay [Today]. For more discussion on
literary writings in the newspapers of the New Culturalists, see Charles Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics
of Historical Experience (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 87.
19 Translated and quoted in Liu, Translingual Practice, 81.
20 L. Chen, “Reading Between Chinese Modernism and Modernity,” 176.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 5

Vietnam in a single quandary: the antagonism between the individual and the community.21
The most well-canonized claim about the synthetical setup of modernity and singularity by Hoài
Thanh (1909-1982) and Hoài Chân also reveals that “since ancient times, there was no
individualism in Vietnamese society,” as if “‘I’ was lost in a strange land” because the unique
characteristics of the individual “were submerged in the family and the country, like a drop of

water in the sea.”22 It was not until Thơ Mới (1932-1945) and TLVĐ appeared as two
constellations in Vietnamese literary history that “I” became validated. Vietnamese and Chinese
literary modernists, scholars believed, attacked the long-ritualized, rigidly obedient, and
unchanged Confucian society that emphasized family- and society-oriented happiness, with the
constrictive localization of harmony in the sense of unity.

The second trope of modernity concerns the idea that the new self is conditional on the
romantic one, which further deems individualism to be the stance oppositional to realism,
based on the Western models between the two. Modern Vietnamese individualism, Ben Tran
argues, privileges the authentic self and heartfelt articulations. “Chủ nghĩa cá nhân”
[Individualism] comes hand-in-hand with the long-established tradition of romantic literature,
which becomes an antithesis to socialist realism according to the nation’s adopted Marxist-
Leninist apparatus.23 Take 1939 Dưới Mắt Tôi [Beneath My Eyes] by a notable literary critic,
Trương Chính (1916-2004), as an example. Trương Chính reckons Nửa Chừng Xuân is “a
combative challenge” of the “individualistic endeavors” and the “new humanistic values” versus
“a traditional system filled with the obsoletes.”24 Similarly, Chinese literary critics have built an
edifice of factionalism dividing the realists from the romantics, as expressed in the antagonism
between Wenxue Yanjiu Hui 文學研究會 [Literary Research Society] and Chuangzao She 創造

21 Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995),
111-13.
22 Translated by David Marr, “Concepts of ‘Individual’ and ‘Self’ in Twentieth Century Vietnam,” Modern Asian
Studies (Cambridge University Press) 34, no. 4 (2000): 787. For the original text in Vietnamese, see Hoài Thanh and
Hoài Chân, Thi Nhân Việt Nam [Poets of Vietnam] (Hà Nội: NXB Văn học, 2015), 58-9.
23 Scholarships about romanticism, displayed in TLVĐ’s writings, were extremely divergent not only between the
interwar period (1932-1945), the First and Second Indochina Wars (1946-1991), and after the Đổi Mới period
(1986-present), but also concerning the divide between northern and southern literary criticism. During the
interwar years, literary critics like Hoài Thanh and Hoài Chân, Vũ Ngọc Phan, and Trương Chính described
“romanticism” as depressing, somber, or even antiquated and ordinary. TLVĐ’s literature, henceforth, was
corrective of these characteristics in popular Vietnamese romance novels like Tố tâm and Giọt lệ thu. On the

contrary, later Marxist scholars and the Communist party, such as Trương Tửu and Trường Chinh, considered
romantic elements in TLVĐ as a pejorative tactic that signifies degeneracy, deterring away from social-realist
literature that propelled Communist revolutionaries. This strand of thinking, according to Ben Tran, was rooted in
the taxonomical binary between romanticism and realism, individualist autonomy and social collective, and
Western foreign paradigm and traditional Confucius society. For more discussion, see M. Nguyen, “The Self-Reliant
Literary Group,” xii-xxii; and Ben Tran, “The Politics of Vietnamese Romanticism and Literary History,” (PhD diss.,
University of California, Berkeley, Ann Arbor: ProQuest LLC, 2008), 19.
24 Trương Chính claims: “Nửa Chừng Xuân là cuốn truyện ghi sự phấn đấu giữa cá nhân với chế độ ấy. Tác giả biện
hộ cho giá trị nhân sinh mới và công bố sự bất hợp thời của những tập quán do nền luân lý cổ truyền tạo ra.”
Trương Chính, “Dưới mắt tơi” [Beneath My Eyes], in Tự Lực Văn Đồn: Trào lưu - Tác giả [Tự Lực Văn Đoàn:
Movement and Authors], ed. Minh Đức Hà (Hà Nội: NXB Giáo dục, 2007), 313.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 6

社 [Creation Society].25 Ultimately, scholars consider romantic love as an elusive display of
“individual sentimentality and passions” that, in effect, “directly challenges” Confucian
ideological structure, representative of medieval Vietnamese and Chinese society.

Most poignantly, many scholars understand that individualism in China and Vietnam has
an explicit connection with the equivalent interplay between modernization and
Westernization. Japan’s imperial expansion in China and France’s empire-building colonization
in Vietnam resulted in the arrival of a Western modernity that was traumatically sudden and
inherently foreign. It is tremendously striking that Huỳnh Sanh Thông (1926-2008) translated
the first policy of TLVĐ’s manifesto as “Modernize completely without hesitation, and
modernization means Westernization,” even though the original manifesto published in Phong
Hoá number 87 does not mention a definitive goal to Westernize [Tây phương hoá].26 TLVĐ
even amplifies the strong sense of nationalism and self-producing literary recognition. “Use
one’s own ability to produce literary works of value,” the manifesto urges, “[don’t] just
translate works from foreign countries simply because they have literary worth.” It explains,
“[t]his is to enrich the literary corpus of the nation.”27 Interestingly, the interpretation of

modernization as Westernization provokes a similar discussion in China. Because the
legitimization of the “new” in the New Culture Movement interlocks with the West’s territorial
expansion, China has been led to believe that “the violence of imperialism” shaped the
purported equation between Chinese modernity and “a complete and total Westernization”––
China had to modernize (read: Westernize) “in order to survive.”28

Considering the dialectic nature of these three tropes of modernity and individualism, I
argue that Khái Hưng’s Nửa Chừng Xuân and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” challenge the normative dyad
of singularity and multitude and the dichotomy of Eastern-established society and Western-
imported values. The three tropes, although they appear arbitrary and unconnected to one
another, are in fact woven together in a united, cohesive ideological whole. The individualistic
wo 我 or “tôi,” I contend, indicates a self-reflexivity that is not intrinsic but rather acquired.
Firstly, this means that the utterance of “tôi” in Nửa Chừng Xuân and 我 in “Sinking” only
becomes meaningful through the mediated, repetitive performativity of language. Secondly, via
sustained performativity, individualism emerges not merely on the textual level, but also on
socio-historical and linguistic levels that are characteristic of and unique to Vietnamese and
Chinese modernism. Individualism in TLVĐ and New Culturalists’ writings, therefore, is neither

25 Chang Hao described four primary literary tensions in the May Fourth era, including rationalism and
romanticism, individualism and collectivism. See Kirk Denton, “The Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s
‘Sinking,’” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 14 (December 1992): 109. DOI:10.2307/495405.
26 Huỳnh Sanh Thông, “Main Trends of Vietnamese Literature Between the Two World Wars.” Vietnam Forum 3,
no. 3 (Winter-Spring 1984), 113-14.
27 Tự Lực Văn Đồn. “Tơn chỉ của Tự Lực Văn Đồn” [Principles of Tự Lực Văn Đồn]. Phong Hố (March 2, 1934): 2.
For further discussion on how the group encouraged writers to find the literary voice of tính cách An Nam
[Annamese characters] instead of a total and universal Westernization, see M. Nguyen, “The Self-Reliant Literary
Group,” ix.
28 Liu, Translingual Practice, 81; and Teh-yao Wu, “Chinese Traditional Values and Modernization,” Southeast Asian
Journal of Social Science 4, no. 1 (1975): 116.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 7

something one can possess, nor is it an “equivalent” to an imported Western concept.
Individualism is significative,29 birthed in the process of “carving” modernities.

First, if we explain that these two literary modernists indulge in the absolute autonomy
of individualism as an antithesis to the collective whole (based on the Western humanist model
of the “self”), then how do we come to terms with Yu’s patriotic and nationalist overtone in
“Sinking”? Or does this dichotomy best represent the promotion of individualism in Khái Hưng’s
Nửa Chừng Xuân, where at the end of the story, the heroine Dương Thị Mai fails to defend her
love against the traditional, Confucianist bà Án? This dualistic thinking has been reexamined,
because the heroine Mai’s “failed attempts” to articulate herself at the beginning of Nửa Chừng
Xuân do not speak to the “universality of Western individualism,” but instead to “a disjuncture
between the modern individualistic “tôi” and the social reality of Vietnam’s colonial world” with
social and historical determinants outside the Western European’s imaginations of the Orient.30
TLVĐ’s novels usually lack the hierarchical, neutral first-person “tôi,” characteristic of the
group’s nuanced individualism. Rather, a system of class-conscious, relationship-based, and
societally charged first-person pronouns [đại từ nhân xưng] mediates “tôi” within a larger
Vietnamese sociolinguistic configuration, such as cháu, con, em, and mình, among others.

During the financial negotiation between Mai and the landowner Nguyễn Thiết Thanh,
the heroine continuously defines and redefines herself in several first-person terms to avoid
Nguyễn Thiết Thanh’s urges that she marry him and become his fourth wife. “Thưa ông, tôi nhớ
đến thầy tơi mà khóc” [Dear ơng (you), I (tơi) think of my father, and so I (tôi) am crying] is later
altered into “Thưa cụ, cụ hãy cho cháu nghĩ lại đã” [Dear cụ (you), cụ should let cháu (me) go
home to think about this].31 Mai first establishes herself through a non-kinship pronoun, “tôi,”
then changes to the kinship term “cháu,” which means grandchild, niece, or nephew. She
concurrently addresses Nguyễn Thiết Thanh as “ông,” which means grandfather. Through this
material, habitual reiteration of many first-person reference forms, Khái Hưng’s character has
distanced herself from her addressee. Such variety in pronouns does not exist in any European

languages; hence, it cannot be simply deemed as an “equivalent” to the Eurocentric paradigm
of individualism. Mai makes use of the collective social stratum of the Confucian hierarchy to
negotiate herself in the modern society of Vietnam.32

In this vein, Yu Dafu also calls into question the observed Western model of the self,
which sees “individual consciousness” as the primary and ultimate negation of the Chinese
“national collective.”33 The more the anonymous character assumes and recognizes the “self,”
the more indignant towards the Japanese he becomes, exemplifying the irrefutably-
documentarian and realistic value that Yu’s work has rendered. When the character’s Japanese

29 The word “significative” in this sentence refers to the Jacques Derrida concept of “significance.” I borrowed
Derrida’s commentary about “deferred” significance, which he argues “slides between signs.” Based on this
Derridean concept, I understand individualism in East Asian literature not as an instantaneity––the idea that as
soon as we have tôi or wo 我 as signifiers, we instantly achieve “individualism” as a signified. Rather, individualism

herein “slides between signs” and acquires its meaning presumably through a process of reiteration by which the
signifier becomes the signified.
30 Trans. Tran, “The Politics of Vietnamese Romanticism,” 131.
31 Ibid., 155-56.
32 Ibid., 15.
33 Denton, “The Distant Shore,” 109.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 8

classmates shun his company, he immediately comforts himself: “They are all Japanese, all my
enemies. I’ll have my revenge one day. I’ll get even with them” [他們都是日本人，他們都是
我的仇敵，我總有一天來復仇，我總要復他們的仇].34 In another instance, he puts down in
his diary: “Why did I come to Japan? … China, O my China! Why don’t you grow rich and
strong?” [我何苦要到日本來。。。 中國呀中國！你怎麼不富強起來].35 It is striking that the
appearance of “I” always happens in concert with his malevolence towards Japanese subjects

and his self-imposed exile, seen through the isolated self and the absent motherland. To
disregard the suicide of the “self” at the end is to accept unquestionably the astonishing
complexity and significative ambiguity of Yu’s story, threatening the configuration of a
“Chinaman” and “Chineseness” on the one hand, while asserting defiance towards the Western
prototype of individualism on the other.

“Sinking” starts with the appearance of the lonesome “he” [ta/他] and ends with the
suicide of the wretched “I” [wo/我]. This roundabout cycle in which “he” finally obtains the “I”
signifies repetitive compulsions, aggravated by and interpellated through psychological
soliloquies and interior monologues that gravitate towards self-annihilation. At first, when
taking in the beauty of the natural landscape around him, he addresses himself as an
ambiguous “you” [ni/你]: “This, then, is your refuge… You might as well spend the rest of your
life in this simple countryside, in the bosom of Nature” [這裡就是你的避難所。 。 。你就在
這大自然的懷裡，這純樸的鄉間終老了罷].36 One can readily assume that this “you” is in fact
the incognito “I,” because “he” was not incentivized to find a voice for “himself”––consigning
his frustration to nature serves as his only escape while studying abroad in the colonizing nation
of Japan. This also enables what C. T. Hsia calls an “obsession with China.”37 Through Yu Dafu’s
extensive literary name-dropping and poetry recitation, we see the main character gradually
embark on the path of self-exploration to ultimately realize his “I.”38 Yu Dafu’s use of interior
monologues gives voice to the mechanism of preservation; he decisively philosophizes about
the character’s circumstances while relishing his state of remoteness and seclusion. In one
instance, for example, he finds himself prone to self-pity and solemnly vows, “I mustn’t do that
sort of thing again” [我以後決不再犯罪了].39 The multiple “I”s scattered throughout the work
emphasize the material and habitual course of action that necessitates the final appearance of
the “I” in the ending scene.

The call for a critical reevaluation of the carving of East Asian modernities and its strict
accordance with the romantic-self elucidates the second trope. Special attention should be paid
to the fact that the textual backdrop of “Sinking” happens in Japan, which is also where the
story was written.40 The status of Japan to Chinese students serves more than just a symbolic

meaning: it represents a “national humiliation” to Chinese pride, traced back to even the First

34 Yu, “Sinking,” 34.
35 Ibid., 35.
36 Ibid., 32.
37 C. T. Hsia, “Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature,” in A History of Modern
Chinese Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967): 536-7.
38 Yu, “Sinking,” 33.
39 Ibid., 42.
40 Feng Lan, “From the De-Based Literati to the Debased Intellectual: A Chinese Hypochondriac in Japan,” Modern
Chinese Literature and Culture 23, no. 1 (2011): 106.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 9

Sino-Japanese War in the late 1800s, when the Qing empire succumbed to Japanese land and
naval forces. Jaroslav Průšek (1906-1980) characteristically links individualism with cynicism in
the context of Chinese literature from the May Fourth Movement of 1919 until the second
outbreak of war with Japan (1937-1945). “Subjectivism and individualism,” he asserts, should
be “joined with pessimism and a feeling for the tragedy of life, along with an inclination to
revolt and even the tendency to self-destruction.”41 This statement accurately maps onto Yu
Dafu’s “Sinking,” wherein the no-name protagonist stands in front of a no man’s land and,
triggered by his deep well of engulfing emotions and nationalist angst, sinks (drowns) himself to
death. Subscribing to the notion of individualism with core fixed values––tragedy, pessimism,
and self-destruction––Yu Dafu pre-establishes his profound sense of crisis about the nation’s
fate through the short story’s self-explanatory title, “Sinking.”

Yu’s experiential trip to Japan as an overseas student (1913-1922) also testifies to a kind
of “fictional material,” or “fictionality,” that retains its capacity to forestall the story’s notoriety
as idealist, apolitical, and futile literature.42 In a monologue after encountering the two
cheekily-laughing Japanese girls, the protagonist laments: “Oh, the girl must have known! They

must have known that I am a ‘Chinaman’! … Revenge! Revenge! I must seek revenge against
their insult” [她們已經知道了，已經知道我是支那人了。。。復仇復仇，我總要復他們的
仇].43 He realizes that his identity, rooted in the societal conception of “Chinaman” and
“Chineseness,” is profoundly threatened by the collapse of the cultural whole. Praising Yu
Dafu’s historically accurate portrayal of the time period, Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892-1978)
commends Yu’s short story as “a spring breeze blowing through China’s decaying society
awakening at once countless youthful hearts at that time.”44 In another short story called
“Xueye” 雪夜 [Snowy Night], Yu himself bluntly links the romantic-self, rendered through his
ferocious nationalism, with libidinal acts: “The insults and mistreatment suffered by the people
of a weak country are felt most deeply and most unbearably in relations between the sexes, the
moment when one is hit by the poison dart of Eros.”45 It is not a stretch to conclude that this
postulation about Yu’s works brackets “Snowy Night” with “Sinking.” In “Sinking,” the
anonymous protagonist’s romantic-self seeks prostitution and sensual satisfaction, specifically
in the context of capitalist fetishism, to invert the inferiority of his nationality as a means to

41 Jaroslav Průšek, “Subjectivism and Individualism in Modern Chinese Literature: Herodotus,” in The Lyrical and
the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature, ed. Jaroslav Prüšek and Leo Ou-fan Lee (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1980).
42 I used the word “fictional,” instead of “fictive,” based on Catherine Gallagher’s “The Rise of Fictionality,” to
emphasize the conditional nature of plausibility and believability as a catalyst of modern novels. To Ben Tran, the
speculative binary between romanticism and realism is often prompted by the confusion between fictional
materiality and verisimilitude, derived from Western-influenced realism. See Tran, “The Politics of Vietnamese
Romanticism,” 25.
43 Yu, “Sinking,” 35.
44 Quoted in Denton, “The Distant Shore,” 108. The original text was extracted from Guo Moruo, “Lun Yu Dafu” 論
郁達夫 [On Yu Dafu], in Chuangzao She ziliao 創造社資料 [Materials on the Creation Society] (Fuzhou: Fujian
Renmin, 1985): 803-4.
45 Quoted in Eva Yin-I Chen, “Shame and Narcissistic Self in Yu Da-fu’s ‘Sinking.’” Canadian Review of Comparative
Literature 30, no. 3-4 (2003): 567. The original text was extracted from Yu Dafu, “Xue ye” 雪夜 [Snowy Night]. Vol.
2, in Yu Dafu yanjiu ziliao 郁達夫研究資料 [Research Materials on Yu Dafu] (Tianjin: Tianjin Renmin): 58.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 10

defy the domineering manner of Japan’s declaration of war with China.46 Notably, the sexual
insecurity that goads him into a brothel is only effectuated after he has sufficiently articulated
and materialized the “self” through sustained and unfaltering soliloquies. Conclusively, critics
have claimed that “Sinking” should be held accountable for “blaming China’s backwardness for
[Yu Dafu’s] own personal sexual crisis;” however, tying “the significant presence of the
national/public allegory” with the seemingly “private history” does not fully do justice to Yu
Dafu’s “Sinking.”47

Applying the same critique of “Sinking,” that even the most far-off romanticism should
be rooted in realism, we can see that Nửa Chừng Xuân appears to blend both structures. When
encountering Khái Hưng’s works, scholars in Vietnam tend to neglect the fact that before we
had a prodigious Khái Hưng as a literary writer, we already had him as a journalist of Phong Hoá
and Ngày Nay magazines. Martina Thucnhi Nguyen’s 2021 On Our Own Strength is a notable
and urgent call to view journalistic contributions of Khái Hưng, in particular, and TLVĐ, in
general, in addendum with their literary texts. Khái Hưng’s works thereby cannot be deemed a
convenient escapism away from realist writing to idealism, to which Trường Chinh has berated
as a “bourgeois romanticism,” conducive to self-indulgence and debauchery.48

In addition to Martina Thucnhi Nguyen’s On Our Own Strength, Phong Hoá thời hiện đại
[Mores in the Modern Times], the most recent collaborative work on TLVĐ, has proposed an
epistemological way of reimagining Khái Hưng’s Nửa Chừng Xuân as a concept-based fluidity.
Rather than circumscribing the novel in the conceptually Western dyad of romanticism and
realism, Phùng Kiên suggests looking at the novel as a “transshipment point” [điểm trung
chuyển] between idealist endeavors and rationalist reality.49 Mai’s pregnancy with Lộc’s child is
a romantic symbolism of the quest for individualism and simultaneously a prod to a traditional
society that still exists. Instead of having his mother bear witness to their marriage, Lộc
convinces a woman to stage a matrimonial ceremony. Phùng’s postcolonial reading of the lies

of Lộc highlights the allegory between the “inequivalency” [khơng tương thích] of such
“linguistic and communicative standards in the transitional times.”50 Again, Phùng’s
underscoring of “inequivalency” calls to mind Lydia Liu’s parabolic sense of “translated”
modernity––questioning the Westernesque spirits––where the transferring of meanings and
concepts between languages stretches beyond the “horizon of an absolutely pure, transparent,
and unequivocal translatability.”51 The mixture of romanticism and realism plays an

46 Yu, “Sinking,” 49-55.
47 E. Chen, “Shame and Narcissistic Self in Yu Da-fu’s ‘Sinking,’” 567.
48 Trường Chinh, “Marxism and Vietnamese Culture,” in Selected Writings (Hà Nội: NXB Thế Giới, 1977), 253.
49 The original reads: “Câu chuyện Nửa Chừng Xuân đánh dấu điểm trung chuyển giữa những gì là lý tưởng và lãng
mạn của thời đại với những gì là thực tế của cuộc sống.” See Phùng Kiên, “Tự Lực Văn Đoàn và Chuẩn mực thẩm
mỹ mới: Tìm kiếm tự chủ văn chương qua hoạt động báo chí” [TLVĐ and the New Aesthetic Standards: In Search
for Literary Freedom through Journalistic Activism], in Phong Hoá thời hiện đại: Tự Lực Văn Đồn trong tình thế
thuộc địa ở Việt Nam đầu thế kỷ 20 [Mores in the Modern Times: TLVĐ in the Colonial Condition in Vietnam in the
Beginning of Twentieth-Century], ed. Dương Ánh Đoàn et al., 167.
50 The original reads: “Lời nói dối của Lộc với Mai có thể được đọc như một ẩn dụ đầy thú vị về sự khơng tương
thích của những chuẩn giao tiếp và ngôn ngữ trong giai đoạn chuyển đổi.” Ibid., 167.
51 Liu, Translingual Practice, 15.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 11

indisputable role within the discourse of the new individualism in Khái Hưng’s works and the
often-deemed romantic literature by TLVĐ.52

In the face of the daunting newness, exacerbated by the sudden imposition and
importation of a Western modern, the exploration of the liminality between the “traditional”
(read as Chinese or Vietnamese) and the “modern” (read as Western) conjured up a
narratological struggle for both TLVĐ and the New Culturalists. Both cases elucidated the
complications of cross-cultural studies discussion: when the term “modernity” is used so

readily, it risks becoming uncritical. The “new” is the counterpart of the “other,” a self-reflexive
mirror feeding the imperialist hunger for exotica, Westernesque in the East Asian eye and
Orientalist in the Western eye. However, TLVĐ and the New Culturalists’ writings disappoint
colonial expectations because their “new” is no longer the exact equivalent of the grand, all-
powerful West.

Lydia Liu’s “Narratives of Modern Selfhood” has problematized Western-language
categories like “the self” in the Chinese vernacular language (wo, ziwo, or ziji), the discourse of
which has long been classified as a demonstrable “response” to the powerful West.53 In several
May Fourth writings, including those by Yu Dafu, modernity often comes across as a self-
identity sought by the male protagonist, almost always leading to a serious identity crisis.54 In
Chinese, the first-person reference 我 (wo) and the third-person male 他 (ta) are not as clearly
distinguished as in European languages because of the lack of subject-verb agreements. The
transitional effect between the male 他 and 我 is not as defined as the striking gendered
difference between the third-person male 他 and the female 她 (also ta). In one specific
instance, the male 他 claims that “the innkeeper’s daughter held some attraction for him, for
otherwise he could really have committed suicide” [幸而他住的旅館裡，還有一個 主人的女
兒，可以牽引他的心，否則他真只能自殺了].55 His interpellated ego, exemplified through
the Chinese language’s differentiation between gendered third-person pronouns, suggests a
possibility that he depends on a woman for self-individuation––the Derridean différance
between the signifier (both ta) and the signified based on the gender binary evokes the
signification that complicates the emergent notion of modern selfhood.56

Because 我 is deemed inconsequential compared to 她, right at the moment when the
verbalization of 我 reaches its zenith, the “I” immediately meets its death. The nation has killed
the “I”: “O China, my China, you are the cause of my death!” [祖國呀祖國！我的死是你害我
的].57 Yu Dafu allows for readerly cognition in a modernist sense that the “I” had to be
verbalized, individualism uttered, modernity expressed, until the “I” is not allowed to talk any
longer. Throughout the course of voicing out those perplexing phantasms, perpetually stuck on

52 Khái Hưng and TLVĐ’s writings often appear to be convenient escapisms from nationalist pragmatism. In the
eyes of Communist officials like Trường Chinh, TLVĐ’s novels are too “bourgeois” by virtue of its indifference to
socialist causes. See Trường Chinh, “Marxism and Vietnamese Culture,” Selected Writings, 253.
53 Lydia H. Liu, “Narratives of Modern Selfhood: First-Person Fiction in May Fourth Literature,” in Politics, Ideology,
and Literary Discourse in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique, ed. Liu Kang and Xiaobing
Tang (Duke University Press, 1993): 103.
54 Ibid., 102.
55 Yu, “Sinking,” 57.
56 Refer to footnote 29.
57 Ibid., 55.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 12

the back of the main character’s throat while trying to banish and repress the painful contents
into a “sex drive,” Yu views “Sinking” as an analysis of hypochondria, which Valerie Levan
addresses as “an expression of a general modern predicament.”58 In Yu’s 1921 preface to the
Sinking collection, he insists that the description of the sick youth’s psychology acts as a kind of
anatomy, a jiepou 解剖 [dissection] of hypochondria.59 The clinical task of “dissecting” the sick
mind of the nation to restore life to its weakened body is also Lu Xun’s favorite emphasis
throughout the course of literary modernization in China.60 Writing creeps into Yu’s life like a
self-sanctioned parasite and settles in his soul as a primary means to conceptualize the “I” out
of himself. This prodigious writer lays the whole nation’s life-battered tragedies onto papers
bled with ink, not as those red-tinged marks on the purportedly pristine Treaty of Versailles
which presupposed China’s nationwide protests and usurpation, but instead as an “armor”
against the guillotine of national ignominy poised over Yu’s neck. The modern individualism
typified by literary reformation is now drowned in oblivion.

The suppression of the “I” herein happens textually and paratextually between two
different layers: within the short story and outside of it, in the Sinking collection’s preface. The
collection’s foreword maintains an utterly detached tone, a strategic disguise to hide Yu Dafu’s

motivations for writing.61 The estrangement of the self poses a challenge to the claim of
equivalency between Chinese modernity and that of the West. Through the demise of the main
character, Yu alerts readers to a spiritual aspiration towards a modern sense of relative self-
awareness. Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885-1967), in his 1922 critique of the Sinking collection,
recognizes Yu’s idealism: “People are not satisfied by reality and are unwilling to escape into
emptiness. Remaining in this cold reality, they seek far-flung happiness and contentment so out
of their reach.”62

Ben Tran, when contextualizing Nửa Chừng Xuân, also attentively takes note of the
conflation of Westernization and modernization, which provokes further acknowledgment of
individualism manipulated by the wide variety of pronouns for addressers and addressees. In
the same financial negotiation between Mai and hàn Thanh, not only does Mai switch between
a variety of first-person pronouns (as mentioned in previous points on individualism and
collectivism), but hàn Thanh also employs an array of personal-referential terms. In one
moment, hàn Thanh expresses:

58 Valerie Levan, “Forbidden Enlightenment: Self-Articulation and Self-Accusation in the Works of Yu Dafu (1896-
1945)” (PhD Diss., Chicago: University of Chicago, 2010), 92.
59 Trans. by the author. The original text was quoted in Levan, “Forbidden Enlightenment,” 39, which reads: “第一
篇沉沦是描写着一个病的青年的心理，也可以说是青年忧郁病 Hypochondria 的解剖，里边也带叙着现代人
的苦闷。。。第二篇南迁是描写一个无为的理想主义者的没落。。。这两篇是一类的东西，就把他们作连

续的小说看， 也未始不可的。”
60 Liu, Translingual Practice, 50.
61 See discussion of this assessment, with quotations and translations, in Levan, Forbidden Enlightenment, 91-3.
62 Trans. by the author. The original was quoted in Zhou, “Chenlun” 沉淪 [Sinking] in Yu Dafu yanjiu ziliao, 3, which
reads: “这集内所描写是青年的现代的苦闷... 生的意志与现实之冲突是这一切苦闷的基本；人不满足于现
实， 而复不肯遁于空虚，仍就在这坚冷的现实之中，寻求其不可得的快乐与幸福。”

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Vậy bây giờ tơi đưa cơ một nghìn để cơ, để em làm vốn và em vờ làm tờ cầm nhà, cầm
đất để che mắt thiên hạ, hẹn đến tháng sáu sang năm chuộc…. Thế rồi... thế rồi đến
tháng sáu sang năm tôi lại giả văn tự cho cơ, cho em… thế thì cơ tính có tiện khơng?”63
[So tôi (I) will give cô (you) a thousand right now so that cô—so that em (you) will have
some capital, and em will just have to counterfeit a promissory note for the house and
land, to trick the rest of the world, to be paid next June.... And then ... next June ... tôi
will draft another contract for em, for cô.... Do cô think this will work?]64
Tran’s recognition of the intricacies and pronoun-specificities in this quote is enlightening. The
first-person pronoun “em” can refer to “em gái” [younger sister] or “em trai” [younger
brother], or more frequently, perform a romantic connotation for the female partner in an
intimate relationship. In contrast, cô may seem more formal, distanced, and respectful. The
more hàn Thanh self-corrects from “cô” to “em” to address Mai in a sexual way, the more Mai
simultaneously self-posits from the neutral “tôi” to “cháu” to establish the boundary of age,
negating hàn Thanh’s established social structure and her own identification specificity. If we
apply the inflected-language trope of Western modernization and consider the word “tôi” as
the Vietnamese equivalent of “I,” then this above dialogue does not signify the intrinsic social
difference and personal intentions between Mai and hàn Thanh. It is through a series of
performative reiteration and redefinition of the first-person pronouns in Vietnamese that both
Mai and hàn Thanh attempt to haggle over their inherent differences in social rankings.
The aforementioned sociolinguistic mobility in addressing and in self-reference is not an
overanalysis of Khái Hưng’s literary works, given that Khái Hưng manages to extract the same
exploration of characterial denial in fixed identification in another short story called “Lên Sĩ…
Xuống Sĩ…” [Move Up Minister… Move Down Minister…].65 Within only a page, the story
recounts the final match of cờ tướng [Chinese chess], but within the scope of the village Làng
Đông, it is played with human pieces, termed cờ người [chess-human]. The game’s two
opposing sides are gender-segregated. The charming Hai Phùng, a man characteristic of the
“rotten scoundrel” of Russian literature, is drawn to an attractive woman playing the sĩ piece.
Over the course of the match, Hai Phùng exerts a dictatorial agency over the female sĩ piece,
which resembles how Khái Hưng consigns an authorial force of individualism to the text at

hand. The chessboard symbolizes the microcosmic scale of a much larger and more regulated
Confucian world, wherein authority figures who adhere to a set of parameters and bylaws
dictate the movements of individuals. Hai Phùng demands sĩ to move back and forth from her
position on the magnified chessboard and even questions her identity.66 This kind of enmity
happens in more than one story by Khái Hưng. For example, in the interrogation between Mai
and the French security guard in Nửa Chừng Xuân, the questioned individual “tôi” is explicitly
gendered. The act of gendering the single “I” posits a new argument for the discursive
transformation of modernism. The individual who is brought to confront the collective is
essentially female, magnifying the difference between female “I” and male “I.” Turning to a
more gendered trope and construction of Khái Hưng’s short story, Tran’s analysis sheds new

63 Khái Hưng, Nửa Chừng Xuân, 73-4.
64 Tran, “The Politics of Vietnamese Romanticism,” 156.
65 Khái Hưng, “Lên sĩ... Xuống sĩ…” [Move Up Minister… Move Down Minister…], Phong Hoá (February 31, 1993): 9.
66 Ibid.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 14

light on prevailing criticisms. Neil Jamieson’s assessment, for example, attests to the firmly
grounded dichotomy between the individual and the community. In doing so, Jamieson failed
to critically examine how individualism got “translated” into Vietnamese as a modern discourse.
Because of the separation of the “I” based on gender, not all “I”s employ the equal agency of
striving to voice self-expression and individualism. The portrayal of the female “I” and male “I”
diverges, with men as the subject and women as the object of interrogation.

Individualism in East Asia is not an untouched cross-cultural site between the East and
the West where we can measure the tropes of modernity through the readily available and
homogenizing frameworks and universalizing machines of modernity derived from Western
scholarship. Lydia Liu and Xiaobing Tang, circa the 1990s, advocated eloquently for the need to
problematize Chinese modernism. China’s modern literary development enacted a site of

pulsing tensions by virtue of China’s quasi-colonial existence after the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing.
Chinese literature, as Liu suggests, becomes a “translated modernity,” or, as Tang argues, a
“subaltern subject” that “is neither the radically different other of the Western subject nor a
simple replica of the Western consciousness.”67 Less than twenty years later, Vietnamese
scholars also challenged the pristine West-to-East transference of modernity. Both Ben Tran
and Martina Thucnhi Nguyen explored the possibilities, as well as limitations, of
“Westernization” and foreign Enlightenment ideals. Vietnam’s modern literary development,
they contend, happened in a society that was constantly grappling with colonial modernity
dominated by Euro-American mores. Such reexamination of the seemingly popular and sterile
tropes––singularity, romanticism, and Westernness––memorializes a larger picture of the
studies of modernism, embedded with its ever-changing structure of sociolinguistic and
geopolitical histories unique to the cultures.

In the era of (post-) postmodernism, literary modernism seems to paradoxically stay in
the antiquated past. Comparative literary investigations between TLVĐ and the New
Culturalists point to a continuation of transnational thought about modernism in East Asia and
under-researched, yet vibrant literary cultures like that of Vietnam. If the new is not necessarily
an equivalent to either singularity and modernization is not simply viewed as Westernization,
East Asian modernities appear unpolished, problematized, and contested. More focus on
modernity in Vietnam and China, not as a universal concept or hypothetical equivalence of the
West, will further the studies of modernism with the consideration of oftentimes unstable
bonds between languages, scriptures, cultures, and histories.

67 Liu, Translingual Practice, xix; and Tang Xiaobing, Tang Xiaobing, Chinese Modern: The Heroic and the Quotidian
(Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2000), 53.

Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2022 15

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