Environment and Narrative in Vietnam 3031411846, 9783031411847

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
Introduction: Environment and Narrative in Vietnam
1 Environmental Crises and Cultures in Vietnam
2 Narrative and the Environmental Humanities
3 The Environmental Humanities in Vietnam
4 Environmental Narrative Across Disciplines
5 Future Directions: Vietnam, the World, and the Anthropocene
References
Part I: Theoretical Foundations
Protected Area Narratives in Vietnam: An Anthropological and Mesological Approach
1 Introduction
2 Scientific Narratives About a Diversity of Worlds
3 The Ontological Foundations of Nature Narratives
4 Conclusion
References
Part II: Indigenous and Spiritual Narratives of the Environment
Legends of Forest Spirits in the Central Vietnamese Highlands
1 Introduction
2 The Sacred Forest in the Indigenous Cultures of the Highlands
3 Narratives About Forest Yang and Forest Malai
4 A Metaphysical Approach to Nature
5 Forest Spirit Stories in Contemporary Vietnamese Media
6 Conclusion
Appendix: News Reports About Forest Spirits
References
Tai Narrative, Ritual, and Discourses of the Environment in North Central Vietnam
1 Introduction
2 Geographic, Economic, and Historical Background
3 Ecological Perceptions, Beliefs, Rituals, and Natural Resources Management
4 Reconstructing the Meaning of Tư Mã Hai Đào and Mount Pha Dùa in Tai Literature
5 Tutelary Deity Worship, Narratives, and the Environment
6 Conclusion
References
Animal Mercy Release, Environmental Conservation, and the Media in Vietnam
1 Introduction
2 Summary of Data Collection and Analysis
3 A Brief Overview of Animal Mercy Release in Contemporary Vietnam
4 Narratives About Animal Mercy Release in Contemporary Vietnamese Media
5 Mercy Release and Environmental Conservation
6 Cultural and Ethics Narratives
7 Intermingling of Values and Ethics from Media Narratives of Mercy Release
8 Conclusions
References
Part III: War Narratives and the Environment
Narratives of the Natural World in Vietnamese Postwar Movies (1986–2020)
1 Introduction: Vietnamese War Movies and Grand Narratives of the Natural World
2 Ecophobia and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
3 Nature as Aggressor and Victim
4 Ecological Aesthetics: Beyond Romance and Epic
5 Conclusion
References
Ecopedagogy, War Memories, and Sensory Experiences of Nature in Contemporary Vietnamese Children’s Literature
1 Ecocriticism and Vietnamese Literature
2 Children’s Literature in the Socio-political Context of Vietnam
3 Homeland and War Memory
4 Coming of Age in the Jungle
5 Sensory Experiences
6 Conclusion
References
Đı̉nh Q. Lê’s The Pure Land and Ecological Phantoms: Levitating Sarcophagi, Submerged Spirits
1 Introduction
2 Đı̉nh Q. Lê’s Pure Land Installation
3 Nature’s Fate: Environmental Conflagration and Photographic Ghosts
4 Buddhist Cosmology and Vietnamese Ancestral Devotion
References
Part IV: Communism, Global Markets, and the Environment
Civil War, Socialism’s Underworld, and the Environment
References
Ecologies of Coffee Sustainability in the Central Highlands
1 Coffee and the Question of Sustainability
2 Ecological Reality and Environmental Imagination in the Central Highlands
3 Coffee Sustainability and Emerging Environmental Movements
4 Ecologies of Vietnamese Coffee
5 Conclusion
References
Part V: Environmental Literature in Vietnam
Environmental Travel Narratives in the Magazine Nam Phong
1 Nam Phong: A Focus of Cultural and Intellectual Life
2 Nature, Serenity, and Spirituality
3 The Wasteland of Wild Nature
4 Escape from the City
5 The Economic Uses of Nature
6 Nature, Colonialism, and the Vietnamese Nation
7 The Modernization of Travel Narrative
References
Gender and Environment in Nguyễn Ngọc Tư’s Narratives
1 Introduction
2 Humans’ Tragic Destiny: Endurance and Resignation as Female Virtues
3 Looking at Animals: Nature’s Resilience in a Broken Human World
4 Unhappy Endings: The Degradation of Nature and the Oppression of Women
5 Conclusion
References
When the City Speaks Up: Nature, City, and Identity in Lê Minh Hà’s Phố vẫn gió
1 Place and Identity Formation
2 Residence and Social Status in Phố vẫn gió
3 Class Identity and Conflict in Lê’s Urban Space
4 Privatization and the Creation of Meaning
References
Political Dimensions in Vietnamese Ecofiction
1 Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Vietnamese Environmental Literature
2 Trần Duy Phiên and Vietnamese Ecofiction
3 The Politics of Vietnamese Ecofiction
4 Trần Duy Phiên’s Environmental Fiction and the Resistance to Globalization
References
Index

Citation preview

LITERATURES, CULTURES, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Environment and Narrative in Vietnam

Edited by Ursula K. Heise · Chi P. Pham

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment Series Editors

Ursula K. Heise Department of English University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA Gisela Heffes Rice University Houston, TX, USA

Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment focuses on new research in the Environmental Humanities, particularly work with a rhetorical or literary dimension. Books in this series explore how ideas of nature and environmental concerns are expressed in different cultural contexts and at different historical moments. They investigate how cultural assumptions and practices, as well as social structures and institutions, shape conceptions of nature, the natural, species boundaries, uses of plants, animals and natural resources, the human body in its environmental dimensions, environmental health and illness, and relations between nature and technology. In turn, the series makes visible how concepts of nature and forms of environmentalist thought and representation arise from the confluence of a community’s ecological and social conditions with its cultural assumptions, perceptions, and institutions.

Ursula K. Heise  •  Chi P. Pham Editors

Environment and Narrative in Vietnam

Editors Ursula K. Heise Department of English Institute of the Environment and Sustainability University of California Los Angeles, CA, USA

Chi P. Pham Institute of Literature Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences Hanoi, Vietnam

ISSN 2946-3157     ISSN 2946-3165 (electronic) Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment ISBN 978-3-031-41183-0    ISBN 978-3-031-41184-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Khanh Bui/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

Introduction: Environment and Narrative in Vietnam  1 Ursula K. Heise and Chi P. Pham Part I Theoretical Foundations  33  rotected Area Narratives in Vietnam: An Anthropological P and Mesological Approach 35 Christian Culas Part II Indigenous and Spiritual Narratives of the Environment  63  egends of Forest Spirits in the Central Vietnamese Highlands 65 L Thi Kim Ngan Nguyen  ai Narrative, Ritual, and Discourses of the Environment in T North Central Vietnam 89 Achariya Choowonglert

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CONTENTS

 nimal Mercy Release, Environmental Conservation, and A the Media in Vietnam109 Mai Hoàng Thạch Part III War Narratives and the Environment 141  arratives of the Natural World in Vietnamese Postwar N Movies (1986–2020)143 Cam-Giang Hoang  copedagogy, War Memories, and Sensory Experiences of E Nature in Contemporary Vietnamese Children’s Literature165 Montira Rato  ı ̉nh Q. Lê’s The Pure Land and Ecological Phantoms: Đ Levitating Sarcophagi, Submerged Spirits181 Conor Lauesen Part IV Communism, Global Markets, and the Environment 207  ivil War, Socialism’s Underworld, and the Environment209 C Ben Tran  cologies of Coffee Sustainability in the Central Highlands229 E Sarah G. Grant Part V Environmental Literature in Vietnam 253  nvironmental Travel Narratives in the Magazine Nam Phong255 E Nguyen Phuong Ngoc

 CONTENTS 

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 ender and Environment in Nguyễn Ngọc Tư ’s Narratives275 G Kim Lan Cao  hen the City Speaks Up: Nature, City, and Identity in Lê W Minh Hà’s Phố vâ˜n gió297 Trần Tịnh Vy Political Dimensions in Vietnamese Ecofiction317 Chi P. Pham Index343

Notes on Contributors

Kim Lan Cao  is a researcher at the Institute of Literature and a lecturer at the Graduate Academy of Social Sciences, Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences (VASS). She completed her PhD at VASS in 2012 and won a postdoctoral scholarship to the University of Las Palmas in Spain, 2016–2017. Recently, she has served as head of the Department of Literary Theories and Criticism (IoL, VASS). Her research interests focus on semiotics, narratology, rhetoric, feminism, modern Vietnamese literature, and cultural studies. She is the author of The Implied Author in The Rhetoric of Fiction (2015) and The Magic of Narratives: Narratology and Interpretations of Modern Vietnamese Literature (2019) as well as numerous articles. She has also co-authored From Signs to Symbols (2018), Narratology: Theories and Practices (2017), and The History of The Vietnamese Literature: Theories and Criticism (2012). In recent years, her research and publications have focused on feminism and gender studies in Vietnamese literature and media. Achariya  Choowonglert is an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Naresuan University, Thailand. She received a PhD in Social Science (international program) from Chiang Mai University, Thailand, in 2012, winning an award for an excellent PhD thesis. She also received the National Research Council Thailand (NRCT) Award 2021 for research in sociology. Her research and teaching in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology focus on Tai Studies in Vietnam, cultural politics, cultural anthropology, cultural and ethnic tourism, and Vietnamese migrants in Thailand. Christian  Culas  is a Senior Research Fellow in Anthropology at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Montpellier attached to ART-Dev (Actors, Resources and Territories in Development), France. His main research fields are the anthropology of relations between human ix

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communities and nature, and the critical epistemology of scientific descriptions of conceptions and local uses of nature. For the past ten years, his research has focused on local knowledge and the ethnohistory of natural protected areas in Vietnam, Madagascar, and France with the aim of improving dialogue between protected area users and administrative authorities. He is the author of Le messianisme hmong aux XIXe et XXe siècles: La dynamique religieuse comme instrument politique (2005) and co-editor of Inter-Ethnic Dynamics in Asia: Considering the Other through Ethnonyms, Territories and Rituals (2009) and Norms and Practices in Contemporary Rural Vietnam: Social Interactions between Authorities and People (2010). Recent publications include “Nature and Human in Sino-Vietnamese conceptions and practices: Articulations between Asian vernacular ‘analogism’ and Western modern ‘naturalism’ modes of identification” in Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures: Histories, Myths and Societies (2019); “Anthropologie des relations État-population rurale: Participation locale et société civile dans les projets de développement au nord du Vietnam” in Moussons (2020). He has also co-authored the articles “Climate Change and Adaptation in Vietnam: Contributions from Environmental History” in Climate Change in Vietnam: Impacts and Adaptation (2021) and “Expressions et évolutions de l’anthropologie du développement au Vietnam” in Anthropologie et développement (2021). Sarah  G.  Grant  is Associate Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). Her current research interests are critical food and coffee studies, social and environmental justice, visual culture, and citizen science with a regional focus on Southeast Asia and California. Recent publications include “Complicated Webs: Risk and Uncertainty in the Vietnamese Coffee Industry” in PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review (2021) and “What’s in a Wet Market?” in the Association for Asian Studies Asia Shorts Series edited volume, Teaching About Asia in a Time of Pandemic (2020). Ursula K. Heise  holds the Marcia H. Howard Term Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is co-­ founder and Director of the Lab for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at UCLA’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability. Her research and teaching focus on contemporary literature and the environmental humanities; environmental literature, arts, and cultures in North and South America, Germany, Japan, and Spain; literature and science; science fiction; and narrative theory. Her books include, among others, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008) and Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016), which won the 2017 book prize of the British Society for Literature and Science. She is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017) and the series Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment with Palgrave Macmillan. She is also a producer and writer of Urban Ark Los Angeles, a documentary created as a collaboration of LENS with the public television station KCET-Link.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Cam-Giang  Hoang is a tenured lecturer and Head of the Arts Studies Department, Faculty of Literature and Sino-Nom, University of Social Sciences and Humanities-Vietnam National University (USSH-VNU) in Hanoi. She received her PhD (2013) in the theory of literature from Vietnam National University and a certificate in film writing (2010) from the Ford Foundation’s Film Studies Program. She was a Harvard-Yenching Institute Visiting Scholar in 2018–2019 and a Harvard Asia Center Visiting Scholar in 2019–2020. Her research focuses on interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches to cinema and literature, such as adaptation, translation studies, and ecocriticism. She currently works on the relations between cinematic ecocriticism and socio-political discourses in East Asian and Southeast Asian movies. She is the author of the monograph Vietnamese Novels at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century: Structure and Tendencies (2015) and she has published more than fifty articles on global cinema arts in English and Vietnamese. Conor Lauesen  completed his PhD (2019) in the Art & Art History Department at Stanford University. He writes about the melancholy of the past through the vantage of photography, painting, and literature. Fluent in the Vietnamese language and the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship in Hanoi (2007–08), Lauesen was originally a doctoral candidate in the History Department at Yale University (2012). Trained as a twentieth-century cultural historian of Southeast Asia, his early academic research explored both the aesthetic and cultural functions of billboards—socialist slogans and political signage—in urban Vietnam. His book manuscript Contemplation in Fire: Immolation, Photography, and Vietnam 1963 is currently under review. He currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). His courses consider topics on modernism and media, abstract expressionism, and the complex relations between art and life. Mai Hoàng Thạch  is a PhD candidate in Geography at Rutgers University and a lecturer in Environmental Anthropology at Vietnam National University’s Hanoi University of Social Sciences and Humanities. His research interests include Science and Technology Studies (STS) and politics of nature; political ecology; human–animal relations; conservation values, tourism, and sustainability in the Anthropocene; environmental values and ethics; environmental governance, policy, and education; and science and communication. His PhD research explores how the Anthropocene condition in tropical countries like Vietnam ties multiple spaces and concepts of nature conservation together, with a focus on species rewilding practices in Vietnam. His research investigates values of aesthetics and wilderness, economic values as connected to the production of nature, the roles of humans and nonhumans in agency-making, and multiple ontology-making of conservation goals and practices as produced by Anthropocene conditions. He has also published on the development of primatology, primate conservation, and wildlife trade in Vietnam through an ethnoprimatology and multispecies ethnography lens.

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Chi  P.  Pham  is a  Tenured Researcher at the Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi. She received her first PhD degree in Literary Theory in Vietnam and her second PhD degree in Comparative Literature in the United States. She is the author of Aesthetic Experience in Ramayana Epic (published in Vietnamese in 2015) and Literature and Nation-building in Vietnam: The Invisibilization of the Indians (2021). She has edited four collections of Indian and South East Asian folktales in Vietnamese translation, and has co-edited a collection of Vietnamese environmental short stories in English translation entitled Revenge of Gaia: Contemporary Vietnamese Ecofiction with Chitra Sankaran (2021). She has also co-edited the essay anthology Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures: Histories, Myths and Societies with Chitra Sankaran and Gurpreet Kaur (2019). She has authored numerous essays on Vietnamese literature and culture for both academic and non-academic publications, in both Vietnamese and English. She is currently working on a co-authored monograph entitled Reading South Vietnam’s Writers: The Reception of Western Thought in Journalism and Literature with Thomas Engelbrecht. Nguyen Phuong Ngoc  is Maître de Conférences (MCF) in Vietnamese language and civilization at Aix-Marseille University and a member of the Institut de Recherches Asiatiques (IRASIA). She works on Vietnamese intellectuals and focuses on the emergence and development of modern Vietnamese literature written in quôć ngư ,̃ the modern Vietnamese writing system, during the first half of the twentieth century. Montira Rato  is Associate Professor of Vietnamese at the Department of Eastern Languages, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, in Bangkok. Her research interests include contemporary Vietnamese literature, Vietnamese culture, and social changes in Vietnam. She also serves as the director of the Southeast Asian Studies Program, Graduate School, Chulalongkorn University. She has published in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and the edited volume Social Inequality in Vietnam and the Challenges to Reform (2004). Thi Kim Ngan Nguyen  is Associate Professor at the Department of Literature and Linguistics, University of Education, Hue University. Her research has focused on folklore in the social context, history of folkloristics, Vietnamese folk narratives, and folk metaphysics. Ngân’s recent publications include “Confucianism and Folklore in the Vietnamese Fantasy Short Stories: Ghost Stories” (2021), “Metaphysical Experiences in Postwar Vietnam” (2021), and “Identity of the Vietnamese Narrative Culture: Archetypal Journeys from Folk Narratives to Fantasy Short Stories” (2021). She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Vietnamese National Foundation for Science and Technology Development and of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Ben  Tran  is Associate Professor of Asian Studies and English at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Post-Mandarin: Masculinity and Aesthetic Modernity in Colonial Vietnam (2017). ̀ Trân Ti n ̣ h Vy  is a lecturer at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City. She holds a PhD in Vietnamese Studies from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her dissertation focuses on the issues of memory and identity in the works of Vietnamese authors living in Germany. In the framework of her research on diaspora literature, memory studies, and postcolonial studies, she published her recent article “Home Sweet Home in Vo Phien’s Essays” in Suvannabhumi: Multi-disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and the book chapter “The Legacy of the Diaspora: Memory and Homeland-in-memory in the Diasporic Vietnamese Literature in Germany” in the Routledge Handbook of Asian Diaspora & Development.

List of Figures

 Protected Area Narratives in Vietnam: An Anthropological and Mesological Approach Fig. 1

Diversity of observable realities about the forest

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 Narrative, Ritual, and Discourses of the Environment in Tai North Central Vietnam Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Northwest Vietnam. (Source: ThS. Trần Thi ̣ Ngọc Trinh, Cần Thơ University, 2016) Mount Pha Dùa located in between Sơ n Thủy and Mư ờ ng Mìn Communes, Quan Sơ n District, Thanh Hóa Province. (Credit: Achariya Choowonglert, March 2017) Tư Mã Hai Đào shrine at Sơ n Thủy Commune, Quan Sơ n District (Credit: Achariya Choowonglert March 2017)

91 101 105

Đı ̉nh Q. Lê’s The Pure Land and Ecological Phantoms: Levitating Sarcophagi, Submerged Spirits Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Đı ̉nh Q. Lê, The Pure Land. Installation view. (Credit from Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand) Đı ̉nh Q. Lê, The Pure Land. 2019. Installation view. (Credit from Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand) Đı ̉nh Q. Lê, The Pure Land Untitled #6. Installation View. (Credit from Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand) Đı ̉nh Q. Lê, The Pure Land Untitled #3 (Light from darkness, truth always rises). 2018. UV print on silver vinyl fabric. 116 × 174 cm. (Credit from Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand)

182 184 188

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 5 Fig. 6

Fig. 7 Fig. 8

Fig. 9

Fig. 10

Phillip Jones Griffiths, Deformed Fetuses Preserved in Formaldehyde at the Từ Dũ Hospital, Saigon, Vietnam 1980. (Courtesy of Magnum Photos) Anonymous illustration. Psychological Warfare Posters Promoting the US-South Vietnamese Cause During the Vietnam War, 1965–1969 (photo no. 306-VP). (Courtesy National Archives) Anonymous photograph, Cà Mau. (Courtesy of the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) Đı ̉nh Q. Lê, The Pure Land Untitled #8 (Light from darkness, truth always rises). 2018. UV print on silver vinyl fabric. 116 × 174 cm. (Credit from Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand) Đı ̉nh Q. Lê, Lotus Land (Monsanto & Uniroyal Chemicals), 1999. Fiberglass, polymer, wood, paint. Approximately 36 × 24 × 24 in. (Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica) Amitabha, the Buddha of the Western Pure Land (Sukhavati). Ca. 1700. (Courtesy of the Met’s Open Access policy)

192

195 196

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199 203

Introduction: Environment and Narrative in Vietnam Ursula K. Heise and Chi P. Pham

1   Environmental Crises and Cultures in Vietnam For readers in Europe and North America, the idea of environmental crisis in Vietnam conjures up, first and foremost, memories and images of what Americans tend to call the “Vietnam War,” and Vietnamese typically call the “American War,” which lasted from 1955 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. In this proxy war of communist North Vietnam against anti-communist South Vietnam, the use of Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants by the US forces has generated some of the most traumatic images of deliberately inflicted environmental damage and its disastrous consequences for human health. America’s herbicidal warfare campaign in Vietnam from 1961 to 1971 coincided with the publication of one of the most U. K. Heise (*) Department of English, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. P. Pham Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi, Vietnam e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_1

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important texts for the emergence of the American environmentalist movement and, to some extent, environmental movements elsewhere: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which brought to the attention of the general public the dangers of pesticides and herbicides whose use was at the time pervasive in American agriculture and gardening. Carson’s scenes of average citizens discovering dead birds in their backyards combine, at that moment of history, with images of military helicopters spraying defoliants on Vietnamese forests. This paradoxical conjunction of emergent public awareness and activism against environmental toxins in North America with the weaponization of these toxins in South East Asia adds to the horror of the war itself, shining a harsh light on global environmental injustice. But environmental crises and collective engagement with them have a long history in Vietnam both before and after the American War. While a brief introduction cannot do justice to this deep history, a few highlights may be useful for establishing the context of the analyses that are collected in this volume. Between 1960 and 2020, Vietnam tripled its population, which grew from approximately 33  million in 1960 to approximately 97 million in 2020 (https://www.worlddata.info/asia/vietnam/populationgrowth.php). Since the Đô ̉i Mớ i Policy (Chính sách Đô ̉i Mớ i) that transitioned its socialist command economy to a socialist-oriented market economy starting in 1986, Vietnam has vigorously pursued industrialization, which has reduced poverty, but often at the price of serious environmental degradation (Ortmann 2017: 1). The most serious current crises include massive deforestation, land degradation, degradation of the swamps and wetlands in the Mekong Delta, high rates of biodiversity loss, air pollution, water pollution, waste, and climate change.1 While Vietnam’s Communist government has recognized many of these problems and has in some cases moved energetically to improve them—for example, through large-scale afforestation campaigns in the last few decades—these efforts have often fallen short of the targeted goals (McElwee 2016: 134–171; Ortmann 2017: 4). The anthropologist and environmental scientist Pamela McElwee diagnoses many of these efforts as examples of what she calls “environmental rule,” government narratives and policies that ostensibly target environmental problems but are also and often mainly intended 1  For an overview of Vietnam’s environmental problems as well as environmental governance and its shortfalls, see Ortmann (2017: 1–21); for a detailed analysis of deforestation, see McElwee (2016); for transformations of the Mekong Delta, see Biggs (2010).

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to achieve other political goals, prominent among them the control of populations who might raise problems or resist the government (2016: 63). The political scientist Stephan Ortmann argues more optimistically that “institutional reformers have achieved much in Vietnam but much more must be done to develop an effective environmental state which can cope with the growing environmental crisis … even without a fundamental transformation of the political regime, there is some room for incremental improvements in the future” (2017: 260). McElwee, Ortmann, and the environmental historian David Biggs broadly agree in their analyses of historical and present-day environmental management in Vietnam that top-down modes of governance that have in different ways characterized French colonialism, American wartime environmental engineering, and conservative as well as socialist governments in North and South Vietnam have tended to ignore traditional land uses, local ecological knowledge, and democratic modes of decision-making. These strategies have created some environmental crises and prolonged others that date back to before the French colonial period (1859–1954; see Biggs 2010: 8). Analyses such as these already indicate that environmental crises, in Vietnam and elsewhere, cannot be properly understood without attention to culture and politics: without an understanding, in other words, of what visions shape the engagement with a given ecological system on the part of communities who define their ethnicities in particular ways, who have unequal access to wealth and power, who engage in divergent methods of governance, and who rely on different visions of what the present and future of nature should look like. Focusing on this interface of culture, politics, and ecology has been the core mission of the Environmental Humanities, as we will explain in greater detail below. Some of Vietnam’s internal environmental conflicts relate to differences between majority and minority ways of life. While a majority (87%) of Vietnam’s population are ethnically Việt (Kinh), who tend to concentrate in the Red River Delta, the Mekong Delta, the central coastal delta, and in cities, no fewer than fifty-four different ethnic groups such as the Tày, Thái, Mư ờ ng, Hoa, Khmer, and Nùng co-inhabit the national territory, many though not all of them established in Vietnam’s mountainous areas. Traditionally, many of the mountain-dwelling groups have practiced swidden agriculture: burning or felling tracts of forest for agricultural use of a few years’ duration and then leaving the area fallow for soil and plant regeneration and moving on to the next area. At the same time, such communities have invested certain mountainous and forested areas with

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specific cultural and spiritual meanings that dictate what forms of natural resource extraction and use are considered acceptable and which ones not. As several essays in this collection show, the spiritual and agricultural practices of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities have repeatedly led to tensions with the Kinh majority, with French colonial governance, and with socialist policies, each with their own narratives about how Vietnam’s natural environments should be managed.2 In turn, ethnic minority groups’ stories about nature have sometimes served as tools of resistance to forces of cultural assimilation and political integration. Swidden agriculture has been one of the recurring points of conflict in these encounters. As McElwee has shown in a brilliant analysis of Vietnam’s forestry regimes over the last eighty years, rotational “slash-and-burn” agriculture has played a crucial role in accounts of deforestation and environmental degradation under French colonial rule as well as in the context of Vietnamese communism. French colonial authorities blamed ethnic minorities and their swidden agriculture for degraded and diminished forest cover, at the same time that they sought to exploit Vietnamese forests for timber extraction. But their methods, derived from European silviculture, did not work well in Vietnamese forests with high tree species diversity and an overall lower quantity of timber. The narrative of harmful minority swidden practices disguised the degradation that the French authorities’ own misguided forestry management caused and helped to justify their auctioning off forest use rights to private companies rather than using the forests as a collective resource (McElwee 2016: 69). With the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the North in 1954, the socialist state sought to nationalize forest resources through the establishment of State Forest Enterprises (lâm trư ờ ng) that persisted until the 1980s (Le et al. 2012). Officials increasingly sought to regulate swidden practices, and the state initiated procedures for converting minority communities to sedentarism, for resettling them from their traditional territories, and for moving lowland populations into the mountains (McElwee 2016: 81–86). These policies perpetuated the narrative of swidden agriculture as harmful to forests—especially burning practices—and sought to manage forests for optimal timber harvests. In practice, because of incomplete inventories of trees, imprecise categories that assigned natural areas to different extractive uses, and poor 2  Biggs has analyzed similar tensions between Kinh and Khmer in the Mekong Delta (Biggs 2010: 50–51; 59–75).

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cutting and processing procedures, forest cover declined further. In addition, local communities sometimes sabotaged timber production that they perceived as an expropriation of their own forest resources and uses (McElwee 2016: 96). Overall, the establishment of State Forest Enterprises contributed to deforestation, continued the oppression of minorities, and relegated their local knowledge of the forests to the margins of an industrial socialism that mostly looked at forests as an extractive resource (cf. McElwee 2016: 92). It is the impact of this long history of deforestation that most concerned communist officials after the end of the American War, McElwee argues, much more so than the damages from the military use of defoliants (2016: 87). If ethnic conflicts have had a shaping influence on Vietnam’s environmental crises, so has its colonial history. Problems of flooding, wildfires, freshwater salinization, and soil oxidation with aluminum sulfate in the Mekong Delta, as Biggs has shown in his detailed environmental history, have often resulted from the introduction of water management philosophies and technologies that were ill-suited to the region’s ecology. Massive dredging of natural waterways and canal construction by French colonial authorities and by American engineers after the end of colonial rule, along with deforestation and dam construction, permanently altered the hydrology of the Mekong River Delta. Canal construction lowered water tables, made it impossible for farmers to drain naturally acidic water from their fields so that aluminum sulfate built up on them, and exposed soil to oxidization of the alum in dry periods. Forest cutting also eliminated natural buffers to water acidity and exposed layers of peat underneath which, once dried out, were prone to wildfires, leading to a large number of abandoned lands (d â̵ ́t bỏ hoang or terres abandonnées) in the Eastern parts. The Western areas of the Mekong Delta became more susceptible to catastrophic floods once coastal mangrove forests were cut down, a risk that was reinforced by dam construction: major floods in 1923, 1929, and 1937, in combination with economic depression, led to the foreclosure of many farms. Missteps of ecological understanding and environmental engineering combined with political and cultural processes to exacerbate the problems: imposition of European-style polder grids on the Mekong waterscape; disrespect for Khmer land rights and forced resettlement of Khmer communities to abandoned lands; and massive in-migration of farmers from the Red River Delta in the North, who were perceived to be successful water managers and farmers by the French authorities, whereas native Mekong

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farmers were understood to be lazy and shifty in their nomadic stewardship of the landscape (Biggs 2010: 91–125). Attempts to remake the Delta waterscape with canal grids as well as to institute land reforms on the basis of imported ideas continued after 1954 under Ngô Đình Diệm’s presidency of South Vietnam (1955–1963), and under the increasing power of American advisors and organizations. These programs sometimes led to protests and uprisings among local farmers and villagers. As Biggs highlights, such ecological misunderstandings, import of land reform ideas from other Asian regions, introduction of new technologies from mechanical dredges to aerial photography, racial and ethnic biases, and ideologies regarding uses of nature combined over several successive regimes to transform Mekong Delta ecology for the worse (Biggs 2010: 153–195). The communist government that has ruled Vietnam since the signing of the Paris Peace Accord in 1973 has made modernization, industrialization, and economic growth its main imperatives. Population growth, rapid growth of urban areas, and industrial expansion have added problems of pollution and waste to the already serious issues related to land use, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. Starting in 1986, the Đô ̉i Mớ i turn to a more market-oriented economy—albeit still under government control— has contributed to exacerbating these problems. The Vietnamese government has also undertaken  sustained attempts at reform and passage of environmental laws over the last four decades. The understanding of these changes differs among scholars of Vietnamese politics. Where McElwee sees mostly government initiatives intended to maintain control over flows of people, ideas, raw materials, and commodities under a veneer of green legislation, Ortmann perceives genuine attempts at reform that have strengthened environmental institutions at the national and local levels, made environmental protection more professional and transparent, and have generated a sophisticated set of environmental laws (2017: 62). But these reforms have confronted powerful opponents. Insufficient funding and manpower, business interest groups, conflicts between government factions, corruption, a handicapped legal system that operates mostly through the levying of fines but rarely obtains compensation for victims, and a political system that tolerates significant divergences between policy and implementation have blocked the efficacy of environmental laws in many cases, leaving many of Vietnam’s environmental crises unresolved (Ortmann 2017: 99–122).

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Climate change is adding new environmental challenges to the already existing ones. With a 3000-kilometer (2000-mile) coastline and two major river deltas, Vietnam is at high risk from sea level rise and storm surges. Both the Red River Delta east of Hanoi and the Mekong Delta south of Ho Chi Minh City are home to dense populations and extensive agriculture at sea level, and 70% of Vietnamese live near the coastline. Geographical and social differences will shape the precise impact of climate change on different areas and populations of Vietnam, as will adaptation and mitigation measures on the part of the national and local governments. New stories about climate change are beginning to emerge in Vietnam, as we will discuss below (Sect. 5).

2  Narrative and the Environmental Humanities A variety of disciplines have researched environmental issues in combination with the study of culture over the last fifty years: these research strands include environmental philosophy, which originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s; environmental history, which developed in the 1980s; ecocriticism, which crystallized in literary studies in the 1990s; and a variety of other research areas such as environmental anthropology, film studies, gender studies, cultural geography, Indigenous studies, postcolonial studies, and religious studies. The Environmental Humanities have emerged as an interdisciplinary matrix of research and teaching over the last decade and a half that seeks to bring into dialogue strands of such scholarship that originally evolved within particular disciplines. The benefits, challenges, and goals of articulating this cross-disciplinary matrix theoretically and translating it into research practice have been explored in detail (Rose et  al. 2012; Bergthaller et  al. 2014;  Neimanis et  al. 2015; Heise 2017: 293–301). Central to the Environmental Humanities is an approach to ecological change and environmental crisis as social and cultural processes rather than primarily as questions of science and technology, important though these may be in the diagnosis and solution of environmental problems. Climate change and fossil-fuel extractivism present themselves differently to a South African mine worker than to a Salvadoran farmer; toxification and its medical effects are approached from divergent cultural traditions of engaging with health and illness in China as compared to Germany; and the disappearance of native species along with the introduction of new ones cannot be understood apart from the context of colonialism and the Columbian Exchange, to name just a few obvious examples.

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In environmental humanists’ research on these and many other points of entanglement between the study of culture and society, on one hand, and natural-scientific analysis, on the other, the pursuit of environmental justice and the translation of academic scholarship into the public sphere have emerged as crucial driving forces. Several monographs and essay anthologies (Emmett and Nye 2017; Heise et al. 2017; Cohen and Foote 2021; Hubbell and Ryan 2022) as well as multiple book series and the by now well-known journal Environmental Humanities have contributed to the visibility and institutionalization of the field in a variety of countries. Along with and even before the emergence of the Environmental Humanities, research on environmental thought and activism has diversified across regions, countries, and languages. The formation of the modern environmental movement was often thought to have taken place in the Global North, with Carson’s Silent Spring frequently receiving credit for catalyzing environmentalism in the United States and by extension around the world. Important as Carson’s book undoubtedly was, the Meadows’ report to the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth (1972), was arguably even more influential in triggering the establishment of environmental organizations across the globe. Gradually, however, the origins of environmental activism came to be recognized as more varied and multidirectional than was initially supposed. In the United States, the environmental justice movement that emerged in the 1980s and focused on environmental racism fundamentally changed the demographic profile of what had up until then been primarily a white middle- and upper-class movement whose attention and activism focused on wild rather than urban landscapes. Differences between regions, at about the same time, began to come into sharper focus. The Indian sociologist Ramachandra Guha and the Spanish political scientist Joan Martínez-Alier published their volume Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South in 1997, documenting substantial differences between environmental movements in India and Latin America when compared to those in North America and Western Europe (Guha and Martínez-Alier 1997). The Mexican sociologist Enrique Leff and the American political scientist David Carruthers analyzed the imbrication of environmental with other kinds of social activism across Latin America (Leff 2001; Carruthers 2008), while Anny Wong researched the foundations and stakeholders of environmental policies in Japan (Wong 2001). In 2004, the Nobel Peace Prize went to the Kenyan environmental leader Wangari Maathai, drawing attention to environmentalisms of sub-Saharan Africa. The literary critic Rob Nixon further

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investigated forms of African environmentalism in the works of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and activist writers from other African countries as well as India (Nixon 2011). These are but a handful of examples of research on the part of anthropologists, geographers, historians, literary scholars, political scientists, and sociologists who have investigated the varied histories, profiles, and goals of environmental movements—including thought, writings, policies, and organizations—across a wide variety of languages and places. Environment and Narrative in Vietnam is intended as a contribution to the investigation of this global spectrum of environmentalisms. Storytelling is a crucial ingredient of environmentalisms around the world and a central object of analysis in the Environmental Humanities. Orally transmitted myths, folktales, and poetry often tell stories about humans’ cosmic origins, their relationship with nonhuman species, and the experience of past disasters that are formative for how communities ranging from Indigenous tribes to nation-states conceive of their natural environments. Contemporary communities often construe their ecological past and diagnose the current state of their environment through narratives that sometimes also trace paths into the future—whether it be by means of historians’ accounts, personal memoirs, travel narratives, journalism, fiction, films, or other forms of art. Whether such stories are based on the best available knowledge of fact or not is often not decisive for their social and political power. As the archaeologist Kathleen D. Morrison has shown, the claim that Northern India once boasted extensive forest cover has become a powerful catalyst for environmental activism in the region, regardless of the fact that there is no historical or ecological evidence for the existence of such forests (Morrison 2017). Similarly, the idea of wilderness understood as nature untouched by humans that needs to be restored was—and to some extent still is—a driving force in Australian and North American environmentalist thought, even though historians such as William Gammage, William Cronon, and Stephen Pyne have demonstrated that Indigenous populations had altered landscapes in both regions intentionally and systematically for millennia before the arrival of Europeans. Wilderness in the sense of natural environments unaltered by humans have not existed on either continent for thousands, even tens of thousands of years, yet the narrative of a pristine nature disrupted by European arrival that environmentalism needs to restore to its original wild state persists.

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As these examples show, narratives are certainly not the only, but one of the most important cultural tools whereby communities around the globe locate themselves in ecological history, in their physical place, and in relation to other species. As cultural tools, narratives are entangled with the legitimation of claims to power, with the justification of and struggle against social inequalities, and with the creation and maintenance of collective and individual identities. Narrative is therefore a crucial area of inquiry for the Environmental Humanities in its project to explore how different historical and cultural communities think about humans in their natural environments, about environmental crises, and about possible ways of overcoming them. Whether they are fictional or nonfictional (or a mix of both), narratives structure culturally specific understandings of environmental change. In its most basic sense, a narrative is “the representation of an event or a series of events” (Abbott 2008: 13; original emphasis), whether this representation takes place in the medium of oral speech, printed text, performance, film, or digital media. In the process of articulating events in any of these media, the storyteller has to make a series of choices about point of view, where to begin and where to end, the ordering of events, and the style and techniques by which the events are conveyed—choices structuring the narrative discourse that readers or spectators interpret. For the audience as well as for the scholar of narrative, central questions that arise from the study of these choices include: Who is the storyteller? Why do they tell the story, and under what circumstances? Who is the intended audience and effect? This rhetorical understanding of narrative, as Phelan and Rabinowitz have called it (2012: 3–8)—that is, an understanding of storytelling that inquires into the sources, reasons, conditions, and audiences of a particular story—is clearly fundamental for narratives about the past, present, and futures of nature. Whether an environmental story is told by an Indigenous elder, a young activist, a government official, a scientist, a corporation, or an NGO, to name just a few possibilities, is obviously crucial for understanding whom the story targets and what effects it seeks to achieve. Whether it aims to amplify or diminish a perception of ecological crisis, what it presents as an ideal state of nature, and what it casts as a disruption are questions that need to take into account the circumstances in which the story is produced and the intentions that explicitly or implicitly shape it. How the story is received by its target audience and other unintended audiences is a further field of inquiry, since many stories are interpreted quite differently from what the storytellers intended,

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change their meaning over time for different audiences, and are resisted or countered by some audiences. Many other choices go into the configuration of the narrative itself. Fictional as well as nonfictional narratives are often located in particular genres that range from the ethnographic account and the travel narrative to the journalistic report and the eyewitness testimony; or in fiction, from the historical novel and the bildungsroman to the ghost story and science fiction speculation. As many narrative theorists have shown, a knowledge of such genres affects how audiences interpret a story and what they consider plausible or not. In addition, the figure of the storyteller matters, not just in how anthropologists, journalists, or historians position themselves in relation to an account of events that are alleged to have really occurred; it acquires additional significance in fictional stories where the one who tells the story (the narrator) is not necessarily identical with the author, and the narrator is not always the one who sees certain events (the focalizer). Some narrators, in other words, are themselves characters in and around the story they tell—and as a consequence, reliable to varying degrees. What science fiction feature in a narrative is an important question for both fictional and nonfictional accounts: Who are the protagonists that drive the action forward, and who are the antagonists that resist them—a question as important for a historical novel about the degradation of a particular natural landscape as for a journalistic account of a toxic spill and its consequences? Who are the major and who are the minor characters in a particular story—that is, which ones merit more or less attention from the storyteller and the audience? Which characters are audiences invited to sympathize with, and why? Which of them invite condemnation or seem to encourage cognitive and emotional distancing? How does the narrative ending reward, punish, or leave open the fate of particular characters and their communities? Representations of environmental change, no matter which medium or genre they adopt, are entangled in such questions. At the same time, such narratives often also seek to be accountable to historical facts, ethnographic insights, sociological analysis, or the scientific study of nature. And, as mentioned earlier, they are often constructed to fit or justify particular power claims, policies, or movements of revision or resistance. The study of environmental storytelling, therefore, has developed into an extremely complex and multidimensional area of inquiry that requires the combined knowledge of a range of disciplines that have contributed to the study of socioculturally divergent environmentalisms and their forms of expression.

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3  The Environmental Humanities in Vietnam Although Humanities research in Vietnam has included environmental perspectives for a long time (Vı ̃ An Lư 2020: 53–54; Hoàng Công Thảo 2020: 30–34), the Environmental Humanities did not become part of Vietnamese academic life until the 2010s. In that decade, terms such as phê bình sinh thái (ecocriticism), nhân học môi trư ờ ng (environmental anthropology), lịch sử môi trư ờ ng (environmental philosophy), and triê ́t học môi trư ờ ng (environmental philosophy) and theories associated with them were introduced into departments of literary studies, cultural anthropology, history, and philosophy at many Vietnamese academic institutions. Cultural anthropology has been the leading discipline in the adoption of an environmental approach in both research and education. The Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences established an official department specializing in studies of the relationships between ethnic minorities and the environment in 2012, and environmental anthropology is taught at large universities such as the National University of Hanoi and the National University of Ho Chi Minh City. In recent years, Humanities departments of these universities have organized public lectures about the Environmental Humanities by leading international experts, and the second conference of ASLE-ASEAN, the ASEAN-­based branch of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, took place in Hanoi in 2018. These events have provided anchoring points for Vietnamese scholars who aim to engage with historical and contemporary environmental problems in their research and teaching. Most importantly, environmentally oriented research in these disciplines has offered Vietnamese scholars a new way of approaching the relationship between humans and nature that goes beyond the Marxist-Leninist theorization of nature. The Marxist-Leninist approach to nature has been prevalent in Vietnam since Hồ Chí Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in 1945 and began to implement Marxism-­ Leninism in all political, cultural, and economic matters. Although the Đô ̉i Mớ i reforms introduced some political flexibility in the 1980s, modernization and industrialization remain the principal policies in contemporary Vietnamese nation-building. In this context, nature is principally a resource to achieve these ultimate goals of socialism. Nature and nonhumans can be used to produce wealth and generate profits, but are not perceived to have any rights of their own or claims on humans’ ethical

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consideration: economic development comes first, and the protection of the environment ranks as a distant second (Culas 2019: 111–128). On this political foundation, as we mentioned earlier, anthropologists have criticized the swidden agriculture of ethnic minorities and portrayed it as backward, nature-dependent, unstable, unproductive, and as the cause of deforestation and soil erosion. Implicitly or explicitly, this type of research promotes sedentary agriculture as more civilized and as a more economically productive way for ethnic minorities to make use of natural resources (Hoàng Công Thảo 2020: 276–283). Such arguments also play into the type of “environmental rule” McElwee analyzes, by means of which the Vietnamese government adopts environmental policies with the primary aim of socially engineering ethnic minorities (McElwee 2016: 1–10). In the discipline of history, environmental concerns tend to emerge indirectly through accounts of settlements, land use, agriculture, water management, and military campaigns against Chinese invaders in Vietnam’s premodern cultures (Vı ̃ An Lư 2020: 53–54). In short, the idea of nature as a source for human exploitation and an object of human control still dominates the mainstream Humanities in Vietnam. By contrast, the Environmental Humanities, introduced mainly from North American scholarship to Vietnam in the second decade of the twenty-first century, foregrounded the assumption of many Western environmentalisms that nature and nonhuman species have agency, power, and value in their own right. The historians Hoàng Anh Tuấn and Vũ Đứ c Liêm have introduced environmental history as a new branch of Vietnamese historical scholarship since 2017 (Vı ̃ An Lư 2020: 55). A series of Vũ Đứ c Liêm’s research essays, published in the journal Tia Sáng in 2017, explores the histories of certain diseases, flood control, and dike construction in the Hồng River Delta and of canal-building in the Mekong Delta as a way of understanding intellectual exchanges, social management, political relations, power conflicts, and technical innovations in Vietnam’s past. In the process, he highlights environmental changes that caused power crises for the last Vietnamese dynasty (Vũ Đứ c Liêm 2017; Vı ̃ An Lư 2020: 54). Concurrently, emergent environmental approaches in anthropology have provided the scientific foundations for critically addressing the government’s ethnic minority policies and have led to demands for alternative policies that take into account the vernacular ecological knowledge of local communities. According to Hoàng Công Thảo, Vietnam’s leading environmental anthropologist, recent research has focused on understanding the impact of local land use and management and on acknowledging

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Indigenous  intellectual contributions to biodiversity conservation. This research also foregrounds the impacts of the government’s development policies on climate change and natural resource loss in ethnic minority ̀ vưn areas, calling for what is officially called phát triê n̉ bê n ̃ g (sustainable development), that is, development that seeks to mitigate environmental degradation that may harm humans themselves over the long term. In a parallel development in the discipline of philosophy, the phrase d ạ̵ o ̵ d ứ c môi trư ờ ng (environmental ethics) has come to the fore as Vietnamese philosophers have suggested new perspectives on human cultural behaviors and the treatment of nonhuman beings and the environment. The environmental philosopher Hồ Sı ̃ Quý, for example, has highlighted some common cultural practices in Vietnam that violate environmental ethics: public flower- and tree-cutting on the occasion of the Lunar New Year, buffalo-stabbing festivals, and the beating of goats before slaughter. He argues that environmental protection must be a standard for evaluating modern citizens’ ethics, and that an environmental ethic must form part of a sustainably developed society (Hồ Sı ̃ Quý 2005: 45–48). Although modernization and economic development still constitute the ideological foundation of much Humanities scholarship in Vietnam, such environmentally oriented research has begun to suggest alternative engagements with the natural world: forms of sustainable development that include environmental protection and stewardship of nature and nonhuman species. This reorientation toward sustainable development has also provided Vietnamese intellectuals with new tools to realize their traditional role as the mind and the conscience of their nation in the context of nation-­ building in contemporary Vietnam.3 In their work, Hồ Sı ̃ Quý and the environmental philosophers Phạm Thi ̣ Ngọc Trầm (2016) and Nguyêñ Thị Giang (2019) directly address governmental bodies and civil organizations as agencies that are responsible for establishing policies and programs to turn environmental ethics into an integral part of sustainable development. This social and political engagement also characterizes Vietnamese ecocriticism, the environmentally oriented strand of literary studies. While Western ecocriticism in the 1990s focused principally on North American and British literatures, other languages and literary traditions came into focus after the turn of the millennium. As John C. Ryan has pointed out, ecocriticism expanded particularly in the areas of East Asian and South 3

 For a discussion of the role of Vietnamese intellectuals, see Pham (2021).

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Asian literatures, whereas Southeast  Asian writings were far less studied (2018: 9–14). Karen Thornber’s monumental volume Ecoambiguity: Environmental Crises and East Asian Literatures (2012) and her article “Literature, Asia, and the Anthropocene” (2014) address Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese environmental literatures, but mention Vietnamese literature only in passing (2012: 521 note 53, 533 note 23; 2014: 995). But Vietnamese literature has emerged as a focus in Chi P.  Pham and Chitra Sankaran’s collection of translated literary texts, Revenge of Gaia: Contemporary Vietnamese Ecofiction (2021), and literary scholars have begun to analyze the general project of ecocriticism as well as particular Vietnamese texts. Nguyêñ Tịnh Thy, for example, identifies ecocriticism as a social responsibility of creative writers and literary scholars in her monograph, Rừ ng khô, suô ́i cạn, biê n̉ d ộ̵ c… và văn chư ơ ng [Burnt Forests, Empty Rivers, Poisonous Seas and Literature, 2017]. She argues that “Nghiên cứ u va ̆n học từ góc nhìn sinh thái học… là công việc cần làm, phải làm cu ̉a ngư ờ i trong cuộc” [studying literature from the perspective of ecology and ecocriticism… is an obligation for Vietnam’s insiders] (17). In general, ecocriticism is seen as a socially responsible act on the part of Vietnamese researchers. According to her, literature must respond to the cry for help of ecology and the environment; both ecocriticism and ecofiction must be the writers’ responsibility in protecting the environment and enhancing society. In the second major work of ̀ Nam Vietnamese ecocriticism, Phê bình sinh thái vớ i văn xuôi Miê n [Ecocriticism and Southern Prose, 2018], all contributions explicitly take this “committed” and “socially responsible” stance, as a summary on the book cover indicates: “Phê bình sinh thái… là sự lên tiê ́ng cu ̉a khoa học văn chư ơ ng trư ớ c sự lâm nguy cu ̉a môi trư ờ ng, những kê ́t quả bư ớ c d â̵ ̀u cu ̉a phê bình sinh thái là một minh chứ ng vê ̀ sự nhạy cảm, bản lı ̃nh, cái tâm và trách nhiệm công dân cu ̉a ngư ờ i nghiên cứ u d ô̵ ́i vớ i thực trạng xã hội hôm nay” [Writings from ecocriticism…are the collective raising of literary voices in response to environmental threats; they embody the researcher’s sensitivity, bravery, engagement, and civic responsibility to today’s social situation; emphasis added]. In her contribution to this volume, Trần Thi ̣ Ánh Nguyệt lists a series of historical and social events—war, industrialization, and modernization—as the factors that have caused environmental degradation in Vietnam: for example, the disappearance of rhinoceroses in 2010, the destruction of forest habitat for elephants in the Central Highlands, and the use of pesticides in agriculture. Similarly, contributors ̵ to the volume Phê bình sinh thái: Tiê ́ng nói toàn cầu, tiê ́ng nói bản d ịa

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[Ecocriticism: Global Voices, Local Voices, 2017], connect their research to environmental problems caused by modernization and industrialization. Lê Thi ̣ Hư ơ ng Thủy examines how novels by Đỗ Phấn, a well-known author writing about Hanoi, focus on urban environmental degradation— noise pollution, smog, tree destruction, water pollution, hunting wild animals, and killing animals—that causes residents to live in frustration and ecological insecurity (2017: 708–723). Nguyêñ Thi ̣ Diệu Linh examines works by Hoàng A Sáng, an ethnic minority author, emphasizing his descriptions of river salinization, forest damage, erosion, and natural disasters (2017: 767–780). Ryan’s edited volume includes a study of the shift in postwar Vietnamese literature from nature as a political allegory for the communist side to nature conceived as a material force in its own right by Tran Ngoc Hieu and Dang Thi Thai Ha (Ryan 2018: 205–228). And the anthology Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures: Histories, Myths and Societies (2019), edited by Chi P.  Pham, Chitra Sankaran, and Gupreet Kaur, contains no fewer than half a dozen contributions on Vietnamese literature. As this brief survey shows, the Environmental Humanities, originally an import from the West, have found fertile ground in Vietnamese humanistic scholarship. They have generated new approaches to the study of Vietnamese culture, history, literature, and philosophy with their focus on the natural environment and different communities’ relationships to it, at the same time that they connect the Humanities to the public articulation of social and political concerns about the environment. The present volume contributes to this multidisciplinary engagement with Vietnamese environments and cultures, drawing on the work of anthropologists, historians, art historians, and literary scholars.

4   Environmental Narrative Across Disciplines Like every anthology of scholarly essays, this one draws on the varied research projects of scholars working on a shared object of study—in this case, the relationship of human communities to their environments in Vietnam as mediated by narratives. Distinctive clusters of concern tie together the essays we selected for inclusion: the relationship, mentioned earlier, between the narratives and ways of life of ethnic minorities in Vietnam as compared with those of the Kinh majority and governmental authorities; the impact of the American War on Vietnamese environments and communities, and the stories such communities tell about it; the

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stories that emerge from the uses and abuses of nature in the context of globalized exchanges of commodities; and the fictional stories that writers, artists, and film-makers tell about environmental management and crises, which touch upon the thematic clusters, but give them a distinctive imaginary spin. Central theoretical concerns run across these different groups of essays. One of the most important ones revolves around the question of how divergent ontologies of nature, as articulated by different cultural groups, might be mediated by nonfictional or fictional narrative. The anthropologist Christian Culas explores this problem in the context of narratives about Vietnamese national parks in his essay, “Protected Area Narratives in Vietnam: An Anthropological and Mesological Approach.” He argues that the emphasis on empiricism and factuality in Western scientific approaches to ecology and sustainable management becomes a handicap in the engagement with non-Western ontologies of nature that do not categorically distinguish between humans and nonhumans, or culture and nature, and that include localized spiritual, affective, and aesthetic dimensions. Economic and agricultural studies of land use and natural resources also tend to exclude such dimensions, even as they shift the focus from nature itself to its human uses. Relying on “mesology” as developed by the geographer Augustin Berque, Culas proposes an alternative approach that breaks the study of nature down into modules that can be combined and recombined in a range of narratives so as to capture different communities’ epistemologies and ontologies of nature without a priori privileging a Western scientific perspective. The clash of such divergent epistemologies and ontologies also informs the three essays in the section on “Indigenous and Spiritual Narratives of the Environment.” In “Legends of Forest Spirits in the Central Vietnamese Highlands,” Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan explores stories about good and evil forest spirits, yang and malai, that are told by many minority communities in the Highlands and that narrativize attitudes of reverence as well as fear of the forest. Dismissed as superstitions by French anthropologists who reported on them during the colonial period, such stories are approached by Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan instead as complex contracts between humans and nature that define humans as guests in a world not owned or dominated by them. Retellings of such stories in contemporary Vietnamese media highlight the contradictory policies and attitudes that structure the relationship between ethnic minority cultures and a government that has variously sought to repress and encourage minority cultural narratives as

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obstacles to modernization or as founts of national identity and sustainable environmental stewardship. Achariya Choowonglert, in “Tai Narrative, Ritual, and Discourses of the Environment in North Central Vietnam,” focuses on Tai communities’ beliefs and rituals about nature, especially those associated with the deity Tư Mã Hai Đào and Mount Pha Dùa. On the basis of her anthropological research in these communities, she argues that Tai intellectuals’ revitalization of ancient stories and manuscripts seeks to create an ethnic identity and a politics of place, ultimately so as to resist the commodification of natural environments and resources that has accompanied Vietnam’s integration into global markets. Stories about the environment, in this context, are inextricably entangled with the imagination of local places and cultural identities in their tension with national—and nationalist—narratives, which themselves serve to negotiate Vietnam’s place in the global order. Thạch Mai Hoàng explores the relation between spiritual, material, and political functions of narratives about nature in the quite different context of Buddhist religious practices in “Animal Mercy Release, Environmental Conservation, and the Media in Vietnam.” The Buddhist ritual of releasing animals into the wild has often been criticized as only a superficial gesture toward harmonious relationships between humans and nature, because the birds, reptiles, or fish that are “released” in such ceremonies have often been captured in the wild and then sold to religious practitioners beforehand in what one might consider a form of poaching. In addition, the release of introduced species such as Red-Eared Slider turtles, transmission of diseases, and abundant plastic trash have led to criticisms of animal mercy releases that Thạch analyzes along the three vectors of environmental, cultural, and ethical values. The most recent media narratives about animal mercy release, he shows, have taken a turn from emphasizing criticism from the viewpoint of biodiversity conservation science to foregrounding environmental opportunities: animal mercy release needs to be considered in terms of the cultural values it provides to its practitioners and can be managed to raise environmental awareness and support biodiversity conservation. Such an integration of cultural with scientific values can only be achieved, however, if the ethical and cultural dimensions of animal mercy release are given their due instead of being dismissed—a conclusion that resonates with Culas’ theoretical framework for culturally grounded environmentalism.

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The third section of our volume, “War Narratives and the Environment,” brings together analyses of texts and artworks that engage with the environmental consequences of the American War. Hoang Cam-Giang describes the heroic and nationalist portrayal of nature in Vietnamese films from 1959 to the present that identify the natural world with “our”—the communist—side of the conflict and deploy the majesty and beauty of nature as symbols for national strength and military power. Against this “grand narrative” of Vietnamese nationalism, she analyzes three films that develop Lyotardian “petits récits” with a very different vision of nature: ̵ ờ ng chân trờ i (There Is No Horizon, Nguyêñ Khánh Dư ’s Không có d ư ̀ 1986), Trân Phư ơ ng’s Ngư ờ i sót lại cu ̉a Rừ ng Cư ờ i (The Survivor of the ̀ thuyê ́t vê ̀ Quán Tiên Laughing Forest, 1991), and Đinh Tuấn Vũ’s Truyê n (The Legend of Quan Tien, 2020). What makes these films stand out from more typical war films is that their protagonists, involved in the American War but typically far from its epic battlefields, come to suffer from the forest as much as from military impact and often fear nature rather than admiring its beauty or power. Ecological degradation appears as the consequence of Viet Cong actions along with those of the American military. And in their plots as well as their cinematic techniques, these three films explore nature’s own suffering through “characters” such as a river, a monkey, or a grove of trees with their “small stories,” at the same time that they sometimes cast nature as the observer of humans, rather than the other way around. The result is what Hoang calls a “new ecological aesthetic” in Vietnamese war films that no longer reduces natural environments to mere settings or national symbols, but instead attributes to them an agency of their own. Montira Rato, in “Ecopedagogy, War Memories, and Sensory Experiences of Nature in Contemporary Vietnamese Children’s Literature,” explores memories of war as they intertwine with evocations of nature in children’s literature, a research area that has grown significantly over the last twenty years. She, like Hoang, alludes to the heroic and allegorical functions that nature often assumes in Vietnamese war literature and film, only to show how this portrayal of nature is nuanced and complicated in children’s books. Rato focuses on Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần’s ́ Măt́ Vừ a Mở Cửa Sô ̉ (Open the Window, Eyes Closed), a short Vừ a nhăm novel that was originally published in 2002, and has since been repeatedly republished, translated, and integrated into Vietnamese school textbooks. She analyzes how a pastoral portrayal of village life is undercut by reminiscences of a war that no longer appears as heroic but as an occasion of

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trauma and loss to the characters. At the same time, she argues, these characters’ multisensory connections to the natural world can be understood as a call to environmental awareness and an invitation to let historical injuries be healed by the renewed affirmation of ecological ties to place. Conor Lauesen takes the analysis of memory in relation to the American War and environmental destruction into the realm of sculpture and photography in his essay, “Đı ̉nh Q.  Lê’s The Pure Land and Ecological Phantoms: Levitating Sarcophagi, Submerged Spirits.” Đı ̉nh Q.  Lê’s installation Pure Land (2019), which includes white fiberglass sculptures along with photographs printed on silver vinyl, seduce museum-goers with their aesthetically appealing surfaces into deeper narratives about the chemical and biological horrors of Agent Orange, he argues. Beautiful prints of silvery landscapes conceal shadowy outlines of malformed fetuses and call up, on closer inspection, comparisons with wartime photographs of landscapes devastated by defoliants. Glossy sculptures of what appear to be children in lotus blossoms turn out to have too many heads or limbs, in a grotesque evocation of the physical deformations caused by the dioxin-­ laced herbicides of the American army’s “Operation Ranch Hand.” But the bodily postures and the installation title also allude to Buddhist beliefs in a supernatural world and turn Lê’s art into what Lauesen considers a necromantic invocation of the spirits of the war dead and the war unborn— including Vietnam’s animals, trees, and landscapes. Section 4 moves into what followed the American War and unification of Vietnam under communist governance: Vietnam’s integration, from the 1980s onward, into global markets and the shift into a more market-­ oriented economy. Ben Tran, in his essay, “Civil War, Socialism’s Underworld, and the Environment,” builds on McElwee’s theory of envi̵ ờ ng ảo vọng (The ronmental rule as he analyzes Nguyêñ Trí’s Thiên d ư Fantasy of Paradise, 2015) and his short story collection Bãi vàng, d á̵ quý, trầm hư ơ ng (Gold, Gems, Incense, 2014). Both works, he shows, focus on a socio-economic underclass in Vietnam after the American War that resorts to mining, logging, and other exploitations of nature which do not just cause damage to the environment, but often to the characters themselves, sometimes even leading to their deaths. The reason that they are forced into these uses of nature is not communism or the transition to a market economy in and of themselves, but the fact that the government marginalizes them socially and economically because of their former connections to the Republic of Vietnam and its association with the United States. A history of the American War as civil war between different sectors

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of Vietnamese society, Tran argues, in combination with the corruption of government officials charged with enforcing environmental laws, lead to the devastation of the environment as well as marginalized citizens, in novelist Nguyêñ Trí’s view. In a very different way than the essays in Sect. 3 propose, war in Tran’s analysis of Nguyêñ Trí continues to inflect the politics of the environment in Vietnam: by way of social division and marginalization. Sarah G. Grant, in “Ecologies of Coffee Sustainability in the Central Highlands,” engages with the narratives surrounding one of Vietnam’s best-known international commodities—coffee. Nature, in a photogenic location such as Đà Lạt, appeals to environmentally oriented youth in Vietnam, she shows, without necessarily involving any in-depth consideration of how its agricultural landscapes are produced and maintained, and how coffee production degrades the environment in spite of its aesthetic ̀ vữ ng) and cultural appeal. By the same token, “sustainability” (sự bê n more often refers to the long-term resilience of economic ventures than to the conservation of local ecosystems. Only recently have environmental activists, journalists, and artists begun to engage with the structural question of whether coffee production and other kinds of Vietnamese agriculture are ecologically sustainable—or whether the international coffee consumption that maintains it is. In these questions about the entanglement of natural and socio-economic systems, narratives and images emerge as crucial tools both to hide and uncover the shape of sustainable futures, Grant argues. The last section of this anthology, “Environmental Literature in Vietnam,” focuses on literary approaches to nature in fiction and creative nonfiction. Nguyen Phuong Ngoc examines stories about nature in “Environmental Travel Narratives in the Magazine Nam Phong,” an important cultural magazine that was published between 1917 and 1934. The travel writers in Nam Phong admired nature as beautiful and powerful, but at the same time often dismissed wild landscapes, which they considered unsafe and useless unless they were improved for human purposes. They developed a modern style of nature narrative that no longer frames natural scenes by references to classical literature, yet elements of nature retain important symbolic functions as signs of an ancient nation that has resisted Chinese invaders in the past and yearns, at least covertly, for independence under French colonialism. Such stories serve as a reminder, Nguyen Phuong Ngoc argues, of how Vietnam’s natural landscapes themselves have changed through colonial exploitation and military conflict,

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but also how Vietnamese thinking and storytelling about nature evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Cao Lan’s “Gender and Environment in Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư ’s Narratives” shifts to more recent storytelling by foregrounding the fictions of an author who has primarily portrayed the harsh lives of poor Vietnamese women. Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư ’s stories Cánh d ô̵ ̀ng bất tận (Endless Field, 2005) and Khói trờ i lộng lẫy (Fabulous Clouds in the Sky, 2010) revolve around the physical and emotional abuse of rural and working-class women by their fathers, husbands, and lovers, in vivid portraits of their life-long unhappiness and struggles with poverty and hunger. Their resignation and endurance in the face of social as well as environmental hardships signals their own resilience, but because of their association with particular places and animals also that of natural systems themselves. Cao’s ecofeminist analysis emphasizes both the material realities and the symbolic valence of the parallels Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư draws between the patriarchal oppression of women and of the natural world, which culminates in the gradual disappearance of nature and the withdrawal of some female characters into the wilderness. Trần Ti ̣nh Vy seeks to integrate urban narrative into environmental literary studies, still a less explored genre than those set in rural or wild landscapes, in “When the City Speaks Up.” In her analysis of Lê Minh Hà’s novel Phô ́ vẫn gió (The Street is Still Windy, 2014) in terms of its portrayal of Hanoi residents and their living spaces in the 1980s, she highlights the contrast between natural and built environments and, even more importantly, that between formally planned and informally improvised living spaces in the novel. She particularly focuses on those characters who, as a consequence of migration, urban modernization, and Vietnam’s transition to a socialist market economy, find themselves in tension with their physical environments. Either by informal or formal acquisitions of space or through nostalgic memories of an older Hanoi that is rapidly fading into the past, these characters are forced to re-envision their own identities even as their urban environment metamorphoses into a new shape. Pham P. Chi’s essay “Political Dimensions in Vietnamese Ecofiction” concludes the anthology. It starts from the assumption that the socialist goals of modernization and industrialization are themselves heir to French colonial politics, which proposed similar goals of progress and modernization: this conjuncture justifies analyzing Vietnamese culture and literature from the perspective of postcolonial studies. In this vein, Pham analyzes three short stories written in the late 1980s by Trần Duy Phiên: in each of

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them, entrepreneurial men venture into nature and seek to establish modern businesses through the use of advanced science and technology, with destructive impacts on the natural environment and nonhuman species. But in each story, this attempt fails as nature strikes back and overcomes the invading humans. Read as allegories, these stories stage the failure of the national modernization project. They also highlight a current Vietnamese political paradox: the confluence of colonial and socialist visions of modernity has catalyzed the rise of rapacious capitalists whose very existence runs against the attainment of socialism that is ostensibly the government’s ultimate goal. As different as the essays collected here are in their objects of study, their assumptions, and their methods, they share several underlying vectors of argument. One is the attempt to re-imagine what nature, environmentalism as a form of politics and activism, and environmental storytelling mean in the Vietnamese context, contesting the assumption that environmental problems resemble each other closely across different regions and cultures. The second argument that recurs across many of the essays is the tension between the communist government’s vision and policies regarding Vietnam’s natural environments and what they should become in the future, on one hand, and the alternative visions of Indigenous communities, regime critics, and youth activists, on the other. Vietnamese environmentalisms and their different narratives, the analyses in this volume show, are a terrain of intense contestation and political struggle. A third shared emphasis follows from this thread of argument, namely the way in which social and environmental policies are intertwined and sometimes superimposed on each other. McElwee’s concept of “environmental rule,” environmentalist reasoning that is strategically employed by government institutions from the level of the village to the region and the nation to exert control over particular populations, resonates across many of the analyses in this volume. This notion of environmental governance contrasts with the advocacy on behalf of nature, sometimes conjoined with struggles for social justice, that have characterized environmental activism in Western Europe and North America, where the conservation of nature remains a crucial goal in and of itself. Many contributors to this volume doubt that nature itself is at stake when the Vietnamese government adopts environmental narratives and strategies. They  suggest that the environment here stands as a proxy for political goals unrelated to ecological conservation. This perspective, along with the other central emphases

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that tie the essays in this volume together, opens up important avenues of research for the Environmental Humanities beyond Vietnam.

5   Future Directions: Vietnam, the World, and the Anthropocene Vietnamese environmental management and ecological crises have been studied across a variety of disciplines, but perspectives from the Humanities are only emerging and opening up new avenues and future directions for researchers. This volume includes a range of explorations of literary texts, but only one essay on environmental art—Lauesen’s analysis of Đı ̉nh Q. Lê’s sculpture and photography—while the work of artists across other media remains to be introduced to an anglophone audience. This includes public art such as the murals produced by the 2017 contest “City 2030: Climate Change and Clean Energy,” which attracted more than thirty young artists and led to the exhibition of ten murals in two districts of Ho Chi Minh City. Similarly, environmental images and narratives as they are created and circulated on social media by different groups and individuals, which are alluded to in two of the essays in this volume, deserve more detailed research, given the increasing influence of such media. Beyond expanded research on environmental literature, arts, and media, certain themes and theoretical perspectives that are touched upon in this volume also invite further scholarly engagement. As cities grow around the globe—with 70% of the human population expected to live in cities by the middle of the twenty-first century—urban ecology, urban planning, landscape architecture, biophilic design, and the imagination of future cities have attracted increasing attention across disciplines. In the present volume, Trần Ti ̣nh Vy’s essay broaches this important topic, but much more critical engagement with urban images and narratives in photography, painting, film, literature and in the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban as well as regional planning is needed. As urban theorists Müller and Werner have highlighted, today and in the future, “[c]ities are … the places where most people have the most contact with nature” (2010: 7), an observation that entails a crucial imperative for environmental humanists. In theoretical terms, the relations of Vietnamese environmental art, literature, history, and philosophy to their counterparts in other countries in the region call for further exploration. Chi P.  Pham’s use of a

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postcolonial perspective on Vietnamese environmentalism is a step in this direction that merits being elaborated further in relation to the vast body of postcolonial studies that have focused on formations of culture under conditions of geopolitical inequality. A number of essays in this volume mention Vietnam’s long and varied relations to China; its convergences and conflicts with other cultures in the region would prove of enormous benefit to the study of environmental culture, given that ecological risks and resources often reach beyond the boundaries of individual nations. More research is also needed on the contributions of Vietnamese intellectuals and activists to environmental philosophy, human-animal studies, and human-plant studies, including, for example, the Buddhist monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh’s influential contributions to rethinking humans’ relations to the natural world. Discourses as well as laws regarding the rights or welfare of animals and the rights of nature more broadly understood have emerged as central concepts for debates and innovations around the globe, from Ecuador to New Zealand. The intricate connections between Indigenous cosmologies, Enlightenment concepts of individual rights, and international law are reshaping cultural expressions and environmental struggles in many places, with Vietnam’s contributions to such debates as yet to be studied in depth. In the context of debates over environmental philosophy and politics, the notion of the Anthropocene also deserves further study as it concerns Vietnamese culture. Discussions about the global environment have been deeply influenced over the last twenty years by the idea of a new geological “Age of Humans.” Proposed by the scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000, the term was meant to capture the magnitude of human impacts on global ecosystems, from soil erosion and disruption of nitrogen cycles to biodiversity loss and climate change, and to serve as a call to awareness and action. Even though the Anthropocene has not been accepted by geological associations as a replacement for the more common designation of the current epoch as the Holocene, it has generated widespread debates inside and outside of universities, art museums, and activist circles in Australia, North America, and Western Europe—though to date less so in East Asia (see Horn and Bergthaller 2020: 170–176; Thornber 2014). Among humanists and social scientists, it has met with resistance from researchers who argue that its emphasis on the human species as the central agent of ecological change obscures the socio-economic inequalities and power gaps between those populations in the Global North who have contributed most to greenhouse gas emissions, and

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populations in the Global South who have generated few emissions, but suffer some of the gravest consequences (Marxist scholars claim that therefore “Capitalocene” would be a more appropriate term). Others have highlighted that positing the beginnings of the Anthropocene in the age of industrialization distracts from the crucial role that European colonialism played in creating the preconditions for the Anthropocene (such scholars sometimes refer to the “Plantationocene” as an alternative). In many of these debates, the Anthropocene no longer functions as an umbrella term for the entire range of ecological changes that human communities have given rise to; instead, it has metamorphosed into a shorthand for “climate change.” Or perhaps climate change has turned into a shorthand for the Anthropocene, since today many environmental crises that are only tenuously or not at all related to climate change—biodiversity loss, toxification, and excessive waste, for example—are all quite frequently perceived and debated as closely associated with it. It may be worthwhile not to amalgamate so many of our current crises in this way, since some urgent environmental problems, such as biodiversity loss, have different and much deeper historical roots than climate change does. But for scholars of culture and of narrative, it is in and of itself intriguing that climate change and the stories associated with it are now providing a gateway for thinking about a wide range of environmental problems. Cities under the impact of climate change have assumed a particularly central role in narratives about environmental futures. Often, these portrayals focus on flooded cities and follow the template of the disaster narrative or even apocalyptic storytelling, where the drowning of the city comes to stand in for the end of an entire society, way of life, or civilization. Such scenarios resonate with the geography of Vietnam’s extensive coastline and vast river deltas. They have also been taken up in what may as yet be a new genre in Vietnamese textual and visual culture—science fiction. In a major contribution to the international canon of climate fiction and climate film, the Vietnamese filmmaker Nguyêñ Võ Nghiêm Minh focuses his unusual approach to the topic of global environmental change on the flooded future of the Mekong Delta, which has always been a landscape dominated by water. His film Nư ớ c 2030 (2014)—a title that points ambiguously to both “water” and “country” in the year 2030—is set about thirty miles south of Ho Chi Minh City, an area from which 80% of the population has been evacuated by 2030, according to the film’s brief introductory text. The plot develops as a combination of mystery and romance, as a young fisher woman, Sáo (Quỳnh Hoa), retrieves her

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husband Thi’s body (Thạch Kim Long), who was killed while working at a floating hydroponic farm. She seeks to find out why and how Thi died, and in the process re-encounters Giang (Quý Bình), a genetic engineer with whom she had been in love ten years earlier and who now works for the company that owns the hydroponic farm. Conflicts over property rights punctuate the plot as it moves backwards to 2020 and then forwards again to the narrative present of 2030: whether Thi’s completely flooded family land, for example, is still reserved for his own use or should be open to collective usufruct as part of the oceanic commons; or whether the genetically engineered crop plant that Giang develops from a seaweed that Sáo has led him to discover should be the property of his company or available for cultivation and consumption by all. Conflicts such as these begin to signal the tenuous hold that old institutions of law and justice have on the water world of Southern Vietnam in a future of climate change.4 ̃ Nguyên-Võ’s film is realistic in many respects, portraying the life of the poor in the Global South, the power of corporations, and the fundamental transformations in individual and social prospects that climate change will bring about. Yet it presents these scenarios at a slow, meditative pace that stands in stark contrast to North American disaster films about climate change—from Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) to Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021)—by means of a visual idiom that is surrealist in many respects. Nowhere is this clearer than at the film’s end, when a typhoon approaches. Sáo and Giang embark on a submersible that takes them on a surrealist submarine trip through an underwater Ho Chi Minh City with buildings intact and the lights still on. This scene does not ̃ make realistic sense in Nguyên-Võ’s cinematic storyworld, since the city was shown several times earlier in the film on the horizon, miles north of the hydroponic farm and well above water. But the underwater city’s mesmerizing beauty in combination with its logical incongruity sends a uniquely powerful signal about the lethal danger, seductive beauty, and disorienting strangeness of Vietnam’s and the world’s climate-changed futures. Rather than relying on the narrative templates of disaster and apocalypse—the approaching typhoon is portrayed as dangerous, but not ̃ as an unusual threat—Nguyên-Võ relies on and exaggerates the expansive waterscapes of the Mekong Delta that he had already explored in-depth in his award-winning earlier film, Mùa len trâu (The Buffalo Boy, 2004). As 4

 For a more detailed analysis of Nư ớ c 2030, see Heise 2021: 28–32.

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suggested overtly by three scenes in Nư ớ c 2030, where the camera pulls back from a local scene and reveals the curvature of the planet by means of a fish-eye lens, the film turns one of Vietnam’s most iconic landscapes, the Mekong Delta, into an encompassing metaphor for the Anthropocene. In what is to date arguably the most original and innovative narrative about ̃ climate change internationally, Nguyên-Võ conveys both Vietnam’s ecological specificity and its global significance as a site that will be transformed by climate change. In this view, Vietnamese ecologies foreshadow global futures—and Vietnamese environmental cultures and narratives deserve all the more to be studied on their own and in their international entanglements.

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PART I

Theoretical Foundations

Protected Area Narratives in Vietnam: An Anthropological and Mesological Approach Christian Culas

Sustainability cannot be limited to the sole environmental, economic and cultural dimensions, leaving aside epistemic and ontological aspects. —Escobar (2018: 82)

1   Introduction This critical analysis of narratives on protected areas in Vietnam stems directly from situations that I have observed many times in my field surveys in Northern and Southern Vietnam since 2003, as well as from reviewing a wide range of literature.1 In my various research sites, for 1  This research includes fieldwork surveys in Lào Cai and Sơ n La provinces since 2003, on Phú Quốc National Park (Kiên Giang province) since 2011, and on Cát Tiên National Park (Đồng Nai province) since 2019.

C. Culas (*) ART-DEV - CNRS - University of Montpellier, Montpellier, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_2

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example among ethnic groups in the mountains of northern Vietnam (Hmông and Tày), among Kinh fishermen in the South, or among peasants around the national parks, I have often encountered significant differences between local facts about the environment and the scholarly texts about them. I have also found that the vast majority of projects for the protection and conservation of natural areas and environment in Vietnam are failures (O’Rourke 1995; Ortmann 2017; Culas 2019). These experiences and observations lead me to propose the following hypothesis: A better knowledge of local actions, narratives, and conceptions of nature and, in particular, of protected areas in Vietnam will lead to a better understanding of the motivations and conceptions (utilitarian, materialistic, cosmological, metaphysical) of the different actors involved in these areas—local populations, development agents, NGO agents, administrative agents, and researchers. This type of knowledge, which is innovative in Vietnam because it distances itself from the dominant paradigm of modern Western science (Apffel-Marglin and Marglin 1990; Santos 2014), should make it possible for the different actors in nature conservation projects to interact better.2 The first objective of this study is to assess a selection of existing descriptions and analyses of the environment, nature, and protected areas in Vietnam in terms of their adequacy for the local realities. All these studies negotiate the interface between the author’s way of thinking and being in the world as a researcher, consultant, project officer, or administrator and those of the local populations living in and near the protected areas. Studying these texts from an anthropological perspective is meant to highlight correlations and correspondences, but also gaps, misunderstandings, ruptures, and denials between these different ways of thinking about the world. All these texts speak to us of a three-way relationship: local populations, nature, and the author. The second objective is more epistemological. All the authors cited in this essay, Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese, are trained in the natural or social sciences and engineering techniques according to the modern Western model. In order to write and publish, they have to accept the 2  The last part of this hypothesis on applications in protected area management will not be developed here as it is beyond the scope of this chapter. We are also aware that a better knowledge of the relations between humans and nature is absolutely not sufficient to guide respectful applications towards people and natural milieux, the introduction of the notions of ethics and care to knowledge is then necessary.

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constraints and embrace, consciously or unconsciously, certain paradigms that underpin modern Western science (Berque 2019a, b). The methods and tools of this science have already proven their effectiveness in many technical fields, but their limitations in describing and understanding human behavior in relation to nature and nonhumans are becoming increasingly evident (Castoriadis 1996: 90; Berque 2018). When authors describe actions and discourses on nature outside the Western world while retaining Western logic and ontology as the sole reference point, the distance between local facts and the research about them often becomes problematic, and the adequacy of their account of others’ reality doubtful. Over the last twenty years, anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists such as Berque, Descola, Ingold, Kohn, Tsing, and Viveiros de Castro have studied the problems of describing and understanding various non-­ Western ontologies in detail. This study is aligned with their research. It builds on the work of the geographer Augustin Berque (2016, 2019a, b), to my knowledge the only researcher who offers both a critique of the modern Western ontological paradigm and a methodology for overcoming the constraints that this paradigm imposes on scientific thought. This study is organized into two main parts. First, I present a selection of narratives about forest, nature, and nonhuman beings in Vietnamese protected areas. In particular, I will focus on the “empirical adequacy” (Olivier de Sardan 2008: 9) of the ways people in protected areas act, speak, and think about nature and the narratives that claim to capture them. This overview is not exhaustive, but seeks to highlight some milestones in the field of narratives and to show that certain epistemological orientations are more dominant than others. Second, from an anthropological and epistemological perspective, I will propose some tools to describe the reality of others with greater accuracy and richness. I will draw on the mesological method, the study of the human “milieu” of Augustin Berque (2013, 2019a) for some little-known tools to open our eyes to the actions, discourses, and conceptions of others about nature.

2   Scientific Narratives About a Diversity of Worlds This section will first present an overview of the different narratives on human-nonhuman relations in Vietnam’s recent history so as to show their diversity of contents and forms of discourse over the last century.

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Secondly, it will focus on some contemporary narratives on the environment and protected areas. For the sake of clarity, I will begin by outlining the current narratives that pose the greatest difficulties in the comprehensive analysis of human/nonhuman relations and move on to texts that pay more finely grained and integrated attention to nonhumans in the management of natural areas. The first works on the question of nature and nonhumans in Vietnam date from the French colonial period, 1858–1945 (cf. Przyluski 1909; Cadière 1918; Stein 1942). These are typically ethnographic and religious studies of pagoda gardens, tree cults, and ritual practices related to stones and mountains. During the colonial period, this type of text was very rare. The majority of narratives about the environment dealt with economics, agricultural engineering, and forestry techniques (Thomas 1999, 2009). It is hard to find texts about human-environment relationships in Vietnam published between 1950 and 1980. From 1980 to 2000, with the economic opening of the country, new studies emerged to deal with these topics. The most remarkable works based on precise field surveys are those of the ethnobotanist, Đinh Trong Hiếu, whose articles (“Signs of Nature, Signatures, Biodiversity: The worshiped groves in Vietnam: For a concept of ‘green vestiges’” [1997] and “Gardens in Vietnam: Nature between Cultural Representations and Cultural Practices” [2000]), focus on local, ritual, and symbolic actions on big trees and gardens at the heart of the relations between the Red River Delta’s farmers and nature. In 1999, Lê Trong Cúc, doctor in ecology and official at the Vietnamese Ministry of Environment, published the article “Vietnam: Traditional Cultural Concepts of Human Relations with the Natural Environment,” one of the first texts on this topic to be published in Vietnam. It presents a simplified synthesis of elements of Vietnamese rituals and cosmology, but does not support some of its claims by first-hand data or literature. The author attempts to rationalize the qualities and forms of an ideal Vietnamese cosmology. For example, after presenting the three worlds of Vietnamese and classical Chinese cosmology—“Heaven (Thiên)/ Humanity (Nhân)/Earth (di̵ a)”—he states: “Each of these three worlds is conceived of as having a dual structure with one half visible and the other half invisible to people” (1999: 68). This division between visible and invisible does not, to my knowledge, appear in any other source and is contradicted by the fact that all beings in the world (humans, animals, spirits, ghosts) share the same world in Vietnamese cosmology. Yet the author asserts this duality several times: “In the consciousness of the

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Vietnamese there is always a pair of categories ‘nature and people’ which is used to investigate the relationship between nature and society” (1999: 70), and “The human world on Earth is a non-natural one that includes things made by humans” (1999: 69, my emphasis). Lê’s claims probably reflect his—perhaps unconscious—integration of the nature/culture dualism of modern Western ontology rather than an accurate description of traditional Vietnamese conceptions. Lê also asserts that “the Viet people conceive of the relationship between humans and the natural environment as one in which everything is given by heaven (Trờ i cho) and all things in the Earth have been created by Heaven (Trờ i sinh). They believe that the gods always control all human activities. Gods have eyes everywhere, and know everything that people do” (1999: 69). The ideas of creation and control of human activities by gods appear to be borrowed Christian cosmological conceptions rather than to describe elements of traditional Vietnamese (Kinh) thought. No other source mentions these specific traditional relationships between man and gods in Vietnam. Lê’s personal synthesis relies on a syncretic and almost rationalist view of Vietnamese cosmology and ontology as seen through the prism of Western ontological dualism.3 A more empirical approach is an original sociological survey by questionnaire of twenty people in Hanoi (Pham and Rambo 2003). This innovative study primarily explored public perceptions of environmental problems and environmental consciousness in Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam, and secondarily people’s perceptions of environmental responsibilities on the part of individuals, governments, and large private companies. Pham and Rambo conclude: We have identified two closely related but somewhat different cultural models of human relations with nature that are employed by Vietnamese. The first model views nature as a limited resource on which humans must rely for their survival. The second model views nature and human beings as having

3  For Descola (2013), ontologies are “modes of identification” of the “existing,” starting from the distinction between physicality and interiority. There are thus four basic ontologies: animism combines a resemblance of interiorities with a difference of physicalities, totemism a resemblance of interiorities and physicalities, naturalism a difference of interiorities with a resemblance of physicalities, and analogism a difference of interiorities with a difference of physicalities. On the question of the existence and forms of ontologies in China and Vietnam, see Matthews (2017), Yu (2011).

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a balanced and interdependent relationship. The models are similar in that both are anthropocentric and utilitarian in orientation. (2003: 97)

But this innovative survey only recorded responses to an environmental questionnaire with closed-ended questions, which therefore guide the content of the answers. In conclusion, they note: Despite well-documented evidence that in the traditional Vietnamese worldview, nature was conceived of as having a large supernatural component, with the relationship between people and the natural environment one in which supernatural beings and spirits played an important role … references to heaven or spirits are almost wholly absent from the responses of our interviewees …. the absence of references to the supernatural in respondents’ comments is difficult to explain.” (2003: 98–99; emphasis added)

The explanation may be that the questionnaire forced the interviewees’ answers to obey anthropocentric or utilitarian Western categories, causing them to miss the specificity of a cosmology and metaphysics at the basis of the relationship between man and nature as a “Great Whole” in Vietnam. Philippe Descola describes the modern Western ontology of nature on which Pham and Rambo rely, probably unconsciously, as “naturalism,” because it essentializes nature as an entity distinct from humans (Descola 2013). Historical and philosophical research on the idea of “nature” in the West has shown that the division between humans (culture, language, thought) and nature (without culture, without language, without thought) is a product of the Renaissance and the beginnings of modern science in Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries (Lindberg 1992; Descola 2013), during which time a dualistic ontology emerged that divides nature and culture, human and nonhuman, spirit and body.4 Pham and Rambo’s problem is not an isolated one in social science research. Researchers whose thinking is based solely on modern Western ontology without a strong critical approach find it very difficult to describe and report on other ontologies. Chinese, Vietnamese, or Japanese ontologies that are designated as “analogical” (Bruun and Kalland 1995; Descola 2013; Feuchtwang 2014) or “homological” (Matthews 2017) in contrast to “dual and naturalistic” Western ontology exemplify this conceptual and epistemological difficulty. In China, Vietnam, and Japan, the 4

 See Berque (2019a) and Culas (2019) for more details.

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nature-culture divide exists in some forms, but it is not rigid, and many bridges are thought to connect humans and nonhumans via correspondences, analogies, and homologies. Chinese and Vietnamese thought and practice in relation to nature are globally classified as “analogism” because in this mode of relations all beings are constantly connected with everything (Culas 2019). Distinctions between humans and nonhumans are not key to Sino-Vietnamese conceptions of the world. Rather, because all categories of actors in the world (human and nonhuman) are different, the Chinese and Vietnamese modes of identification work on the mapping of these different categories. It is through analogy that the different categories of the world are meaningfully linked and make up a system based on cosmological and metaphysical frameworks (Leaman 1999). To map this very diverse world, analogical modes of identification have created many forms of hierarchies between beings. The cosmos, for example, is divided into three levels: the highest is the “sky,” the middle one is that of “humans,” and the lowest level is that of the “earth.” The classic Chinese formula is “Put human in the center” (以人为本). Since 2005, many studies of Vietnam have focused on human-­ nonhuman relations, often through the management of natural areas. The studies fall into three categories according to their level of “adequacy to the reality” of the local populations (Olivier de Sardan 2008). The first set includes those that seem to me to be the furthest from a comprehensive descriptive approach to the relationship with nature. The second group corresponds to the classic sociological and geographical approaches that apply academic reading grids to Vietnamese local realities. Finally, the third group presents different approaches that take historical contexts and local cosmological dimensions into account more precisely. One author in the first group, Đinh Thanh Sang, has studied the role of local knowledge in natural resource management in Cần Tiên and Bù Gia Mâp National Parks in at least eight papers since 2010. His studies focus on very specific aspects—for example, bamboo and rattan knowledge and uses—so as “to understand the indigenous knowledge, and to assess the collaborative management situation in the park” (Đinh 2020: 9). This suggests a comprehensive approach to local ways of acting and thinking about nature. But the author also argues with regard to the possible uses of local knowledge for biodiversity conservation that “[t]he positive points of the knowledge of the Indigenous Ethnic Minorities (IEM) should be widely applied and integrated with the modern knowledge. Also, negative sides of the indigenous knowledge should be abolished” (Đinh 2020: viii; emphasis

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added). Several articles include this recommendation to suppress indigenous knowledge that the author considers harmful. “So the indigenous knowledge should be applied to sustainable edible plant use and conservation. Harmful harvesting practices in particular need banning soon. The highly valued forest plants traditionally used by S’tieng ethnics should be domesticated and commercialized” (Đinh 2019: 8; emphasis added; translation mine). It is a priori surprising to see an author who pays so much attention to the details of the local knowledge of ethnic minority groups talk about abolishing certain aspects of their local knowledge without any nuance about cultural value or consideration of ethics. Đinh’s texts highlight two recurring and more general problems about local knowledge studies in Vietnam and elsewhere. First, natural science training leads many researchers to believe that they “intuitively” possess the accurate methods of ethnographic surveys without any training. Moreover, they ignore that one of the specificities of anthropology is its reflexive and critical epistemology, which is absent from the natural sciences. Without these two elements, there is no quality ethnography. Training in the biological and agronomic sciences provides specific skills to technically describe local knowledge, but this framework also makes it very difficult to conceive of local knowledge and practices as parts of a larger symbolic and cultural system that includes human-nonhuman relations as well as elements of cosmology. But such disciplinary divisions do not in themselves justify the failure to take into account local ways of thinking and acting in the world. For example, Dư ơ ng Thi Bích Ngoc, who originally trained in soil and environmental sciences,5 nevertheless takes into account humans’ non-­material and non-economic relations to the forest in order to better understand how to manage it effectively in his 2019 thesis. In recent years, natural scientists have been attempting to build multidisciplinary research agendas between natural sciences and anthropology (see Ostrom 2009 and Blair et al. 2017). Second, the sponsors of local knowledge studies almost always ask researchers to make specific recommendations for managing and transforming this knowledge for better nature management. Thus, sometimes in spite of themselves, these researchers will go beyond their fields of expertise to give advice on the social actions of populations. The vast 5

 Doctor of Agricultural Management in 2019 (see below).

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majority of the social science texts on natural areas in Vietnam have in common that they share basic assumptions of sociology, geography, and anthropology: a focus on specific themes and objects of study valued by these disciplines, at the expense of other themes and objects simply ignored by the field of study, often without justification. Two major trends in this group’s studies include, on one hand, those that pay very close attention to specific activities of people living in protected areas, but ignore some others that I would argue are necessary to understand the relationship between people and nature. Now we will examine how some studies attempt to engage with a large number of themes that shape the relationship between humans and nature (social, symbolic, ritual, cosmological, affective, aesthetic, poetic, etc.), but do not totally succeed in this endeavor, for reasons that I will mention. The Quebecois geographer Steve Déry, one of the specialists on national parks in Vietnam, has studied  issues directly related to conceptions of nature and the environment in Central Vietnam since the 1990s: for example, forest protection and its consequences for ethnic populations, and protected areas and national parks as tools for the state’s political and spatial control of local populations. Déry initially focused on issues of space management and land tenure as well as on the impact of newly created protected areas on the lives of local populations as he sought to highlight the importance of ethnic, cultural, and social factors in the specific modes of forest management and the transformation of forests into agricultural land (Déry 2003). In other publications, he discusses the historical relationship of the Vietnamese (Viêt-Kinh) with the forest. He points out that before the French colonial period, the Viêt-Kinh already had a conception of the territory in which the forest had no place: “their village space is conceived as open and free of all wilderness” (Boulbet 1984: 27 quoted by Déry 2003: 2). The assertion that “supposedly wilderness” has no place in the Viêt-­ Kinh village reiterates the idea that Vietnamese symbolism and cosmology are based on the opposition between civilized and natural spaces, that is, between the “human” and “nonhuman” categories. However, several studies (Stein 1942; Đinh Trong Hiếu 1997; Culas 2019) show that a certain form of nature is indeed present in the heart of the Vietnamese village in the gardens. In spite of the conceptual openness present in these texts, the author does not deepen the quality of the polysemic dimensions of Vietnamese conceptions of nature.

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But Déry repeatedly points out that one of the important problems in the design and management of protected areas in Vietnam is that they are designed on a Western model, which is thought to be a “universal model” by international environmental conservation agencies, a model that can be applied to all countries and cultural and social contexts: “the approach used, most of which comes from international institutions, [is] a model in which human and nature cannot coexist, [which] has generally discarded [approaches] that do not conform to this model” (2008: 223). He also shows that local conceptions of nature are never taken into account and that all decisions on protected areas in Vietnam are top-down: The problem to be kept in mind is that there is only one problem: on the one hand the approach used to set up these protected area networks, and on the other hand the definition given to the forest, a definition that does not take into account local perceptions and uses in any way … local development (in protected areas) remains a top-down, paternalistic approach. (Déry 2008: 13; translation mine)

The development approach criticized by Déry is based on Western naturalistic ontology: humans and nonhumans are separate and opposing entities. Déry highlights a fundamental problem in the study of protected areas and nature in general, but he does not attempt to go beyond. To do so, he would need to mobilize tools from anthropology and the philosophy of the relationship between nature and culture: authors such as Berque (2013, 2019a), Descola (2013), Ingold (2000), Kohn (2013), and Viveiros de Castro (2014) have debated ways of acting with, talking about, and thinking about human and nonhuman categories for the last twenty years. Dư ơ ng Thi Bích Ngoc’s thesis, Social Aspects of Forest and Nature Conservation in Vietnam (2019), articulates an intermediate position that is dominated by agricultural management, but on several occasions attempts to include symbolic and cosmological dimensions. Seamon already noted in 1984 that nature and forest protection not only have an economic value but also a non-rational, affective basis: love and responsibility for the earth “cannot only be thought about cerebrally; they must be felt emotionally, with the heart” (769). Following this line of argument, many scholars have argued that the most important influence on human

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commitments to protect nature may be the emotion of caring about the environment (Clayton 2003; Orr 1993; Wilson 1984, 1993). Dư ơ ng indicates explicitly that her work is “inspired by this perception” (2019: 16). She clearly positions herself as a researcher who wants to integrate non-rational aspects such as affects and emotions into her approach. Dư ơ ng notes that Vietnamese practices and conceptions of the forest are not limited to economic and utilitarian criteria: Other roles of the forest however lie much closer to Seamon’s (1984) “affective basis” that connects nature and the forest with traditional spirituality, virtues of care, intrinsic natural values and so on. Reading the forest policy documents, nothing of this breadth is visible at first sight, however. The forest is described basically only in economic terms, and the most recent forest policies are explicitly economic ones, both in terms of objectives (economic growth) and in terms of instruments, e.g. ‘payment for forest environmental services’. Against this background, the overall question of this thesis became: How and to what extent are economic and non-economic (cultural) forest values expressed and at work in Vietnam? (2019: 17; original emphasis)

This central question matches almost exactly the one motivating this essay. Dư ơ ng conceptualizes the relationship the Vietnamese have with the forest through the expression “strong pro-forest culture”: Forests constitute a crucial nature element that tangibly and intangibly supplies material welfare as well as mental, spiritual and cultural well-being, particularly to forest people that make up nearly a quarter of the population. … Overall then, we conclude that Vietnamese culture contains a strong pro-forest element both in the ‘practical culture’ of forest-adjacent people and in the more abstract culture of people living in mainstream rural and urban areas. (2019: 157–158; emphasis added)

Dư ơ ng shows that despite this “strong pro-forest culture,” the economic and exploitation drivers in the short term are stronger (2019: 160), as is obvious from massive looting and rapid degradation of natural environments. In spite of her interest in the non-material dimensions of human relations with the forest in Vietnam, Dư ơ ng encountered difficulty in producing information on “spiritual matters” about the forest: “In the interviews, respondents expressed shyness to speak about spiritual matters such as

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these to a stranger such as the researcher,” she notes (Dư ơ ng 2019: 39). This fear of talking about spiritual things with a researcher does not stem, as she supposes, from any timidity in evoking such subjects, which are part of the daily life of the Vietnamese, but instead from the fact that this researcher is perceived as “positioned,” through her questions, in her attitude towards spiritual things. As a doctoral student in environmental science at a Dutch university, Dư ơ ng is perceived by farmers as the bearer of the Western ontological and scientific system. In this context, the interviewees will position themselves in agreement with it and will not be comfortable talking about the spiritual and cosmological dimensions of nature, because they know that these dimensions, although important to them, are not valued by Western science as they understand it. Note that Pham and Rambo (2003) conclude their study with the same difficulty: even though they recognize the importance of “supranatural” dimensions of nature, they are bewildered by their interviewees’ silence on these matters. To illustrate how it is possible to build a rigorous scientific approach that is open to nonscientific conceptions of nature, we will use the recent texts of two authors who approach ways of thinking about the nature and environment of other ethnic groups in ways that seem normal to many anthropologists, but which are still exceptions in studies on Vietnam. The work of Cầm Hoàng, an anthropologist and specialist in forest management among ethnic minorities in northwestern Vietnam (Thái and Dao) and a senior researcher at the Institute of Cultural Studies in Hanoi, pays close attention to the local ethnohistorical context (2009, 2011). He shows how logging in Khau Li Forest (Sơ n La province), a “national natural preservation zone” (Hoàng 2009: 1) by outsiders—Kinh, Mư ờ ng and Hmông—and by the ethnic Thái inhabitants was made possible by the repeal of the local traditional lord’s old customary laws by the Vietnamese State in the 1960s. We might logically think that the laws of the State with ̉ Lâm and police), and their their formalism, their means of control (Kiê m means of repression (sanctions and fines) would be more effective than the old Thái customary laws. But the case of the Khau Li reservation clearly shows that the customary laws have not been replaced by the laws of the Vietnamese state. In fact, as Hoàng shows, today all the inhabitants of the area (Thái, Kinh, Mư ờ ng, and Hmông) face a “legal vacuum” because the laws of the state are considered illegitimate at the same time that the old political and symbolic system of the local Thái lord has been abolished and devalued by the state.

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The process of impossible substitution of customary laws by state laws highlights several problems that we have already come across. First, the state had no precise knowledge of the local customary laws of the White Thái of this valley, as it probably never thought to seek information on this specific local system. Like today, some researchers neglect traditional local political and symbolic systems in their studies of environmental management. Second, if the state has been informed of the existence of these local traditional systems, it has chosen to treat them as “primitive,” “backward,” and “destructive” (Hoàng 2009: 8). In this case, the new state, with its political, legal, and administrative strength sought to break with the past “feudal” system of ethnic groups and bring them into communist and Kinh modernity (McElwee 1999). The founding ideology of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Marxism-Leninism associated with Hồ Chí Minh’s thought, ontologically represents an extreme form of ‘naturalism,’ that also transformed the conceptions of the relationship between man and nature (see Culas 2019). Hoàng is not doing an ontological reading of the local Thái and Kinh realities of the State. He shows the differences between the two systems: one old, local and symbolically anchored in a political, social, cosmological, and natural space, respected because it enjoys an ancient cosmological legitimacy and authority; the other modern, new, “parachuted” into a mountain ethnic space, and so certain of its ideological and rational superiority that it neglects the local systems already in place. The Swedish anthropologist, Nikolas Århem, has focused on Central Vietnam and various political ecology-related issues facing the Katu people. In academic publications such as In The Sacred Forest: Landscape, Livelihood and Spirit Beliefs among the Katu of Vietnam (2009) and Forests, Spirits and High Modernist Development: A Study of Cosmology and Change among the Katuic Peoples in the Uplands of Laos and Vietnam (2014), as well as reports for an environmental NGO (Århem and Nguyen 2006), he has developed a very broad understanding of the realities of daily life of Vietnamese forest populations. For example, in the WWF Vietnam report (Århem and Nguyen 2006), he discusses almost all the activities of the Katu group. The chapter on the impacts of the Ho Chi Minh Highway gives a clear idea of the authors’ broad scope of study, including rice cultivation, hunting, community structures, Indigenous religion and spirituality, and domestic production (Århem and Nguyen 2006: 34–39). For the study of local knowledge, Århem and Nguyen clearly define the relationships between this knowledge and conceptions of nature:

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In the (Katu) village…, now located along the Ho Chi Minh Highway, a number of ‘prohibited areas’ are still respected when it comes to hunting and clearing swidden land. All these religious-ritual taboos and regulations—although based on spiritual beliefs—constitute a form of ‘environmental protection system’ since it leaves certain areas of the forest off-limits for hunting and agriculture. Anthropologists have termed these types of belief systems ‘coded ecological knowledge’. Part of indigenous people’s ecological knowledge is, thus, embedded or encoded in—and cannot be separated from—their spiritual beliefs. (96)

In order to remain faithful to local ways of thinking about the nonhuman world (the “emic” aspect of reality),6 Århem and Nguyen analyze hunting and meat distribution rites from both social and religious perspectives: In short, hunting is an integral part of indigenous cultural and religious life; it expresses and largely constitutes manhood (maleness) in (local) society, and the ritual sharing of game meat following upon a successful hunt not only symbolizes village unity but effectively creates and reproduces the village as an autonomous social unit. Indeed, in the local idiom “sharing game meat” means “belonging to the same village.” When game sharing stops, so does village solidarity and cohesion. (2006: 35)

Århem notes elsewhere that “[c]osmology, livelihood and the local forest environment are here closely and fundamentally integrated” (Århem 2014: 26). He thus applies a balanced approach to the technical actions of hunting, farming, and gathering and their meanings in the local religion. This approach is intended to be as faithful an echo as possible of how people live and what they do with nature. Several of Århem’s texts (Århem 2009, 2014; Århem and Nguyen 2006) go further than this comprehensive approach that integrates the “emic” aspects of local reality. The author articulates micro-local and traditional situations with the socio-economic changes linked to the development processes of modernity. His narrative encompasses situations of dynamics between “Forests, Spirits, Cosmology and High Modernist

6  In anthropology, “emic” means from the inside of the social group being studied: the point of view of the observed; and “etic,” from the outside: the point of view of the observer, the researcher.

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Development” as experienced by the Katu in their daily lives. Such studies capture the dynamic and adaptive reality of the Katu with great precision. The texts presented in this section do not cover the whole spectrum of nature narratives in Vietnam. I have deliberately limited myself to scientific narratives, but it should be kept in mind that a significant proportion of nature texts in Vietnam are commercial, intended to promote natural tourist spots such as Phú Quốc Island or Cát Tiên National Park. Literary and poetic texts about nature in Vietnam are also numerous, but lie beyond the scope of this study.

3  The Ontological Foundations of Nature Narratives In most of the narratives presented here, but also in many other texts on human/nature relations in Vietnam, we find that important dimensions of the daily reality of the populations are missing. These gaps in research have direct consequences for the understanding of local nature management strategies, and thus for the effectiveness of conservation actions (Århem 2014; Hoàng 2009; Culas 2019; McElwee 1999, 2016). In this section, I will attempt to go beyond the diagnosis of gaps to propose a heuristic tool truly able to speak about other ways of being in the world. I will use Augustin Berque’s “mesology” to define the deep reasons (epistemological, philosophical, and ontological) that explain these absences and to propose an analytical reading of the studies discussed above. Dư ơ ng, Hoàng, and Århem pay attention to the non-material dimensions of reality, but they do not explain the epistemological principles that guide their work. If their methods are to be used elsewhere, the epistemological foundations of their reasoning must be investigated. According to Berque, it is the ontological foundation of much modern Western science that prevents us from seeing certain aspects of the reality of others (Berque 2016, 2019b). Modern Western ontology imposes serious constraints on scientific as well as popular thought. Because of anthropological and philosophical comparisons with other ontologies, modern Western ontology has become one of several possible ontologies rather than “the ontology par excellence” that modern Western science has supported for several centuries. For many scientists, even today, modern Western ontology continues to be the only true scientific and rational ontology (See critics in Survire 1973: 54; Feyerabend 1993:

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Part 19; Berque 2019a: Chap. III). From an epistemological point of view, however, this ontology is only one of the possible ways of seeing and thinking about the world. In order to be able to describe the ontologies of others, methods must be sufficiently open and flexible to allow for the fact that interactions between humans and nonhumans exceed the schemes of modern Western ontology. Đinh Thanh Sang’s hyper-detailed but ontologically limited approach, as we have seen, prevents him from understanding local knowledge as a system of actions, meanings, and symbols for its practitioners. This selective approach is based on the idea that Western science easily grasps the complexity of local practices and conceptions. In practice, this reductionism eliminates everything that Western science considers to be erroneous or even aberrant conceptions of the world. Thus, emotional, sensitive, spiritual, intuitive, and cosmological dimensions are rejected because they are allegedly irrational and mystical—too far removed from the material, economic, and technical world valued by modern Western science. Reductionist approaches are often seen as a matter of method that concerns only a particular field of knowledge. However, we know that there is a strong correlation between the cosmological and ontological foundations of science and the foundations of modern Western civilization since the Renaissance. Naturalism, mechanicism, reductionism, individualism, quantitative methods, capitalism, and industrialism, among others, are typical constructions of modernity (Hess and Bourg 2016; Berque 2019b: 3). The extensive overlap between modern science and Western dualistic ontology is one of the obstacles to rational and rigorous approaches based on other ontologies. To develop better accounts of non-Western ontologies of nature and ways of being in the world, therefore, it is necessary to take a sufficient distance from this dominant ontology. Several anthropologists have taken a critical and constructive epistemological look at modern Western ontology (Descola 2013; Escobar 2018; Ingold 2000; Kohn 2013). But to my knowledge, few authors have gone as far in the analysis of different ontologies and the constraints they impose as the geographer and Japanologist, Augustin Berque. Over more than twenty-five years, Berque has gradually developed an approach whose objective is to go beyond the constraints of modern Western ontology in order to think about the world in these multiple dimensions. This method, at once geographical, philosophical, and

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anthropological, that focuses on the relationship of beings to their milieu is called mesology. Mesology explicitly states that a being is structurally linked to its milieu, and therefore, ipso facto, that the milieu is a singular thing, specific to a certain individual or collective being (group, society, species...), and therefore irreducible to this universal object that is the environment for a modern science such as ecology. Beyond modern dualism, mesology is thus posed as a science or rather a paradigm that goes beyond modernity (i.e. transmodernity). (Berque 2018: 4)

The distinction between environment and milieu is necessary to come out of the Western framework. “A milieu is always defined in relation to a place, at least one activity, or a social group, a person. The milieu does not exist in itself, it is the milieu of something or someone,” Brunet, Ferras and Théry emphasize (2005: 330). Elsewhere, Berque elaborates that “[t]he reality that surrounds us is not that of an objectal environment (made up of objects), viewed by an individual subject, but that of a milieu in which things participate in our very being” (Berque 2013: 62). The reality of the milieu clearly goes beyond dualism because it is beyond the subject-object dichotomy. According to Berque (2013: 60), the milieu is a ternary compound through the reciprocal relationship between a subject and an object, but the milieu is elusive through modern mechanism and the logic of the excluded third that underlies it. Mesology is still a little-known paradigm. It defines itself against three essential components of modern Western ontology: modern dualism, principle of the identity of the subject, and the principle of the excluded third party (Berque 2014, 2019a). As Berque argues, “[t]he dichotomy between the subjective and the objective which we call dualism is the origin of the couple of modern conceptual oppositions ‘nature versus culture’ … On the contrary, mesology aims at understanding what in a concrete milieu unites in a single reality that which dualism separates into two poles” (Berque 2019a: viii). The formal opposition between subject and object is structured for modern dualism. In the mesology problematic, the question of the subject has a crucial place. The usual approach limits this question to human affairs, while the rest— [other species]—is reduced to mechanistic objectification …. From the dualism of the modern western paradigm, which is correlated with and symmetrical to the modern scientific object, emerged the modern individual

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subject, who became the central actor of our world …. The subject became its own foundation and by cutting itself off from its milieu it opposes a world which then itself becomes an object. (Berque 2019a: x–xi)

Using the formal notations of linguistics, Berque argues that modern dualism has a reductionist view of the relationship between subject (S) and predicate (P) based on a supposed rational objectivity. In particular, Berque (2014: 68) shows that modern dualism goes hand-in-hand with the basic statement of Western logic that “S is P”: the subject (S) is equivalent to its predicate (P). This allows for objective judgments such as “water (S) is H2O (P),” the foundation of modern science. This binarity has proven its extraordinary effectiveness in certain fields, although it arbitrarily ignores the interpreter (I) by whom, concretely and historically, the statement “water is H2O” must necessarily be made. Of course, the eviction of the interpreter is part of the protocol aimed at eliminating all subjectivity from the “S is P” judgment, but this tacit eviction condemns this science to reductionism. How does mesology propose to overcome this reductionist dualism? According to Berque (2019a), the description of relative reality (r) can be schematized as follows, r = S/P, which reads: reality (r) is the subject (S) as it is predicated (feeling-sensing, acting, thinking, saying,) (P), since to grasp things is to predicate them (by action, by meaning, by thinking, by words). Let us take some examples from Berque (2010: 62–63). For science, water is grasped as a chemical composition (H2O); for a farmer, it is a resource; to cross the river, it is a constraint; it is a risk during a tsunami, water is also an amenity in the garden fountain, and so on. Water is therefore never abstractly a pure object (S), but is always concretely a thing S/P. Water (S) cannot be only and only H2O (P) as science asserts. In concrete reality, S can never be equal to one and only P, each interpreter (I) produces his own reality (r) from a specific link between S and P. Mesology also argues against the principle of the identity of the subject as articulated in René Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637) (Berque 2014: 39). Following Descartes’ philosophy, the being of the modern subject is abstracted from any milieu. It exists in itself, independently of what surrounds it. Cartesian philosophy asserts that the subject is always the same regardless of external elements, and that this abstraction of the subject from its milieu guarantees its identity. Mesology, by contrast, focuses on the subject’s entanglement with its milieu.

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The third principle that mesology positions itself against is the excluded third-party principle or law of the excluded middle. The basis of this principle is the statement, “A is true and Non-A is false.” This logical and mathematical principle is in fact a simplification of human realities: because it “admits only one explanation of the reality of an object entity in a predefined category” (Shao 2012: 3–4). As Berque elaborates: The principle of the excluded third party in science is a logical abstraction, because in a concrete milieu, and for mesology, the reality of things is necessarily tetralemma, i.e. the four logical components of A and non-A: assertion (A) and negation (non-A), bi-negation (neither A nor non-A) and bi-­ assertion (both A and non-A). The logic of mesology goes beyond the abstract binarities of dualism (subject-object, nature-culture, subject-­ predicate, etc.); it also goes beyond the principle of the excluded third party. (Berque 2019b: 4)

This principle, however, is not invariably shared by other cultures. As some researchers have argued, Chinese ontology, for example, is based on becoming rather than being, and in this view, the law of the excluded middle isolates humans from their milieu (Shao 2012: 12). For our topic, one of the efficient analytical tools of mesology would be a tripartite schematization that characterizes the reality of a “thing” as an object (S) to which an interpreter (I) gives a particular meaning (P), the relative reality (r) then becomes: r = S – I − P. Applying this formalization to studies of the forest in local practices and conceptions as an example, the forest (S) would be experienced, told, used, organized, ritualized, thought, or imagined by different interpreters (I) as different predicates or meanings (P) to yield the following diagram (Fig. 1): In Đinh Thanh Sang’s approach, certain elements of the forest that are used by local populations, such as bamboo and rattan, are described with botanical precision based on qualitative and, especially, quantitative data. This technical-scientific approach takes into account only certain aspects of the forest reality as experienced by local populations. In spite of this arbitrary choice, Đinh nonetheless takes the liberty of prescribing what should be conserved and what should be eliminated in local knowledge about the forest. Đinh focuses mainly on the technical (P1, see Fig. 1), ecological (botanical) (P2) and economic (P3) aspects of the forest. All other aspects (P4 to P11) are ignored or minimized. This would not pose any problem in a purely botanical study, but the author allows himself to

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Object (S)

Interpreter (I)

Relation ”taken as”

Predicate (P) Aspects of reality

Loggers, Farmers…

Technical Aspects (P1)

Farmers, Traders, State…

Economical Aspects

Rangers, Researchers…

Ecological Aspects (P3)

Farmers, Landowners…

Social Aspects (P4)

States, Police, Army…

Political Aspects (P5)

(P2)

Farmers, Rangers, Tourists… Symbolic Aspects (P6)

Forest (S)

Shamans, Farmers…

Religious Aspects (P7)

Almost all Interpreters

Cosmological Aspects (P8)

Almost all Interpreters

Aesthetic, Affective, Emotional, Poetic and Imaginative Aspects (P9)

Landowners, Researchers…

Historical Aspects (Archives) (P10)

Local People, Researchers… Ethno-Historical Aspects (Oral) (P11) Other Interpreters….

Other Aspects of Reality…

Fig. 1  Diversity of observable realities about the forest

slide into value judgments in order to organize “the collaborative management” of national parks (Đinh 2020: 9). Déry’s studies present a panorama of classical themes of geography: forest management and agriculture are at once technical, economic, ecological, and political (P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5). Local forms of governance involve social and political aspects (P4, P5), their transformations, and their historical dimension (P10). Déry also addresses symbolism (P6) and cosmology (P8), but does not deal with these two aspects in this research. He evokes the negative impacts of naturalistic ontology (nature vs. culture) in discussing agents of development (P6 and P8 relative to Westerners), but without developing these themes. Dư ơ ng Thi Bích Ngoc’s thesis focuses on two themes: the history of forest policies and the impact of payment for environmental services, which correspond to P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, and P10. These are typical ingredients of social science studies (P1 to P5 and P10), but Dư ơ ng’s originality lies in her  clear awareness of the need to integrate the symbolic,

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cosmological, and affective dimensions for local people (P6, P7, P8, and P9). Dư ơ ng only has the classical Western scientific tools at her disposal to analyze Vietnamese conceptions of nature, which do not allow her to explore the “Vietnamese strong pro-forest culture” and “spiritual matters” in detail. A mesological approach would complement her research. Cầm Hoàng addresses a very broad range of issues in the conceptions and uses of the forest among Vietnam’s ethnic populations. Like Dư ơ ng, he deals in detail with local ways of living and thinking (P1, P2, P3, and P4). When he addresses the political dimension (P5), he integrates the local political history of traditional Thái lords and their relationship with the dominant Vietnamese party-state. It is a work of complementarity between textual history (P10) and oral ethnohistory (P11), which directly echoes the social (P4), symbolic (P6), religious (P7), cosmological (P8), and aesthetic/emotional (P9) dimensions of the Thái ethnic management of nature. The different predicates of the subject “forest” are thus closely related. In order to understand the meaning of “forest” one must be able to embrace a large number of its predicates. Århem focuses his research on local cosmologies and ontologies (P6, P7, P8), but he is not limited to religious and spiritual themes, as specialists in religion often are. He also includes the dynamics of local social change: the articulations, tensions, and agreements between the still traditional local society (P11) and the development projects as politics and ideology of modernity. These analyses show the deep interrelationships between the technical (P1), economic (P2), ecological (P3), social (P5), and political (P6) aspects and the double historical dimension (P10 and P11) of local realities. These articulations derive from the contemporary global world, which is dominated by production and a  liberal economy that surrounds and makes sense for local actors. The analysis of studies on perceptions of nature and forest narratives shows that an accurate description of the relationships between humans and nonhumans must take into account aesthetic, emotional, and intuitive, but also historical and ethnohistorical dimensions. The reality of a specific social group (logger, farmer, ranger, tourist, researcher…) is thus composed of a large number of dimensions that constitute the specific ways of making sense of and being in this natural environment for this group. This point is essential because it places, at the heart of research, the role of the interpreter in the production of the reality of the forest, of nature, and thus in his ways of acting with and managing it.

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4  Conclusion This overview and analysis of studies that engage with cultural perceptions of and narratives about nature has shown a rich variety of ways of thinking and living nature among different populations in Vietnam. The cosmologies, symbolic systems, and ontologies that support these ways of being in the world are still largely unknown. The burden of habit and the assurance of rationality in Western science are the main reasons that limit our access to this knowledge. The other factor that makes it difficult to grasp the forms and contents of these cosmologies and ontologies is that all the populations under study have been in contact with kingdoms, merchants, missionaries, and states for centuries. In fact, these populations know and are capable of deciphering foreign cultures and integrating certain logics and elements of respective ontologies into their own. For this reason, Pham and Rambo faced the same difficulties as Dư ơ ng in getting people to talk about their relationships with the “supernatural.” Their interviewees (Kinh and ethnic people) know that in the ontological and moral reference systems of the modern West and Marxism-Leninism, talking about these things is not welcomed and has even been strongly punished by the Vietnamese state at certain times. This refusal to speak highlights the interviewees’ ability to situate themselves in different ontologies depending on the social and political context. Thus, researchers who are foreign to the local group are locked into a single ontology: Western and modern naturalist, the basis of science. These ethnic populations may, depending on the social, symbolic, and political contexts, take their own ontology as a point of reference, for example, when it comes to performing a ritual that strengthens the links between their community and the sacred trees. When agents of the state, development projects, or researchers come to question them, they then rely on their knowledge of foreign ontologies (Kinh and Western) to satisfy these external agents and thus produce “socially acceptable words” (Bourdieu 1984: 122). Locally, these different ontologies can be used separately or in combination. When combined, hybrid or overlaid ontologies emerge, for example, when Vietnamese patients use Western biomedicine and traditional Vietnamese medicine together to treat the same disease. These two forms of medicine are based on different ontologies, and the study of such hybrid or syncretic ontologies raises new questions for research. Few works address these epistemological problems, even though they constitute an important limitation of much research.

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All texts about nature tell us about the meaning or meanings that certain interpreters attribute to it and about the position of the interpreters. Nature can be interpreted by local communities that give it a particular meaning, or by scientists with a different meaning. The basic problem is that many scientists still find it difficult to accept the existence and importance of a local sense of nature. Most studies only include the scientific interpretation of nature, either ignoring local interpretations or believing that it can simply be subsumed under the scientific approach. What method and what relationship to others would allow us to better take into account and understand the meanings they give to things? The Canadian anthropologist Hy Văn Lư ơ ng gives the beginnings of an answer when he outlines three fundamental methodological pillars of anthropological research in Vietnam: “(1) a command of a local language as a vital entry point into the local sociocultural universe, (2) a sense of empathy for local culture and society, and (3) intensive participant observation, ideally and continuously for twelve months or more, in a particular community” (Lư ơ ng 2006: 371). These objectives, he claims, could be accomplished through “long-term anthropological fieldwork by Western-based scholars, involving extended stay and total immersion in a studied community” (2006: 372). Anthropologists often talk about “immersion” to describe their relationships with the populations they study, but in fact, they also involve participation and integration in local life and empathy. All these notions refer to exchange, listening, and reciprocity—a willingness “to open oneself to the being of another” (Ingold 2013: 342), and thus to reduce the intellectual, cultural as well as emotional distance from them; in other words, simply to live with them. These attitudes are not valued by modern Western science: they are affect-laden and too anchored in particular cases from which it is impossible to derive general laws. So in the end they are judged to be unacceptable and unscientific. Mesology opens up an alternative path, making it possible to think rationally and rigorously outside the dominant scientific system and naturalistic dualism. This path promises a new understanding of different cultural communities’ relationships to and stories about the natural world.

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PART II

Indigenous and Spiritual Narratives of the Environment

Legends of Forest Spirits in the Central Vietnamese Highlands Thi Kim Ngan Nguyen

1   Introduction The Central Vietnamese Highlands consist of red basalt and include mountainous terrain and plateaus interspersed with valleys and plains. The North Central Highlands include Kontum, surrounded by mountains such as Ngoc Linh with an altitude of over 1000  meters. The Central Highlands consist of low mountains, and the South Central Highlands are the intersection between highlands and mountains of Lâm Đồng province (Nguyêñ Văn Chiên̉ 1985: 89). The seasonal cycle of this region follows the pattern of tropical monsoon climate: rainy season from November to March, dry and hot season from April to October. This clear weather contrast shapes the characteristic cycles of production and cultural life. The ̵ Xơ Đăng, Gia Rai, region is inhabited by ethnic minorities such as Êdê,

T. K. N. Nguyen (*) Department of Literature and Linguistics, University of Education, Hue University, Hue, Vietnam Hue University, Hué, Vietnam © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_3

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M’Nông, and BaNa. It is also one of the areas of greatest biodiversity in Southeast Asia and the world (Nguyêñ Văn Chiên̉ 1985: 211–254). Ethnic groups in the Central Highlands live from the forest, which is their source of life and offers them divine protection. The forest is the “biosphere,” the greatest reality they face every day. For them, “nature means forest, forest means nature. The forest covers, protects, and feeds them, and it also shapes village culture” (Nguyên Ngoc 2018). Even as the village preserves the forest, it can only itself be preserved through a chain of vital relations with the forest. At the same time, the forest is also immense, mysterious and intimidating, a symbol of fear, and a dwelling place of evil spirits. Ôn Khê Nguyêñ Tấn’s Vũ Man Tap Luc (1871) is regarded as a priceless medieval Vietnamese document because it systematically records the history of contact between the Annamites and the Central Highlands people and the policies of the Vietnamese feudal dynasties throughout the Central Highlands ethnic groups’ history. Ôn Khê Nguyêñ Tấn characterized them  in his historical bibliography: “the high mountains having a dense atmosphere, verdant forest, long clear streams, and springs teeming with shrimp and fishes. Because their topographic environment is perilous, their habits are rudimentary and frugal” (Ôn Khê Nguyêñ Tấn 2019: 175). Ethnic groups in the Highlands have established a lifestyle adapted to the natural habitat, its topography, and climate over hundreds of years. Ethnic communities have used nature to survive and have typically expressed their respect and gratitude to the natural world. The leading Central Highlands missionary and ethnographer, Jacques Dournes, who lived in the area for twenty-three years, emphasized that the region cannot live without forests: Or la forêt est présente même au village, car la civilisation joraï est une civilisation du végétal. Les piliers porteurs de la maison, ainsi que les traverses et entraits, sont en bois; planchers et cloisons sont en bambou fendu et déroulé; les arbalétriers sont en bois, les pannes en bambou plein; la couverture est en chaume; bambous et rotins assurent tous les travaux de vannerie. En sa maison, l’homme demeure ainsi dans un cadre forestier, il n’en sort pas. (1978: 20–21) [Now, the forest is present even in the village, because Joraï civilization is a plant civilization. The columns that support the house as well as the cross-­ beams and ties are made from wood. Floors and partitions are made from split and flattened bamboo. Rafters and roof beams are made from wood and whole bamboo, the roof cover from straw. All basketry work relies on

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bamboo and rattan. In his house, man thus remains in a forest framework; he cannot leave it.] (Translation Ursula K. Heise)

Because of fewer than 500  years of history of contact between the Central Highlands and the rest of Vietnam, the Central Highlands are a typical autonomous region, but they have experienced fluctuations and instabilities since ca. 1545, the reign of King Lê Trang Tông (1515–1548) (Nguyễn Quốc Sửu 2011: 49). Bùi Tá Hán, the first mandarin to rule the highlands, was appointed by King Lê Trang Tông in 1540. This illustrious general progressively consolidated the Lê dynasty’s rule over tribes in the Trư ờ ng Sơ n mountain range and the Central Highlands (Ôn Khê Nguyễn Tấn 2019). Bùi Tá Hán established the base, expanded trade, migrated Kinh people from the lowlands to settle in the Montagnards and Central Highlands, and fostered a harmonious relationship between Kinh people and ethnic minorities. This mandarin adopted a governing program that ensured the Central Highlands Indigenous peoples’ autonomy to a high degree, resulting in a rare time of calm for the region. A short period of historical stability was associated with French colonial policy in Vietnam (1884–1945). Medieval Han character documents such as Đai Nam Thực Luc (1821–1909) and Khâm d i̵ nh Viê t sử thông giám cư ơ ng muc chính biên (1856–1884), all recorded and compiled through the Vietnamese feudal dynasties just mentioned, show that the Vietnamese feudal court did not interfere in the social structure of the community of the feudal lords. Indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands and the tribes here still live with their millennial cultures, beliefs, customs, and social structures. Since being incorporated into Đai Viêt territory, the Lê court has implemented a policy of rule in which the autonomy of the Indigenous peoples of the Central Highlands is ensured to a high degree, creating a period of calm for this land that lasted about 200 years. In 1900, the French School of the Far East, a predecessor of the Permanent Archaeological Mission of Indochina (1898), which was officially established to explore new lands, expand the colony, and extend French influence in the Far East, served at the same time for the invasion and rule of Vietnam (Ngô and Trần 2009). French ethnologists at that time were urged to develop a better understanding of Vietnam, but they were also attracted to the long and diverse cultures of the Vietnamese people, especially in the region of the Central Highlands. Henri Maître, a French colonial official but also a scientist with a love of freedom, took the

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first steps in “civilizing” this wilderness: two seemingly contradictory impulses that co-existed in the same man, captivated by the beauty of the Central Highlands. Pendant ces deux années de découvertes captivantes, de courses incessantes and opiniâtres, je me suis enivré sans mesure du charme profond des jungles insondables; sur les marais et dans les chaînes abruptes, dans l’immensité des forêts-­ clairières sans bornes, sur les hauts plateaux que fouette la brise effrénée, j’ai connu la liberté absolute, infinie, le pénétrant orgueil qui dilate l’âme des découvreurs. (Maître 1912: n.p. [dedication]) [During these two years of fascinating discoveries, of interminable and obstinate journeys, I have been endlessly intoxicated by the profound attractiveness of the unfathomable jungles. In the swamps and on steep mountain ranges, in the boundless forest clearings, on the high-plateaus lashed by frenzied winds, I have come to know the absolute, infinite freedom, the deep-seated pride that expands the soul of explorers.] (Translation Ursula K. Heise)

Although Maître asserts that the Annamites knew the Moi (authentic ethnic minorities) people from ancient times and primarily based historical research on the Central Highlands  on the Phu ̉ Man Tap Luc of  a Vietnamese mandarin, his research is still widely regarded as the most outstanding contribution to the study of Indigenous  tribes in Vietnam’s Central Highlands (Ngô and Trần 2009). Maître warned in the early twentieth century that in a few years only the communities in the Highlands might be truly Moi (authentic ethnic minorities), while those at the outer rim would be devastated. In addition, he argued, the destruction would be aggravated by the imposition of colonial civilization, which would lead to a hybrid culture in the not too distant future (Maître 1912: 103). Maître’s urgent appeal was published in 1912, and now, more than 100 years later, his warnings have come true. Along with Maître’s works, many valuable discoveries on the Central Highlands that laid the foundation for the study of Vietnamese folklore were written by famous scholars of the French School of the Far East such as Indochina (1905) by Paul Dumer; Les Rhadés: Une société de droit maternel [The Rhadés: A Matriarchal Society] by Anne de Hauteclocque-­ Howe (1987); Forêt, femme, folie: Une traversée de l’imaginaire joraï [Forest, Female, Folly: A Journey through the Joraï Imagination] (1978) and Pötao: Une théorie du pouvoir chez les indochinois Jörai [Pötao: A Theory of Power among the Jörai Indochinese] (1977) by Jacques

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Dournes; as well as Nous avons mangé la forêt de la Pierre-Génie Gôo [We Have Eaten the Stone Spirit Gôo’s Forest] (1977) by Georges Condominas. These researchers, under the French colonial empire, aspired to bring the spirit of the  Enlightenment to a region they considered ignorant and sought to colonize its peoples, but on their journeys, they were seduced by the pristine beauty of the rainforests and the supernatural cosmologies of the Indigenous people. Therefore, all of these scholars proposed long-­ term strategies for preserving the Indigenous folklore of the highlands, which French colonial authorities took little interest in. The Republic of South Vietnam (1955–1975), with its policy of cultural assimilation of all ethnic minorities to majority-Kinh Vietnamese culture, undertook extremely harsh measures of suppression and discrimination against Indigenous groups in the Highlands, such as prohibitions against  teaching Indigenous languages and against  wearing traditional clothes like loincloths in public spaces. Tribal land ownership was denied and customary courts were abolished (Nguyêñ Quốc Sửu 2011: 52). The Highlands also became a major war zone of violent conflicts between South Vietnam and the Viêt Minh. Large-scale destruction and social dislocation were the fate of the Highlanders, with 85% of Highland villages forced to relocate because of the fighting (Hickey 1982). At that time, the Viêt Minh consolidated control over part of the Highlands, and this area gradually became an experiment for its future administrative and social policy in Northern Vietnam (Brown 2002 [1991]: 16). Vietnamese researchers under the Communist Party government contributed to research and cultural preservation of the Central Highlands, such as Cao ̀ Thư ợng [Essay of the Upper Highlands] by Cửu Long Nguyên Miê n Giang and Toan Ánh (1973). Although many valuable ethnographic studies on ethnic minorities in the upper Highlands of Vietnam have been published, there is little evidence of interest in the folk beliefs and the legends of forest spirits as manifestations of the unique metaphysical worldview of ethnic minorities. This essay, therefore, focuses on the textual analysis of folk narratives, mainly drawn from books, that describe the beliefs and legends of the Highlands groups. Most of them are collected in the studies and ethnographic descriptions of French researchers who went on long field trips to study Indigenous peoples in the primeval and tropical forests of the Annamite and Central Highlands regions in the nineteenth century, populations who had had little prior contact with the “modern” world. Other research material derives from the collections of Vietnamese researchers

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from the mid-twentieth century. More recently, journalists have reported on the destruction of primeval forests in the Central Highlands and included beliefs about forest spirits in the region in their reporting. On this basis, this essay seeks to contribute to the understanding of oral narrative and perceptions of forest spirits.

2  The Sacred Forest in the Indigenous Cultures of the Highlands Scholars refer to Central Highlands culture as a “culture of forests,” “civilization of plants,” or “civilization of upland fields” (Nguyêñ Văn Kim and Nguyêñ Thành Tâm 2019: 45). The social organization of the ethnic groups is based on the structure of the village near the forest. Their economic form is swidden cultivation: each year, they burn a different patch of forest for upland cultivation; cultivation moves from one patch to the next so that soil can recover and forest regrow in the fallow parcels, and can then be recultivated. In this fashion, the cycle of the forest being cleared into a village and then the village transformed back into forest takes fifteen to twenty years (Nguyên Ngoc 2018). Ethnic minorities in the Highlands often divide forests into three types: forest turned into habitat, forest that has been converted to agricultural use, and ghost forest or sacred forest (Nguyêñ Văn Kim and Nguyêñ Thành Tâm, 2019; Nguyên Ngoc 2018). Unlike the village area and upland fields that are familiar and transformed by human hands, the sacred forest has a hidden meaning and is geographically separated from the village. Corresponding to each type of forest, the relationship between culture and nature and between people and forests has different characteristics. According to animist belief, the sacred forest is the seat of the yang (good spirits) and the malai (or rohung, evil spirits). Each village owns a sacred forest whose borders are often demarcated by the village elders with ancient trees, streams, or large rocks. Usually, such forests are located upstream and on mountain tops, conserving water and preventing erosion. Some ethnic groups in the Gialai and Kontum areas also use such areas as village graveyards, where villagers rarely set foot. Though the boundaries are only conventional, neighboring communities acknowledge and respect them.

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The typical taboos in the customary laws of the Central Highlands state that such areas should not be violated, that ancient trees cannot be felled, and that sacred forest used as graveyard must lie lower than the village (Phan 2014: 445). The communities believe that if a sacred forest is violated, the entire community will be punished by the spirits with illness or fatal accidents. Therefore, the Highlanders worship the sacred forest but are also afraid of it. In their perception, the sacred forest both protects them and can inflict disasters on them if it is violated. To control this tremendous power, Highlanders have thousands of spiritual practices. They are very interested in the good-luck and bad-luck signs, dreams, and other signs sent by the spirits, especially in the sacred forest itself. Highlanders typically believe that natural oddities function as omens of impending negative occurrences in one’s life, and that events in the past that brought bad luck to the village must be avoided in the future. As a consequence, they are extremely attentive even to slight changes in their surroundings. According to M’nông belief, for example, in the event of an encounter with sêr birds (sparrows), calling people on the left side is lucky, while calling people on the right side is risky. Or if one stumbles on a tree stump, it is best to turn one’s head and stop because that is a bad sign. Or when one goes to the forest to cut down trees to build a house, if there are rlang birds (starlings), or kring birds (great hornbills) singing, it is a bad omen, and it is best to turn back. In the forest, whatever one does, one must pray to the gods first and absolutely not wash rice and use the hands rather than a spoon to scoop rice (Tô 2003: 63). These taboos derive most likely from previous experiences of bad luck or disaster. In his book, Les chasseurs de sang [Blood Hunters] (1938), Jean Louis Le Pichon mentions entre autres [signes envoyés par les génies], le cri de l’oiseau d’or sur la gauche du chemin, l’arbre abattu en travers d’un sentier, les oeufs de paon rencontrés en forêt. Citons encore le chant du coq à minuit, le vol du toucan en direction du soleil, la vue d’un python, la rencontre en forêt de certaines plantes … etc… . et même l’éternuement au moment de s’engager dans une grave affaire!] (Le Pichon 2011 [1938]: 15; ellipses in original) [among other (signs sent by spirits) the call of the golden bird on the left side of the road, a tree fallen across a path, peacock eggs found in the woods. Let us add the cock’s crow at midnight, the toucan’s flight toward the sun, the sight of a python, the discovery of certain plants in the woods … etc…. and even a sneeze at the moment one engages in serious business!] (Translation Ursula K. Heise)

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In addition to belief in signs, M’nông spirituality includes an agreement between humans and spirits for patronage that is solicited through sacrifices in forests. The yang in nature that are frequently invoked by the M’nông people are trôk yang (god of heaven), teh yang (earth god), dak yang (water god), bri yang (forest god), Ndu Nam Ka yang (Nam Ka mountain god), dlei yang (tree god), and mau yang (stone god). Similarly, the yang in the BaNa language are called yang kong (god of the forest) and yang unh (god of fire). “The yang can help humans if they are satisfied with the sacrifices but can also punish them if they do not perform promised sacrifices or violate the village of yang, destroy the yang house” (Nguyêñ Thi Thanh Xuân 2019). Such animist beliefs about the sacred forest are common among ethnic groups in the Central Highlands. They believe that humans are born from trees and that their bodies therefore enter a tree trunk when they die. Deities also exist in the trees. In this human-plant-divinity cycle, the elements appear in different forms, but share a common existence (Ngô 2007: 35). Central Highlanders consider themselves “guests” in this forest, on the land, and in the universe. The forest cannot be owned by humans, but is conceived as an ancestral legacy that is passed on to descendants, on the basis of a temporary social contract between humans and spirits, in which humans are only dependents who express their gratitude to the land. Ethnic minorities, in other words, show their respect for the forest through worship of the forest spirits, through taboos, and through customs that preserve the forest and build an archive of rich legends. The mysteries of forests are entrusted to the community, at the same time that they help communities to preserve their forests.

3  Narratives About Forest Yang and Forest Malai Que les ancêtres te protegent! Que ton sommeil soit souriant! Bois et dors. La vie est longue, Le riz pousse difficilement dans les ray, Et la forêt est pleine de mauvais génies! (Le Pichon 2011 [1938]: 23) [May the ancestors protect you! May you sleep with a smile!

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Drink and sleep. Life is long, Rice is difficult to grow on the ray. And the forest is full of evil spirits!] (Translation Ursula K. Heise)

This is a lullaby that mothers in the Central Highlands use to sing their babies to sleep (Le Pichon 2011 [1938]: 23). From the cradle onward, children are transported into a world full of divisions between good and evil spirits, yang and malai (rohung), in forests which are both sacred and dangerous. People pray to the yang to protect the babies that have just been born, but they must also do everything they can so the birth of the baby does not offend any evil malai. All ancestral customs must be carefully respected and no prayer must be omitted if the mother wants her child to survive, and if she wants to avoid being dragged to death by ghosts. The sacred forest, therefore, is associated with a rich array of narratives about yang, good spirits that protect the community, and malai, who suck blood, perpetrate cannibalism, and entice humans to join them by eating their souls. Forest Spirit legends such as yang and malai are popular among all ethnic groups in the Central Highlands, particularly ̵ M’Nông, Ma, and K’ho people. The characteristic yang and among Êdê, Malay legends can be found in Central Highlands folk narrative collections such as X’tiêng Fairytales (Phan Xuân Viên 2015), M’Nông Folktales (Trư ơ ng Thông Tuần 2010), Ma Folktales in Đô ̀ng Nai (Huỳnh Văn Tớ i and Phan Đình Dũng 2014), and Vietnamese Folktales of Ethnic Minorities Collections. One of the yang stories, the story of Mâu Yang Gô according to Mr. Yo Kring in the Krong No area, runs as follows: ̵ ông d i̵ và gặp mô t hòn d á̵ rất to, ơ ̉ d ó̵ xuất hiê n mô t con Có mô t ngư ờ i d àn ̵ ́ ̆ d ang ran ngâm mô t khúc cu ỉ , nhìn thấy ngư ờ i nó nhả khúc cu ỉ ra, ngư ờ i ̵ ông nhặt lấy và mang vê ̀ nhà. Đêm ấy ông ta nàm d àn ̆ mơ thấy mô t vi thần ̵ xuất hiê n và bảo rằng: “Ta tên là Goo, nhìn thấy ngư ơ i d áng thư ơ ng nên sau này ta sẽ cho ăn nên làm ra”. Sáng hôm sau thứ c dây, nhớ lai giấc mơ , ngư ờ i ̵ ông d ó̵ tin ràng d àn ̆ hòn d á̵ d ó̵ chính là hiê n thân cu a ̉ mô t vi thần tên là Goo ̵ tên cho hòn d á̵ d ó̵ là Mâu Yang Go. nên d ã̵ d ặt [There was a man who went and met a very large rock. There appeared a snake holding a piece of firewood in its mouth; seeing the snake release the wood, the man picked it up and brought it home. That night he dreamed of a god appearing and said, ‘My name is Goo, I see you’re worthy of pity, so I will make you rich later.’ The next morning, remembering his dream upon waking up, the man believed that the stone was the embodiment of a god

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named Goo, so he named the stone Mau Yang Go.]. (Nguyêñ Thi Thanh Xuân 2019: 61; translation mine)

This simple story exemplifies how the real world of the Central Highlands is surrounded by a magical world of environment and nature, which is also the realm of the yang. The old, upstream forests are the yang’s domain. The importance of the forest yang to the Highlanders is also reflected in the legend of Chặt Cây Thần (Cutting Down the Spirit Tree). The K’ho ethnic group believes that a tree that was divided up gave rise to the different ethnic communities in the Central Highlands: the Chil took the root, the K Du people the trunk, the Yong and the Ma branches and leaves, which each of them took to the places where they live today (Lê Hồng Phong 2006: 27). Another famous legend of the Central Highlands, Ngư ờ i Lấy Cây (Marriage with a Tree), tells the story of a girl who went to the fields and slept in a hut in the forest, and then suddenly became pregnant. The girl explains to her parents that she had eaten or drunk something in the forest (Trần 2006: 137). Some of the most beautiful stories concern marriage between people and yang trees (Dournes 1978: Chapter 3). The worship of yang may stem from basic perceptions of dangers associated with the forest: its stifling heat and humidity, stagnant streams, and predatory animals. Because of such risks, those who had to hunt or fell timber in the forest would watch the signs of nature carefully and often prepare a propitiatory sacrifice to the yang by way of precaution. In turn, such fears and precautions prevented forest workers from exposing themselves to the worst dangers. But the relationship between humans and spirits was envisioned as reciprocal: if humans express their respect and desire through a sacrificial ceremony, then yang, in turn, must respond by satisfying human desires and providing prosperity. The epidemics, droughts, and crop failures that nonetheless occur are, correspondingly, seen as the consequences of exchanges that did not satisfy the spirits. Although yang are generally considered to be good spirits, distinctions between good and evil are not stable in the stories and beliefs of the Central Highlands people. Spirits are able to change their nature from a protective to an angry yang divinity who uses spells and amulets to harm humans and make them lose their minds. Meanwhile, malai represent the evil spirits of cannibalism who in certain cases are able to let go of the cannibal spirit and return to a normal body.

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Ôn Khê Nguyêñ Tấn describes Moi’s fighting ability as “coming like light, leaving like flashes,” relying on dangerous places to shoot arrows, and javelin is their forte. Đai Nam Thực Luc also mentions many of the ancient Moi practices of murder and the strange occurrences around death. Therefore, it is easy to recognize that death, devils, and the horrific happenings surrounding deceased souls become a vital theme in the folk narratives of the Central Highlands. The folk narratives of ethnic groups in the Central Highlands call malai (devils) by different names according to their language. The Srê equivalent of malai is cà’, a witch who eats human souls. Somri, a form of tiger-­ man malai also known as kiak in the BaNa language, is believed to be a ghost who often harms people while they sleep. The malai have a dual character, just as the forest world and the entire metaphysical world of the ethnic communities do. Stories among the Jarai and Êdê̵ explain the origin of forest malai: ̵ ̀ cua Ông Trờ i (Adei) goi ngư ờ i lên làm viêc trên cánh dô̵ ng ̉ ông; dể trả công, ̀ loai thit khác nhau; nhữ ng ai ăn thit ngư ờ i ông mờ i ho ăn môt bữ a ăn có nhiêu ̵ u ̵ u, ̀ tiên và moc môt cái mông ̀ trên dâ ̀ khiên ́ trơ ̉ thành nhữ ng ngư ờ i rohung dâ ho nhanh chóng bi nhân ra và bi tàn sát. Ho kêu vớ i Trờ i, Trờ i làm mât́ cái ̵ u ̵ Ngày nay, chúng ta không còn biêt́ ai là malai (rohung). ̀ trên dâ ̀ ho di. mông ̵ ý là ̀ tình trang cua ̀ lai theo thế hê; dâ Có nhữ ng rohung di truyên, ̉ ho truyên ̉ hơ n. Nhữ ng ngư ờ i khác là nhữ ng rohung mớ i, ho nhữ ng ngư ờ i ít nguy hiêm ̵ ợc goi là nhữ ng loai “làm hai,” hay atau-rohung “ma ăn ngư ờ i.” Ho bi như dư vây là do ăn thit ơ ̉ chỗ môt rohung khác, hoặc do bi môt phù thuỷ ném bùa chú ̵ không tuân thu các câm ́ kỵ cua dèng, hoặc là ngư ờ i pojau dèng dã ̉ ̉ tôc ngư ờ i. (Cửu and Toan 1973: 25) [God (Adei) demanded people work in his meadow; to compensate the people for their labor, he offered them many types of meat for eating. Those who ate human flesh became the early rohung people. The horns on their heads made them easily recognized by their enemies and thus easily killed. The rohung people asked God to cut the horns on their heads. Without the horns, rohung people are not easily recognized. Presently, we can no longer identify who the rohung people are. There are traditional rohung people. They are less dangerous. The new rohung belong to the harmful type of people, which is named atau-rohung (ghost who eats human flesh). Such categorization is a form of punishment for the fact that they once ate the flesh of rohung people. Or it was because a witch threw at them the cursed talisman called dèng. Or they were punished because they broke the ethnic taboos of their community.] (Translation mine)

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According to the Highlanders, ordinary people can also turn into malai if they often interact with malai and are invited by them to eat human flesh, or if they are possessed by demons. According to Chil belief, malai have white eyes without any blood (Cửu and Toan 1973: 31). During the day, malai live like ordinary people, hiding in ordinary human bodies. But at night, they murder people for food or to chew on their dead bodies. When a malai’s identity is found out, it is put to death like an animal. Any person in a village can be suspected of being malai by the community, and if so, this individual will be exposed to intense hatred. The call of a barn owl is perceived to be a bad omen, indicating that it is possessed by a malai who will bring death to the village, as Dournes reports: J’ai entendu le cas de ces gens qui veillaient un mort, ils entendent du bruit sous la case, ils versent une marmite d’eau bouillante entre les lattes du plancher; après cela un homme du village n’est pas sorti de chez lui pendant huit jours! Quand on entend, la nuit, la chouette effraie hurler: hiaak hiaak khek khek khek, c’est signe qu’il y aura un mort au village. (Dournes 1978: 174) [I have heard of a case of people who watched over a dead person. They hear a noise under the hut, they pour a pot of boiling water between the floorboards; after that a man from the village did not emerge from his house for eight days! At night, when you hear the barn owl calling “hiaak hiaak khek khek khek,” it is a sign that there will be a death in the village.] (Translation Ursula K. Heise)

Thus, for the inhabitants of the Central Highlands, malai were human before they became supernatural. In stories about malai, this typical state of transition between village and forest, between humans and spirits, is indicated by the recurring motif of the spirit morphing into the shape of a human (Lê Hồng Phong 2006). In stories like Quỷ giã gao làm men (Demons Pounding Rice to Make Yeast), the main character is a malai who either blends into the village community, or a villager who is possessed and transformed into malai. Most malai are killed by villagers when they are discovered, but in certain cases, the villagers return evil beings to the forest (Phan 2015: 449). There are thirty-five traditional narratives that feature the punishment by death of suspected malai. Uncanny forms of suspicion and torture of malai have also been documented in ethnographic descriptions. The Êdê̵ people performed a ritual invoking the gods to witness; right after that they lightly stepped on the neck of the suspected malai to see if the malai

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was scared; the Jarai people actually beat and tortured them. They worshiped the divinity and then drowned the suspected malai. Sometimes they tried the malai’s reaction with poison or boiled sap, or they poured liquid lead on the victim’s hand. By the time of the Republic of South Vietnam, all forms of torture and murder of suspected malai were strictly forbidden, but fear of ghosts still permeated the spiritual life of minority communities. Instead of being publicly executed, suspected malai were killed in secret or driven out of villages (Cửu and Toan 1973: 32). Thus, yang and malai, the good and evil spirits, embody the dual nature of the forest in the narratives and practices of Central Highlands communities. Yang creates a form of harmony between man and nature, through whose worship these communities practice Indigenous knowledge and preserve the original forests. Meanwhile, malai embody the terrifying dark side of immense forests with no escape on windswept highlands, functioning as a metaphor for the eternal fear of the forest dwellers. The journey to the forest, therefore, is both a journey to the sacred world of the gods and to the dark world of the wild domain where people can get lost and be driven to insanity.

4  A Metaphysical Approach to Nature The legends of forest spirits in the Central Highlands express Indigenous conceptions of three different but intertwined worlds that make up the universe: the human world, nature and the environment that are the realm with innumerable yang, and the ghost world (malai/rohung). All three worlds interact with each other, but not so that one world becomes dependent on or controlled by another world. The three worlds’ particular connection is built on negotiated exchanges and punishments. All three worlds have a mutual responsibility and respect for each other’s independence to maintain the harmonious order of the universe. Human activities that break this harmony are thought to lead to a disturbance of nature and to drought or individual or collective illness. Whether in stories told by the fire at night, in historical recollections, or in myths about the origin of the universe and objects, metaphysics permeates the belief system about forest spirits. Considering the difference between reality and fantasy, Condominas commented that “the Central Highlands people like to live in the past. They do not live in their own time. It is an outdated case” (Condominas 2003: 11). By contrast, Nguyên Ngoc, a well-known writer who has for many years pursued the

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preservation of ethnic cultural values in the Central Highlands, observes that the lifestyle of Highlanders shows their wisdom about the world: Mô t ngày nào d ó̵ trong mùa Ni-nông (tiê ́ng Xê-d a̵ ̆ng nghı ̃a là “không làm nông”) kéo dài 2-3 tháng, toàn bô dân làng theo già làng bỏ lai tất cả nhữ ng ̵ d ê̵ ́n cho ho: dung cu, gì mà toàn bô lich sử tiê ́n hóa cu ̉a con ngư ờ i d ã̵ d em ̀ ́ ́ quân áo, thóc lúa…Tât cả kéo nhau vào rừ ng, và sô ng lai hoàn toàn d ờ̵ i sô ́ng nguyên thu ̉y. Lấy d á̵ co vớ i nhau làm ra lửa, sa ̆n bat́ ̆ hái lư ợm… trong vòng ́ ̆ gô i trong cô i 15-20 ngày. Nguyên Ngoc nhấn manh: “nhu cầu trơ ̉ vê ̀ tam nguô ̀n nguyên thu ̉y cho sach con ngư ờ i—tôi nghı ̃ d ó̵ cũng là mô t cái minh triê ́t. (Nguyên 2018) [A day in the Ni-nông season lasts from two to three months. On this day, the villagers leave behind all things that the history of human evolution has given to them: tools, clothes, rice … and together they return to the forest, and completely re-immerse themselves in the simple life, rubbing rocks together to make fire, hunting and gathering over fifteen to twenty days. The need to return to bathe in the original lifestyle is a way to cleanse people—I think that’s also a kind of wisdom.] (Translation mine)

Therefore, the ethnic minorities residing in the tropical forests of the Highlands always live in a dual reality and always seem to live two lives at the same time. One life belongs to the space of the village and to the harsh reality of immense forests with their animal life. Another life belongs to the world of spiritual beliefs and to the mystery of the forests. These two lives are not in contradiction with each other. This demonstrates that ethnic people build a life of continual spiritual experiences while rationality remains awake, as well as a “free existence” from within based on the eternal values of nature and ancestors’ lifeblood. Through the extremely lively presence of stories about the world “beyond,” the metaphysical world of Highlanders lies not in the future, but in the present; the spirit world always accompanies them. From sunset until dawn, as ordinary people live their everyday lives, another life dominates the spiritual world. When the village’s inhabitants slowly fall asleep, the world of forest creatures wakes up through myths about yang, malai, and cannibalism. However, this dual reality does not mechanically divide these communities’ lives, as their imaginations, actions, and customary law obey the mystical laws of nature and are in constant dialogue with all the supernatural forces of the spiritual world. There is no sign of any conflict between a metaphysical sense of the world and rational perceptions of life. There is always an implicit voice negotiating between reality and

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metaphysics, and ethnic people act according to the guidance of the negotiation process between humans and yang. The ongoing interweaving of malai and yang traditions also reminds us that forest spirits are not a static force. The good and evil forest spirits are interchangeable, the supernatural permeates everyday life, and encroachment on the sacred forest results in tragic consequences. Similarly, spiritual reverence and dread are inextricably linked while considering the forest and the stories of yang and malai. Such Indigenous legends have contributed to forming the attitude of respect and fear towards forests in the spiritual universe of the Central Highlands and the capacity of keeping sacred jungles of ethnic minorities for hundreds of years. The yang and malai forest spirits have been two integral parts of the Central Highlands people’s lives from ancient times, also the two inseparable sides of the sacred forest, much like light and darkness in this universe. While yang provide divine protection, malai exist as a shadow in the soul and life, reminding the forest’s inhabitants that every being is a tiny planet inside an infinite universe. Furthermore, nature is not only protective, as yang are, but is also capable of destroying people, as malai are. Over time, tales about yang and malai evolved into a code of conduct and a contract between humans and nature. The ongoing interweaving of these traditions also reminds us that forest spirits are not a static force. The good and evil forest spirits are interchangeable, the supernatural permeates everyday life, and encroachment on the sacred forest results in tragic consequences. Similarly, spiritual reverence and dread are inextricably linked. Such indigenous legends have contributed to the attitude of respect and fear towards forests in the spiritual universe of the Central Highlands and the capacity of keeping sacred jungles of ethnic minorities for hundreds of years.

5   Forest Spirit Stories in Contemporary Vietnamese Media Over the last ten years, there has been a continuous flow of research projects and reports on deforestation in the Central Highlands, which has been accompanied by the reconstruction of traditional legends about ghost forests in contemporary media. A search for “forest-worshipping ceremony” yields about 1,830,000 results (0.36 seconds) on the Internet. While some administration officials in the media try to erase the remnants

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of indigenous belief as proof of Kinh civilization’s superiority by continuing to evoke stories of malai and their executions, other scholars as well as the media have begun to promote Highlanders’ native knowledge as a means of forest protection. The increasing frequency of news reports that feature legends of sacred forests indicates movements of resistance and self-defense against the loss and destruction of the great forests. The simultaneous appearance in new media of stories about malai and yang legends demonstrates the government’s hesitancy and contradiction in implementing social and cultural programs in the Central Highlands. On the one hand, the Central Highlands are  Indochina’s crossroads, a vital strategic military territory with a long history of autonomy (Bùi Tá Hán, Đai Nam). Throughout Vietnam’s medieval history, the Central Highlands region maintained an autonomous model. Until the reign of King Bảo Đai (1926–1945), the Nguyêñ Monarchy (1802–1945), Vietnam’s last feudal dynasty, continued to implement the policy of autonomy for the Central Highlands and legalized it with the policy of Hoàng ̀ Cư ơ ng Thô ̉ (the land on the border of the imperial court). The Triê u ̀ physical and political areas defined by the Nguyêñ Dynasty in Hoàng Triê u ̉ Cư ơ ng Thô are those in which Kinh do not have a majority, including the present-day Central Highlands and autonomous zones of ethnic minorities in North Vietnam. On the other hand, following the 1975 reunification of the two parts of Vietnam, the government aimed to build an enormous national unity block, holding the territory and border from South to North. Various experimental policies and models associated with the Central Highlands quickly followed. Additionally, the government claimed that imposing the Kinh social model on Central Highlands ethnic minorities simplified macro-management in a country with different ethnic groups. Additionally, the Kinh people hold a strong view that it is vital to bring civilization and material comforts to the plains and the majority to the Central Highlands. The retellings of traditional yang and malai stories point to different extremes of the administration’s management of Central Highlands’ issues through the media. From 1975 onward, the government initiated a campaign called “new economy” that fostered the move of ethnic Kinh (86.2% percent of the population) from the lowlands and coastal areas to the Highlands. This policy culminated in the 1980s and was re-emphasized in important resolutions of the National Congress of the Communist Party ̵ of Vietnam that emphasized that “vấn d ê̵ ̀ dân tô c và d oàn kê ́t các dân tô c ́ là chiê n lư ợc cơ bản, lâu dài cu ̉a sự nghiê p cách mang nư ớ c ta” [the issue

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of the nation and the unity of the peoples is the basic and long-term strategy of our country’s revolution] (Viên Nghiên cứ u Xã hôi 2011: 7; translation mine). However, the “new economy” policy lacks a deep understanding of the cultural characteristics of this region, and the migration of many other poor ethnic groups continues to cause serious instability for the Central Highlands in the contemporary context. As of 1975, only about sixteen Indigenous peoples had lived in the region. Only a short time later, more than thirty other ethnic minorities flocked to the area, most of them poor and illiterate families with many different forms of religious beliefs who do not speak the Vietnamese language of the Kinh people. “New Economic Zones were created in lightly populated areas, particularly in the Central Highlands and in border regions in southern Vietnam. Since 1975 over half a million people have moved to the Central Highlands particularly from the overcrowded Tonkin Delta. Around 350,000 of these have migrated since 1981” (Brown 2002 [1991]: 266). As a consequence of this migration and the rapid transformations in the ethnic make-up of the region, economic patterns have been disrupted, forests have been destroyed for cultivation, and land ownership has changed. Waves of migration over time have left haunted forests of dead trees, which turn the legends of primeval sacred forests into mere nostalgic memories. The history of development and changes in the early Indigenous communities in the Upper Highlands of Vietnam as they integrated into Kinh lowlands culture shows that the different cultures and civilizations adopted by the early tribes in turn often did not complement each other to become complete and good. Today they are messy, chaotic, and colorful. The vast forests, their space of existence, disappeared in a short period of time. Some ethnic groups became close to the Kinh, gradually abandoning traditional high-mountain villages to join the bustling cities. They left their familiar stilt houses to settle in villages with concrete houses and media with pre-installed official channels of state information. Central Highlands people gradually became familiar with the purchase, sale, and exchange of lands—which used to be the non-transferable inheritance of their ancestors—and surrendered their use to the Kinh. Other groups of people who did not adapt to urban life gradually retreated into the deep woods, dispersed, and became more angry and agitated over time. The lack of deep knowledge of ethnic minorities’ habits, beliefs, and farming practices, particularly their autonomous social model, has resulted in a slew of regulations that badly affect their cultures (Ngô 2007). The

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Department of Ethnic Minority Affairs’ summary reports also demonstrate that the government is acutely aware of the effects of the collapse of traditional ethnic structures that will destabilize or eliminate minority cultures (Vu Dân tôc 2020). The destruction and disappearance of great forests and the flooding caused by the removal of watershed forests during the rainy season from October to November 2020 in the central and highlands region have alerted and awakened society to horrific environmental destruction. Therefore, official media communications emphasized backwardness, ignorance, and wildness in their portrayal of ethnic minorities before 2000. A survey of the language used in reports written about ethnic minorities in official state media, carried out by the Institute for Studies of Society, Economy and Environment, found that the authors used significantly more language with negative than positive connotations. Such negative words, when they are frequently used in newspapers, can cause prejudice and deepen negative beliefs about ethnic minorities as backward, poor, dependent, and unengaged communities (Viên Nghiên cứ u Xã hôi 2011: 19). However, since the early 2000s, with the rapid disappearance of vast forested areas, the attitudes of the media that reflect the government’s official views has begun to change. Stories about beliefs in forest gods and the benefits of Indigenous knowledge in using and protecting forests have appeared frequently in reports about deforestation and calls for conservation and the promotion of minority cultures. The media messages are clear that the government’s behavior and policies toward the Central Highlands are contradictory. The government’s supportive response in promoting and disseminating forest spirit legends and Central Highlands customary forest protection laws appears to be part of a strategy of “promoting the allocation of forest land and forest resources to communities, particularly ethnic minority communities, for management and use following their customary law” (Cuc lâm nghiêp 2001; translation mine). However, the government continues to pursue the goal of unifying the ethnic community throughout Vietnam by rejecting all traditional autonomous structures of the Central Highlands ethnic groups. This issue contributes to the fact that the state’s official media continue to portray ethnic groups as backward, inferior, and wild (Viên Nghiên cứ u Xã hôi 2011). This inferior status is considered the most legitimate and reasonable justification for bringing lowlanders’ civilization to the highlands, enhancing “people’s knowledge” in the highlands, and imposing uniform management methods and practices on all ethnic communities in Vietnam.

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6  Conclusion The instability and decline of the traditional social structures of the Central Highlands villages force us to re-examine their unique traditional cultural values, which are gradually being lost. An analysis of the traditional metaphysical beliefs of Central Highlands ethnic groups focusing on narratives about forest spirits shows the views from inside and outside of the ethnic minorities’ experience of change as their traditional social structures have collapsed. The narrative of yang, the kind deity who keeps the forest, can be understood as a “romanticization” of the ancient values that Central Highlands people invoke to promote the restoration of destroyed forests. The stories of malai, by contrast, highlight Indigenous people’s sense of “tragedy” in the contemporary cultural context. These two tendencies point to the deep rift between autonomous Indigenous societies and their metaphysical worldview in the past, on one hand, and the survival of minority cultures and their diminished and marginalized identity in contemporary society, on the other. The resurgence of stories about forest spirits in the contemporary world reveals the strength of minority cultural discourses. At the same time, highlighting Indigenous knowledge, beliefs, and legends protects the ecological integrity of ethnic cultures. As environmental destruction in Vietnam progresses, the power of Indigenous knowledge and narratives about nature emerges with greater clarity. Acknowledgements  This research was funded by the Ministry of Education and Training under grant number B2022-ĐHH-03. The author also acknowledges the partial support of Hue University under the Core Research Program, Grant No. NCM.DHH.2022.10.

Appendix: News Reports About Forest Spirits Report 1 ̀ bào bản d̵ia Tây Nguyên nghìn d̵ờ i d̵ã tao dựng, gìn giữ bồi d̵ắp kho “Đông tàng văn hóa quý giá, d̵ặc sắc qua Luât tuc, Sử thi, Truyên cổ… Thế như ng bên canh nhữ ng giá tri tích cực, còn d̵ó mảng tối tâm linh d̵ày d̵oa nhiều phân ngư ờ i bi thảm nhất. Ma lai là môt minh chứ ng… Trong môt tiêc cư ớ i, A Thun d̵ã cãi nhau và lỡ tay tát ông A Táo ơ ̉ cùng làng. Dù ngay sau d̵ó 2 ngư ờ i d̵àn ông d̵ã bắt tay làm hòa như ng hôm sau, A Táo d̵au bung dữ dôi rồi qua d̵ờ i. Mặc dù các bác sı̃ khẳng d̵inh A Táo chết do bi ngô d̵ôc rư ợu, như ng mối nghi ngờ A Thun là Ma lai d̵ã loan khắp làng. Ngư ờ i ta suy diễn A Thun

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d̵ã dùng “thuốc thư ” giết chết A Dong và Y Dôt vài năm về trư ớ c, vì 2 ngư ờ i d̵ó bênh nặng, cúng Yàng hết mấy con trâu, con bò như ng vẫn không khỏi. Già làng tổ chứ c hop khẩn cấp, buôc A Thun nghe cả làng “d̵ấu tố.” Bi dồn ép, A Thun vừ a nhân mình là Ma lai, liền bi lũ làng kéo d̵ến d̵ốt nhà, d̵uổi ra khỏi làng. Cùng d̵ư ờ ng, A Thun d̵ư a vợ con d̵ến ơ ̉ tam tai chòi rẫy trên nư ơ ng, d̵ợi khi sự viêc lắng xuống. Nào ngờ ngay sáng hôm sau, dân làng lai lũ lư ợt kéo d̵ến chòi, buôc A Thun phải giao “thuốc thư ” ra, mớ i mong d̵ư ợc sống. A Thun quỳ lay dân làng, thề d̵ôc mình không phải là Ma lai, không có thuốc thư , như ng vẫn bi d̵ám d̵ông quá khích tròng dây mây vào cổ kéo ra con suối canh làng, d̵ánh cho d̵ến chết, rồi căn dặn vợ con A Thun: Hễ ai hỏi phải nói A Thun tự tử, nếu không cả nhà sẽ bi giết!” (Hoàng Thiên Nga 2013) [The Indigenous people of the Central Highlands have created, preserved and fostered a valuable and unique cultural treasure through customary law, epics, and ancient stories … But besides these positive values, there is also a spiritual dark side, one that has damned some people to tragic fates. Malai is an example. At a wedding party, AThun quarreled and accidentally slapped ATao, a fellow villager. Afterwards the two men shook hands to make up, but the next day ATao came down with a severe stomach ache and suddenly passed away. Although doctors confirmed ATao died from alcohol poisoning, suspicions that AThun was a Malai spread throughout the village. It was deduced that AThun had also used a “poisonous herb” to kill two other villagers, ADong and YDo, a few years prior, because the two of them were seriously ill, and despite making an offering of buffaloes and cows to yang, they still could not heal. The village patriarch held an emergency meeting, forcing AThun to answer “accusations” from the whole village. Under pressure, AThun admitted that he was malai; villagers immediately burned Athun’s house and kicked him out of the village. With nowhere to go, AThun took his wife and children to temporarily stay in a hut on the upland field, waiting for things to settle down. Anyway, the next morning, the villagers flocked to the hut again, forcing AThun to hand over the “poisonous herb” if he wanted to live. AThun knelt and bowed to the villagers, swearing that he was not malai and had no poisonous herb. Yet the villagers still dragged him to the stream next to the village, beat him to death, and instructed his wife and children that: If anyone asks, say AThun committed suicide, otherwise the whole family will be killed!] (translation mine).

Report 2: “Trong khi da̵ i ngàn trên khăṕ Tây Nguyên bi xâm hai không ngừ ng, gây da̵ i ̀ chiu cảnh khô khát chờ mư a, thì han khiêń ngư ờ i dân và hàng van cây trông ́ rừ ng dô̵ ì Cư H’Lăm vẫn xanh tôt,́ chúng tôi dừ ng chân tai thi trấn Ea Pôk,

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́ cách Buôn Ma Thuôt chừ ng 15 cây sô,́ tìm hiêủ huyên Cư M’gar (Đăḱ Lăk), huyêǹ thoai dô̵ ì Cư H’Lam ̆ rông 18,6 ha vớ i nhữ ng lờ i nguyêǹ bí ẩn, giúp khu ̀ trơ ̉ thành “chiêć máy diê̵ ù hòa” cho thi trấn ngôt ngat. Gặp rừ ng dư̵ ợc bảo tôn, ̉ nhiêù na ̆m giữ chứ c trư ơ ̉ng buôn ơ ̉ buôn Ea già làng Y Ruê Mlô (67 tuôi) ́ ́ ́ ̀ Măp, thi trân Ea Pôk hỏi vê sự tích rừ ng Cư H’Lăm, ông vui vẻ cho hay: ‘Mình nghe ông bà xư a kể rằng: Ngon d̵ồi này d̵ã có từ lâu, thuơ ̉ ấy nó chư a có tên goi, cho d̵ến khi có mối tình say d̵ắm giữ a nàng H’Lăm và chàng Y Đhin. Ngày ngày ho dắt nhau lên d̵ồi hái hoa nguyên thề suốt d̵ờ i bên nhau. Tuy nhiên mối tình của ho sớ m tan vỡ khi pham vào luât tuc ngư ờ i cùng ho không d̵ư ợc lấy nhau. Ho chết trong d̵au khổ và hóa thành nhữ ng linh hồn rừ ng, khiến cả d̵ồi cây trơ ̉ thành khu rừ ng thiêng. Câu chuyên trên d̵ư ợc lư u truyền qua nhiều thế hê cùng vớ i lờ i nguyền khó lý giải. Nếu ai vào rừ ng vô tình nhắc d̵úng tên Y Đhin và H’Lăm sẽ bi thần rừ ng giam giữ d̵i mãi không ra. Nhữ ng ai có ý d̵ồ d̵en tối, truc lợi rừ ng Cư H’Lăm d̵ều phải d̵ền tôi. Chặt cây dựng nhà, lâp tứ c nhà sâp hoặc bi cháy trui. Còn săn bắt thú rừ ng sẽ gặp tai nan hay phát bênh d̵iên khùng vô phư ơ ng cứ u chữ a, tai hồ nư ớ c ơ ̉ khu rừ ng có rất nhiều khoai môn nư ớ c, như ng ngư ờ i dân chı̉ d̵ư ợc phép lấy d̵em luôc rồi ăn tai chỗ chứ dứ t khoát không d̵ư ợc d̵em về, nếu không sẽ mắc tai hoa cho bản thân. Ngư ờ i trong làng còn truyền tai rằng, cách d̵ây gần 10 năm, môt ngư ờ i trong làng vào rừ ng bắt d̵ư ợc con rùa vàng. Về d̵ến nhà ngư ờ i này d̵ang bình thư ờ ng bỗng hóa dai. Gia d̵ình liền thả rùa về rừ ng như ng bênh tình vẫn không thuyên giảm’ (Lê Nhuân, Báo Dân Sinh, cơ quan truyền thông của Bô thư ơ ng binh và xã hôi).” (Lê Nhuân 2018) [While thousands of trees all over the Central Highlands were continuously damaged, causing droughts that led people and thousands of trees to suffer from dryness and thirst, waiting for rain, Cu H’Lam hill forest remains green. We stopped at Ea Pok town, Cư M’gar district (Dak Lak), about 15  kilometers from Buôn Ma Thuôt, to learn about the legend of Cư H’Lam hill, 18.6 hectares wide and known for its mysterious curses, helping to preserve the forest and becoming an “air conditioner” for the stuffy town. Meeting the village elder, Y Ruo Mlo (67 years old), for many years a village chief in Ea Mom village, Ea Pok town, we asked about the legend of Cư H’Lam forest and he happily said: I heard the elders say: This hill has existed for a long time, but in the past it had no name, until there was a passionate love between Ms. H’Lam and Mr. Y Đhin. Day after day, they took each other up the hill to pick flowers and vow to be together forever. However, their love soon broke down when they violated the customary law that prohibits relatives from marrying. They died in agony and turned into forest spirits, turning the whole hill into a sacred forest. The above story has been passed down for generations along with a curse that is difficult to explain. If someone entered the forest and mentioned Y Đhin and H’Lam’s name by mistake, they would be kept by the forest god forever. And those

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who have dark intentions and profit from Cư H’Lam forest must pay for their crimes. If they cut down trees to build a house, for example, the house will immediately collapse or burn to the ground. Hunting wild animals in the forest will cause an accident or make them go crazy with no cure. At the lake in the forest, there are many water taro, but people are only allowed to boil and eat them on the spot but definitely not take them home; otherwise, it will cause a disaster. People in the village also said that, nearly ten years ago, a villager went into the forest to catch a golden turtle. At home, this man suddenly went wild. The family immediately released the turtles to the forest, but the illness did not get better] (translation mine).

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Maître, Henri. 1912. Les jungles moï: Exploration et histoire des hinterlands moï du Cambodge, de la Cochinchine, de l’Annam et du bas Laos. Paris: E. Larose. ̵ Ngô, Thế Long and Trần Thái Bình. 2009. Hoc viê n viê ñ d ông bác cô ̉: 1896–1957. ́ Hanoi: Nhà xuât bản Khoa hoc xã hôi. Ngô, Đứ c Thinh. 2007. Nhữ ng mảng màu va ̆n hóa Tây Nguyên. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Trẻ. Nguyên, Ngoc. 2018. “Ngư ờ i Tây Nguyên ‘làm’ văn hóa như thế nào?” Ngư ờ i Đô Thi. https://nguoidothi.net.vn/nguyen-­ngoc-­nguoi-­tay-­nguyen-­lam-­van-­ hoa-­nhu-­the-­nao-­12614.html. Accessed 27 April 2020. ̵ u ̃ Văn Chiên. ̉ 1985. Tây Nguyên – Các d iê ̀ kiê n tự nhiên và tài nguyên Nguyên, thiên nhiên. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Khoa hoc và kỹ thuât. ̃ Hư ng. “Giải mã bí ẩn rợn ngư ờ i vê ̀ câu chuyên “ngâm ngải” di̵ tìm Nguyên, ̀ trâm.” Công Lý và Xã Hô i. https://conglyxahoi.net.vn/phong-­su/giai-­ma-­ bi-­an-­ron-­nguoi-­ve-­cau-­chuyen-­ngam-­ngai-­di-­tim-­tram-­10237.html. Accessed 14 April 2020. ̃ Thi Hoài Phư ơ ng. “Môt số lư u ý trong vấn dê̵ ̀ dân tôc ơ ̉ Tây Nguyên Nguyên, hiên nay.” Tap chí Dân tô c. http://tapchidantoc.ubdt.gov.vn/2013-­06-­21/ e4ae75004011b41c93c0bb3da27dd78c-­cema.htm. Accessed 12 May 2020. ̃ Quốc Sửu. 2011. “Góc nhìn lich sử vê ̀ tính tự tri trong chính sách dô̵ ́i vớ i Nguyên, công dô̵ ̀ng các dân tôc Tây Nguyên.” Tap chí Nghiên cứ u Lâp pháp 12.197: 47–56. ̃ Thi Thanh Xuân. 2019. “Tri thứ c bản di̵ a cuả ngư ờ i M’Nông ơ ̉ huyên Nguyên, lăḱ trong viêc quản lý và sử dung các nguồn tài nguyên thiên nhiên.” PhD diss., Hoc viên khoa hoc xã hôi Viêt Nam. Phan, Đăng Nhât. 2014. Luât tuc các dân tô c thiê ủ sô ́ ơ ̉ Viê t Nam  – Quyê n̉ 4. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản. Phan, Xuân Viên. 2015. Truyê n cô ̉ Xtiêng. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Khoa hoc xã hôi. Tô, Đông Hải. 2003. Nghi lê ̃ và âm nhac trong nghi lê ̃ cu ̉a ngư ờ i M’Nông (Bu Nông). Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Văn hóa dân tôc. Trần, Thi An. 2006. Tô ̉ng tâp va ̆n hoc dân gian các dân tô c thiê ủ sô ́ Viê t Nam – Tâp 1. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Khoa hoc xã hôi. Trư ơ ng, Thông Tuần. 2010. Truyê n cô ̉ M’Nông. Hồ Chí Minh: Nhà xuất bản Trẻ. Viên Nghiên cứ u Xã hôi, Kinh tế và Môi trư ờ ng và Hoc viên Báo chí. 2011. ̵ p truyê n ̀ thông vê ̀ dân tô c thiê ủ sô ́ trên báo in. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Thông d iê Thế giớ i. Vu Dân tôc. 2020. “Tác dô̵ ng của dân di cư tự do dê̵ ́n kinh tế – xã hôi các tı ̉nh Tây Nguyên.” https://tuyengiao.vn/khoa-­giao/khoa-­hoc/tac-­dong-­cua-­dan-­ di-­cu-­tu-­do-­den-­kinh-­te-­xa-­hoi-­cac-­tinh-­tay-­nguyen-­129820.

Tai Narrative, Ritual, and Discourses of the Environment in North Central Vietnam Achariya Choowonglert

1   Introduction The Vietnamese population regards the natural environment as an integral part of the ecological system supporting their cultivation and subsistence economy. Indispensable natural resources vital to their livelihood compelled local communities to preserve and protect the environment in the past. However, starting in 1960, all local resources had to be handed over to the state. The state’s concurrent policy aimed at eradicating backwardness and superstitions among ethnic minorities, including the Tai, and prohibited traditional practices related to the supernatural world. The economic policy of the early 1990s transformed natural resources into either commodities or preserved them as part of the ecology, or both. This

A. Choowonglert (*) Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Naresuan University, Phitsanulok, Thailand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_4

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policy, which potentially transforms ancestral territories into tourist destinations, scared the local inhabitants and threatened their future. The approach of local communities to managing natural resources differs significantly from the state’s development of roads and tourist attractions such as caves and forests. Nevertheless, in the context of marketization and the new state policy on cultural revitalization, local communities attempted to revive their languages, cultures, and beliefs to reconstruct not only the local lifeworld and their identities but also the societal discourses on places and the environment. This study is based on the analysis of myths, local historiographies, and ritual chants as well as ethnographic fieldwork in the Quan Sơ n district of Thanh Hóa province from October 2016 to March 2017, in August 2019, and in February 2020. This essay will elaborate how local intellectuals and authorities revitalize culture and its discourse to relate to the people’s lifeworld. It is an attempt to understand the dynamic interplay of rituals, deities, and the environment in producing discourses of place and environment within the specific period of Tai literary reformation and cultural revitalization in contemporary Vietnam. I will show how myths and historiography express Tai perceptions of that community’s relationship with the natural environment and their cultural construction of the meanings of places, including sacred ones (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 8), which emerges from the intertwining between self, place and feeling towards a particular site (Jorgensen and Stedman 2001: 244). Furthermore, my analysis will show how the local authorities attempt to use the ritual narratives and symbolism to reproduce the discourse of environmental protection and endow places with meaning. Applying Hyme’s ethnography of speaking, this study focuses on the story of a tutelary deity named Tư Mã Hai Đào as expressed in myths, historiographies, and ritual chants. These texts only acquire meaning through contextual interpretation with reference to market transition, geography, history, local customs, and beliefs in ritual practices under the state policy of cultural revitalization (see McQuillan 2000: 10). Although they are considered superstitions by the state and its environmental practices, they exemplify Raymond Williams’ notion of residual culture. This (new) emergent culture gives a new meaning, value, and significance to society by transforming folklore into a new kind of knowledge.

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2   Geographic, Economic, and Historical Background Located in the western highlands of Thanh Hóa and 150 kilometres from Thanh Hóa City, Quan Sơ n shares a border with the Hoa Pan Province of Laos (Fig. 1). To date, Quan Sơ n has been a gateway of trade between Laos and Vietnam. Rainforest covers 88.8% of its land area, and it is very rich in biodiversity. Its landscape of creeks, three rivers, terraced fields, and several large caves such as Bo Cúng stands out for its beauty. Before the socialist era, the population of Quan Sơ n mostly earned a living through farming, fishing, hunting, and gathering forest products. During the period of socialist economy (1950s–1980s), the rural economic structure was based on collective farming of wet rice, terraced rice fields, and swidden cultivation. After a few years of economic renovation, the so-called Đôỉ Mớ i period starting in December 1986, the government launched a policy of agricultural land allocation to each household (“chính sách bàn ̵ giao dâ̵ ́t nông nghiêp cho từ ng hô gia dình”). Following the 1993 Land Law, agricultural lands were privatized and allocated to each household unit as lifetime security (“dả̵ m bảo”).

Mường Xia

Hà Nội H

Fig. 1  Northwest Vietnam. (Source: ThS.  Trần Thi Ngoc Trinh, Cần Thơ University, 2016)

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The villagers’ livelihood conversion to a household economy forced them to participate in the market economy. The interviews I conducted with several villagers and local authorities revealed the following commercial activities that support job creation and income generation for the community: manufacture of bamboo products followed by commercial reforestation (bamboo trade); brickwork, pebble, and sand production plants; cash crop cultivation and petty trade. The villagers also have paddy fields and grow vegetables for consumption and subsistence. Compared to villagers in nearby districts such as Lang Chánh and Quan Hóa, Quan Sơ n experiences considerably less migration, with one-third of its population searching for job opportunities elsewhere. Based on my ethnographic inquiry, this is notably low compared to the migration rate (both documented and undocumented) in the districts nearby, in which over half of the population are migrants. Recently, local authorities’ reconstruction of the road from Quan Sơ n to the Na Mèo border station has  facilitated transportation and promoted ecological and cultural tourism in the area. These efforts encourage economic development, raise household income, incentivize job creation, preserve and promote the identity of ethnic culture, and protect natural resources and the environment in the context of a semi-controlled neoliberal market. Still, its tourism sector has not so far been successful. No strong historical evidence shows the exact time when the Tai people settled in the area presently called Quan Sơ n, but they have been in the area since at least the early fifteenth century. After the victory of the Lam Sơ n uprising against the Ming Military of China occupying Vietnam (1418–1428 A.D.), Lê Lợi, the leader of the rebellion, who then became the first king and the founder of Lê dynasty of Đai Viêt (ancient name of Vietnam), instated two Lao troop chiefs as lords of the cities of Ca Da (presently the Quan Hoá District) and Mư ờ ng Mìn (presently the Mư ờ ng Mìn Commune, Quan Sơ n District). Subsequently, the two lords changed their surname from “Lò” (of Laos) to “Pham” (of Đai Viêt) and became the lords governing the Tai. Lê Lợi stationed some groups from the Northwest region of present-day Vietnam in Quan Sơ n. Moreover, numerous groups of Tai migrated from several other areas from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries—mostly from the North and Northwest regions of present-day Vietnam. They initially migrated to the provinces of Hua Phan (currently in Laos) and nearby Nghê An (currently in Vietnam), then to Quan Sơ n along the Lò and Luồng Rivers. Some groups also journeyed from cities near the Vietnam-China border

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following the Red River and then to the Black River. They initially settled at the valley cities named Mai Châu and Môc Châu before moving west along the Mã River to the places presently called Quan Hóa and Quan Sơ n. Their origin can be traced through oral histories and stories of ancestors whose souls migrated back to their cities of origin, according to Tai belief, which are the cities in the Northwest and Northern regions of present-day Vietnam. Presently fifteen Tai family clans reside in Quan Sơ n (Thư ớ c and Quang 2017: 517). Even though a policy intended to “build a new economic zone” (xây dựng vùng kinh tê ́ mớ i) would have resettled ten million lowland people (mainly Kinh) in the highlands occupied by minority groups since the 1960s (McElwee 2004: 200), this project did not materialize in Quan Sơ n. The majority in this district is still Tai, who make up around 81% of the population, followed by the Kinh (9.1%), Mư ờ ng (7.4%), and Hmông (2.3%) (Trư ơ ̉ng et al. 2016: 16). Tai culture is a hybrid form between the cultures of Laos, Mư ờ ng, and other ethnic groups nearby (Choowonglert 2012: 239). They differ from the Black and White Tai of the Northwest Region in terms of language, traditional costumes, funeral rites, and other cultural practices. In the past, the border cities of Sơ n Thủy and Na Mèo, where my fieldwork took place, were the centers of Mư ờ ng Chu Sàn and were later renamed Mư ờ ng Xia (meaning “the city which is lost to the other”). According to Tai legend, the name Mư ờ ng Xia refers to the suffering of two descendants of a Tai lord who lost an archery competition against their younger half-brother, whose father was Kinh. Based on the rules of the competition, whoever lost could not assert a right to the lordship of Mư ờ ng Chu Sàn, which was governed by their Tai father. The Tai descendants consequently left the city to look for a new place to live and changed the name of Mư ờ ng Chu Sàn to Mư ờ ng Xia. Their younger Kinh brother and his offspring adopted the family name “Pham Bá” and kept on ruling Mư ờ ng Chu Sàn (Mư ờ ng Xia). Nowadays, the Tai still perceive Mư ờ ng Xia as their ancestral land, even though they lived there together with the Kinh. Furthermore, my ethnographic observation suggests that the people nearby presently consider “Pham Bá” as a Tai family name, which demonstrates ethnogenesis and Tai-ization. The ethnic origin of the deity Tư Mã Hai Đào is in fact Mư ờ ng, but he has become Tai. In combination with teaching and studying Tai language, local intellectuals and authorities have attempted to write the history of Tư Mã Hai Đào based on an ancient Tai manuscript, which was

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re-­transcribed and translated into Vietnamese in April 2015 by Hà Nam Ninh and Hà Công Mầu. In brief, according to this manuscript and oral narratives, Tư Mã Hai Đào was a great borderland lord of the aristocratic Đai Viêt empire.1 After winning a battle at the Đai Viêt—Ai Lao border area, he took over the western borderland (presently Thanh Hóa province) that had been occupied by Laos. However, apart from this ancient manuscript, there is no evidence regarding the origin of Tư Mã Hai Đào. Historically, there was a border war (during which maybe Tư Mã Hai Đào was a commander-in-chief), either between 1329 and 1341 A.D., during the reign of the Trần Dynasty, or in 1483, during the reign of the Lê Dynasty. According to Tai oral literature, as narrated by Hà Nam Ninh, a local intellectual of Thanh Hóa province,2 and the historiography written by Pham Xuân Liên (1–5), Tư Mã Hai Đào was born in Đào village (presently in Bá Thư ớ c district, Thanh Hóa province). His assigned birth name was Hai Đào of the ethnic group Mư ờ ng, and he was a servant of the lord (Tao) of Mư ờ ng Khô. Once, he had an opportunity to participate in a “martial arts competition” where the king appointed those who passed the contest as martial aristocrats (Trang võ). With his diligence, he eventually passed the examination and became a martial arts aristocrat (Trang văn) and later married the king’s daughter. When Laos attacked Đai Viêt again, Hai Đào volunteered to be the commander-in-chief, which the king accepted. The king also provided him with weapons, noting his strength and skill. Hai Đào’s fighting acumen and ability made him victorious in his conquest. During the settlement of the borderline between Đai Viêt and Laos at Tén Tằn Mountain (present-day Tén Tằn commune, Mư ờ ng Lát district, Thanh Hóa province), the empire appointed him Tư Mã, meaning a border guard commander-in-chief. Even though in this role, he was responsible for collecting tributes from over twenty cities, which were sent to the Thăng Long court, his duty resembled that of a lord of the borderland cities. He built the big city (Chu/Châu) named Mư ờ ng Chu Sàn mentioned earlier, which included three present-day borderland districts in Vietnam and some communes in Laos. This vast borderland territory 1  The oral narratives were provided by Pham Xuân Cừ , a local intellectual in Quan Sơ n district, on 14 July 2015, and by Hà Nam Ninh, a local intellectual in Bá Thư ớ c district, on 14 and 15 July 2015. 2  Interview with Hà Nam Ninh on July 21, 2015.

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governed by Tư Mã Hai Đào made him a compelling figure. After his death in Mư ờ ng Xia, Tai and Lào people built shrines scattered around several locations and worshiped him as their ancestor and the tutelary spirit of Mư ờ ng Chu Sàn. Tư Mã Hai Đào, in the perception of the Tai, is not only a hero who brought victory to Đai Viêt (present-day Vietnam) in the fourteenth century, but also a great lord by constructing cities (bản-mư ờ ng). Besides, Tai people recognize that throughout their history in the western highlands of Thanh Hóa, Tư Mã Hai Đào held the highest-appointed rank Tai courts could give. Since Mư ờ ng Mìn has no place of origin, they do not know who their ancestors were or their place of origin. They say that Mư ờ ng Chu Sàn, which Tư Mã Hai Đào constructed, is their homeland, and Tư Mã Hai Đào their ancestor. After his death and burial at Mount Pha Dùa (center of the city), his descendants worshiped him as their tutelary spirit. Local authorities and intellectuals also constructed him as the tutelary spirit of the city (“thành hoàng” in Vietnamese) and the keeper of “kwan mư ờ ng” (“spirit of the city” in Tai). Because of these important stories about Tư Mã Hai Đào, local authorities of the Quan Sơ n district included them in their history book, Lich sử dả̵ ng bô huyên Quan Sơ n tâp I (History of the Communist Party of Quan Sơ n District I, 2006). Additionally, accounts of Tư Mã Hai Đào also appeared in a 2014 history of all Tai cities in the Quan Sơ n district by Pham Xuân Cừ , former director of Na Mèo natural preservation park and presently a local intellectual. And in 2016, the history of Tư Mã Hai Đào was reproduced again in the book, Đia Chı ̉ Huyên Quan Sơ n, written by a group of local intellectuals, authorities, and lecturers of the provincial university (Trư ơ ̉ng et al. 2016).

3  Ecological Perceptions, Beliefs, Rituals, and Natural Resources Management In the pre-socialist era, the Tai people lived in villages called “bản.” A “Tao Bản” headed a village of around 40–50 households. Several Tai villages together formed a city (“district” in contemporary language) called Mư ờ ng in Tai and administered by a mayor named “Tao Mư ờ ng.” In the past, clans, political structures, and individual obligations played an essential role in natural resource management and its use in economic activities.

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Unlike other ethnicities who view the forest as a product, as in the proverb “rừ ng vàng biên̉ bac” (“the forest is a valuable capital like silver and gold”), the Tai perceive the environment holistically as connecting human beings, nature, and the supernatural rather than as a commodity. For them, nature not only provides the basic resources for living, but also plays an integral part in their socio-ecological system. Thus, everyone has to use and protect the environment (Tùng 2017: 823). I have identified seven ways in which the villagers manage their natural resources: (1) forests, sacred forests, dams, channels, and so on; (2) knowledge (for the preservation of the natural resources); (3) public opinion and belief; (4) rituals and ceremonies to control management of natural resources; (5) customary laws and habits; (6) leaders and organizations; (7) individual rights, as with the Tai habitus of passing down through many generations practices of sustainable use and maintaining social institutes to protect the environment (Hoang 1999: 58–60). Handing down traditional laws and practices for sustainable use and the preservation of resources is understood as a community duty. For the Tai, public opinion and religious beliefs act as means for guiding and coercing each member to abide by them. They function as mechanisms to control the management of nature, and they also represent a vast accumulated store of knowledge regarding the preservation and use of natural resources. The “mư ờ ng” resolves conflicts among different “bản” regarding the management of its natural resources, especially the control of the irrigation system. The city lord plays a decisive role in managing and regulating natural resources, especially managing water for paddy fields by laying down pertinent laws on natural resource management. In order to properly use the natural resources, villagers must consider each other’s rights and those of the whole community. For example, the systematic organization of the irrigation system ensures a year-round water supply to enable two-time cultivation for all households. In this form of social organization, adult members of each household support the dam’s workforce construction and take turns in its protection as their responsibility. This water management system gives rise to the Tai’s association of workgroups (Choowonglert: 97–8). Moreover, customary laws prohibit the unsustainable use of natural resources. Transgressors are condemned by public opinion and subject to fines. Additionally, because of their strong belief in the supernatural world, individuals must ask permission from supernatural forces through rituals and ceremonies before utilizing resources. The Tai believe that every

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element in nature possesses its spirit; they regard forests as the abodes of spirits (“phí”), which embody the sacred soul of the city (“mư ờ ng”). The Tai classify forests into various types of spirits. First, there are sacred forests (“pa sần”), where the forest spirits and tree spirits dwell: for example, the place where the first lord who built the city is buried under sacred trees (“có phí” or “co mi phí”). Forests in this category become sacred because slain heroes and ancestors died in them. A second kind of sacred forest harbors tigers called “pà cằm,” who have killed humans. Third, forested ̵ military cemeteries called “pa sần,” or “dông sần” are considered sacred. Fourth, forests where people died without any cause or lost their sanity are sacred. A fifth type of sacred forest is an abused forest where people did not ask permission before utilizing its resources. Sixth, the forested coḿ munity called “pa sliêng” is sacred, where one can hear ancestors’ talks, ̵ laughs, and cries. And seventh, forests called “pa dông sần” are sacred (Tùng 2017: 823–6), appointed sites chosen by the city lord as his place of doing spirit worship called “village spirit worship” (“xên bản”) and “city spirit worship” (“xên mư ờ ng”). The Tai perceive each “pa sần” forest to have spirits to protect them, so that cultivation in these forests infringes on the spirits’ zone. The spirits will cause illness and even death to violators in order to secure these sites. ́ Forbidden forests (“pa căm”), located upstream, are not intended for gathering and hunting and require permission from the city mayor, especially as nearby villages and clans may have erected shrines here. Violators have to pay hefty fines and are condemned by public opinion. The forests for use (“pa êt́ kin”) are those that people can utilize to gather, hunt, cultivate, and raise their livestock. In the past, “pa êt́ kin” constituted approximately 70–80% of the forests. Mư ờ ng Xia and Mư ờ ng Min, the people of Xia City and Min City, regard Mount Pha Dùa (Phu Pha Dùa) as their sacred place, associated with the tutelary spirits of seven deities and souls of army leaders, especially Tư Mã Hai Đào. Additionally, the corpse of Pham Lành, the troop leader in the yellow-flag rebel invasion (a rebellion that originated in Southern China), is also associated with Phu Pha Dùa, as the following narrative shows: Phu Pha Dùa is a sacred forest and a revered place for praying to the seven deities and the soldiers’ spirits. Tư Mã Hai Đào, the general of the Đai Viêt (Vietnam) army fighting the Ming military of China, is there. He ruled many frontier cities from Sơ n La [presently located in the Northwestern

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Region] to Nghê An [presently located in North-Central Region]. He died in Mư ờ ng Xia, and his spirit was brought into Phu Pha Dùa. Also in Phu ̀ village, Mư ờ ng Min, Pha Dùa is the spirit of Pham Lành, the Tai of Chiêng in the 18th century. Pham Lành dispatched his troops to fight in the yellow-­ ̀ Châu (comflag rebel invasion. Although he died at Na Bò (village), Chiêng mune), Mai Châu (district) [presently Hòa Bình Province] and we were unable to bring his corpse back home, we brought his spirit to Phu Pha Dùa. Although our youth went and a few of them died during the French and American wars, many young men came back home safely—this was how ̀ the seven deities blessed them. In 1957, there was a villager from Chiêng village who got into this sacred forest. Unfortunately, a tiger attacked him and his two buffalo. The spirits killed them all. (Trư ơ ̉ng et al. 2016: 813; translation mine)

This narrative casts a natural environment as a divine burial site. Their rebirth of soldiers as divinities makes this area a sacred place of abode, and they are perceived as the guardians of the environment. These narratives and customary laws for the protection of the forests are connected, as reflected in the following popular proverb: Pa dô̵ ́ng xống côt, may pín khún, cân pín nuốt ́ dô̵ ́ng khéo, may húa tá, nga húa bó Pa căm ̵ piêng, ́ ̀ ́ pa căm ́ dô̵ ́ng xên. Pa tăm dín pa heo dô̵ ́ng căm, [The old trees’ many branches are like the elder men’s beards and the plentiful trees of the upstream forests. The headwater forests are our tribute to the forbidden and sacred forests]. (Tùng 2017: 826)

Since a lord’s lineage and family originated from a higher status, the destiny of a “mư ờ ng” was in their hands. The commoners helped the lords conduct the city affairs with loyalty and faith to their leaders. Lê ̃ Xên Mư ờ ng, the annual celebration established firmly by the lord’s cult and his family, was a communal ritual where the lord himself acted as the mediator between the “then” and “phi” of ancestors and nature. In this ceremony, he gathered all his constituents’ offerings, mainly buffalo meat, and summoned the deities and spirits for protection of all people and the resources of the city. After the oblation and ceremonies, the community celebrated joyfully with an abundance of food in banquets, dances, songs, games, and socialization for two days and two nights. The Lê ̃ Xên Mư ờ ng aimed to reinforce submission towards the lord’s authority in governing the city

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(Van 1972: 190–191), and at controlling the citizenry and the city’s natural resources. ̃ i Mư ờ ng Along with the history of social relations before socialism, Lê hô ̃ or Lê Xên Mư ờ ng maintained the authority of the lord in this feudal system, including the relations of production and the management of common properties such as irrigation, rice fields, and forests. In Tai feudalism, commoners worked for the lords and the ruling class members voluntarily to obtain rights to cultivate communal land. In contrast, the lords and nobles endlessly appropriated more lands despite their customary law stating that lands belonged to the community (Van 1972: 177–8). The lord Mư ờ ng used the Lê ̃hôi Mư ờ ng Xia to establish a paternal relationship with the commoners as a power mechanism that forced commoners to obey the lords as sons obey fathers, and to respect and worship them even after their deaths in return for the lords’ protection. This structure of Tai feudalism weakened during the period of French colonialism. The French colonizers initially reinforced the local feudal regime. Later on, they converted the communal lands into plantations and forced the commoners to render unpaid labor (“corvée”), which limited the Tai lords’ power and put their authority in question. Today, the lords strive to regain their political influence and preserve their communal land (Van 1972: 184–5) through the continual practice of Lê ̃ hôi Mư ờ ng. Inherently geared towards sustainable living, this traditional management of communal lands among Tai attempts to balance ecological and economic aspects with social coherence and order. Their views and the way they manage the natural resource reflect socio-economic management’s cultural structures for long-term livelihood security (Choowonglert 2012: 98). However, during collectivization, cooperative committees managed and regulated natural resources, especially water, through their irrigation teams. At present, the management and use of water are quite similar to the period before the collective farming era. Nevertheless, Vietnam’s move towards a market-oriented economy significantly changed village livelihoods that were culturally and economically anchored in earlier modes of production. Still, the perception of nature and spirit plays a vital role in its local economy despite the decades of repression and restrictions of religious and cultural practices.

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4  Reconstructing the Meaning of Tư Mã Hai Đào and Mount Pha Dùa in Tai Literature In 2010, in the context of implementing Vietnamese government policies on cultural revitalization, local intellectuals, universities, and Thanh Hóa province officials led a significant effort to preserve local languages, culture, and history. The team’s efforts to teach Tai Thanh Hóa and produce teaching materials for over a decade substantially increased the number of people who can read and interpret Tai Thanh Hóa ancient scripts. Focusing on Quan Sơ n, local intellectuals and authorities produced a substantial number of historiographies, documents, and conference papers about Tư Mã Hai Đào. Some of these materials are: (1) a historical book highlighting some parts of his life, produced by the provincial Communist party of Thanh Hóa; (2) a document in the Tai language entitled Pứ n Tư Mã Hai Đào (The Story of Tư Mã Hai Đào), produced by Hà Nam Ninh; (3) a historical book on the history of all Tai cities in Quan Sơ n district written by Pham Xuân Cừ ; (4) an article on Tư Mã Hai Đào presented at the seventh national conference on Tai Studies in Vietnam; (5) most importantly, in March 2018, the people’s committee (“uỷ ban nhân dân”) of Mừ ơ ng Lát District organized the conference on “General Tư Mã Hai Đào and Relics in Mư ờ ng Lát” (Tư ớ ng quân Tư Mã Hai Đào và di tích vê ̀ ông trên Mư ờ ng Lát). Histories re-written in recent years based on ancient Tai manuscripts attempt to reconstruct Tư Mã Hai Đào as a tutelary deity of border cities. His offer of protection of the (border) land and the environment is evident in the following popular narrative: ̀ Công, Xôm Sip, Tén Tằn Everyone who passes through these lands of Chiêng has to worship Tư Mã Hai Đào. For a long time, he has protected the land from here to the land of the “Nùng” and the “Keo” (Kinh or Viet), along with the river’s spirit. He rides the elephant to conquer lands in Laos with the protection of twenty gods [thén phá in Tai]. Anyone who goes to the lowland or trades cattle must worship him. Anyone who passes this way, even the royal soldiers, must dismount and worship him while keeping their hats off and umbrellas folded. (Mầu and Ninh 2010: 1–2; translation mine)

His descendants worship him as the spirit of the capital of networked cities. Moreover, since Mount Pha Dùa is located at the centre of this network, people believe that the spirit of Tư Mã Hai Đào takes care of “kwan

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Fig. 2  Mount Pha Dùa located in between Sơ n Thủy and Mư ờ ng Mìn Communes, Quan Sơ n District, Thanh Hóa Province. (Credit: Achariya Choowonglert, March 2017)

mư ờ ng,” the spirit of the cities. Based on Tai manuscripts, local intellectuals and authorities also translated into Vietnamese and published the romantic story called Truyêǹ Thuyêt́ Tình Pha Dùa (The Love Story of Phá Dùa). This story of two lovers from different social classes whose marriage is prevented by the woman’s father and who therefore commit suicide atop Mount Pha Dùa rather than resigning themselves to arranged marriages, establishes the mountain as sacred (Fig. 2): The day before the girl’s wedding ceremony, the couple [from the two different cities of Mư ơ ng Min and Mư ơ ng Xia] went up Mount Phá Dùa [to fulfill their romantic affair, hindered by their economic and social inequalities], cut their fingers, and drank their blood. Together, they committed suicide with the intention that they would be the deities of the two cities, happily living in heaven after their death. As deities from two different cities, they will ensure that their people will live in harmony with each other, and the boys and girls would be free to express their love and live happily.

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Mount Phá Hen serves Mư ờ ng Dùa in calling out boys and girls to love each other there. Unlike other places, if people go, they could not come out easily. As for the magicians, going to Pha Dùa increases their power and success. Phu Pha Dùa (sometimes called Mư ờ ng Dùa—Dua City) is the most prominent mountain in this range. There are three deities in Mư ờ ng Dùa, one of them is Dùa Khằm—the most significant and most powerful deity in place of Tư Mã Hai Đào, and the deities of soldiers and aristocrats. Mư ờ ng Dùa’s fertile and excellent environment for vegetation brings people not only for economic prosperity but also to pray. The intensive mobility of the people brought the construction of wide roads that connect various communities. Unlike Mư ờ ng Chay, Mư ờ ng Dùa has lots of animals, and calling out the spirits of big animals is easier. The main shrine, the place of deities, is many steps up. Fronting it are small and huge trees of many kinds—betel, coconut, sugar palm, sugar cane, banana, and various fruits. Since several deities live in Mount Pha Dùa, girls must wear a brooch of protection when passing near Pha Dùa to avoid getting caught with a bad deity. Good deities, big animals, and the lords with their sacred weapons protect the villagers from these bad deities. Mount Pha Dùa is a place of prosperity and overcrowded with people coming to and fro with lots of gold and silver through large roads, and stone bridges. (Thư ợc 2009: 1–5; translation mine)

The natural resource management in the area is mediated by these representations of Pha Dùa, which determine the mountain’s meaning, endow it with sacredness, and forbid all encroachments on the forest in both the pre-socialist and socialist-neoliberal eras. Additionally, since Mount Pha Dùa is the dwelling place of several types of good and bad deities, it functions as a mechanism for environmental protection, by associating economic prosperity with people’s connection to it. Furthermore, this myth gives meaning to both conflicts between social classes and between the two cities. The spirits of nature, respecting no class or boundary, mediate the disputes between the rich and the poor and between the warring cities. Thus, they are intentionally inviting the power of the spirits of nature to bring social harmony and happiness.

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5  Tutelary Deity Worship, Narratives, and the Environment Concurrently with the revival of local languages and literatures, the Vietnamese government promotes the cult of ancestor worship as its new national cultural identity. The state policy of religious and spiritual revival since 2004 has attempted to locate the ancient cultural roots of the nation ̀ in its “return to the origins” (“vê ̀ nguôn”) (Jellema 2007: 58–59) and has integrated all local and national ancestor worship and cults into a collective cultural identity (Van Chinh 2007: 10). However, while promoting unified and reinvented traditions, the government has not succeeded in controlling the unique practices of local communities and in determining their meanings. The Tai continue to produce histories of their deities, environments, and places. Reinvented in Quan Sơ n district in 2010, the tutelary deity and spirit worship in Mư ờ ng Xia called lê ̃ Hôi Mư ờ ng Xia arose after the 1957 prohibition and the socialist period. Through the reinvention of Tư Mã Hai Đào as their ancestor and their ritual practices at his shrine at Sơ n Thủy, Tai communities worship five elements: first, the city spirit (thần mư ờ ng) at the Tư Mã Hai Đào shrine; second, the city’s spiritual pillar (lặc ́ at the centre of commune where the village spirit stone is located; măn) ́ third, the water spirit (sần cuông) at Xia stream and Luông River; fourth, ̀ phay) at Luông River located nearby Tư Mã the spirit of fire (sần phiêng Hai Đào shrine; and fifth, the spirit of watergate at watergate shrine of the banks of the Luông river (sư a tú nặm) at Mount Pha Dùa (Nhung 2010: 29). Following Tai customs, rituals and ceremonies always involves animal sacrifices. Thus, people bring their offerings of white or black buffalo, cows, pigs, ducks, chickens, sticky rice, rice soup, local alcohol (“rư ợu cần”), and super alcohol (“rư ợu siêu”) to the deities and spirits. However, before the formal ceremony and worship begin, people must plant a tree in the village’s northern part (“dâ̵ ̀u bản”). Summoned to lead the prayers for the deities (“thần linh”) of nature and past aristocrats (“ngư ờ i có công”) are female shamans called “Mê Môt.” Then the male shamans or “Vóong Mòo” who assist the “Mê Môt” take responsibility for all animal sacrifices and bring these offerings to the Tư Mã Hai Đào shrine and asks for his permission to organize the ceremony (Nhung 2010: 27–8). People go to Lê ̃ Hôi Mư ờ ng Xia to pray to Tư Mã Hai Đào. Five shamans, consisting of three women and two men, lead this ritual. The chief

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shaman (ngư ờ i lê ̃ chính), a “Mê Môt” (but in some situations when the “Mê Môt” is not available, a male shaman takes over), takes the main role of leading the prayers along with two female shaman assistants (“ngư ờ i nữ ̃ The two men are also responsible for playing traditional music. phu lê”). The chant (bài cúng Thần Mư ờ ng) mentions Tư Mã Hai Đào and invites all deities and spirits to receive the offerings. Below is the transcription of the chant translated into English that invites Tư Mã Hai Đào and all deities and spirits who live on the mountain: I need to respectfully say to the deities to lend me your ears, sir. Saying goodness and niceties on this great day, please listen to my words, both your left and right ears. Praying from my words, the deity of the river and headwater in this place, please listen. I raise the hands over the head to pay respect. I kneel to pray. Saying that there are three peaks of the mountains, and the land has three yards. They all have deities and spirits to protect. May my respectful prayers awaken the deities who are sleeping and those who are doing something, I invite you to be here. Or if you are drinking alcohol, please come here and sit on the good and beautiful mat, hemmed with silver and gold. Please sit on your legs crossed, sit on your legs. I have not been saying yet, sir, please wait. I will go to the north of the city and invite the great deities to come. I invite the great deities of the northern village and the great lord that dwells at the top of the glass-door house—a shrine of fresh air. Please, the lord and deities come together. I invite Tư Mã Hai Đào, the great deity of the three big cities. The great deity Tư Mã Hai Đào, who died a long time ago. (I) invite all of you to come. The spirits of silver and gold turtles have arrived. (I) invite the deities wearing striped and green hats, the (deities) aristocrats, and warriors. All of you, come here, missing no one. (Thư ợc 2009: 1; translation mine)

́ The prayer for the city’s spiritual pillar (“lặc măn”) is similar except for the additional phrase “[All deities] come to awaken the spiritual pillar of the city.” Especially mentioned in all chants for the spirits and deities of nature is Tư Mã Hai Đào (Fig. 3). For the Tai, Lê ̃ Hôi Mư ờ ng Xia functions as a reconstruction of the locals’ perception of Tư Mã Hai Đào as the heroic ancestor and tutelary deity as well as the intercessor to the spirits and deities of nature—water, fire, and land who protect the natural resources and environment. This understanding of Tư Mã Hai Đào reconstructs and binds Tai people to their land and nature. Local leaders and shamans believe that revitalizing lê ̃ Hôi Mư ờ ng Xia preserves the spiritual and tutelary culture (“văn hóa

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Fig. 3  Tư Mã Hai Đào shrine at Sơ n Thuỷ Commune, Quan Sơ n District (Credit: Achariya Choowonglert March 2017)

tâm linh”) of the deities and spirits who connect people with the environment, integrating its people, the supernatural world, and the environment.

6  Conclusion In the period of commodification and state control of natural environments, Tai communities have gradually come to consider natural resources as commodities, undermining their cultural and moral values. The Tai worldview is becoming more adapted to market rationalities. However, traditionally, as Hoang argues, Tai managed their natural resources through a sophisticated integration of local practices based on customary laws with narratives and rituals, an underlying eco-cosmological view of humans’ relationship to the environment rather than a bio-ecological one (Hoang 1999: 49). Hence, the Tai view is that tutelary deities and natural spirits must protect natural resources. Thus, to resist the commodification of natural resources, local intellectuals and local authorities have attempted to revive the Tai manuscripts—narratives about the environment and Tư Mã Hai Đào—and to revitalize tutelary spirit worship in order to

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reconstruct a sense of place for the Tai people. Narrative and ritual therefore function as a politics of place. In addition, the Tai produce themselves, or an idea of themselves. In other words, local intellectuals and people use Tai identity in what postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak called “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1988: 344–51), so as to negotiate with the powers of the global market and the nation-state, turning “backward people believing in supernatural forces” into a mechanism of protection for culture and ecology. Three conclusions follow from my analysis here. The first concerns the production of meanings and representations of place and environment during the cultural revitalization of rituals. Local narratives and rituals create a vital link connecting deities/spirits, people, and the environment to a sacred place. In the process, Tư Mã Hai Đào and the deities/spirits of nature have become guardians of place and the environment. Additionally, as an ancestor, Tư Mã Hai Đào has remained faithful and rooted in his origin (another meaning). As the geographer Doreen Massey argues, the changing global economy and political conditions provoke local agencies by replacing the meanings of places (Massey 2001: 169–70). In terms of this analysis, the meaning of place as sacred for the Tai, as reconstructed by the local community, supersedes its meanings as a border area, bamboo trade site, and cross-border trade town that are provided by the global economy and the state. Hence, narrative and ritual can be seen as spaces of contestation in relation to the ideology of market and state, in a project that simultaneously reconstructs (by recollection) the Tai view of the environment. The Tai communities defend places by constructing cultural boundaries around them, and these reconstructed meanings and representations of place reshape the social and cultural perception of the environment more broadly. Secondly, the narratives about Mount Pha Dùa reproduced in the annual ritual ceremony imply the two cities’ perpetual love of nature. The deities of nature, through their powers, make people happy and enable them to live in harmony with each other. Mount Pha Dùa represents the space in between that brings people of different classes (the rich and the poor) into harmony and diminishes conflicts between the two cities. Importantly, it also functions as the region’s economic hub, connecting people from different areas to the abundance of Quan Sơ n. Using this specific context, thus, living in nature brings social harmony in spite of clashing cultures and economic conditions. Both the spiritual world and the market are compatible with each other, especially in sustaining local

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people’s livelihood. This revival of narratives and ritual practices can be considered an attempt by local authorities and local intellectuals to create harmony among various groups of peoples (villagers, local authorities, and merchants) as well as ethnic groups (the Tai, Kinh, Mư ờ ng, H’mông, and Lào) living in and passing through the dynamic place of Quan Sơ n. Finally, applying Escobar’s notion of places, the process of cultural revitalization reveals the dynamics of place-based cultures, power (critique of power, state and market discourses of environment, and local knowledge and perceptions), as well as local and global economies (Escobar 2001: 141–142). A culturally revitalized place ties complex elements such as social classes, spirits, and the environment into local power. Thus, despite living at the margins of society, ethnic groups, through their creative reproduction of discourses, subsequently use them as a mechanism of protecting their livelihood and the environment.

References Ban chấp hành dả̵ ng bô huyên Quan Sơ n. 2006. Lich Sử Đảng Bô Huyên Quan Sơ n Tâp I (History of the (Communist) Party of Quan Son: Part 1. Thanh Hóa: Nhà xuất bản Thanh Hóa. Chinh, Nguyen Van. 2007. Cultural Identity and Nationalism in Cultural Anthropology: A Review of Debates on Ancestor Worship in Vietnam. Proceedings of the International Conference on Cultural Identity and Nationalism in Asia. Jakarta: Indonesian Institute of Sciences. Choowonglert, Achariya. 2012. “Negotiating Authenticity: Cultural Economy of the Ethnic Tourist Villages, Northwest Upland of Vietnam.” Ph.D.  Thesis, Chiang Mai University. Chiang Mai, Thailand. Escobar, Arturo. 2001. “Culture Sits in Places: Reflections on Globalism and Subaltern Strategies of Localization.” Political Geography 20.2: 139–74. Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1992. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Cultural Anthropology 7.1: 6–23. Hoang, Cam. 1999. “Ritual and Natural Resources Management: A Case Study of the Tai in Mai Chau District, Hoa Binh Province, Vietnam.” Tai Culture 9.2: 48–63. Jellema, Kate. 2007. “Returning Home: Ancestor Veneration and the Nationalism of Đổi Mớ i Vietnam.” Modernity and Re-Enchantment: Religion in Post-­ Revolutionary Vietnam. Ed. Taylor, Philip. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Publishing. 57–89.

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Jorgensen, Bradley S., and Richard C.  Stedman. 2001. “Sense of Place as an Attitude: Lakeshore Owners Attitudes toward Their Properties.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 21.3: 233–48. Massey, Doreen. 2001. Space, Place and Gender. Third ed. Minneapolis: Wiley. Mầu, Hà Công, and Hà Nam Ninh. 2010. Pứ n Tư Mã Hai Đào. Manuscript: Bá Thư ớ c District, Thanh Hóa Province, Vietnam. McElwee, Pamela. 2004. “Becoming Socialist or Becoming Kinh? Government Policies for Ethnic Minorities in the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.” Civilizing the Margins: Southeast Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities. Ed. Christopher R.  Duncan. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. McQuillan, Martin. 2000. The Narrative Reader. London and New  York: Routledge. Nhung, Nguyêñ Thi. 2010. “Tìm Hiêủ Lê ̃ Hôi Mư ờ ng Xia ơ ̉ Xã Sơ n Thuỷ — Huyên Quan Sơ n—Thanh Hóa” [Understanding Mư ờ ng Xia City Spirit Worship at Sơ n Thủy Commune—Quan Sơ n District—Thanh Hoa]. Trư ờ ng da̵ i hoc văn hóa Hà Nôi. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” Subaltern Studies IV. Ed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Vol. 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 330–63. Thư ợc, Pham Bá. 2009. “Truyên Tình Mư ờ ng Dùa (Love Story of Dua City).” Manuscript. Thư ớ c, Pham Bá, and Lò Hồng Quang. 2017. “Môt Số Đặc Trư ng Văn Hóa Của Ngư ờ i Thái Ở Quan Sơ n, Thanh Hóa (Some Cultural Features of the Tai in ̀ các dân tôc Thái-­ Quan Son, Thanh Hoa).” Phát huy vai trò, bản săć công dô̵ ng Kadai trong hôi nhâp và phát triên̉ bêǹ vữ ng, Hôi nghi quôć gia vê ̀ Thái hoc Viêt Nam lần thứ VIII. Ed. Toàn, Vư ơ ngs.: Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giớ i. Trư ơ ̉ng, Lê Văn, et  al. 2016. Đia Chí Huyên Quan Sơ n. Thanh Hóa: Huyên Ủy-Hôi Đồng Nhân Dân-Ủy Ban Nhân Dân, Huyên Quan Sơ n, Tı ̉nh Thanh Hóa. Tùng, Mai Văn. 2017. “Rừ ng Trong Đờ i Sống của Ngư ờ i Thái Huyên Quan Sơ n, ̀ Thống Nhân Thứ c Vê ̀ Giá Tri Nhân Văn Tı ̉nh Thanh Hóa—Bài Hoc Truyên ̉ ̀ Và Phát Triên Bên Vữ ng” [Forest in the Lives of the Tai in Quan Son District, Thanh Hoa Province— Lessons of Traditional Consciousness on Human ̀ các Values and Sustainable Development]. Phát huy vai trò, bản săć công dô̵ ng dân tôc Thái-Kadai trong hôi nhâp và phát triên̉ bêǹ vữ ng, Hôi nghi quôć gia vê ̀ Thái hoc Viêt Nam lần thứ VIII. Ed. Toàn, Vư ơ ngs.: Nhà Xuất Bản Thế Giớ i. Van, Dang Nghiem. 1972. “An Outline of the Thai in Viet Nam.” Vietnamese Studies 8.32: 143–201.

Animal Mercy Release, Environmental Conservation, and the Media in Vietnam Mai Hoàng Thạch

1   Introduction Animal mercy release is a practice vaguely correlated with historical Buddhism that raises environmental and ecological concerns related to public health and safety (Shiu and Stokes 2008), ethics, and conservation goals and practices (HSI 2009; Liu et al. 2012; Knott 2016; Everard et al. 2019). In Vietnamese media, animal mercy release is portrayed as a common practice related to Buddhist religious practices and cultural identities surrounding the Lunar New Year. But in Vietnam, this topic has rarely been studied, with little exploration of media and environment intersections in narratives about animal mercy release. Through an analysis of journalists’ and related actors’ narratives about animal mercy release, this

M. H. Thạch (*) Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA Vietnam National University’s Hanoi University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi, Vietnam e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_5

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paper will highlight the intersections between environmental conservation and culture in media narratives about animal mercy release, with potential insights into human-nature disconnections in biodiversity conservation. I analyze the intersections between three types of narratives, environmental conservation (environmental protection and biodiversity conservation), culture (national identity, spiritual customs, and Buddhist religious traditions), and ethics (virtue, deontology, and consequentialism) in contemporary media coverage of animal mercy release to answer the following questions: What are media narratives of animal mercy release in Vietnam and how are they formulated? How do narratives of animal mercy release connect to other narratives of biodiversity conservation and environmental protection in Vietnam? And what values and ethics drive media narratives of animal mercy release?

2   Summary of Data Collection and Analysis Internet data collection in this research followed two steps. The first step was to identify which online newspapers, websites, and other media materials would be suitable for data collection. For the first step, I searched on Google for “mercy release” in Vietnamese using the two synonymous keywords phóng sinh (northern accent) and phóng sanh (southern accent) bounded by the date range of 2000–2020, restricting by geography to Vietnam, and removing duplicates. Based on data from the first ten pages of results for each year, I selected seven online newspapers: vnexpress.net, dantri.com.vn, tuoitre.vn, thanhnien.vn, vietnamplus.vn, vietnamnet.vn, daidoanket.vn; and three Buddhism websites: including phatgiao.org.vn, thuvienhoasen.org, and giacngo.vn as focal media websites. In the second step, I performed comprehensive searches of the focal media websites’ material including articles and posts year by year since 2018, using the same pair of keywords. I used data from both steps to synthesize a chronological overview of media narratives and meanings of animal mercy-release practices in Vietnam. In addition to newspaper and Buddhism websites, I searched for video posts about mercy release on youtube.com and facebook.com using the same keywords and search bounds as on Google. I applied thematic and chronological data analysis in this research. First, I conducted a thematic analysis of a 1998 Vietnamese TV movie entitled, Chim phóng sinh (Mercy Release Bird). The film was the first major media appearance of this topic in Vietnam, and from its thematic analysis I was

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able to explore the origins of environmental, cultural, and ethical narratives of animal mercy release in contemporary Vietnam. Second, for a chronological analysis, I arranged data collected from each media source in chronological order following three types of narratives: environment (e.g. pollution caused by plastic bags and other trash or wildlife trade, invasive species release, poaching animals, and selling them for mercy release), culture (e.g. events and actors performing mercy release, origin and cultural values of mercy release), and ethics (e.g. ethical debates about virtue and animal welfare). The subthemes and keywords for each source were selected and coded in each group in chronological comparison with others to depict the historical occurrence of events or (sub)themes. To analyze the components of ethics in mercy-release narratives as they relate to the other narratives (cultural and environmental narratives), I applied Sahni’s (2008) analytical framework of virtue-deontology-­consequentialism ethics. Virtue ethics are ontologies of good will, such as the conscience of human beings, awareness, and sentiments of practitioners (e.g. compassion, blessing, empathy, sympathy), which generates standards, values, attitudes, motivations, or goals for actions of mercy release. Deontology ethics relate to methods of action or implementing behaviors (e.g. purchasing animals for release, praying for good karma, releasing animals into nature) and consequentialism ethics relate to post-action outcomes (e.g. the suffering of beings, supply-demand levels for mercy release, increases in wildlife trade, invasions of alien species, biodiversity loss, environmental pollution of plastic bags and trash).

3  A Brief Overview of Animal Mercy Release in Contemporary Vietnam Media narratives of animal mercy release in Vietnam depict practices originating from two sectors: Buddhist religion and Vietnamese folk culture. As a Buddhist practice, animal “mercy release” is synonymous in academic terms with Severinghaus and Chi’s “prayer/ceremonial animal release” (1999), Agoramoorthy and Hsu’s “ritual releasing of wild animals” (2007), Shiu and Stokes’ “Buddhist animal release” or “release of living beings” (2008), Gilbert et al.’s “merit release” (2012), Liu et al.’s “traditional Buddhist wildlife release” (2012), Liu et  al.’s “religious release” (2013), Li and Davey’s “mercy release” (2013), and Everard et  al.’s “prayer animal release” (2019). Historically, mercy release is practiced for

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the cultivation of compassion (Sanskrit karuna; Chinese dabei; Tibetan thugs rje) in Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism (Shiu and Stokes 2008; Everard et al. 2019). The practice includes two layers of meaning: liberation of the animal and avoidance of killing/slaughtering (Shiu and Stokes 2008). In Tibet, it is called “tshe thar” (or Tsethar), which means liberating the life of animals (Sambhala Times 2011). However, the practice likely has a hybrid origin in both Chinese Buddhism and Daoism (Agoramoorthy and Hsu 2007; Shiu and Stokes 2008; Li and Davey 2013). Though it is closely connected to the notions of compassion and non-violence in Buddhism, the practice likely originates from an indigenous Chinese cultural practice along with the Daoist work Liezi in the fourth century (Shiu and Stokes 2008). Indeed, in Taiwan today, the practice is not limited to Buddhist and Daoist groups, but found to be popular in Catholic and Protestant groups and folk religions as well (Shiu and Stokes 2008). In Vietnam, likewise, the practice is common across the country, and it is unclear whether it is connected to a particular school of Buddhism— northern (Mahāyāna) or southern (Hı ̄nayāna or Theravāda)—or to Daoism. A mainstream speculation about the origin of mercy release in Vietnam is that the practice came from China along with Mahāyāna Buddhism and/or Daoism. For instance, on the one hand, the phonetics of this practice in Vietnamese as phóng sinh/sanh (northern/southern accent) might be derived from fangsheng in Chinese. On the other hand, in Vietnamese philosophical books on Buddhism, the practice is connected to Mahāyāna Buddhism (Vietnamese Đại thặng or Đại thừ a, Chinese: 大乘) in northern and central Vietnam, which differs from Theravāda Buddhism (Vietnamese Tiêủ thặng or Tiêủ thừ a, Chinese: 小 乘). Đại thừ a means a great carriage (cô ̃ xe lớ n) to liberation of not only oneself but also other living beings’ souls from samsa ̄ra, the cycle of ̀ rebirth (vòng luân hôi—the continuous wheel of life, death and reincarnả tion), while Tiêu thừ a means a small carriage (cô ̃ xe nhỏ) to enlighten an individual mind for liberation of his/her soul from samsa ̄ra (Trần Trọng Kim 2007). Two types of celebration rituals are defined in the online Vietnamese Buddhism Encyclopedia, which is translated from the Chinese language version. The types are phóng sinh khí (Chinese 放生器, a container for storage of small animals (breathing creatures for release) and phóng sinh hội

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(Chinese 放生會, festival for release of large animals).1 The first practice describes daily mercy release, when monks use a mesh net to save tiny animals living in water and move them to a mercy release container for release back to larger water bodies. Shiu and Stokes relate this practice (Chinese: fangsheng chi) to the “Chinese translation of the Sarva ̄stiva ̄din code” (2008: 183), This festival type defines a formal ceremony usually organized by elites such as masters, priests, or politicians, to gather many people to pray and then release terrestrial and aquatic animals including birds, fish, turtles, and mammals. Somewhat separate from Buddhist practices, carp release in Vietnam and China is a cultural practice for the celebration of the three kitchen ́ one week before the Lunar New Year (Vietnamese Têt́ ông gods (thần bêp) Công, ông Táo or Têt́ Táo quân). Many believe the practice connects to a legend of three kitchen gods who must report the household’s good and bad behaviors to the heavenly god. In order to travel, these three gods need a means of transportation, which are carp. A related ancient Chinese legend states that the heaven god opens a race to challenge animals to jump over the five element gates (ải vũ môn) to heaven. If they succeed, they will be granted rebirth and transform into a dragon. In the legend, the carp was the animal that jumped to pass the gate and completed the challenge, turning into a dragon. In Vietnamese folklore, the three kitchen gods are able to ride the carp up to heaven’s gates and report back on household behaviors because the carp will transform into dragons, bringing a good new lunar year to come. This practice probably derives from Daoism because of its connection to the heaven god or Jade Emperor ́ However, there are no historical records of this (ngọc hoàng thư ợng dê̵ ). connection. In the early 2000s, phóng sinh/sanh in Vietnamese media only referred to the Buddhist practice, which differs from the folk practice in that any animal can be released, not just carp. However, today media narratives often blur the boundary between these two types of practices using the terms phóng sinh/sanh loosely, which in Vietnamese literally means “liberating the life of animals,” since both are loosely analogous to the simple 1  Harvey elucidates that “[a]n offense requiring expiation is also committed if a monk uses water while knowing that it contains breathing creatures that will be killed by his action; to avoid this, a water-strainer is part of the traditional kit of a monk. Again, it is an offense to sprinkle water on the ground if it is known that there are living creatures there that will be harmed by this” (2000: 156).

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act of “release” (thả). Technically, both practices consist of two parts: prayer before release, which either shows gratitude to the three kitchen gods or expresses Buddhist merciful blessing, and the action of release itself. Nowadays on Vietnamese online news, reporters refer to either practice with the terms thả cá phóng sinh (carp mercy release) or phóng sinh (life release). Furthermore, phóng sinh is also used by the media and the public to refer to the wildlife conservation practice of animal rescue and release, which has goals and methods seemingly distant from the cultivation of compassion or good karma as in the more traditional phóng sinh practices.

4  Narratives About Animal Mercy Release in Contemporary Vietnamese Media Three types of narratives on animal mercy release emerged from my analysis of media in contemporary Vietnam. Environmental narratives focus on “brown issues,” for example, pollution of abiotic environments from littering plastic bags and other trash as “ugly or uncivilized behaviors.” Environmental narratives also revolve around “green issues” of biodiversity conservation and wildlife management, for example, commercial wildlife trade, biocentric values (intrinsic values of nature), threats to biodiversity and crop damage from invasive species, but also possibilities for positive wildlife conservation outcomes (e.g. fish restocking for reproduction of biological resources). Cultural narratives focus on human-­ agency values around livelihood and cultural authenticity of animal release actions. Ethics narratives target virtues of compassion (that also connect to environmental and cultural narratives such as human conscience towards suffering beings, environmental stewardship, and animal welfare), particular implementing behaviors (deontology), and post-release consequences (consequentialism) to judge the moral implications of release activities: broadly speaking, the question of whether animal mercy release should be practiced and with what ‘correct’ virtue and knowledge, attitudes and methods, and behavioral outcomes for the practitioners’ karma, the animals, and for environmental conservation. These narratives are intermingled with each other as ‘inclusive’ goodwill ethics of environment-culture following the virtue of merciful compassion, with environmental narratives emerging since the 2000s, while the two other media narratives were conveyed prominently in Đại’s 1998 TV movie, Chim Phóng Sinh.

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The movie narrates the story of an unmarried, poor couple in Ho Chi Minh City. The young woman, Út, collects morning glories from the river to sell on the market for a living. She is deeply in love with Chân, who has a disabled leg and uses a wheelchair. To earn a living, he traps birds (mostly house sparrows) to sell to a merchant, who in turn resells them to visitors to the Vietnam National Pagoda (Việt Nam Quôć Tự) for mercy-release practices. Chân wishes for another livelihood, as he laments to Út: “Chứ ́ sông ́ thôi!” (What is another biêt́ làm nghê ̀ gì bây giờ ? Nghèo quơ vào kiêm livelihood that I can do? … Because I am poor, I have to live on it) (translation mine, minute 5). Út comments on the ethics that stem from his guilt and others’ thoughts: “Ngư ờ i thì nói công, ngư ờ i thì nói tội. Ổng Bảy í thì nói là bắt chim nhốt vào lồng là hành hạ nó, là có tội. Còn má em á thì nói bắt chim phóng sanh là làm ơ n” (Some say your work is mercy, others say it is sinful. Uncle Bảy said that trapping birds is torture, is sinful. But my mom believes that trapping for mercy release means mercy). Chân responds: “Anh cũng nghı̃ như bác Bảy: chim phóng sinh thư ờ ng chết dọc d̵ư ờ ng, không chết thì cũng khổ, cũng cùng. Như ng anh d̵âu còn cách nào khác d̵âu?” (I also think like Uncle Bảy. The birds for mercy release always die after release, and even if they don’t die, they are suffering in the end. However, I have no other option for my livelihood) (translation mine, minute 5). Uncle Bảy expands on his viewpoint against mercy release later in the movie, insisting: “Hai d̵ứ a cũng nên tính d̵i. Không lẽ cứ săn bắt hái lư ợm?” (You both need to think about a new livelihood, you don’t want to keep a hunting-gathering livelihood for your whole life, do you?) Út replies: “Dạ, tụi con cũng nghı̃ như vậy nếu phải d̵i chỗ khác” (Yes, we also think of changing, if we move to another place). Bảy comments in return, “Hay d̵ấy! Chim chóc cứ bắt chi rồi thả, kêu là phóng sinh. Làm ác chi làm phư ớ c. Cách phóng sinh hay nhất là d̵ừ ng có bắt nó.” (That’s good! Trapping birds for release is called ‘mercy.’ It is cruel rather than a merciful act. The best ‘mercy release’ practices are to never trap them) (translation mine, minute 79). The comments of Út, Chân, and Bảy provide some insights into cultural narratives, environmental narratives, and ethics narratives about animal mercy release in Vietnam. Here, anthropocentric values focus on livelihoods and on right and wrong ways to perceive animal release actions in this context. Thus, cultural narratives shape polarized ethical positions in Vietnamese society about Chân’s job: mercy vs. guilt/ sin. Ironically, Chân’s complaint about the fate of birds after release justifies the interpretation of mercy release as a kind of guilt or sin by Vietnamese

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people in the late 1990s. Furthermore, the movie’s title is a metaphor for the fate of the poor unmarried couple, who are trying to escape their livelihoods like birds in a cage waiting for mercy release. Although environmental “brown issues” of animal mercy release are not mentioned in the movie, Chân does complain in one scene about polluted water that results in his catching fewer birds: “Nư ớ c hôi quá con chim nó sợ” (The canal water is so stinky that birds are scared) (translation mine, minute 4). Virtue ethics connect environmental narratives and cultural narratives via civilization discourse and intermingle “good” or “bad” (ugly) behaviors of environmental stewardship with “civilized” behaviors of cultural values, treating both as qualities of virtue ethics. For instance, city campaigns in Hanoi and other big cities in Vietnam have promoted environmental values since the early 2000s; for example, the slogan “Hà Nội Xanh, Sạch, Đẹp” (green, clean, beautiful Hanoi) combines with another one promoting “ngư ờ i Hà Nội văn minh, thanh lịch” (the civilized and elegant Hanoian), who does not litter in public spaces to define environmentally friendly behaviors by city dwellers. Yet plastic bags, trash from incense burning, and altars and other containers are often left as litter by mercy-release practitioners after their ceremonies. In recent media narratives, this behavior has been characterized as an “ugly practice” that goes against environmentally civilized standards. In terms of biodiversity conservation, incense ash and other trash like plastic bags were blamed for the death of released animals and other animals living in ponds, lakes, and even rivers in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. For instance, since the 2010s, media narratives have foregrounded how dead fish are found inside plastic bags in Hanoi’s Red River after release ceremonies, because practitioners did not open the bags carrying the fish before release. Since 2014, many electronic newspapers have posted photo essays of dead fish and snails found in polluted water at release locations, with incense ashes and plastic bags next to them—an aspect that I will discuss further below. Likewise, the release of animals into environments to which they are not adapted increases the likelihood of their death after release, for example, the release of golden carp and other fish into either still water bodies like ponds and lakes or running water bodies like streams and rivers in Vietnam, depending on the type of fish. Non-native habitats apparently have a negative impact on the survival of released animals. Environmental narratives of animal mercy release are therefore closely connected to not

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only cultural narratives that revolve around environmentally friendly behavior, but also to conservation narratives about animal care and welfare, as I will discuss further in the next two sections.

5  Mercy Release and Environmental Conservation Environmental conservation in mercy release has been emerging in Vietnamese media as a dominant issue including subtopics of invasive species, human health, animal welfare, and litter/pollution. The release of non-native and invasive species, for example, Red-eared Slider Turtles (Trachemys scripta subsp. elegans) and snails like the Golden Applesnail (Pomacea canaliculata) and the Spike-topped Apple Snail (Pomacea bridgesii), are featured in media narratives about the threats of biodiversity loss and crop damage from mercy release. Since the 2010s, vietnamplus.vn and other online newspapers (e.g. tuoitre.vn, tienphong.vn) have reported news about the mercy release of invasive species and negative impacts on biodiversity conservation, with ten reports on vietnamplus.vn in 2010 about threats to local biodiversity in some provinces from mercy releases of Red-eared Sliders. For instance, one pagoda in Bạc Liêu Province recorded devastation of lotus and other pond plants and native animals such as fish, eels, and soft-shell turtles caused by Red-eared Slider releases. In the same year, local authorities destroyed 18,400 Red-eared Sliders imported by the company Caseamex to Cần Thơ Province. Many other provinces recorded the occurrence of this invasive species, for example, Quảng Ninh, Bạc Liêu, Cần Thơ , Hậu Giang, Vı ̃nh Long, and Đồng Nai. One interesting narrative centers on the threat of Red-eared Sliders to the conservation of the Giant Soft-shelled Turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) in Hoàn Kiếm Lake (Sword Lake), Hanoi. This narrative emerged in 2010 and continued into 2011 on several sites, reporting that observations of injuries on the giant turtle were connected to Red-eared sliders. Thanh Bình (2010) reported on vnplus.vn: Từ nay dê̵ ń trước ngày 31/12, các cơ quan chức năng tại Hà Nội sẽ phải có ̵ hiện dang ̵ ́ Hô ̀ Gươm và de̵ dọa tới biện pháp xử lý rùa tai dỏ, “xâm chiêm” ́ cuả “cụ rùa.” Thông tân ́ xã Việt Nam và nhiêù cơ quan môi trường sông ́ xuât́ hiện rât́ nhiêù rùa tai dỏ̵ báo chí khác dã̵ phản ánh, tại hô ̀ Hoàn Kiêm ̵ ̵ ́ ́ ̀ gây nguy hại dên vân dê môi trường và ảnh hươn ̉ g dê̵ ń sự sinh tôǹ cuả “cụ ́ xuât́ xứ từ rùa.” Rùa tai dỏ̵ … có hai viêǹ màu dỏ̵ ở ngay phía sau măt, thung lũng Mississippi (Băć Mỹ), xuât́ hiện nhiêù tại Việt Nam khoảng 3–4

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nămtrởlạid ̵ â y . L o à i n à y k h i m ó ̛ i s i n h r a c h ı ̉ d à i k h o a ̉ n g 2 c m , ́ từ 50–70 năm, dư̵ ợc l ú c t r u ̛ o ̛ ̉ n g t h à n h d ̵ a ̣ t d ̵ ê ́ n 25cm, có thê ̉ sông ̵ xêṕ hạng là một trong sô ́ 206 dộng vật xâm hại môi trường. Theo Bộ Nông nghiệp và Phát triên̉ Nông thôn, ngoài phá hoại môi trường, rùa tai dỏ̵ còn có thê ̉ mang vi khuẩn salmonella, gây bệnh thương hàn cho người. Vì thê,́ Tô ̉ chức ̀ trong 100 loài Bảo tôǹ thiên nhiên quôć tê ́ (IUCN) xêṕ rùa tai dỏ̵ dứ̵ ng dâ̵ u ̉ nhât́ thê ́ giới. xâm hại nguy hiêm [From now until December 31 (2010), the authorities in Hanoi will have to take measures to handle the red-eared turtles (Sliders) currently “invading” Hồ Gư ơ m (Sword Lake). The Vietnam News Agency and many other press agencies have recently reported that many red-eared turtles found in Hoàn Kiếm Lake are harmful to the environment and affect the survival of the “elder” turtle [“cụ rùa,” the giant soft-shelled turtle]. The red-eared turtle … has two red bars behind the eyes, originates from the Mississippi Valley (North America), and has been in Vietnam since about 3–4 years ago. When born, it is only about 2  cm long, grows to 25  cm, can live from 50–70 years, and is listed as one of 206 invasive animals. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, in addition to destroying the environment, red-eared turtles can carry salmonella bacteria that cause typhoid in humans. Therefore, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) ranks Red-eared Slider Turtles in the top 100 most dangerous invasive species in the world.] (Thanh Bình 2010; translation mine)

Narratives about mercy-released Red-eared Sliders as invasive and harmful to native species are prominent, but other released animals are also depicted as threats by Vietnamese media. Many exotic species, especially aquarium animals, were imported into Vietnam for pet or food purposes after Đôỉ Mớ i (Open Door Policy 1986). Due to mercy release and/or release of unwanted pets or for other reasons, such animals were released into the Vietnamese environment with little attention from authorities or the media before the 2000s. For example, from my own personal observations in Hanoi, Red-eared Sliders have been available in aquarium shops since the late 1990s, more than ten years before they appeared in media narratives about invasive threats. Another widespread example of a mercy-released invasive species is the long-nose gar (Lepisosteus osseus). This species was imported as an aquarium pet without authoritative management of its potential capacity for invasion if released or discarded. As a consequence, Ngọc Nhung (2013) reported on https://thanhnien.vn a proposal by Đồng Tháp Provincial

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Fishery Department, a province in southern Vietnam, to ban trading and live release of “predator” fish, targeting long-nose gar by describing its morphology and also giving it the strange Vietnamese vernacular name of ̃ and other synonyms of platypus, or crocodile-­ “rocket fish” (cá hoả tiên) headed fish. The article characterized the behaviors of this exotic fish as “rất hung dữ , sinh sôi nhanh” (very aggressive, fertile), and warns that ̵ và release into the local environment “sẽ tác hại rất lớ n dê̵ ń loài cá bản dịa môi trư ờ ng” (will cause great harm to native fish and the environment) (Ngọc Nhung 2013, translations mine). Yet the reporter acknowledged that fishermen in other provinces like Kiên Giang, Vı ̃nh Long, and Bến Tre had caught this species in other rivers and canals and had done so for some time. Seven years later, on June 5, 2020, the spread of this species by mercy-release practices was no longer limited to southern Vietnam; one Hanoian posted a photo of this species found next to Bảy Mẫu Lake in Thống Nhất Park on Facebook. The picture of a strange “crocodile-­ headed” fish spread to other social media narratives. Biodiversity conservation management authorities in Vietnam confirm at least five more invasive fish species including Australian red-claw crayfish (Cherax quadricarinatus), Suckermouth Catfish (Hypostomus punctatus and Pterygoplichthys pardalis), Smallmouth Bass (Micropterus dolomieu), and Largemouth Bass (Micropterus salmoides; Hoàng  Thị Thanh Nhàn 2012). These five species were imported as aquarium pets and for aquaculture and are all likely used by average citizens for mercy releases. In addition to these formally recognized invasive species, there are many other introduced aquatic species used in mercy releases that have been identified as potentially invasive such as the Red Swamp Crayfish (Procambarus clarkii), Red-bellied Pacu (Piaractus brachypomus), and Mozambique Tilapia (Oreochromis mossambicus; Hoàng Thị Thanh Nhàn 2012). Media narratives about threats to biodiversity from mercy release depict not only recognized invasive species, but also potentially invasive ones. In 2017, Bồ Đê ̀ Pagoda in the Long Biên District of Hanoi organized a major mercy release ceremony of ten tons of fish into the Red River that were supposedly Red-bellied Pacu. More than 10,000 practitioners were involved in the ceremony, which was called controversial because of potentially negative conservation effects (Phạm Hư ơ ng 2017). Accordingly, the Hanoi Fishery Department opened an investigation, and the fish species was identified as Colossoma brachypomus, which is closely related but different from Red-bellied Pacu and is also an introduced species, but is not recognized as invasive. Even though ten tons of fish were released into the

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Red River without post-release observations of environmental impact, this story highlights how an invasive species in a mercy release captured the attention of both the public and the governmental authorities with respect to biodiversity conservation. A related theme in media narratives about mercy release is the connection between the environment and human health, such as the warning quoted above that salmonella bacteria can be transmitted from the Red-­ eared Slider to humans. Another example is the H5N1 influenza, which emerged in Vietnam in 2003 transmitted by poultry and wild birds, including mercy-release birds. In response to media narratives on how the loose management and poor control of mercy-release bird trading in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City may pose threats to human health by contributing to a new wave of H5N1 influenza, MARD (2005) issued an emergency ministerial circulation to ban bird trade and transportation into cities; Dân Trí newspaper reported that people stopped purchasing birds in Hanoi by late 2005 (Trung et al. 2005). In addition, contemporary media narratives discuss public attention to animal care and welfare as related to techniques and practices of mercy release that may ultimately cause the deaths of many released animals. These concerns include critiques of husbandry practices by merchants and careless release practices, which have emerged since about 2004 by way of photo and video clip news stories, combined with comments on news articles. For instance, on phatgiao.org.vn (cited from dantri.com.vn), Đình Thảo (2016) used a photo essay titled “Tp. HCM: chim phóng sinh bị mua d̵i bán lại d̵ến…chết mớ i thôi” (Ho Chi Minh City: Birds for Mercy Release Were Sold and Resold Until… They Died) to narrate the suffering of birds captured and sold for mercy release, with photos of birds in cages captioned as follows: “Cả trăm chú chim d̵ư ợc nhốt trong chiếc lồng chật chội d̵ể chờ ngư ờ i mua phóng sinh” (Hundreds of birds were kept in cramped cages waiting for buyers to release), “Nhữ ng chú chim tội nghiệp trơ ̉ thành công cụ kiếm tiền của ngư ờ i dân” (Poor birds became merchant’s money-making tools), “Trong số 10 chú chim d̵ư ợc phóng sinh thì chı̉ 3 con tự bay ra khỏi lồng, số còn lại bay yếu ớ t” (Out of ten birds released, only three could fly out of the cage by themselves, the rest flew weakly), and for a photo showing a bird trap, “Một chiếc bẫy của kẻ xấu d̵ặt trong khuôn viên Lăng Ông Bà Chiểu d̵ể bắt lại số chim ngư ờ i dân phóng sinh. Chı̉ ít phút d̵ã có 3 chú chim tội nghiệp bị sập bẫy” (A trap is placed on the ground of Tomb Lê Văn Duyệt to catch the birds that people release.

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Within minutes, three poor birds were trapped)” (Đình Thảo 2016, translations mine). In a comment on the page, Hồng Yến asked: Không biêt́ họ hàng nhà chim nên vui hay buôǹ khi nhữ ng ngày “dạ̵ i xá” [phóng sinh] săṕ dê̵ ń gần? Chúng sẽ thoát khỏi sự giam cầm, kìm kẹp trong ̵ ̵ ̀ chật chội hay chı ̉ là nhữ ng diêñ viên dóng nhữ ng chiêć lông vai “kẻ dáng ̵ ́ ́ thư ơ ng” trong trò chơ i “băt - thả” cuả ngư ờ i dờ i?… Liệu sô phận cuả nhữ ng ́ sót dư̵ ợc sau màn con vật sau phóng sinh ấy ra sao? Liệu có bao nhiêu con sông ̵ Đấy là chư a kê ̉ hành vi mua - bán cua chúng ta có phóng sinh hoành tráng dó? ̉ ̵ thê ̉ dang tiêṕ tay cho cái ác mà không hay biêt.́ (Vì có nhữ ng ngư ờ i mua như ̵ chúng ta nên nhữ ng con vật dáng thư ơ ng kia mớ i bi ̣ truy lùng, săn tìm ́ ráo riêt.) [We do not know if the bird’s relatives should be happy or sad when the days of “great amnesty” [mercy release] are near? Will they escape from confinement … or are they just actors playing “pitiful people” in the “catch and release” game of humans? What will the fate of the animals be? How many will survive the epic release? That’s not to mention our buying-selling behavior that may be helping the evil without realizing it. (Because there are buyers like us, those poor animals are hunted and hunted hard.] (Hồng Yến 2017, translation mine)

Other concerns about animal welfare are reflected in criticisms raised against a popular singer and social media influencer who posted photos of a turtle’s carapace painted in Buddhist symbols and carved with family names before mercy release (Hạ Nhiên 2021; Mya 2021), and of 55 Yellow Bitterns (Ixobrychus sinensis) hanging upside-down with their feet tied together from the side mirrors outside a car on the way to release animals (Thùy Dung 2021). In the first case, Vietnamese Netizen (a ‘z’ generation community on the internet) argued that carving human names on a turtle carapace causes pain to the animal (Hạ Nhiên 2021) and they criticized: “mai rùa có dây thần kinh bên trong và cũng là nơ i cung cấp ̵ dớ̵ n nêú bi ̣ tôn̉ thư ơ ng” máu nên rùa có thê ̉ bi ̣ chảy máu và cảm thấy dau (The turtle’s shell contains nerves underneath and it is where there is blood supply; therefore, the turtle can bleed and feel pain if it is injured) (Mya 2021, translation mine). In the second incident, Netizens argued that the upside-down hanging of the Yellow Bitterns causes pain and threatens their survival during long distance car transportation (Thùy Dung 2021). Both acts were criticized by Netizen as animal welfare violations and as ‘inhumane’ or ‘uncivilized’ behaviors.

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Finally, adding to these concerns about animal welfare as well as biodiversity conservation and human health, media narratives often reflect on “ugly behaviors” of littering plastic bags and other trash in mercy releases, which pollute the local environment and kill the released animals and other local animals. Concerns about environmental pollution from plastic bags and other trash as by-products of mercy release have been reported by the media since 2008. In 2008 and 2009, tienphong.vn reported a series of photos showing plastic bags and trash in ponds and lakes in Hanoi after mercy releases. Since then and throughout the 2010s, many other online media sources used photos, video clips, and news articles to repeat narratives about the pollution of plastic bags in water bodies as byproducts of mercy releases. For instance, tuoitre.vn showed a photo story on 26 January 2011 (23 December 2010 in the lunar calendar) of littered plastic bags, containers, and ash after mercy releases in Hanoi—for the first time for this media outlet—with a news article titled, “Têt́ ông Công ông Táo: thả cá, xả rác bừ a bãi” (The Tet of Mr. Cong, Mr. Tao: Releasing Fish, Littering Trash Carelessly). The article began with a two-sentence comment by the reporter: Tập tục thả cá chép phóng sinh trong ngày têt́ ông Công, ông Táo vôń là một ̵ ơ ̉ Hà Nội, hành dộ̵ ng dẹ̵ p, mang nhiêù ý nghı ̃a. Tuy nhiên, nhiêù năm gần dây ̵ ̵ hoạt dộng dó lại rất phản cảm bơ ̉i sự thiêú ý thứ c, trách nhiệm giữ gìn vệ sinh môi trư ờ ng cuả nhiêù ngư ờ i dân. [The practice of mercy release of fish during the Lunar New Year holiday of Mr. Công and Mr. Táo is a beautiful and meaningful act. However, in recent years in Hanoi, that activity is very offensive due to the lack of awareness and responsibility of many people to preserve the local environment.] (Nguyêñ Hà 2011, translation mine)

To expand on this observation, the reporter, Nguyễn Hà, visited and photographed how people threw plastics bags and incense ash into some lakes in Hanoi City such as Giảng Võ, Thành Công, Đống Đa, West Lake, and at two Red River bridges: Long Biên and Chư ơ ng Dư ơ ng. In addition, the article included interviews with bystanders, who tend to connect civilized behaviors with pro-environment acts in a virtue ethics framing of mercy release: “Thật d̵áng buồn là không một ai có ý d̵ịnh mang túi nilông d̵i sau khi thả cá, họ buộc d̵ầy thành cầu, xả cả túi tro xuống lòng sông. Phần lớ n trong số họ d̵ều là nhữ ng ngư ờ i ăn mặc d̵ẹp, lịch sự, d̵i xe máy, ôtô sang

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trọng, vậy mà cứ d̵ến giữ a cầu lại vứ t túi tro, túi cá xuống sông” (Sadly, no one removes the plastic bags from the [environment] after releasing fishes; they filled the bridge, dumping the entire bag into the riverbed. Most of them are well-dressed, polite people with motorbikes and luxury cars; however, every time they arrive to the middle of the bridge, they throw bags of ash and bags of fish into the river) (Mr. Lư ơ ng Thành Biên, 80-year-­old man living near Long Biên Bridge) (Nguyễn Hà 2011, translation mine). The photos of plastic bags left on motorcycle handlebars on Long Biên and Chư ơ ng Dư ơ ng Bridge in Hanoi from these news stories have become the iconic images of “ugly behaviors” by carp (and mercy) release practitioners, and this narrative is popularized and revived in most electronic newspapers and television news on every Lunar New Year. In addition, as a tool of environmental education to raise awareness about environmental protection supporting by the discourses of urban civilization with the appreciation of aesthetic values of the clean environment, media narratives connect the story of inappropriate behaviors of littering during mercy release with uncivilized mindsets and irresponsibility to environmental values in urban settings. More recently, environmental pollution narratives are complemented by more positive images and ideas about possible solutions. In 2014, the media reported for the first time about youth environmental activists and their campaign to resolve the plastic trash problem in Hanoi. Their slogan was “Thả cá, dừ̵ ng thả túi nilon” (Release fish, not plastic bags), which has become a popular slogan in the years since (Trần  Kháng 2014). Since 2014, many electronic newspapers have reported on mercy-release ceremonies along with photos of young volunteer groups translating this slogan into action. The volunteers divide into groups who stand ready on both bridges with a bucket and rope to help people release their animals and collect plastic bags for a cleaner environment. They explain how the activity reduces plastic bag trash and increases survival of animals after release. To illustrate the determination of activists to foster environmentally friendly release practices, Diệu Minh, probably a Vietnamese female pseudonym on phatgiao.org.vn, wrote decisively as a conclusive comment that “Phóng sinh cá chép trong ngày Têt́ ông Công ông Táo là một trong ̵ văn hóa dân gian truyêǹ thông, ́ dừ̵ ng dê̵ ̉ nét văn hóa dó̵ bị nhữ ng nét dẹp ̃ nhiêm ngập bơ ̉i bao túi nilon” (The release of carp during Tết of Mr. Công and Mr. Táo is a beautiful folk tradition that cannot be polluted with

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plastic bags) (Diệu Minh 2020, translations mine). In addition, she proposed that mercy-release practitioners adopt alternative, reusable, and non-plastic bags made of environmentally friendly materials.

6  Cultural and Ethics Narratives Blurring the boundary between the two practices for Kitchen God Ceremony and Buddhist mercy release, cultural narratives on animal mercy release have been portrayed in the media with a strong connection to the national identity of Vietnamese culture. In fact, as an iconic culture, ̵ văn hoá” (a beautiful idenmercy release has been claimed as “một nét dẹp tity of Vietnamese culture) in every media narrative on how to practice animal mercy release culturally. This claim usually connects to “tinh thần hiêú sinh” (the life-affirming spirit), which is deeply embedded in Vietnamese traditional culture of “dân tộc hiêú sinh” (a life-affirming nation) (Thích Tâm Hiệp 2021). As a consequence, the practice has been popularized in the media with symbolic images of Very Important Persons (VIPs) performing the practice. Annually, a traditional pigeon- or carp-­ release ceremony is performed by the Vietnamese President before the Lunar New Year. For instance, vnexpress.vn reported that the late president Trần Đi Quang released white pigeons, symbolic birds of world peace, at the Vaysak festival at Quán Sứ Pagoda in 2016 (Ngọc Thành 2016), and vietnamnet.vn reported that president Nguyêñ Phú Trọng released carp in 2019 (Thái An et  al. 2019—from Thái An, Xuân Quý, Phạm Hải 2019). In addition, US ambassadors Ted Osius and Daniel J.  Kritenbrink released carp before the Lunar New Year (Trúc Quỳnh 2015; Minh Sơ n 2020). As folklore cultural practices, mercy release has become popular for both Vietnamese celebrities (and lay people to perform the practice at weddings and funerals (Vân An 2014; Nguyêñ 2015), at the beginning and in the middle of each lunar month, for new school years, or when opening a new business. In addition to a political will to frame mercy release as a beautiful part of Vietnamese culture, most other narratives centering on folklore culture of mercy release concentrate on the authenticity of the cultural and religious motivations of release and how to practice formally for meeting standards of goodwill or virtue. Typically, mercy release is a part of ceremonial ordinance in Buddhist rituals of praying for peace (cầu an) and/ or spiritual mourning for emancipation (cầu siêu). Based on this typicality,

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Thích Tâm Hiệp (2021) denied that authentic Buddhist mercy release could have a motivation of praying for human welfare (cầu phúc) and interpreted the meaning of the practice as an attitude of appreciation for life and all beings (thái dộ̵ tôn trọng sinh mệnh). Criticizing the act of buying birds in front of a pagoda for mercy release, Thích Giác Quang (2019), Thích Trí Thi ̣nh (as cited in Thùy Dư ơ ng 2020) and the like interpreted the meanings behind mercy release in two layers: the literal meaning is to emancipate or liberate animals from imprisonment or captivity; and the metaphorical meaning is to cleanse a ‘sinful mind’ from greed, envy, competition, revenge, and so on. Thích Trí Thi ̣nh appreciated the profoundness of this metaphorical meaning and rejected the acts of booking or purchasing animals for mercy release as meaningless or fruitless towards achieving this deeper meaning (Thùy Dư ơ ng 2020). The spiritual motivations in both Vietnamese culture and in the formal Buddhist theory of ‘samsara’ and ‘karma’ target for either humans (living or dead souls) or animals (survival or emancipation of life forms) or both. Therefore, except carp release in the late lunar year (23rd Lunar December) as a distinguished cultural spirituality, it is hard to separate spiritual components of culture and religion in other mercy-release practices throughout the year. This entanglement in spiritual motivations and goals of mercy release links cultural narratives to ethics narratives and to environmental narratives in the narratives of “a beautiful cultural identity” and of “ugly behaviors.” As some analyses in the previous section, the ethics narratives on good will or human virtues are not merely connected to cultural values but also intertwined with environmental values. Pro-environment goodwill polarizes cultural and ethics narratives about animal mercy release in Vietnam between reflection on strong cultural ̵ va ̆n hoá” (a beautiful identity of Vietnamese culture values—“một nét dẹp and its “ugly behaviors,” for example, violating animal welfare, questioning whether mercy release with or without virtue spirits is a sin or a blessing [Trúc Phư ơ ng 2019]). On 15 August 2013, Zingnews.vn (anonymous) posted a shocking news article entitled, “Căt́ cụt chim phóng sinh, nhặt vê ̀ bán lại” (Cutting Birds’ Wings, Selling Them) that told a story of mercy-­ release birds that were sold, then recollected and resold to others by merchants in three pagodas in Ho Chi Minh City including Vı ̃nh Nghiêm (District 3), Giác Lâm (Tân Bình District), and Hoằng Pháp (Hóoc Môn District). This news, cited from Infonet, raised issues of animal welfare and

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portrayed wildlife trade as shaped by mercy-release practitioners’ demand for animals to be released (Zingnews.vn 2013, translation mine). In this anonymous article, animal welfare issues emerge in the subtitle, “Giêt́ chim phóng sinh ngay cửa chùa” (Killing Birds for Mercy Release at the Pagoda’s Gates). Birds sold for mercy release in Vı ̃nh Nghiêm Pagoda, District 3 (Chùa Vı ̃nh Nghiêm, Quận 3), were held in high densities in small iron cages such that they suffered injuries and death from overcrowding. Ironically, the bird merchants threw the dead birds into a corner of the pagoda. Wildlife trade issues are conveyed in subtitles like “Mua ̃ (Purchasing for ‘Mercy Release,’ Cultivating ‘phóng sinh’, reo tội lôi” Guilt/Sins). The bird merchants in Giác Lâm Pagoda, Tân Bình District (Chùa Giác Lâm, Quận Tân Bình) had removed the flight feathers on the wings of birds to prevent them from flying away so as to collect them easily after release for resale to other practitioners. According to a pagoda visitor, Mrs. Đỗ Thanh Hư ơ ng from District 3: Việc phóng sinh là vô nghı ̃a, thậm chí trái vớ i Phật pháp vì nghi thứ c này mà nhữ ng con chim tội nghiệp bị giam cầm, bị mua di̵ bán lại. Nhu cầu phóng ̉ chùa. sinh cuả họ dã̵ tạo ra cảnh ngư ờ i mang chim dê̵ ń bán tấp nập ơ ̉ công ̀ chật he ̣p như thê ́ thì khi dư̵ ợc giải thoát Nhữ ng con chim dư̵ ợc nhôt́ trong lông ́ gì là “tái sinh.” cũng chẳng còn sứ c dê̵ ̉ bay nữ a, huông [Mercy release practice is meaningless, even contrary to the Buddha Dharma; because of this ritual, poor birds are imprisoned, sold, and resold. Practitioners’ demands for mercy bird release produced a market with bird merchants bringing birds to sell at the pagoda gate. The birds are locked in such a tight cage, when being freed, they no longer have the power to fly normally, and never become a “rebirth.”] (Zingnews.vn 2013, anonymous; translation mine).

These narratives convey how the act of mercy bird release in the pagoda goes against the original spirit of mercy release and is thus an inauthentic cultural practice that is inappropriate for either cultural or environmental goodwill (e.g. mercy release without conscience, without religious and cultural knowledge). Likewise, following the movie, Chim Phóng Sinh, the issue of whether mercy release is a blessing or a sin played a central role in debates among cultural and ethics narratives about cultural and environmental goodwill or virtues, focusing on mercy release as a moral act. In this line of narrative, authenticity is justified as goodwill and/ or as a virtue. In 2008, Nam

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Thiên, probably a pseudonym, raised the question of delays in bird releases because of long ceremonies and prayers as in the Buddhist festival of Vesak, when animals must linger in cages for a long time before release. In his ̵ post entitled, “Phóng sanh như thê ́ nào mớ i dúng ý nghı ̃a? (How to Practice Mercy Release in a Righteous Way?), he asked if this procedure of mercy release is morally right, and whether the buyers would achieve the blessings they hoped for. Responses to his post pointed out that those acts are not right and do not correspond to authentic Buddhist procedure. Indeed, when buyers get the animals, they must release them immediately because mercy release is intended to nurture our compassion (lòng từ bi). Since practitioners celebrate compassion, they generate empathy for those who suffer, such as animals that practitioners assume are begging for their help because of the sounds or movements that they make. Empathy motivates Buddhist followers’ mercy and incentivizes them to buy animals back to release them into freedom. Delaying mercy release causes more suffering and begging for freedom and is, therefore, more sin than blessing: “Có khi ̉ chờ thầy làm lê ̃ xong, có con thì chêt,́ có con thì què quặt bay di̵ không nôi… ̵ Như vậy, thì lại càng thêm tội chớ nào có phư ớ c dâu!” (Sometimes waiting for the master to finish the ceremony, some animals will die, some others will be so crippled that they cannot fly anymore … If that’s the case, then the act of mercy release is more sin than blessing” (Nam Thiên 2008, translations mine). While this critique targeted the implementing behavior of prayer (deontology ethics), it is likely connected more to the root cause, that is, a lack of goodwill or human virtue (virtue ethics). Many media narratives refer to the origins of a justifiable practice in correlation with a good will spirit as an authentic trait of merciful compassion, a quality for Buddhist virtues. For instance, one instruction titled, “Phóng sinh là tôt́ như ng phải biêt́ cách” (Mercy release is good, provided that you know how) on blogphatgiao.org (anonymous authors 2016) indicates: ̵ Ngày nay, phóng sanh dư ờ ng như dang mất di̵ nét dẹ̵ p và ý nghı ̃a thực thụ cuả nó. Khi việc phóng sanh len lỏi sự vụ lợi, mong cầu và mê tín bên trong. Nêú ̵ phóng sanh không dúng cách chúng ta sẽ không nhận dư̵ ợc phư ớ c báu trọn veṇ ̵ cuả hành dộng thiện lành này và còn hơ n thê ́ nữ a sẽ vô tình gây ra nghiệp sát. [Today, mercy release seems to be losing its beauty and true meaning when self-interest, desire, and superstition integrates into it. If we do not practice mercy release properly, we will not receive the full blessing of this whole-

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some action and even worse, we will unknowingly cause the karma of sin.] (blogphatgiao.org 2016, translations mine).

In order to justify good will as a theorem of authenticity of the mercy spirit that is the guideline of cultural values and virtue ethics, these narratives correlate to the methodology of “how to know what is an authentic mercy spirit.” Central to this methodology, relational values, which derive from the autonomous selfhood of one’s mindset, are indicators and qualities of religious authenticity of mercy practice. Accordingly, these relational values are only shaped by the interaction between the release practitioners and released animals with a self-nourished compassion mind. Without relational values, the good will is not justifiable and violates the criteria of cultural authenticity. Hence, we can understand why media narratives draw on ideas about the cultural authenticity of mercy release to justify the right and wrong position and the right or wrong techniques of release one ought to do. Likewise, utilitarian values are not enough for a right practice because the right one requires virtue values from the good will with both environmental and cultural values. For instance, without animal care that first emerged in Chim Phóng Sinh as a sin or mercy moral act, a basic ethical question challenges the ethical foundation of mercy release: should Vietnamese practitioners maintain this cultural practice, or should they ̃ ̀ Ngu 2013). stop? (e.g. Nguyên Minh Tiến 2007; Quảng Tánh and Huyên This type of question, which increased in frequency in the 2010s, is normally broken down into sub-questions like “the dilemma of buying or not buying animals for mercy release.” In the book emerging on media since 2010s titled, Công dứ̵ c phóng sinh (The Good Deed of Mercy Release), the master clarifies the critique of buying animals but failing to save their lives as follows: ́ dư̵ ợc chı ̉ là một sô ́ ít. Nêú ta Thứ nhất, nhữ ng con vật thả ra mà không sông ́ không làm việc phóng sinh thì tât cả nhữ ng con vật ấy dê̵ ù bị giêt́ hại. Thứ hai, trong nhữ ng con vật thả ra, dù có bị chêt́ thì ít nhất cũng dư̵ ợc chêt́ trong tự do, chêt́ trong môi trư ờ ng thiên nhiên quen thuộc….Thứ ba, dô̵ í vớ i con vật không may chêt́ di̵ thì chúng ta nên thành tâm cầu nguyện sự tôt́ lành cho chúng. [First, just a few of the released animals can survive. If we don’t do the mercy release, all those animals will be killed…. Second, of these released animals, even if they die, they at least die in freedom, die in their familiar

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natural environment…. Third, for the animals that are unfortunately dead, ̃ Minh Tiến 2007: 28–29, we ought to pray for their blessing]. (Nguyên  translation mine).

Responding to the question if Vietnamese people should or should not practice mercy release, ethics narratives can solve the dilemma of buying or not buying animals for release in the new form of “inclusive” virtue ethics, which tends to engage both environmental values and cultural values, while it must blur the utilitarian values. For instance, mercy-release practices like those that are designed and promoted for fish restocking encourage the connection between humans and nature by nurturing compassion and empathy for the released animals as well as their environments. However, when cultural authenticity requires a focus on anthropocentric assessments about the right or wrong ways to approach animal release, the utilitarian values appreciation is justified and the practice delineates the connection between humans and nature and widens the division between them. Without ‘inclusive’ good will or virtues ethics in mind, practitioners merely perform their act of mercy without understanding the meanings of practices to validate their behavior or possibilities to act with biocentric values or anthropocentric values in their mindset. The more they practice, the “uglier” their behaviors become due to their distorted perception of cultural values including false validation and empathy, failing the original purpose of mercy for the released animal. ̀ Ngu (2013) replied to the issue of how to Quảng Tánh and Huyên practice mercy release for the best good deed that ties to above-mentioned good will and authenticity with sincere compassion: ̀ ý kiêń không nên mua chim phóng sanh dư̵ ợc mang dê̵ ń Chúng tôi tán dô̵ ng bán trong chùa. Trư ớ c hêt,́ ngư ờ i phóng sanh thiêú tâm thành, nhân tiện có ngư ờ i mang dê̵ ń bán thì mua phóng sanh luôn nêú không gặp thì thôi. Mặt khác, việc làm này vô tình tiêṕ tay cho nhữ ng ngư ờ i ác tâm, lợi dụng lòng từ ̵ cuả Phật tử, chuyên dánh băt́ một vài loại chim (sẻ, én) dê̵ ̉ phục vụ cho phóng sanh. Ngoài ra, việc mua bán chim cá trong chùa sẽ làm mất di̵ sự tôn nghiêm, ̀ Ngư ờ i Phật tử không thực hành phóng sanh theo thanh tịnh cuả chùa chiên. kiêủ “di ̣ch vụ tận nơ i” này. Nêú phát tâm phóng sanh, hãy ra chợ mua một ̀ chı ̉ cần cách tự nhiên, tuỳ khả năng và tâm nguyện, không cần sô ́ lư ợng nhiêu, ́ ̀ tâm thành. Tu tập từ bi, phóng sanh phải găn liên vớ i trí tuệ thì phư ớ c báo mớ i viên mãn. Nêú chúng ta phóng sanh ngẫu hứ ng và tuỳ tiện thì dê ̃ dàng bị lợi dụng và lẫn quẫn trong việc lý giải cho hành dộ̵ ng cuả mình.

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[We agree that one should not buy the birds being sold in the pagoda. On the one hand, the mercy releasers who buy those birds show their lack of sincerity because they practice in an “arbitrary” manner: when they see someone selling birds, they buy them for release, and if not, they will not do mercy release. On the other hand, this act accidentally encourages malevolent people who take advantage of the Buddhist mercy tradition to catch some types of birds (e.g. sparrows, swallows) for release. In addition, the purchase of birds or fish in a pagoda will reduce the solemnity and tranquility of the pagoda’s ambience. Buddhist followers do not practice this type of “on-site service” mercy release. If one wants to cultivate their merciful mind, they should go to the market to buy animals in a natural way, depending on their capacity and desire, without needing a large number, just with their sincerity. Practicing compassion, with which the mercy release of beings must be integrated along with wisdom, will fulfill our blessing for a good deed. If we practice mercy release spontaneously and arbitrarily, it is not hard for it to be abused and then confusing to explain our actions.] ̀ Ngu 2013; translation mine) (Quảng Tánh and Huyên

In other words, this “ugly behavior” practice empowers the division between humans and nature by increasing wildlife trade and producing environmental problems. With logical recognition, Trần Đình Sơ n, a Vietnamese cultural researcher, raised the question whether this reverse affective division is due to humans themselves or to cultural identity. In the case of mercy release in Vietnam, he argued that the answer was the cultural identity that ties modern Vietnamese people to representative rituals without understanding of its true values and meanings. To avoid further misguided practices due to an obsolete context of cultural authenticity, he proposed abandoning animal mercy release for Lunar New Year celebrations. In his view, this change is necessary simply because in today’s cities, which are distant from the rural landscapes of Vietnam’s past, there are no release sites that are appropriate for animal survival. Furthermore, Minh Thạnh, probably a Vietnamese male pseudonym, commented on phatgiao.org.vn, proposing a “Cẩm nang phóng sinh” (Guidance manual for mercy animal release) to convey authentic Buddhist protocols and correct techniques of release, with specific steps and appropriate release sites). Adopting an ‘inclusive’ virtue ethics to achieve Buddhist compassion, he also suggested a goal would be to “dê̵ ̉ bảo dả̵ m cho việc phóng sinh góp phần vào việc bảo vệ môi trư ờ ng, giữ gìn sự cân Đôỉ Mớ i trư ờ ng, làm phong phú hơ n cá thê ̉ sinh vật và da̵ dạng sinh học” (ensure the contribution of animal mercy release to the protection of the

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environment, the preservation of environmental balance, and the enrichment of organisms and biodiversity) (Minh Thạnh 2013, translation mine). Similarly, Thích Nhật Từ , a head of Giác Ngộ Pagoda in Hochiminh City, criticized booking animals for mercy release as a sin (and certainly not mercy or compassion), because it encourages wildlife trade and he suggested that practitioners practice in a simple way (không rư ờ m rà) when they have the appropriate chance (tuỳ duyên) with the manner of “hoà hợp và dê̵ ̀ cao sự cân bằng môi trư ờ ng” or appreciation for harmony and balance with the environment (Khánh Linh and Anh Tú 2021, translation mine). Moreover, he suggested completely abolishing the practice of mercy release for prayer. To resolve conservation problems caused by mercy releases, Minh Thạnh’s narrative suggests a detailed, conservation-­ based method that aims to turn carefully prepared release ceremonies conservation tools, including: Chọn loài vật gì dê̵ ̉ phóng sinh, ứ ng vớ i sô ́ lư ợng bao nhiêu con/lần phóng sinh là thích hợp; cỡ, dộ̵ tuôỉ cuả sinh vật phóng sinh, nguôǹ cung cấp sinh vật ̵ phóng sinh dáng tin cậy, các phư ơ ng thứ c giữ gìn, bảo quản, vận chuyên̉ sinh ̵ vật dư ợc phóng sinh, phư ơ ng thứ c phóng sinh, kỹ thuật cụ thê ̉ trong việc tiêń ̉ phóng sinh, thờ i gian phóng hành phóng sinh ứ ng vớ i các loài cụ thê,̉ dị̵ a diê̵ m sinh thích hợp, tránh các việc bất lợi như bị sinh vật khác ăn thịt, bị băt́ lại. [Consideration of what species will be selected for release, including estimation of the appropriate number of how many individuals in each release, the size and age of the released animals, reliable suppliers of released animals, methods for care, storage, transportation and transfer of the released animals, the mode of release and the specific technique with respect to species, appropriate location, release time, avoidance of harmful incidents such as being eaten by predators or being recaptured.] (Minh Thạnh 2013, translation mine)

These narratives made their way into a plan for conservation policy in 2017, when the National Fisheries Protection Department signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Association of Buddhism to collaborate and produce guidelines for mercy-release practices to coincide with established fisheries restocking management criteria (Thiện Tâm 2018). Likewise, environmental narratives in the media have captured the attention of younger generations towards public ethics of particular behaviors. Since 2014, a volunteer group of young people launched an annual campaign to help people release carp and animals in many bridges, for

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example, Long Biên Bridge in Hanoi (Trần Kháng 2014). In addition to support for animal release by providing buckets and rope to lower animals safely down to the river, they clean up plastic bags and other litter. Likewise, women from “Hội phụ nữ phư ờ ng” (Ward Women’s Union) in Hanoi stand at release sites to remind practitioners to place their litter into dustbins and to release animals with care. Many media clips and newspaper ́ trư ợt) articles in 2020 highlighted activists using a plastic tube slider (ông to help practitioners safely release fish into lakes and ponds from a distance, preventing some from throwing whole bag of fish into water bodies (Việt Linh 2020). These activities elucidate the impact of three media narratives for an ethical and pro-environment mercy release.

7   Intermingling of Values and Ethics from Media Narratives of Mercy Release Beyond questions of economic subsistence and cultural authenticity, cultural narratives directly connect with environmental and ethics narratives. Chân’s work in the movie Chim phóng sinh portrays the economics of the wildlife trade for animal mercy release in Vietnam: poachers trap birds, then they sell to merchants, and the merchants resell birds to visitors in the pagoda for their mercy release. In addition, Bảy’s advice in the end of the movie (“never trap them”) implies possibilities for positive wildlife conservation outcomes. An environmental narrative on animal conservation therefore emerges through the portrayal of the wildlife trade problem. In this way, the anthropocentric focus on how the poor make a living in cultural narratives also contribute to producing narratives. In terms of ethics, in the movie Chim phóng sinh, Bảy’s empathy for the fate of birds after release is strongly based on the position of biocentric values and the intrinsic values of nature, according to which birds or nature more broadly contain their own values that humans should appreciate. Acceptance that the animal has agency produces human empathy, contrary to human-agency (anthropocentric values that consider birds as a means of livelihood). The advice that “the best mercy practice is to never trap them” is the result of animal care concerns and it judges the morals and ethics related to release activities. In this case, biocentric values in conservation narratives produce moral values in ethics narratives. In other words, to follow virtue ethics is not necessary to keep the fixed position of cultural/utilitarian values (in cultural narratives). Therefore, values and

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ethics are intertwined and they become the major drivers shaping the entanglements of these three narratives. We can visualize this argument in the following texts: Phóng sinh là một việc thiện như ng chính hành dộ̵ ng dó̵ dã̵ tiêṕ tay cho dộ̵ i quân chuyên di̵ san̆ lùng bat́ ̆ các loại chim vào nhữ ng dip̣ lê,̃ vô tình tiêṕ tay cho ̵ nhữ ng ngư ờ i di̵ dánh băt́ gây thêm nghiệp sát, nghiệp giam cầm. …việc phóng sinh cuả mọi ngư ờ i cần hòa hợp và dê̵ ̀ cao sự cân bằng trong môi trư ờ ng. Có nhữ ng vùng cần phục hôì một sô ́ loại sinh vật khác nhau, việc ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ ̵ mua dúng các chung ̉ loại dó và phóng sinh ơ ̉ khu vực dó thì sẽ dem lại dúng giá trị cân bằng hệ sinh thái. Nêú phóng sinh mà lại gây ảnh hư ơ ̉ng dê̵ ń môi trư ờ ng bằng nhữ ng hành vi như xả túi nilon tại các sông hô,̀ vứ t rác bừ a bãi sau khi phóng sinh hay thả nhữ ng sinh vật phóng sinh không phù hợp môi trư ờ ng thì phóng sinh là bi ̣ biêń thành việc làm không tôt.́ [Animal release is a mercy act but this practice encourages hunters and poachers to capture birds on holidays that unwittingly facilitates them to cause more bad karma of slaughtering and imprisonment. …a practitioner’s mercy release must be in harmonious balance with and in appreciation of the environment. For the areas where a number of different species are in need of recovery, a practitioner’s purchase of the right species for mercy release in such areas will bring about the true value of ecological balance. If the mercy release affects the environment by actions such as littering plastic bags into rivers and lakes, dumping waste indiscriminately after release or releasing animals that are not suitable for the environment, then the release act has been transformed into a bad practice.] (Thích Nhật Từ , Head of Giác Ngộ Pagoda, Hochiminh City, cited from Khánh Linh and Anh Tú [2021]; translation mine)

While the ethics narratives of mercy release are represented in the three forms of virtue, deontology, and consequentialism in both of the other two types of narratives, environmental and cultural, virtue ethics in its inclusive form of environment-culture appreciation is the dominant entanglement between environmental values and cultural values. While the two types of narratives maintain their boundaries in terms of goals and motivations for ethical ends in practice, they are embedded with the above-­ mentioned inclusive (or holistic) virtue ethics. Two types of virtue ethics advocates are popularized in media narratives of mercy release: animal

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advocates and goodwill advocates. Animal (or environmental) advocates question the ignorance of practitioners about environmental quality, the welfare of animals, and post-release impacts on biodiversity conservation and pose queries about whether the release is ‘correct’ (merciful instead of sinful), that is, with or without conscience or dignity towards the animal. They argue that ignorance about environmental pollution as a byproduct of mercy release is ethically wrong, distorts the cultural beauty of mercy practices, and turns the practice into an ‘ugly behavior’ against civilized culture and against the environment. In this line of argument, the performance of civilized behavior is another cultural standard to connect environmental and cultural values in one inclusive, holistic form of ethics for mercy release, as found in recent guidance on how to practice mercy release in a righteous and responsible way. Likewise, they argue that false empathy towards animals and the environment will not bring about the desired karmic good deed, but even worse, it produces ‘bad karma.’ This implication connects with Buddha’s opposition to animal sacrifice, a basic ethical code for Buddhist followers. Goodwill advocates question the virtue ethics of animal mercy release in terms of the practitioner’s motivations and selflessness. For these advocates, a ‘correct’ mercy release must originate with a true desire on the part of the practitioner to do a good deed without wanting anything in return (anti-pragmatism or utilitarianism). Therefore, the practice of purchasing animals for mercy release is ethically wrong. Similar to animal advocates, the position of goodwill advocates towards mercy release is also concerned with false empathy or false compassion and connects strongly to the authentic standards of Buddhist teachings. Considering ethical standards and ethical authority, cultural authenticity and personal qualities create an intermingling between animal advocates and goodwill advocates, which can be combined into a holistic authority of practice provided that it includes the legitimacy of purity (from cultural authenticity) and virtue (from goodwill).

8  Conclusions Animal mercy release has been studied internationally through a traditional conservation science research lens. These studies highlight how the practice poses threats to biodiversity conservation such as the pollution of habitats and increased wildlife poaching and trade (Gilbert et al. 2012), as well as the spread of invasive species that may degrade local biodiversity

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and ecosystem quality (Agoramoorthy and Hsu 2007; Everard et al. 2019; Magellan 2019). They therefore argue that mercy release has no value for conservation (HSI 2012; Liu et al. 2012, 2013). However, as the narratives discussed in this paper show, animal mercy release practices are not simply or linearly related to biodiversity conservation goals. Instead, cultural and other values involving people’s well-being and spiritual lives are at odds with, interact with, and may outweigh the negative impacts of animal mercy release for the environment and wildlife. Narratives about mercy-release practices imply both connection to and disconnection from biodiversity conservation in Vietnam. Mercy-release practices can be managed to meet loosely some criteria of biodiversity conservation, especially targeted practices for specific areas or wildlife entities (endangered species, landscapes, ecosystem components and structure), as in the case of the fish restocking program. Mercy release happens beyond traditional spaces and places of conservation such as wildlife refuges or zoos, meaning that the establishment of a conservation-based method of release could guide the public to participate in biodiversity conservation in new, non-traditional spaces. However, the goal of mercy release is centered on cultural practices, which are ultimately anthropocentric and do not privilege intrinsic values of animal life. The three dimensions of media narratives discussed here (environmental values, cultural values, and ethical values) do not operate in exclusion. Rather, they interact to create entangled spaces for dialogue among the environmental movement, culture and religion, and ethical decision-­ making. It is through their connection with each other that we can see both the physical (environmental) and cultural reality of animal mercy-­ release practices in contemporary Vietnam. For instance, the consequences of environmental pollution and invasive species effects are antithetical to the original intention of mercy release to cultivate “compassion.” Ultimately, and perhaps counterintuitively for traditional conservation science, the cultural and ethical aspects of animal mercy release need to be explored further and can certainly not be discounted as potential avenues to reduce negative impacts and generate positive impacts of animal mercy release for environmental conservation. Acknowledgements  I am grateful to the editors of this volume for inviting my contribution, and to my PhD advisor, Dr. Pamela McElwee, for her comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. This research was funded by the Departments of

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Human Ecology and Geography at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and by a WWF Russell E. Train Education for Nature Fellowship.

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PART III

War Narratives and the Environment

Narratives of the Natural World in Vietnamese Postwar Movies (1986–2020) Cam-Giang Hoang

1   Introduction: Vietnamese War Movies and Grand Narratives of the Natural World1 Each year in Vietnam, the mass media recall the “victory day” of April 30, 1975, as the greatest glory of the Vietnam War. During thirty years of war (1945–1975), ten post-war years (1975–1985), and the Đôỉ Mớ i era (1986–2020), state-sponsored war films have been regularly produced to commemorate that historic day. To appeal to a younger audience, orthodox filmmakers try to tell the contemporary generation not to forget their fathers’ great feats and send them “messages of humanitarianism and patriotism” (Nhân Dân Magazine online 2018; Mai 2017). The main 1  This research was solely funded by VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi, under project number ussh-2022.06.

C.-G. Hoang (*) Faculty of Literature and Sino-Nom, University of Social Sciences and Humanities-Vietnam National University (USSH-VNU), Hanoi, Vietnam e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_6

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content of these films is usually the fierce battlefield in the South and the mountains and forests of Trư ờ ng Sơ n, where resources were transferred from the North to the Southern forces.2 In these government-sponsored war films, the filmmakers often turn the Trư ờ ng Sơ n archipelago into a human monument full of romance and epic deeds. These films often feature a heroic atmosphere, with characters representing the community’s quality and splendid settings. We can call these “the war movie genre,” where nature is not considered independently, and the natural scenery is the frame that helps portray the heroes in the battle. These films simultaneously represent the “grand narrative” of the stature and position in their relations with the nonhuman world, which is more metaphorical and symbolic than ontological. The natural beauty, which no bomb or toxin can destroy, seems to be born out of the courageous, optimistic, and future-oriented souls of the people. Its vitality is indicated in the famous verse of Phạm Tiến Duật, “The road to the ̵ lăm), ́ 3 or battlefield this season is stunning” (Đư ờ ng ra trận mùa này dẹp ̃ that of Nguyên Đình Thi, “Seeing you on a high windy place /The red leaves fall in the strange forest” (Gặp em trên cao lộng gió/ Rừ ng lạ ào ào ̵ 4 From this viewpoint, the environment always symbolizes perfect lá dỏ). human beauty, inscribing the image of soldiers onto the Trư ờ ng Sơ n landscape and immortalizing them. The lyrical beauty of the natural landscapes also represents the “nation,” homeland, country, and revolution. Generally, in mainstream art, the scenery is fixed and immutable and portrayed as siding with “our army” or the “right side,” for example in the famous line from a Tố Hữ u’s poem “The forests protect us and traps the enemy” (Rừ ng che bộ dộ̵ i, rừ ng vây quân thù).5 In the same spirit, state-­ sponsored war movies are mostly directed towards a discourse of national pride and foreground the lasting power of mountains and rivers (both in the spiritual and geographical sense), no matter how many changes occur. With mass communication and education, “the pride in the glorious past” 2  “The Ho Chi Minh Trail” or “Trư ờ ng Sơ n Trail,” along with the Trư ờ ng Sơ n mountain range, was a strategic transportation route from the northern rear to the southern battlefield (Military History Institute of Vietnam 2002: 28). 3  This verse is excerpted from a poem named “Trư ờ ng Sơ n Đông, Trư ờ ng Sơ n Tây” [Truong Son East, Truong Son West]  by Phạm Tiến Duật (1969), in Nguyẽ̂n and Nguyẽ̂n (2009: 297). I, Hoang Cam Giang, am the translator of all Vietnamese quotes used in this article. ̵ [The Red Leaves] by Nguyen 4  These verses are excerpted from a poem named “Lá dỏ” Dinh Thi (1974), in Nguyẽ̂n and Nguyẽ̂n (2009: 318). 5 ́  This verse is excerpted from a poem named “Việt Băc” by To Huu (1954), in Hoàng Như Mai et al., Textbook of Literature 12, Volume 1 (2016: 110).

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is a way for cultural managers to create national traditions that young people can rely on against the strong waves of globalization and the dangers of contemporary society such as environmental pollution and the gap between rich and poor (Đỗ and Hà 2006: 11). Given romantic films with ́ (“Miss a backdrop of evergreen forests amid bombs such as Rừ ng O Thăm ́ Tham” Forest), Mảnh trăng cuôi rừ ng (A Crescent Moon in the Woods), Nhữ ng ngư ờ i viêt́ huyêǹ thoại (The Legend Makers), Đư ờ ng thư (The Mail Line), Cuộc dờ̵ i cuả Yêń (Yen’s Life), and Đừ ng dô̵ t́ (Don’t Burn), contemporary viewers (especially the younger generation who has not experienced the war), will perceive the Vietnamese natural world from the perspective of nationalism, as nature and the Vietnamese soul are represented as forever immutable and inviolable even during the deadliest storms of history. This discourse has influenced the way of constructing landscapes in war movies in Vietnam from 1959 to the present day. Since the end of the war, however, especially since the Đôỉ Mớ i period in the 1980s, war films telling small stories of forgotten or marginalized people, creatures, and forests in the context of epic battles have emerged in Vietnam. In these “little narratives,” the relationship between man and nature in wartime is reviewed, reevaluated and questioned, and is portrayed as more profound, more painful, and more challenging. The natural world is not assigned to a stable idea or a fixed political position (us or the enemy) anymore but becomes immense, mysterious, and unpredictable, with its own identity and quality. Starting from Jean-François Lyotard’s idea of “petits récits,” little and local narratives, I use ecological “little narratives” to analyze cinematic narratives about nature in war—a different presence and story hidden by mainstream and popular narratives.6

6  This concept (little narrative), in Lyotard’s words, describes a new mode of thinking that contradicts the idea of “grand narrative”—the great ideologies and philosophies which always have “the unifying and legitimating power” of “speculation and emancipation” (Lyotard 1984: 38). When remaining “the quintessential form of imaginative invention” (Lyotard 1984: 60), the little narratives are “the temporary contract [that] is in practice supplanting permanent institutions in the professional, emotional, sexual, cultural, family, and international domains, as well as in political affairs” (Lyotard 1984: 66), and also “give the public free access to the memory and data banks” (Lyotard 1984: 67.) Instead of constructing the “comprehensive explanations of historical experience” like the metanarrative strategy, the little narratives aim to present “the history of everyday life and of marginalized groups” (Wolin 2021).

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In these small narratives, we also understand more about Vietnamese people’s ecological awareness in the past and present, after going through the most brutal and deadliest war in the history of Vietnam. I would like to apply Lyotard’s terminology to study a set of cross-temporal subjects, based on a compelling and rational argument by Umberto Eco: “We could say that every period has its postmodernism” (Eco 1984: 66). This statement can be interpreted as follows: in every age, there is a sphere outside the center of contemporary discourse of power, where “small stories” emerge that are unaffected by the “grand narratives.” On that basis, I have selected innovative films that are different from the mainstream, between 1986—the beginning of the Đôỉ Mớ i or “renovation” period in Vietnam—and the present. The three films are Nguyêñ Khánh Dư ’s There Is No Horizon (Không có dư̵ ờ ng chân trờ i, 1986) from the beginning of the renovation period; Trần Phư ơ ng’s The Survivor of the Laughing Forest (Ngư ờ i sót lại cuả rừ ng cư ờ i, 1991), immediately after Vietnam opened its doors to the world and started a socialist-oriented market economy; and Đinh Tuấn Vũ’s The Legend of Quan Tien (Truyêǹ thuyêt́ vê ̀ Quán Tiên, 2020), from the time period when Vietnam embraced globalization. All three films are set in the Trư ờ ng Sơ n tropical primeval forest, an essential location for transferring troops and food from the North to the South in Vietnam’s war against the US. For each phase, I analyze how the film directors choose a point of view for dialogue questioning the narratives of previous revolutionary films that featured nature during wartime, and how that point of view is affected by their creative personality and the socio-political circumstances of their period. The term “little narrative” used here is closely linked to the concept of “micro-­ history,” the part of history that is obscured, trapped, and forgotten among mainstream and popular histories.7 The interesting coincidence is that all three films adapted war-themed literary works created by the new generation of Vietnamese writers after Đôỉ Mớ i. With the unique characteristics of film language and the particular reading style of each director, plus the influence of the era that director belongs to, each film creates a unique small story with its images. Each of

7  “Micro-histories are uncertain situations in which individuals strive to manage on their own; [there are] individuals that possess a short-term vision and the dilemma of trying to survive the institutions they cannot understand, which are often perceived as treacherous and dangerous” (Ricoeur and Antohi 2005: 16).

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them also shows ecological discourses that have never appeared in Vietnamese cinema before. When approaching previous studies of these three films, I found that the same tendency guided public awareness of them as of prior war films: that is, nature is always regarded as a still, unchanging, and symbolic background for the people (and their righteousness) in war. In many cases, the “forest” is only referred to as the movie’s general setting. Regarding There Is No Horizon, the website “Một thờ i Hà Nội hát” also indicates that the film explores human destiny in “a small station next to a stream” (Trư ơ ng 2020). The Survivor of the Laughing Forest is summarized as a story of “a weapons warehouse and five young women hiding under the canopy of Trư ờ ng Sơ n forest” (Phim hay dien anh 2016). And Cinema World magazine claims that The Legend of Quan Tien “reflects the tragic fate and the dark experiences of young female volunteers that day” in the “extreme context” of Trư ờ ng Sơ n forest (Vũ 2019). In general, these reviews focus on two aspects: first, the human condition during the war, with Trư ờ ng Sơ n as the original context, compared to previous war films; second, the thrill and fascination of these films, in which old forests and their artifacts act as a backdrop that contributes to the films’ appeal. These claims also show that, although public and media perception registers these films’ specific innovation, it still stops at the surface meaning and uses an anthropocentric basis. At the same time, because the ontology of the natural world in wartime goes unnoticed, the reviews do not really grasp the depth and the innovative and radical characteristics of the narratives in these three films. Using discourse theory along with eco-ethics, ecocriticism, and postmodernism, I will analyze the small narratives and micro-histories in these films, the stories that have been obscured, ignored, or distorted by dominant discourses on ecology in earlier Vietnamese art films.

2  Ecophobia and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder8 All three movies were filmed in the central Trư ờ ng Sơ n, but do not focus on the battlefield itself as many mainstream war movies do. Instead, they are set in remote forest areas away from major roads, where manufacturing 8  According to Simon C. Estok in The Ecophobia Hypothesis, ecophobia is “the irrational fear, dread, dislike, antipathy, apprehension, avoidance, and  indifference towards nature” (Estok 2018: 23).

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or food stations are located. The main characters in these films do not belong to the main forces (“Uncle Ho’s army”) that often bravely go to the battleground and manifest a divine, tragic beauty. They are manufacturers, logistics officers (the sick and the wounded staying behind to help produce food), young volunteers (those who help maintain the arsenal, military equipment, and food stalls), and young women. In other words, they are not typical characters and play minor roles in the war. They also have physical defects or disadvantages related to social status: for example, Khoa, weakened by fever and taken to a camp to be a manufacturer (There Is No Horizon); Ku Xe, who is mocked as an “ethnic person” or Thiet, a deaf soldier (The Legend of Quan Tien). Precisely because of their work and their role, they constitute the rear that is always behind the frontlines of military conflict. While the main armies move forward to fight the enemy, the rear forces are very far away, unaware of where battles are taking place, or where to go. They cannot even inform their distant relatives about their real situation. In short, they seem to stand still in the middle of nowhere, deep in the jungle, trapped and isolated in the wild for a long time. This situation entails that they are more in contact with nature than with the war their comrades and enemies are fighting. From the viewpoint of these supporting characters, the natural world presents itself very differently compared to previous books, poems, and films on wartime Vietnam. For them, the individuals belonging to their faction, nature (the mountains and the creatures), and the US/puppet armies (helicopters, spies, transporting soldiers) become three main forces engaging in these unique narratives of war. The first question is, does nature stand with “our side,” that is, the Viet Cong troops, as portrayed by the mainstream discourses and in absolute harmony with them as represented by the epic/heroic stories? Do the advantages of being “native Vietnamese” help these characters much in their survival in the forests, and are they advantageous, when the concept of “enemy” itself is very complicated?9 And is the common idea that “the forests protect us and traps the enemies” (rừ ng che bộ dộ̵ i, rừ ng vây quân thù) which used to be a great encouragement to “us,” still real? 9  The film not only portrays American soldiers as strangers who are unfamiliar with and trapped by a natural world they don’t understand. The “enemies” of “our side” are also the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) soldiers. They are also Vietnamese and may understand the forest routes no less than the Viet Cong. For example, the intelligence teams making sudden attacks in The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, or the commandos occupying the entire lower section of the river and the people dropping leaflets from above in There Is No Horizon.

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The answers given by these three movies are all consistently negative. First, viewers are shown the traumatic war story of the characters of “our factions,” their terrible suffering during their days in Trư ờ ng Sơ n, not because of their military enemies but because of nature. This dimension had never appeared or been paid attention to in film before 1986. In spite of some familiar scenes, Trư ờ ng Sơ n is not portrayed in these films with a romantic and dreamy atmosphere as in previous films, but is full of tangible and intangible threats and dangers. In There Is No Horizon, for the first time in Vietnamese cinema, we see the dangers, losses, and injuries inflicted on Viet Cong soldiers by the natural world in a naked, direct, and grim way. The film opens with the funeral of Y Nua, a native of the Central Highlands who dies after being crushed by a tree when he tried to save his comrade. His four comrades then bury him in the forest and see him off with gunshots aimed at the air; here, guns are not used to fight the enemy but to perform a funeral rite. The second catastrophic accident happens to Biên, who tries to trap wild chickens and is ambushed by a tiger. The third tragedy is Đàm’s, who suffers from malaria and cannot be cured by herbal medicine. Besides, the death of an unknown person under a forest tree (occupied by termites) is discovered by Mộc and Nga. Nga herself is exhausted, nearly dies, and loses track of her unit in the forest. During the days living at the manufacturing camp, she is also wilted and pale, her hair is dry, and at the end of the film, she escapes from the wood in panic along with her child. In The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, Thảo and the young women at the Laughing Forest station also struggle with recurrent malaria in Trư ờ ng Sơ n. The health and beauty of these teenage girls are also depleted and worn out every day; their hair falls out, and their bodies become thin, pale, fibrous, and lifeless. The director uses a long shot during the scene where Thảo combs her hair; the thick curls are entangled in the comb and fall on the clear stream amidst the beautiful natural scenery. The camera then closes off on Thảo’s dumbfounded face, and her dark, numb eyes, next to the peaceful, smooth sounds of the stream and the waterfall. Interestingly, the young women here suffer from the same disease as the female character in The Legend of Quan Tien: hysteria. They often cannot control their mental state due to living too long and isolated in the forest, away from the external world. Four of them die on their way back to the station in an empty stream. For all the characters, the forest causes physical and biological problems and deep psychological traumas. All of them experience anxiety, insecurity,

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and the fear of being abandoned and losing themselves when they are alone in the jungle for a long time, creating a constant phobia that tortures them. Separation from their peers and comrades causes them increasing confusion and takes away their confidence in the future and the zest for life. In The Legend of Quan Tien, Mùi is pursued by a terrifying, mysterious monkey whenever she is alone near the stream or in the cave, causing her to flee in a panic. Tuyết Lan, just like the characters in The Laughing Forest, struggles with mental illness. Khoa and Nga in There Is No Horizon become so desperate that they leave the station, and eventually, Khoa dies in the stream, with Nga unsure of where to go. The young women in The Survivor of the Laughing Forest caress each other’s bodies to endure their attacks of panic, and they also feel extreme pain when failing to protect Thảo from the assault by the polluted water sources. Mùi in The Legend of Quan Tien is in constant fear caused by insomnia and malnutrition, and Tuyết Lan feels stressed all day and night. These are three rare films among the war films funded by the Vietnamese government that mention and depict the ecophobia of Viet Cong soldiers in the Trư ờ ng Sơ n forest. Embedded in these movies is the fright of the jungle creatures and spaces felt by characters sometimes called “the people coming from the forests.”10 Their ecological terror is even greater and more intense than their fears of the enemies and the battlefield, to the point that it destroys their bodies and souls. An obsessive dread of nature and blame on the nonhuman world for people’s injuries are always connected. This emotional complexity is unexpected compared to the war films discussed in Sect. 1, where a phobia of the environment does not exist in the psychological life of the Viet Cong soldiers who are being celebrated. In There Is No Horizon, the characters repeatedly remind their commanders of the deadly threat the jungle they live in poses. They do not want to “die pathetically in the forest” (chêt́ dấm chêt́ dúi ơ ̉ cái xó rừ ng ̵ mãi này—Khoa); they cannot “just wait here to die or something” (cứ dợi ̵ ̵ ̉ ́ ơ ̉ dây dê chêt cả hay sao—Nga), or they are “too scared to sleep, and dream ́ ̆ nham ́ ̆ mat́ ̆ vào là thấy rơ i xuông ́ vực—m). of falling into a pit” (sợ ngu ̉ lam, 10  This phrase is adapted from the novel, The People Coming from the Forests (Những ngư ờ i di̵ từ trong rừ ng ta), by famous army writer Nguyêñ Minh Châu (Nguyêñ 1982). “The people coming from the forests” is also a prevalent image of revolutionary soldiers hiding in mountains and forests and relates to secret bases, guerrilla fighting, and unexpected ambushes.

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They also resent seeing futile deaths in the forest; in response to a teammate’s demise, they lament: “another guy falls, that’s stupid” (lại thêm ́ một thằng nằm xuông, thật vớ vẩn). They urge their leaders: “leave this place and go somewhere, save the people if you can otherwise let them ̵ mà di̵ di,̵ phải cứ u lấy mọi ngư ờ i, nêú make their own choice” (bỏ dây ̵ ̵ ̵ ̉ không cu ̃ng dê cho họ dư ợc chọn một cái xứ ng dáng). When Đàm is seriously ill, Khoa claims that the civet Đàm brought from the forest “only brings disaster” (con cầy chı ̉ mang tai họa dê̵ ń thôi). It seems that all the loss and despair they have suffered come from the nonhuman world. Therefore, they increasingly keep their distance, become cautious and even resistant to the woods, and insist on preserving the traditional customs of their hometowns.11 The major characters in these films avoid mentioning their lives in the forest to make their relatives in the rear proud, for example, when Đàm writes a letter to his parents before dying of malaria. An image of the RVN military appears dimly at the beginning of the film when voices from a loudspeaker above call them to “return to the national cause” (hãy trơ ̉ vê ̀ vớ i chính nghı ̃a quôć gia). For the soldiers at the manufacturing camp, who have not even “seen an RVN soldier in real life” (chư a nhìn thấy thằng ngụy ngoài dờ̵ i bao giờ ), but “only on TV” (chı ̉ thấy trên TV), they even mistake the straw scarecrows in the field as RVN soldiers and strike them down as if engaging in a mock battle. In other words, Viet Cong soldiers do not see their enemies but only hear their distant voices, while what they directly encounter every day are the forest trees, wild animals, diseases, and the corpses of their comrades. This pattern, over time, transformed their perception to the point where they believe that the forest is a visible enemy or an ally of the enemy that rains down threats from above and brings death. In the last moments of the film, when Mộc (who had previously called most vigorously for “clinging to the forest”) looks around and realizes that he is alone among his teammates’ four graves, he realizes that “there is no horizon,” no way out as the jungle entirely surrounds him. In Trần Phư ơ ng’s movie, the young women also think of the Laughing Forest as the thief of their youth. As soon as Thảo joins them, they worry most about her becoming its victim like them. They are determined to prevent her from washing her hair with spring water, wanting to “protect ̀ a soldier, stops by the station and her hair at all costs.” When Hiên, 11  For instance, when Nga sings Quan họ, dreams of a peaceful river wharf in Băć Ninh and of making Cao Bằng-style rolls.

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witnesses what he perceives as the young women’s hysteria, he cannot help laughing at what he sees. Thảo responds in frustration: “You men try to stay in the jungle together for a long time; then you become the same” ́ The (Các anh cứ thử xem, ơ ̉ thật lâu trong rừ ng vớ i nhau, rôì cu ̃ng thê ́ hêt). paradox here is that they consider the forest an unnatural environment because it hinders and inhibits their standard social relationships (with families, neighbors, lovers). As in There Is No Horizon, they live in a remote mountainous area but always keep a distance from it, still trying as hard as possible to maintain the connection with the delta and city culture. They carry amaranth seeds from the North to plant them in Trư ờ ng Sơ n. They frequently mention their former homes in Hải Phòng, Hà Nội, and Hạ Long with happy and prosperous lives. The Laughing Forest itself is named after the young women’s disease, which seems to be caused by the forest. At the end of the film, while lying on a hospital bed in the city, Thao dreams of a romantic beach, where she and her lover are happily walking hand in hand. In her struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder, Thao flees from the forest as if it were her constant enemy. In The Legend of Quan Tien, the struggle between humans and nonhumans is concretized and intensified most vividly, not least in the psychiatric disorder of Tuyết Lan caused by “the absence of people” when living in a remote place for a long time. Right at the beginning, when chief Lam assigns the task of building Quán Tiên (Fairy Station) to Mùi, she tries to refuse it. The fear of forests that already inhabits her psyche latently manifests itself when her team lives isolated in Trư ờ ng Sơ n. A creepy atmosphere emerges when someone mysteriously moves the young women’s clothes from the creek’s bank to nearby rocks. Then, after Mùi’s dreams of a shadow entering her cave, the ape appears for the first time when Mùi is alone at the brook. He chases her to the cave door with its dangling arms, causing the three young women to panic. Their fear increases when Tuyết Lan tells a story about human-animal sexual relations: “In the old days, when women went into the forest alone, they were raped by a monkey” ̵ bà mà di̵ vào rừ ng một mình, bi ̣ khı ̉ bat́ ̆ dư̵ ợc là nó hiêṕ dâ̵ ́y). (ngày xư a dàn When the monkey reappears several times, the young women ask Lâm to send two male soldiers to hunt it. For Quán Tiên’s inhabitants, the nonhuman creatures in the Trư ờ ng Sơ n represent the wild, brutal, inhuman world, threatening their spirit and body.

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3  Nature as Aggressor and Victim Ecophobia does not express itself only as a vague feeling, but gradually turns into hatred and wariness of the nonhuman world, and nature itself is blamed for the protagonists’ suffering (this can be a kind of “victim-­ blaming”). In the three films, where the forest itself is devastated and poisoned by the US-RVN army, the ecosystem and the Viet Cong soldiers are both victims of war. Instead, the forest is blamed for ruining their lives. The films’ protagonists do not realize that, even though they seem to be living in a completely isolated world under the dense old trees, neither they nor the forest surrounding them can escape the formidable forces of war. Bombs and toxic chemicals are continuously dropped; helicopters roar by day and night to search for Viet Cong soldiers. These military activities burn trees and kill primeval forests, endanger and intoxicate the habitat, and simultaneously destroy VC shelters more  than ever. In The Legend of Quan Tien, a monkey hides from the bombs in the humans’ cave while the humans themselves tremble before the monkey. In The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, the young women are gunned down by a helicopter, merging their blood with the river. And in There Is No Horizon, a soldier falls hard from a raft messing up the brook under the bomb explosion. These scenes demonstrate that humans and nonhumans both become victims of the war. And after the war, both humans and forests suffered from inveterate “post-traumatic injuries.”12 In addition, these are three rare films that refer to the “joint responsibility” of the people on the Viet Cong side in destroying the natural environment of Trư ờ ng Sơ n. Trư ờ ng Sơ n is an ancient forest with its unique biodiversity and ecological environment (Dudley et al. 2012: 139). When North Vietnam’s army opened this route to transfer troops to the southern front (to avoid the fierce raids on the other roads), they also deployed medical, communications, and manufacturing stations as well as food and

12  “The survivors continue to face serious economic, social and environmental problems that the war has caused,” and “[h]ighly-concentrated herbicides not only destroy soil nutrient content and erode the soil, but with monsoon tropical climate, they make it very difficult for the forests to recover” (Vũ 2015: 47). “The almost 6 million ha of commercial forest in South Vietnam were especially hard hit during the Second Indochina War” (Westing 1983: 374). “In other words, they [the US Army’s herbicides] were used as chemical weapons pointed at the environment of the enemy, and they became ecocides” (Robert 2016: 4).

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arms depositories. Inevitably, they caused massive disruption to the lives of its native flora and fauna.13 In There Is No Horizon, the soldiers in the B3 manufacturing camp have to level hills, cut trees, burn fields for farming, and hunt wild animals to provide food for the troops and for their own survival. Many scenes depict the gradients where slash-and-burn techniques were applied, leaving large stumps of trees cut down and burned, the ground arid and gray, and smoke spread all over the place. As is well known, in a forest mother trees are “the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection and sentience” (Simard  2021: 5). Cutting down these big trees also destroys the whole ecological system and “threaten[s] the survival of our forests” (Simard 2021: 6). In another scene, mentioned earlier, Đàm traps and brings a civet to the encampment, and the three soldiers discuss how to handle it: Đàm and Khoa want to kill it, while Biên says he is afraid of “causing a bad omen” (xúi quẩy), so he wants to let it go. They end up keeping it as a pet in the camp. But then, in a fit of anger, Khoa throws away the civet after attempting to “beat it to death” and harshly curses it for betraying its kin, even though it was him who stole it from the forest: “There is no lack of fruits in the forest, but the civet would rather be stuck here eating boiled cassava and excess rice, and I have never seen it longing to return to the forest, to its fellows; what a damned animal!” (Ngoài kia ̵ ngôì ́ ̆ luộc, buộc dâu thiêú gì quả rừ ng thê ́ mà nó cam phận a ̆n cơ m thừ a san ̵ ́ ̀ ́ ̀ ̀ dây, tao chư a hê thây nó có một khát vọng nào hư ớ ng vê vớ i rừ ng, vớ i dô̵ ng ̵ ́ loại, dúng là một con vật khôn nạn!) The violent double standard in the treatment of wildlife by humans, and the imposition of human standards and thinking on nature, make the nonhuman world suffer more immeasurable injuries. In The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, the constant troop movements and the presence of human life also affect the ecological environment. The soldiers still try to collect and plant the seeds they bring from the plains so as to maintain their sense of belonging to their place of origin. The ways in which they live, farm, and sustain themselves as they did in the city/ delta areas, and their attempt to “domesticate” the forests and mountains to overcome their psychological trauma, inevitably disturb the natural 13  The construction of infrastructure such as bridges to facilitate movement caused deforestation, even if it seems insignificant compared to the large-scale destruction inflicted by the US. Besides these impacts of road openings, “the continual movement of troops and war machinery (tanks and artillery pieces) increased the damage” (Robert 2016: 8).

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environment. Moreover, when peace is restored, there is no mention of returning to restore the forest. The neglect of the woods by the young post-war generation is most evident in Thành and his classmates. When the whole class goes to the beautiful scenery of the Silver Waterfall (Tam Đảo), and Thảo says that Trư ờ ng Sơ n also had a Silver Waterfall in the Laughing Forest Station, Thành just laughs at Thảo’s words. He does not show any interest in the space that his lover once lived in and where she fought fiercely for peace. In the end, her stay in the Laughing Forest becomes just another anecdote, a faint and distant memory, without any impact on those living in the present. Similarly, in The Legend of Quan Tien, when the station’s chief, Lâm, decides to send three young women to set up Fairy Station in Trư ờ ng Sơ n, he is attempting to “domesticate” wild nature. He and his comrades subordinate nature to anthropocentric goals and purposes: Quán Tiên is a place for gathering unit members and parking vehicles, collecting water and vegetables, and hunting wild animals, a place full of noise, heat, and constant movement. The very presence of three humans in this deserted place causes significant disturbance to the nonhuman world. It also contributes to the tragedy of the monkey, one of the central characters of the story. Overall, the engineers and volunteer soldier units have a substantial impact on plants, animals, and landscape: they damage the mountain, cut trees to pave the way for the convoys with mines and shovels, construct military, weapons, and food stations, and move tanks and trucks day in and day out. In invading and (accidentally or intentionally) exploiting and destroying the environment, the main characters experience a double challenge: attacks by enemies and retaliation from nature. Some die of forest malaria; some are killed by predators, others by bombs; some develop hysteria, and others cannot stand the situation and disappear. These characters—soldier-­ farmers, liaison officers, women volunteers—do not actively choose to live in the forest, because they only play supporting roles and do not have the right to decide their own actions. In There Is No Horizon, the B3 soldiers must obey the command of their superiors and the will of Captain Mộc despite having to risk their lives in the forest. In The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, despite their struggle with illness and crisis, the young women still adhere to the orders of their superior to protect the arsenal. In The Legend of Quan Tien, three girls, though young and unwilling, still have to obey the somewhat unreasonable orders by station head Lâm when Quán Tiên is constructed.

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But from the standpoint of nature, the very imposition of rules from both the leading and supporting characters forces the forest to bear a similar double burden: sudden violence from bombs and bullets poured down by the Americans every day and gradual disorder caused by the forest dwellers over time. Interestingly, in all three films, nonhuman beings, who rarely appear in war films and are often silent when they do (most of them have symbolic functions), all begin to take on voices, faces, and destinies. In There Is No Horizon, the forest takes the shape of the captured civet and burning tree stumps. In The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, the forest presents itself through a dark blue river and the petals scattered on the water. And in The Legend of Quan Tien, the forest is represented by the monkey who follows the girl and is finally shot, but still haunts the dreams of humans. Nature, which in earlier films was not allowed to function as a narrative character of its own and remained subordinated to human political purposes, takes on an independent role in the discourses of Nguyêñ Khánh Dư , Trần Phư ơ ng, and Đinh Tuấn Vũ. These war narratives not only reflect the psychological and physical traumas that humans (even the winners of a war) suffer due to the pressures of wild space and of living too long in the forests, they also, and more importantly, foreground the “small stories” of the wilderness, trapped, forgotten, and caught up in the battle between warring human factions. At the very least, in these films, viewers are exposed to stories about the vulnerability and power of nature during the war, about eco-­ awareness and the joint responsibility of warring parties that are hidden or ignored in other cinematic works. This fact itself gives rise to the polyphony of these narratives. Compared to the stories of nonhuman creatures that only played marginal roles in previous war films, these movies open up a different reading, a new and suggestive interpretation of the Vietnam War. Notably, they demystify the relationship between “our side” and the living world in the “Socialist Revolutionary Arts” (văn nghệ cách mạng).14 They do not reduce the natural world to an element of grand ideological narratives (“the forest covers our army and traps the enemy”), of epic poetics and romantic inspiration, but allow it to have its own life and stories. This is the beginning of a new aesthetics of war film: ecological aesthetics.

14  “Socialist Revolutionary Arts” were born in the war of national liberation under the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam (1945–1975).

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4  Ecological Aesthetics: Beyond Romance and Epic Commonly, in war films, viewers easily recognize the significant events of history, the vast temporal and spatial movements of the people, and the nation. The films’ rhythm is often rushing, tense, detailing the fierce confrontations between “us” and “the enemy.” People actively participate in the battlefield’s history and spaces, as if they could grasp their own destiny and with an awareness of their central position in history and the cosmos. For example, the film Song to the Front (Trần Đăc,́ 1973) is about a soldier named Nam, who is injured after a big battle and has to be treated at a military station in the middle of the forest. He suffers painful moments caused by his wounds and experiences extreme anxiety because he might be blinded and not allowed to participate in the new campaign. In the end, a stay in a fresh green forest, next to a gentle nurse, helps the hero recover completely so he can return to the battlefield and take part in the new campaign. Bombs are always very far from the healing forest. Similarly, in Miss Tham’s Forest (Hải Ninh, 1968), the forest is always available as an endless resource, with its most solid trees ready for soldiers to cut down so they can pave the way for the timely arrival of convoys transporting weapons to the South. When the battles are over, the forest returns to its origí With the nal state and is even named after the protagonist—Miss Thăm. premise that nothing is more important than human ideals, missions, and combat objectives, nature plays the role of the servant, the supporter of the Viet Cong army, which is always full of energy and fighting spirit. Nature serves as a tool and not a sphere to be protected by humans at war. In the three films I am focusing on here, the script writers have built stories that feature no significant historical event related to their characters’ lives. Instead of military challenges, the characters mainly face daily and ordinary life difficulties, and their arduous yet seemingly minor and dull survival in the middle of the jungle. Their lives are a series of repetitive tasks and routines: planting corn, hunting wild animals, burning trees, taking a bath in the river, or digging the soil to plant vegetables. Life thus goes on slowly as if it would never end; the effects nature has on people, or vice versa, are often described as a long process, accumulating day by day and eventually reaching a state of extremity: for example, the wildfires set by soldiers for agricultural purposes in There Is No Horizon, the young women in The Survivor of the Laughing Forest bathing in a spring and having their hair fall out. The efforts of the people in Quán Tiên to trap the

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monkey chasing Mùi (The Legend of Quan Tien) are all different manifestations of the “slow violence” that gradually erodes the relationship between humans and forests and “out of sight,” “is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2011: 2). It is a violence that is not easily recognized and defined until both the human and nonhuman worlds fall into crisis or death, and the conflict cannot be overcome. In There Is No Horizon, when all his comrades have fallen in the middle of the forest, Mộc realizes he is hopelessly trapped in the wild. The war is officially over for him. In The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, Thao survives and returns to the city, leaving behind her teammates’ graves and the poisoned forest. Still, the mental traumas and obsessions caused by life in the forest prevent her from leading a healthy life anymore. In The Legend of Quan Tien, although the soldiers have defeated the monkey, its silhouette and soul still haunt Mùi in her dreams. The general atmosphere that this way of storytelling produces is not a theatrical atmosphere of beauty, nor a feeling of overwhelming expectation, but suffocation, withering fatigue, insecurity, and helplessness. This storytelling mode also foregrounds entities that usually receive little attention, such as a river, a civet, a monkey, or trees: they too experience the horrific war, just like humans—but they are typically ignored in traditional narratives of war. With this slow violence, Nguyêñ Khánh Dư , Trần Phư ơ ng, and Đinh Tuấn Vũ have proposed a new ecological aesthetic—an aesthetics of slow cinema.15 At the same time, these directors creatively portray nature’s surveillance of humans. They set up natural objects as the foreground (tree arches, orchids, stumps), and the humans in their least defensive state serve as the middle ground when they bathe, work, and play together. Interestingly, the humans are not aware that what they are doing is observed and judged by an invisible force, a power outside the social structure that they always believe in and try to protect. Because of that, we hardly see any images of great revolutionary soldiers standing at the center and transcending nature, controlling and mastering natural resources as in traditional war films, and showing the assertive posture of a triumphant conqueror. 15  “Slow cinema” or “contemplative cinema” is based on the employment of (often remarkably) long takes, de-centered and understated modes of storytelling, and a pronounced emphasis on quietude and the everyday (Flanagan 2008; de Luca and Jorge 2015: 1; Elsaesser 2011: 117). Besides, “while mainstream cinema avoids (or ‘kills’) boredom, slow cinema uses it as an aesthetic strategy” (Caglayan 2016: 66).

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Besides, these three films often include moments when the characters engage in contemplation in the presence of nature.16 Sometimes, the characters sit down and gaze at a waterfall or a horizon for hours without saying a word: Khoa, Nga, and Huy in There Is No Horizon, Thảo in The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, and Mùi in The Legend of Quan Tien. Sometimes, the camera lingers for a long time on completely burned tree stumps under a yellow sky, blue-black streams, or loud and restless rainfall. Creating a silent and almost invisible melancholia arising from the characters’ inner world, these pauses themselves also produce the turning points in storytelling. They are directly related to and awaken ecological awareness. In these storyworlds, nature also has a soul, feelings, perceptions, and its own history. The nonhuman creatures appear vividly material rather than merely symbolic. It is tough to find such contemplative moments in other war films where characters are always caught up in historical events, in the significant and demanding missions, and where it proves challenging for them to slow down and contemplate the injuries to the natural world as well as to themselves. In Vietnam War films created during or after the war, the romanticization (and mythologization) of harmony between humans and nature is always one of the core aspects. The essential characteristic of the romantic spirit is returning to the past and living in an eternally beautiful world. This way of framing nature visually portrays the past world as a perfect, lush, and enduring environment, a vision of a stunning and energetic past world. The brutal, long, and bloody war is not enough to change that fact or leave any consequences, and it is possible to restore the world through human will power. For example, in Whirlwind Season by Hong Sen (1977), the two main characters lie side-by-side in a small boat in the middle of a beautiful lotus lagoon, despite US planes always flying over. The dreamlike beauty of nature is also used as a counterweight against the waves of bombs and storms. It represents optimism, vitality, and belief in the bright future of the Vietnamese people during wartime. The three films I have analyzed here vigorously contest this portrayal of nature, with the film language changing at the same time. First, all three movies use contrasting shots that foreground the transformation of the natural world: for example, one frame shows a green forest and the next one a dry, barren hill; one frame features a calm, 16  These moments do not directly constitute the narrative flow, which only has room for essential events that push the story forward.

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murmuring brook, and the next one a murky stream of water with crushed trees and flowers floating on its surface; one frame focuses on bright sun falling through the canopies of the trees, the next one on a fire and ruined mountains and forests. Nature in these films is no longer an immutable and enduring entity, resilient amid the destruction of bombs. The refusal to turn nature into a picturesque backdrop and the emphasis on its vulnerability instead are crucial components of the new ecological aesthetics in these films. The rough visuality and the slow-paced editing that bears a resemblance to documentaries clearly articulate the movies’ environmental discourses. Through their mise-en-scène, the filmmakers return nature to its wild, pristine, and mysterious origins without polishing or beautifying it. It is easy to see that the primary color of these three films is green. Still, they tend to be dark because the filming is usually done during the late afternoon or night. This choice makes the space appear more massive and mysterious, as if foreshadowing the upcoming dangers for both the human and nonhuman worlds. While using a green color palette for the forests and the soldiers’ uniforms is very common in war movies and often feels dreamy, romantic, and calm, the directors transform the emotional connotation of that palette. In particular, they use deep and extremely wide shots and combine them with exceptionally high or low camera angles, techniques that make the humans and creatures in the forest appear minor, lost, and insecure. For example, in There Is No Horizon, the camera is placed on a treetop in the opening moments of the film and aims at four soldiers burying their teammates’ coffin. In The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, when Tham runs into the jungle after a hysterical breakdown, the camera is placed low and points up to a burned treetop as the smoke makes its imprint on the sky. In The Legend of Quan Tien, the high angle of the camera, combined with its motion, is continuously used to show Mùi’s panicked moments as she tries to escape the monkey’s grip. In these scenes, the natural world no longer appears as a just reward bestowed upon the brave warriors of the faction that is portrayed as righteous, nor as a congenial environment that allows them to rest and relax between battles. In all three films, the forest is no longer a place to nurture romantic and secret loves: on the contrary, when the movies end, we only see the disintegration, collapse, and separation between people. In There Is No Horizon, Nga leaves Mộc and the forest to find a future; in The Survivor of ̀ part by the stream, and the latter the Laughing Forest, Thảo and Hiên never returns; in The Legend of Quan Tien, Quỳnh is killed in action, leaving his lover alone in the mountains of Trư ờ ng Sơ n.

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5  Conclusion Before the three films discussed here appeared, the discourse on the proud achievements of the past in mainstream Vietnamese war films functioned as a popular way for cultural managers to create a national tradition for the younger generation. However, the events of the war, their consequences for both warring factions, and their horrific impacts on the country’s natural environment cannot be erased or denied. Through three “small stories” or “micro-histories” about the Trư ờ ng Sơ n forest, There Is No Horizon, The Survivor of the Laughing Forest, and The Legend of Quan Tien create rare cinematic scenarios that address the ecological traumas from a postwar perspective. They engage with difficult questions that tended to be overlooked in most previous war films: How were the forests regularly intruded upon, exploited, and abused by both warring sides? Why did humans come to fear nature, and how did the natural world respond to them? To what extent do portrayals of a good, harmonious, proximate relationship between the Viet Cong troops and the forest in officially sanctioned cinema, literature, and fine arts correspond to reality? In the three films I have analyzed here, the characters’ obsessions, fears, and anger stem from a misconception of nature and humans’ relationship to it as well as humans’ inability or unwillingness to understand nonhuman species. These shortfalls and misconceptions lead to the ruthless destruction of the environment and wounds that are difficult to heal. Recurring story templates in the portrayal of the past lead to corresponding actions in the present, consciously or consciously. For example, the willingness to sacrifice forests for rice paddies further damages many primary forests during peacetime, including those in the Trư ờ ng Sơ n range (De Koninck 1999; Ngo and Mahdi 2016). In general, at any stage, we always need the small narratives and micro-histories obscured by popular and/or dominant art discourses to reveal a more comprehensive and more profound view of reality. In this case, it is the voice of the forests, land, and rivers during wartime that reveals the consequences of war for nature, for which the humans on either side have to take responsibility and which they need to remediate. Acknowledgements  This research is solely funded by VNU University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Hanoi, under project number ussh-2022.06.

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References ̵ ờ ng diệ ̵ n ảnh” (The Vietnamese Anonymous. 2018. “65 năm—một chặng dư Revolution Cinema Industry: The Steps Follow the Historical Flow). Nhân Dân magazine online. September 3. 2018, www.nhandan.org.vn/megastory/2018/03/29/. Accessed 10 April 2021. Caglayan, Emre. 2016. “The Aesthetics of Boredom: Slow Cinema and the Virtues of the Long Take in Once upon a Time in Anatolia.” The Journal for Movies and Mind X.1: 63–85. Đinh, Tuấn Vũ. 2020. Truyêǹ thuyêt́ vê ̀ Quán Tiên (The Legend of Quan Tien). Hanoi: Hongngat Film and DV&H Creative Studio. Đỗ, Hồng Thái, and Bùi Thi ̣ Thu Hà. 2006. Party Documents in Teaching and Learning History (Van̆ kiện Đảng trong dạy—học lịch sử). University of Education Publishing House. 11. Dudley, Nigel, Rodolphe Schlaepfer, William Jackson, and Jean-Paul Jeanrenaud. 2012. Sue Stolton Forest Quality: Assessing Forests at a Landscape Scale. New York: Routledge. Eco, Umberto. 1984. Postscript to The Name of the Rose. New York: Harcourt. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2011. “Stop/Motion.” Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms. Ed. Eivind Røssaak. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 109–122. Estok, Simon C. 2018. The Ecophobia Hypothesis. New York: Routledge. Flanagan, Matthew. 2008. “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema.” 16:9 6.29: www.16-­9.dk/2008-­11/side11_inenglish.htm. Accessed 10 April 2021. ̃ Đăng Mạnh, Hà Minh Đứ c, Nguyên ̃ Văn Long, and Hoàng, Như Mai, Nguyên Trần Hữ u Tá, eds. 2016 Textbook of Literature 12, Volume 1. Hanoi: Nhà xuất bản Giáo dục (Vietnam Education Publishing House). Koninck, Rodolphe De. 1999. Deforestation in Viet Nam. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. Lyotard, Jean Franςois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Transl. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Luca, Tiago de, and Nuno Barradas Jorge. 2015. Slow Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ̀ thoại’” (When the Young Mai, Hoàng. 2017. “Khi ngư ờ i trẻ 'viết tiếp huyên People Continue to Write Legends). Da Nang Magazine online (5 August): www.baodanang.vn/channel/5414/201708/khi-­nguoi-­tre-­viet-­tiep-­huyen-­ thoai-­2565207/. Accessed 10 April 2021. Ngo, T.D., and Mahdi. 2016. “Targeting Deforestation Through Local Forest Governance in Indonesia and Vietnam.” Redefining Diversity and Dynamics of Natural Resources Management in Asia Vol.1: Sustainable Natural Resources Management in Dynamic Asia. Ed. Ganesh Shivakoti, Ujjwal Pradhan, and Helmi Helmi. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 273–288.

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̃ Khánh Dư . 1986. Không có dư̵ ờ ng chân trờ i (There Is No Horizon). Nguyên, Hanoi: Vietnam Feature Film Studio. ̃ Minh Châu. 1982. The People Coming from the Forests (Những ngư ờ i từ Nguyên, trong rừ ng ra). Hanoi: People’s Army Publishing House. ̃ Sĩ Cứ. 2009. Trường Sơn đường khát vọng. Hà Nội Nguyẽ̂n, Thé  ̂ Kỷ, and Nguyên : Nhà xuá  t̂ bản Chính trị quó̂c gia. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ̵ n ảnh. 2016. The Survivor of the Laughing Forest (Ngư ờ i sót lại cuả Phim hay diệ Rừ ng Cư ờ i). (5 August). http://phimhaydienanh.com/phim-­tinh-­cam-­ nguoi-­sot-­lai-­cua-­rung-­cuoi-­full-­hd-­phim-­viet-­nam-­hay/. Accessed 10 April 2021. Ricoeur, Paul, and Sorin Antohi. 2005. “Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue Between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi.” Transl. Gil Anidjar. Janus Head 8.1: 14–25. Robert, Amélie. 2016. “At the Heart of the Vietnam War: Herbicides, Napalm and Bulldozers Against the A Lư ớ i Mountains.” Journal of Alpine Research 104.1: 1–17. Simard, Suzanne. 2021. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Trần, Phư ơ ng. 1991. Ngư ờ i sót lại cuả Rừ ng Cư ờ i (The Survivor of the Laughing Forest). Hanoi: Motion Picture Studio I. Trư ơ ng, Quý. 2020. “Thanh Quy and a quan họ Bac Ninh Fork Song.” Facebook (11 April): www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=search&v=3353450581403695& external_log_id=197f8c7007bba969ae9e95e70171a918&q=m%E1%B B%99t%20th%E1%BB%9Di%20h%C3%A0%20n%E1%BB%99i%20h%C3%A1t. Accessed 10 April 2021. ̀ cảm hứ ng Vũ, Anh. 2019. “Truyêǹ thuyêt́ vê ̀ Quán Tiên: Xúc dộ̵ ng và truyên cho khán giả” (The Legend of Quan Tien: Touched and Inspired the Audience). The Cinema World Magazine (14 November): www.thegioidienanh.vn/truyen-­thuyet-­ve-­quan-­tien-­xuc-­dong-­va-­truyen-­cam-­hung-­cho-­khan-­ gia-­40884.html. ̉ 2015. “The Impacts of the Vietnam War (1954-1975): Some Vũ, Quang Hiên. Discussion Matters.” Journal of Historical Research 4: 44-55. Westing, Arthur H. 1983. “The Environmental Aftermath of Warfare in Vietnam.” Natural Resources Journal 23.2: 365–389. Wolin, Richard. 2021. “Jean-François Lyotard.” Encyclopedia Britannica. https:// www.britannica.com/biography/Jean-­Francois-­L yotard. Accessed 10 April 2021.

Ecopedagogy, War Memories, and Sensory Experiences of Nature in Contemporary Vietnamese Children’s Literature Montira Rato

1   Ecocriticism and Vietnamese Literature Ecocriticism, which developed first in Western countries, has also been welcomed as a current literary trend in other parts of the world, including Southeast Asia. An example is the special issue of The Journal of Ecocriticism published in March 2018, which presents various aspects of ASEAN literature from ecological perspectives. This publication celebrates the founding of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment-­ Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASLE-ASEAN) and focuses on the relationship between nations and literature of ASEAN countries (Sankaran and Zhengwen 2018: 1). Another example is the book Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures: Histories, Myths and Societies (Chi, Sankaran,

M. Rato (*) Department of Eastern Languages, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_7

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and Kaur 2019), which explores Southeast Asian histories, myths, and societies through the interconnection between nature and literary texts. Still another is Southeast Asian Ecocriticism: Theories, Practices, Prospects, edited by John Charles Ryan (2018), which presents a wide range of topics and literary genres of Southeast Asian traditions concerning the environment. These groundbreaking volumes include chapters on ecology and Vietnamese literature. While many authors focus on environmental losses and the threats imposed by urbanization and industrialization, others present the ways in which nature, ranging from rivers and fields to forests, is portrayed in Vietnamese literary texts, prose, and poetry, mainly with a nostalgic emphasis on childhood memories and the past. In the last two decades, as in other parts of the world and in other Southeast Asian countries, ecocriticism has received considerable attention in Vietnam and has been used as a tool to read and present environmental problems and engagements with nature. Vietnamese literature typically depicts a pastoral atmosphere and life in harmony with nature. Vietnamese writers have traditionally contrasted the breathtaking beauty of nature and the virtuous life of the country with the crowded atmosphere and moral deterioration of the city. Recently, however, environmental issues like deforestation, air pollution, and water pollution have received more attention from Vietnamese writers, critics, and mass media. Research on Vietnamese literature from environmental perspectives has taken place in two areas. First, researchers have focused on how various environments and landscapes are depicted in literary texts and how they are linked to people and cultures in particular places or settings. In short, the relationship between people and the landscape is underlined to enhance environmental awareness and attachment to the locality. For example, Trần Thị Ánh Nguyệt discusses how nature is depicted in the short stories of Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư , a well-known female writer from the Southern part of the country. The author concludes that Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư ’s short stories represent nature as an important factor for a balanced and happy life (Trần Thi ̣ Ánh Nguyệt 2014: 39–50). Another interesting example is Nguyêñ Thị Quế Vân’s analysis of Đoàn Giỏi’s prose fiction from an environmental perspective, which points out how humans can exist only when nature exists (Nguyêñ Thị Quế Vân 2017: 64–69). Second, the fact that ecocriticism has been introduced to Vietnam and applied as a new tool to read and discuss texts and as a new lens through which to understand literary works and the environment demonstrates the increasing concern about environmental deterioration. Many studies focus

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on the ways in which literary texts deal with environmental issues, both explicitly and implicitly. They highlight stakeholders’ perspectives on environmental problems in texts and even how texts would suggest political action or policy recommendations for those problems. A good example is Trần Thị Ánh Nguyệt’s article on deforestation in post-1975 Vietnamese prose fiction. This article shows how environmental problems are portrayed in Vietnamese literature and how Vietnamese writers are aware of environmental issues, which are complicated and related to social issues such as poverty and abuse of power. Towards the end of the article, Trần Thị Ánh Nguyệt emphasizes the role of literature in protecting the ecological system (Trần Thị Ánh Nguyệt, 2017b). Ecocriticism has been embraced by Vietnamese writers and critics for literary production and interpretation. However, while studies on ecocriticism and Vietnamese literature have been increasing, they are still few in number, particularly studies of children’s literature from an ecocritical perspective. Thus, this chapter aims to make a contribution to the ecocritical study of Vietnamese literature through a textual analysis of Nguyêñ Ngọc ́̆ Ma t́̆ Vừ a Mơ ̉ Cửa Sô ̉ Thuần’s acclaimed novel for children, Vừ a Nha m (Open the Window, Eyes Closed), which was first published in 2004. The chapter begins by investigating how natural and historical landscapes are represented and interconnected as well as how war memories and local wisdom are integrated into Vietnamese children’s literature. As Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần points out, losses from the war can be healed by Mother Nature. In this way, the book discusses how a sense of place is created through individual connections and emotional responses to the local environment and the homeland in cultural, geographical, and historical aspects. I will then propose that this novel fulfills an ecopedagogical function as it helps to raise awareness in children and young readers of their relationship with various environments, both natural and social. Through textual analysis of the story, I identify those Vietnamese literary traditions that are maintained and those that are discontinued in Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần’s literary work.

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2  Children’s Literature in the Socio-political Context of Vietnam According to Lã Thị Băć Lý (2017: 5–21), a professor of children’s literature at the University of Education (Hanoi), Vietnamese children’s literature emerged in the early twentieth century during the French colonial period. Before that, there was no clear separation of literary works for readers of different ages. The notion of children’s literature was brought to Vietnam through the introduction and translation of Western works such as the French collection of Livre du petit and La Fontaine’s fables. Children’s literature flourished after the August Revolution of 1945.1 The establishment of Kim Đồng Publishing in 1957 reflected how the communist government paid considerable attention to producing books for children. In 1945, Vietnam, especially the Northern part of the country, was under the control of the Communist government while the French troops still remained in Vietnam. The Communist government launched a campaign to fight against French colonialism. Subsequently, Vietnam faced still another war, widely known as the Vietnam War, or from the Vietnamese ́ Mỹ), which ended perspective, the war against America (Chiêń tranh chông in 1975. During this long period of war, writers were required to take part in the struggle, and literature was expected to unite people in order to win the battle. Under Communist Party guidelines, Vietnamese writers needed to motivate (cô ̉ vũ) the people to take part in the war for the survival of the nation. Artists and writers were not only “artists” (nghệ sı ̃) but had to play the role of “fighters” (chiêń sı ̃) as well. Writers were forced to take part in promoting political propaganda and mobilizing the masses. The necessity of literature to take part in the national struggle was confirmed by Nguyêñ Đình Thi, a poet and leader of several literary organizations. The poet said in an interview: For us a book is a weapon. Our readers know how to use a jungle knife, a hand grenade. They want to have the same trust in what a book says as in their weapons. Writing must support them and strengthen them, must offer them explanations, a point of view. We have founded no literary school. We have no time for experimenting with form, with visionary new literary cre-

1  On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared independence against French colonial rule in Vietnam.

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ations … our literature is intended to be political, to have a practical application. (Weiss 1971: 70–71)

Thus, literature could not separate itself from the wartime context. It is not surprising that stories of war and soldiers occupied a large space in Vietnamese literature, even in children’s literature, especially during the Vietnam War from 1960 to 1975. Because of the wartime context, Vietnamese children’s literature had two main functions: didactic and political. The didactic function was the continuity of Vietnam’s literary tradition. That is to say, the role of literature was to convey morality (văn dı ̃ tải dạ̵ o) and to educate people for the purpose of social stability. As for its political function, literature of any genre was required to take part in the national struggle. Thus, in wartime literary works, child characters are often portrayed as trẻ em-chiêń sı ̃ or child fighters (Lê Thị Băć Lý 2017). However, the political ties between literature and the arts began to be loosened after the Vietnam War ended in 1975 and the country moved towards a new era of economic reform. Under the policy known as Đôỉ Mớ i (Renovation Policy), announced in 1986, the country moved from a centrally controlled to a market economy. Vietnam was in transition from a country of war to one of new development. Literature, including children’s literature, also responded to this economic and social transformation. From the late twentieth to the early twenty-first century, children’s literature in Vietnam has flourished and has been well received by young readers and their parents. This change can be seen in new topics concerning children’s and parents’ interests in new life and hope as a result of economic development after the Renovation policy. Outstanding young writers such as Nguyêñ Nhật Ánh, Nguyêñ Quỳnh, Dư ơ ng Thuấn, Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư , and Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần have emerged, whose works focus on child psychology. Although war memories are still often included, the topics raised in children’s literature are more diverse and responsive to young Vietnamese readers’ hopes, dreams, and fears. In this chapter, the discussion will focus strictly on Nguyêñ Ngọc ́ Ma t̆́ Vừ a Mơ ̉ Cửa Sô ̉ (Open the Thuần famous short novel Vừ a Nhăm Window, Eyes Closed). His works emerged in the early twenty-first century and he soon became a success. Open the Window, Eyes Closed, launched in 2002, has been well received by Vietnamese readers and translated into other languages. It has won numerous literary prizes in Vietnam and abroad, such as the State Prize for Vietnam’s children’s literature in 2002 and Sweden’s Peter Pan Award in 2008. It is remarkable that because of

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the book’s success, Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần appeared on the list of Vietnam’s ten most outstanding young faces in 2004.2 More than twenty editions of the novel have been published, and it has been translated into many languages such as English, Swedish, Korean, and Thai. My discussion and citation of the literary text are based on the English version of the book, translated from Vietnamese by Trư ơ ng Tiếp Trư ơ ng and first published in 2011. The story is narrated by a young boy named Cư ờ ng.3 He tells us about his daily activities, his family members, his friends, and his village surroundings. Apart from his everyday activities, he also tells us about his relations with his friends, neighbors, and even strangers from outside his village. Relationships between human beings and their environments, both natural and historical, are also foregrounded. A picture of Vietnamese village life, which looks peaceful on the surface but dynamic underneath, is vividly portrayed. It is not clearly indicated when the story is set, but it can be gathered from anecdotes that it takes place a few years after the Vietnam War. War memories are still referred to, though they begin to fade away, and the impacts or losses caused by war are still mentioned in the novel. The elements of this story are quite familiar to Vietnamese readers. When composing a story for children, Vietnamese writers always include beautiful vistas with unique local aspects like plants, animals, products, and customs to highlight the Vietnamese concept of tính quê hư ơ ng or homeland. Childhood memories and nostalgia for the past are often romanticized. On the surface, Open the Window, Eyes Closed follows this tradition. However, when looking closely at the details described in the story, one can detect an interesting transformation in perspective: the protagonist of Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần’s story goes beyond the local boundaries of national citizenship as a citizen of the planet. He draws a connection with war memories not to glorify the war but to underline losses and casualties. On the other hand, he portrays the simplicity of village life to show that there is no heroism but that only nature can alleviate the war trauma. 2  This award is annually given to young outstanding Vietnamese with great achievements in different fields like culture and arts, sports, innovation, and social activities. 3  The translator changed the name of the boy, the protagonist and narrator of the story, from Dũng to Cư ờ ng. However, this does not affect the content and plot of the story. The reason for this change may be that readers of English translation are likely to read Dũng as “dung,” which would create an awkward connotation.

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Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần’s work is a confluence of the pastoral depiction of nature and the awareness of changes from the process of urban and industrial development causing negative environmental impacts. Born in a village in Bình Thuận province, located on the country’s south Central coast, Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần’s work reveals his nostalgia for childhood and village life. However, studying in an art school and working in a big city like Ho Chi Minh City, he has also experienced and observed urban life and the growth of industrialization. On one hand, an idealized landscape is depicted, but on the other hand, the depiction is disturbed by anecdotes of losses and tragedies, such as the story of an old man losing his hands and legs during the war, the grief of a woman after the death of her baby, and the death of a Catholic nun. It can be speculated that the writer would like to keep the image of a peaceful landscape and nature, but he does not romanticize it. He realizes that rural life is also rustic and complex, and changes are irresistible. When outsiders like a traveling circus group come to the village, it is a signal that the village will soon be exposed to the outside world. Changes seem inevitable for Vietnam’s rural villages. Vietnam’s environment has been affected by market-oriented economic development and in the longer-­term perspective by wars. The way Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần presents pastoral life in his children’s literary work is to help promote environmental values among his younger readers and highlight Vietnam’s traditional worldview: That is to stay close to nature. We cannot really tell whether or not this is Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần’s intention, but it can be another dimension for readers to examine the implication of his literary text. As the writer himself reveals in an interview, we should “trust the literary work more than the author” (nên tin tác phẩm hơ n là tin nhà văn) (Tuổi Trẻ online, 2009).

3  Homeland and War Memory In Vietnamese literature, the natural landscape is described in order to construct a sense of place and a homeland. Thus, the beautiful descriptions of natural settings like rivers, jungles, mountains, and local plants and flowers are placed alongside images of war relics. By investigating the textual representation of environmental and historical landscapes, I will analyze how a sense of place is created through individual connections and emotional responses to local environments and the homeland in cultural,

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geographical, and historical respects. In the article “Landscape, Identity, and War,” Svend Erik Larsen states that war and landscape are as closely linked as “Siamese twins.” He explains that “[w]ar takes place in a landscape called a battlefield, and the aim of war is to exercise control over a landscape designated a territory” (2004: 469). In this sense, landscape plays a vital role in drawing the boundaries of a local, regional, or national territory. A landscape also helps to legitimize war because of its “double face” as a homeland for those who live there and a “sign of the foreignness and artificiality of others” (Larsen 2004: 482–483). Likewise, in Vietnam’s wartime literature, a sense of homeland (quê hư ơ ng) and fatherland (tô ̉ ́ is often emphasized. quôc) Phạm Văn Đồng, the former prime minister of Vietnam, once said that “revolutionary heroism” (Chu ̉ nghı ̃a anh hùng cách mạng) was a product of the wartime period and an important element in fighting against American troops. Apart from heroic people (nhữ ng ngư ờ i anh hùng), there are also heroic units (dơ̵ n vi ̣ anh hùng) and heroic local districts (di̵ ̣a phư ơ ng anh hùng) (Phạm Văn Đồng 1967: 1–4). Thus, heroism is not limited to human characters but is also applied to descriptions of place and landscape. It is also remarkable that Vietnamese authors use landscape not only to locate a national territory but also to justify the action of war to protect the homeland. At the same time, the foreign troops are depicted not only as “invaders” but also as “alien” to the cultural landscape of the homeland by their look and smell. In Nguyêñ Thi’s short story “Children in the Family” (Nhữ ng ̵ dứ̵ a con trong gia dình), first published in 1966, American soldiers are portrayed through the viewpoint of a Vietnamese girl as strange and disdainful objects: Vật dâ̵ ̀u tiên là xác một thằng Mı ̃, cái nón săt́ của nó dụ̵ ng phải tay Việt. ̵ giày bó giò cuả nó. Rồi thằng thứ ba, thứ Thằng thứ hai, Việt rờ phải dôi tư ...Thằng nào cũng toát ra cái mùi Mı ̃ kì lạ, mùi tanh lạnh của xác chết. [The first object is the dead body of an American. His helmet falls into Việt’s hands. For the second body, Việt examines his pair of shoes wrapped in a banana leaf. Then, the third, the fourth … Each of them has a strange American smell, the fishy and cold smell of corpses.] (Nguyêñ Thi 1985: 184; translation mine)

In short, wartime writers capture the realistic facets of the war through their portrayal of battlefields in different places of the country. Landscape

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is, therefore, not the center of wartime literature but rather a setting for war heroism and national pride. It also provides a platform for characters or individuals to unfold and transform their power, ideology, and imagination under conditions of war. Such settings in literary works play an important role in constructing the boundaries of Vietnam’s national territory and cultural identity through mountains, hills, rivers, and other local landscapes. Most Vietnamese literary works use water, rivers, and mountains as metaphors for the country or the national boundaries or territory that Vietnamese soldiers and citizens need to protect. Huỳnh Sanh Thông explains that in Vietnamese the term nư ớ c refers to a “homeland,” a “country,” and a “nation.” It is an abbreviation of non nư ớ c (mountain and water) and dâ̵ ́t nư ớ c (land and water). The word nư ớ c is used to signify territory and a cultural, historical and spiritual entity (Huỳnh Sanh Thông 1996: 121). The word nư ớ c often appears in combination with other words in phrases like yêu nư ớ c (love the country), mất nư ớ c (lose the country), or cứ u nư ớ c (save the country). Moreover, this word also appears with the word làng (village) as làng nư ớ c (village and country) (Huỳnh Sanh Thông 1996: 121–145). Allusions to mountains and water or rivers are common in Vietnamese war stories. A good example can be seen in the short story “Rừ ng Xà Nu” [Xà Nu Forest], written in 1965. In this story, Nguyên Ngọc describes the patriotism of Tnú, a member of an ethnic minority group, towards the nation by referring to mountains and water: Nó là ngư ờ i Strá mình. Cha mẹ nó chết sớ m, làng Xô-man này nuôi nó. Đờ i nó khổ như ng bụng nó sạch như nư ớ c suối làng ta. Đêm nay tau kê ̉ chuyện nó cho cả làng nghe, dê̵ ̉ mừ ng nó vê ̀ thăm làng. Ngư ờ i Strá ai có cái tai, ai ́ nghe mà nhớ . có cái bụng thư ơ ng núi, thư ơ ng nư ớ c, hãy lăng [He [Tnú] is one of our Strá tribe. His parents died early and the Xô-Man village raised him. His life is miserable, but his heart is as pure as our village’s spring water. Tonight I am talking about him to the whole village in order to welcome him back. Any of the Strá people who have ears and heart must love mountains and water, please listen and remember.] (Nguyên Ngọc 1985: 216, translation mine)

̀ presents various In Open the Window, Eyes Closed, Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuân dimensions of the Vietnamese village landscape, both ecological and historical. Through textual analysis of this novel, I investigate how natural

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and historical landscapes are represented and interconnected as well as how war memories and local wisdom are integrated. In Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần’s story, the picture of war, while still present in the villagers’ memories, is beginning to fade. War is no longer connected with heroic action or glory but with the losses and wounds that the characters must live with. For example, Uncle Hùng, a neighbor and close friend of Cư ờ ng’s family, lost one of his fingers during the war; cut off by a bullet, it lies in a bush at the sand hill (Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần 2011: 26). This case is similar to that of old Tư , the village’s senior member. To save a schoolboy in the village, old Tư lost his legs and arms from an exploding bomb, leaving him only his torso. His hands and feet are buried in a bomb crater. The villagers filled the crater with soil, and then planted a coconut tree there (Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần 2011: 29). In this way, familiar pictures of Vietnamese villages and the countryside are portrayed with local plants like the coconut tree. Influenced by Chinese philosophy, the idea of vạn vật nhất thê ̉ (all things are one) is widely known in Vietnamese society. That is to say, humans (Nhân) cannot separate themselves from Heaven (Thiên) and Earth (Địa) (Lê Thị Diệp 2014: 37), and it is very important to live in harmony with nature rather than to control it. This may explain why the author describes parts of human bodies buried under trees or bushes, showing their limbs or fingers returning to and being taken care of by nature. The depiction of the landscape in this novel is not to highlight local identity or indicate national boundaries. It is rather meant to demonstrate how the remaining war legacy, like the painful memories of the loss of body parts, can be healed by nature, as Uncle Hùng’s finger and Old Tư ’s hands and feet are covered by bushes and coconut trees. Another interesting example is the reference to herbal medicine. When a young boy named Tí is bitten by a snake, he is rescued by a village herbalist and herbal medicine. Here, nature can be seen as a source of healing, both physically and spiritually. Nature helps to save lives and console human souls. Thus, we should be grateful to nature, the novel implies.

4  Coming of Age in the Jungle The jungle often appears in Vietnamese children’s literature as a symbol of adventure and escape, which is a part of a child’s learning process. For example, one of the best-known works of Vietnamese children’s literature, Dê ́ Mèn phiêu lư u ký [The Adventure of Cricket], first published in 1941

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and edited in 1955 by Tô Hoài, shows how the main character, a cricket, grows and learns about things through his adventures in the forest. Đoàn Giỏi’s novel, Đất rừ ng phư ơ ng Nam [Southern Forest], published in 1957, presents a vivid picture of Southern Vietnam’s natural landscape with descriptions of local plants, animals, and customs. The journey of the protagonist, a young boy called An, is comparable to the development of Vietnam’s national revolutionary path, which faced many difficulties before achieving the goals of national independence and a socialist society. Generally speaking, Vietnamese writers tend to allegorize nature to illuminate different characteristics of humanity, or they place nature scenes as obstacles in the protagonist’s path that hinder progress. According to Trần Thị Ánh Nguyệt, in pre-1975 Vietnamese literature, humans are always central in literary works while nature is a setting for the story or a means to depict human characteristics (Trần Thị Ánh Nguyệt 2017a). Even in the twenty-first century, the forest still frequently appears in Vietnamese children’s literature. For instance, Nguyêñ Quỳnh’s 2012 novel for children, Cậu bé ngư ờ i rừ ng [A Forest Boy], draws a picture of the Vietnam-Laos border. The jungle is still filled with mystery and adventure, but it is also described as a refuge and safe zone for a young boy. As an orphan, the boy is lonely and is exploited as a laborer by his relatives, and so he leaves home and decides to take refuge in the jungle. Though it is not easy to live there, he finds it more enjoyable than living in the village. The jungle in Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần’s work is portrayed as a place of mystery and adventure, similar to other Vietnamese works. With the forest as a setting for coming-of-age plots, the characters in such stories usually grow up and overcome all difficulties after getting lost in the jungle, leaving the jungle as winners or heroes. In contrast, Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần’s main characters seem to surrender after their adventures in the forest. In Open the Window, Eyes Closed, Cư ờ ng and his friends also get lost in the jungle and experience fear and worries. He finally takes his friends back to the village by following the fragrance of jasmine flowers. In this story, the characters appear weak, small, and humble—as if they could never triumph over the fearful and unpredictable jungle. But it cannot be said that nature remains central to the plot of Open the Window, Eyes Closed. Nature still serves as a prop or setting for the story, but it is more strongly emphasized and serves to show a more balanced relationship between humans and the natural world. Nature plays an important role not only in setting the scenes but also in influencing the

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protagonist and getting the reader to rethink whether we actually know nature and its unpredictable duality. On one hand, Cư ờ ng and his friends are stunned by the beauty of jungle orchids, but on the other hand, they find out that they must be wary of potential perils in the unknown forest. Thus, nature can be violent and unpredictable in showing its power, and this reminds readers of how small humans are when compared to nature. We cannot always take control, and we are just one of many species on the planet, according to this novel. It is actually the scent of jasmine from the village that guides Cư ờ ng out of the jungle. By following this scent, Cư ờ ng and his friends find a way back to the village. As this detail implies, survival requires staying close to nature and returning to your local environment. Another lesson Cư ờ ng learns from this incident is his love for his family, friends, and neighbors as well as the love he has received from them. He feels more connected to the village and more attached to his local environment.

5  Sensory Experiences Open the Window, Eyes Closed fulfills an ecopedagogical function as it helps bring children and young readers into an awareness of their relationship with both natural and social environments. Throughout the novel, one can see attempts on the part of the characters to live in harmony with nature, animals, and diverse human cultures. For example, Cư ờ ng and his father use their human senses to communicate with nature: Cư ờ ng can close his eyes and identify flowers by their scents, which points to an egalitarian relationship between humans and nature. Another good example is the friendship between young boys and crickets. Thus, polyphonic voices of nature, interspecies relationships, and compassion toward other people reveal the process of awakening environmental consciousness, respect for all life, and hope for a more peaceful and sustainable society. Cư ờ ng’s family has a very large garden where his father grows many kinds of flowers. After returning from his rice field, he always takes Cư ờ ng to the garden, and Cư ờ ng often helps his father with the watering. As the title, Open the Window, Eyes Closed, suggests, sight is not used much in this story, probably because the author wants his main character to establish a deeper contact with nature. Cư ờ ng’s father teaches him to enjoy the beauty of flowers and to be familiar with them not by sight but by the other three senses—touch, smell, and sound. He gets to know flowers by touching them with his hands: “Cư ờ ng closes his eyes, places his hands on

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every flower and tells what flower it is” (Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần 2011: 42). And another part of the story tells us that flowers are nature’s gifts: “Every flower was a small gift. I closed my eyes and touched it, and called out the names of its gifts” (Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần 2011: 48). Cư ờ ng identified the flowers by their smell not to control them but instead to regard them as guides. As the author puts it, “You will never get lost in any garden because flowers will be your guides … the flowers are the true guides” (Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần 2011: 51). This skill becomes very useful to Cư ờ ng as the scent of jasmine helps him find his way home after he and his friends get lost in the jungle: Theo hư ớ ng hoa lài, chúng tôi trì kéo nhau di.̵ Mùi hoa càng lúc càng gần lại. Cây rừ ng giãn ra từ từ và chúng tôi dã̵ nhìn thấy dô̵ ́m sáng từ những ngôi nhà … Tôi cũng chư a bao giờ thấy mùi hoa lài thân thư ơ ng dê̵ ́n vậy. ̵ ợc nữa. (Nguyêñ Ngọc Tôi biết mình sẽ không bao giờ ghét nó dư ̀ Thuân 2012: 76) [We dragged ourselves towards that jasmine scent. As we got nearer and nearer to the scent the thickets gradually began to thin out. Soon we were about to see the lights from the houses … Never before had I found the jasmine scent so lovely. I know now I’d never ever be able to dislike it.] (Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần 2011: 81)

The polyphonic voices of nature provide sound experiences for Cư ờ ng. For instance, in the evening he can hear the crickets’ song, which he describes as “loud but slightly melancholy,” and in the morning he often hears the mooing of Uncle Hùng’s cows (Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần 2011: 68). Apart from these sounds, the sound of rain is also mentioned: “The midnight rains were the most peaceful ones” (Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần 2011: 116). In this novel, sounds are meant to help create a more ecological and peaceful sustainable society. As Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần’s story seeks to show, human souls are nourished by nature’s gifts and beauty. However, in order to experience that beauty offered by nature, it has to be experienced with all senses, not only with the eyes. Interspecies relationships between man and nature are also presented in Open the Window, Eyes Closed. Animals are depicted as gifts. For example, a cow is given as a wedding gift to Uncle Hùng and Aunt Hồng. Throughout the story, crickets are described as good friends of a homeless boy who wanders from one place to another with his blind grandfather.

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He looks different and even strange in the eyes of Cư ờ ng and his friends. The homeless boy also has difficulty making friends with other children. Thus, he becomes a target for teasing and bullying. The boy puts a cricket in a matchbox and carries it around as if the cricket were a friend that he can talk to. When Cư ờ ng and his friends find the homeless boy’s secret box and see that the cricket has died, they try to find another cricket to replace the dead one in order to apologize for their bad words and behavior towards him.

6  Conclusion Even though many areas of the Vietnamese countryside have been transformed and urbanized, and industrial development has caused pollution and ecological imbalance, nature has not disappeared from Vietnamese children’s literature. Literary texts still play an important role in transmitting memories of war and love of the homeland through natural landscapes. Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần’s Open the Window, Eyes Closed reminds readers to be grateful for the sustenance and protection that nature gives us, to learn to appreciate nature for its beauty and nourishment, and to pursue the pleasant sensory experiences of nature, not only by sight but through all of the senses—smell, sound, and touch. Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần presents nature as a source of healing and a means of reconnecting Vietnamese readers with their heroic but painful past. Scenes involving rivers, jungles, gardens, trees, flowers, and animals in this story can be seen as sources of contemplation. Thus, the story aims to fulfill an ecopedagogical function, reminding young readers of their place in the natural order of the planet. Children’s literature can be an effective tool in stimulating environmental awareness among the young generation. Greta Gaard proposes six boundary conditions for an ecopedagogy of children’s environmental literature (2009: 12–14). One of them is “teaching in the social and natural environment” to make children aware of their embeddedness in both these environments. Thus, the novel Open the Window, Eyes Closed, as a literary work, can serve the process of awakening environmental consciousness and thereby an ecopedagogical function. Parts of the story are selected and included in the Vietnamese Grade ̀ 2 textbook (volume II) for Vietnamese schools with the titles, Cánh dô̵ ng ́ ̉ cuả bô [Father’s Rice Field] and Khu vư ờ n tuôi thơ [Childhood’s Garden]. Chapter 5 of the novel is also chosen for the Vietnamese Literature Grade 6 textbook (volume I) (Lý Ngọc, 2021). All selected passages from this

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novel for the national curriculum textbooks engage with nature and local plants, flowers, and animals so as to increase children’s environmental awareness by creating individual connections to places and local environment.

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Đı ̉nh Q. Lê’s The Pure Land and Ecological Phantoms: Levitating Sarcophagi, Submerged Spirits Conor Lauesen

1   Introduction Born in 1968 in Hà Tiên—a province located near the Cambodian border of the southern Vietnamese delta—Đı ̉nh Q. Lê and his family were forced to flee Vietnam when he was a young boy. In interviews, Lê has often recounted this 1978 story of escape from the genocidal campaign of the Khmer Rouge. After some time in a refugee camp in Thailand, Lê and his family eventually found permanent asylum in California. Twenty years later he returned home for the first time. It was during this first return trip in 1998 that Lê visited his families’ grave, a transgenerational locus of loss where five generations of loved ones are buried.

C. Lauesen (*) Art History Department, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, SAIC, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_8

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The Khmer Rouge regime’s power that forced Lê’s family into exile was heightened by the American bombing campaigns that likewise ravaged the countryside. The violence in the border region of the Khmer-­ Viet Mekong Delta, therefore, was multivalent: B52 air raids and the dust clouds of Agent Orange were deployed as tools of US military destruction even as local Khmer Rouge junta forces slaughtered the land and its people. It was only in the year 2000, during a visit to Vietnam, that US president Bill Clinton accepted national responsibility for the more than 2.5 million tons of bombs dropped on politically neutral Cambodia from 1964 to 1975. Previously classified Air Force data confirmed this horrific statistic. Although he was born on the Vietnamese side of the border, Lê spent his formative youth years enmeshed in this historical catastrophe. His monumental installation The Pure Land (2019) is a multimedia project comprised of sculpture and photography that hearkens back to this traumatic landscape (Fig.  1). Shining porcelain-like icons are carefully

Fig. 1  Đı ̉nh Q.  Lê, The Pure Land. Installation view. (Credit from Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand)

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positioned across the floor, and large-scale photographs printed on silver vinyl sheets hang on the red-painted walls. This site-specific installation haunted the gallery space of the Tang Contemporary Art Center in Bangkok during the winter of 2018–2019. What do we see in Lê’s Pure Land? How does the installation reimagine environmental dislocation, dreadful memories, and historic violence? Why does Lê’s 2019 work import a visual vernacular of ecology, the transformative sacred and grotesque narrative fracture? This chapter suggests that through sustained looking and an absorptive bodily engagement, Lê’s Pure Land offers a gothic reconceptualization of landscape and Buddhism, shared trauma, and a collective social past in contemporary Vietnam (see Vann 2019). On first approaching Pure Land, it may appear as if Lê’s spatially conjoined aesthetic objects portray some otherworld of sublime beauty and religious ecstasy. Lê’s sculptures summon a lexicon of both ancient Buddhist iconography and Western baroque sculpture. Indeed, mythmaking and the grotto realm of epiphanic religious statues seem like sensible analogs. Concurrently, the first look at Pure Land could conjure up the visual language of postmodern “shimmer” and gloss, glisten, and polish (Rose 2017: 52). However, Lê’s palette of grays, silvers, and whites functions as a mere nominal device, a formal tool of visual negation. This gossamer shine is one of many thin veneers in Pure Land. Instead, as one continues to look, it becomes clear that Lê’s sense of mechanical precision and 3D-printed technical sleekness is only surface-deep, a base layer of ornamental pretense: the romancing sheen to conceal the larger pathos of his artistic project. Rather, Lê’s Pure Land is a visual elegy, a tactile graveyard of fantastically twinned bodies. The grace of lotus reeds and blossoming petals functions as a visual foil to obscure the pain. Quickly, viewers begin to notice attendant elements of the uncanny on some of the bodies: four arms, one torso, and two heads. In one of Lê’s seven untitled sculptures, a sinewy prepubescent body prostrates inside a lotus bud, his two frontmost hands reverently flipped upwards in a gesture of Buddhist prayer (Fig. 2). In this phantasmatic doubling, Lê’s art installation begins to spawn its redemptive visionary universe. Eminent phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty reminds us that “every perception is a communication or a communion with the world … and the communion has healing factors” (2013: 373). Operating on the edge of this dialogic interfold, Lê’s gestalt sensibility surfaces in The Pure Land. Soon enough, an apparitional effect subsumes the gallery, and the aesthetic forms unveil their pregnant

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Fig. 2  Đı ̉nh Q. Lê, The Pure Land. 2019. Installation view. (Credit from Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand)

spectrality. The photographs and sculptures alike portray the victim-angels of Agent Orange. A palimpsest of calm creatures and hazy aquatic photography, the taboo subjects—guiltless children and voiceless mothers, the toxic fissures of environment and atmosphere—are exposed (see Lê in Paracciani). Cultural anthropologist Mai Lan Gustafsson’s central question in War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam is pertinent here: “If the war haunts Vietnam, who or what haunts the Vietnamese? It is the angry spirits of the dead, or con ma. The millions of dead from the war joined other classes of beings in Vietnam’s otherworld, known as the thê ́giớ i khác” (2009: 11). Although Lê’s miraculous statues and quixotic images purport to stand alone in strange introversion and staid reverie, the gallery space operates as a recuperative community altar and shared space of prayer. Archetypal figures of loss, Lê’s ghost objects gather inward. It is as if the artist’s sleight of hand was only an initial gesture of concealment, a subdued act of repudiation. For witnesses, the belatedness (of circumstantial details) functions as a generative grief, deference imbued with both transformative infinitude and creative sublimation. Enmeshed

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in a process of generative accruing perception, spectators are thrust into the haunted cosmological sphere of Pure Land. In conversation with curator Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani, Lê further highlights this empathic exchange: Coming home [in 1998] I was simply shocked by the many people with deformities begging on the streets. That got my research started, learning more about it, reading about it and meeting up with people for information. That was also difficult because, at that time, this problem was a taboo subject—people were afraid to talk about it. If you did talk about it, people thought they might give birth to a deformed child. So, nobody was talking about it, there was no help for these people. (Paracciani 2019)

As a pantheon of unremembered victims, Lê’s inflected objects slowly accrue fresh gravitas and summon the polyvalent language of shared disfiguration and loss, rebirth, and longing. Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters illuminates the unique quality of haunting “as an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely” (2011: xvi). Lê’s hybrid subjects revel in a similar indexical state of flux: Pure Land, in other words, is a symbiotic ecosystem constitutive of both public mourning and catastrophic loss. Throughout this chapter, I therefore analogously read Lê’s work as an embodied matrix of bereavement, an interwoven communal space and echoing proclamation of spirit solidarity. I suggest that the content and form of Pure Land ultimately dovetail to create a panoramic scene of imaginative regeneration, a novel worldscape most prophetic in its own dense mise-en-scène. Paracciani is helpful when she writes: As early as the 1990s when Lê started his research on this topic, he quickly realized the legacy of Agent Orange had acquired a spiritual dimension, whereby people prayed to the conjoined infants who died, believing they were pure spirits. In life, these infants were dreaded; in death, they are elevated among the deities of the Buddhist pantheon—if only for the people to appease their own fears. (Paracciani 2019)

Pure Land is rhizomatic synthesis. More precisely, Lê’s 2019 project is a conjunction of necromantic Buddhist landscape and a revolutionary future nonsite of emancipation (see Tien 1997). In this mystically structured arena of heterodox Vietnamese selves, queered forms of karmic rebirth and transcendent spiritual identities blossom. What disparate

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stories of shock (both local and universal) are embedded in Lê’s reappropriated images and chimerical figures? How should we best understand the confluences of image and history, materiality and memory, resuscitation and reconciliation floating just below the surface of Pure Land? Where does the story of ecological pollutants emerge in his installation? A revisualization of history and the remaking of dreadful images are the forces that construct this chapter. To approximate the narrative pitch of Lê’s work and the aesthetic intensity of Pure Land, I first carry out a close visual analysis of the exhibition. I formally position the work within a wider framework of grotesque realism, folk gothic, and supernatural narratology. An inchoate multiplicity of strident voices and submerged stories triangulate in Pure Land. Next, I detail the historical background and traumatic social underpinnings of Lê’s 2019 installation piece. At stake is a momentous (and variegated) structure of feeling generated by Lê’s landscape as a collective response to the Agent Orange tragedy. A history of skin and rebirth, the story of Pure Land likewise starts with dust. The slow toxic burn continues today, and in Lê’s work, we see the dead applying pressure on the gruesome microphysics of war. Last, I situate Lê’s personal history as an artist and witness, as Việt Kiêù (overseas Vietnamese) and refugee, and his larger oeuvre in the Buddhist vernacular. Coexistent with the stories of ecological erasure and social fissure burrowed in Lê’s landscape, I situate Pure Land as a commemorative site of ancestral worship, a dominion of transgressive death rites and fluid kinship. Lê’s 2019 project is an emotive cartographic horizon wherein a somatic poiesis dwells and revolutionary, intracorporeal drama unfolds.

2   Đınh ̉ Q. Lê’s Pure Land Installation What is fascinating to me is that some Vietnamese deities also have multiple arms, legs, and heads. This piece grows out of my fascination with the idea of collapsing distance between mythology and reality.—Đı ̉nh Q.  Lê (Paracciani 2019)

The pathos of The Pure Land is a strange visual space most rightly understood as a protean clearing of melancholic disruption in narrative and landscape. Consider the artist’s self-reflexivity in the above epigraph: to enfold truth in fiction, fact in mythos, liberation in suffering. In Lê’s emancipatory vision, a multiplicity of realities and proliferation of limbs

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becomes part and parcel of the everyday. Gustafsson’s War and Shadows shows us that the line between the living and the dead is thin in Vietnam, and I agree with Gordon when she argues that “the ghost is not simply dead or a missing person, but a social figure” (2008: 8). Through Lê’s gestures of defamiliarization, spectators of Pure Land are asked to envision a future beyond the lost histories of these child victims. Dynamic imagistic vectors, in Lê’s Pure Land we are beholden to both the dislocated scars of environmental fracture and future utopic archaeology of the unborn. Gradually we begin to understand how a similar deep confluence of dialectical terms—memory and disavowal, fictional and mimetic, personal and public, dispossession and excess, death and rebirth—dwell inside Lê’s creation. Through sequential displacement and kaleidoscopic distortion, stable notions of common time and terrestrial space evaporate in this ecosphere of shapeshifting tricksters, in an echo of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque: “The grotesque body is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body … the grotesque ignores the impenetrable surface that closes and limits the body as a separate and completed phenomenon” (1984: 317–320). Read as an embodied lacuna of transgenerational grief, Lê’s Pure Land presents a metamorphosis of narrative, a visual entanglement in the romantic grotesque. Where do the biochemical scars of history, spiritual trauma from the delta, and ellipsis of temporal orientation coalesce? What do we see when we look closely at Lê’s juxtaposition of photography and sculpture? We begin from the inside out, both literally and figuratively: our first visual thicket of inquiry are Lê’s porcelain-like white sculptures. Although the individual figures appear atomized in their reticent quiet, Lê’s paranormal forms collectively spring from the spectral life of mud. Nils Bubandt’s Haunted Geologies is right to posit that “mud is cosmopolitical: at once a political symbol and a cosmological agent. The political agency of mud is deeply entangled with the world of spirits” (2017: 135–136). Submerging from the grime and muck of botanical matter, The Pure Land offers these misplaced souls an alternative place of birth. Lê’s calm pictorial sensibilities invent this realm of unreason, and his sculpture Untitled #6 is a personified representation of this love (Fig. 3). The girl’s reflective skin is soothing in the white porcelain finish of Lê’s statues. In Untitled #6, the child’s eyes contemplatively fixate on some distant nowhere as a whimsical braid hangs down her left shoulder.

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Fig. 3  Đı ̉nh Q. Lê, The Pure Land Untitled #6. Installation View. (Credit from Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand)

Kneeling in a blossoming lotus, Lê’s angel-victim is a reborn deity. With a quiet set of hands dignifiedly raised, her body posture is a common mudra position. At heart level, the child’s fingers gently link in an act of dialogic communal prayer. Her thumbs and forefingers barely clasp to form circles that touch: the right hand just faintly faces outward as her left sensitively tilts inward. This Buddhist invocation is often termed “Dharma-chakra Mudra.” A signal of universal instruction, the beneficent mandala wheel of Buddha’s teachings is contained in the girl’s Pure Land pose. A symbol

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of devotional poise and elegant learnedness, Lê’s necromantic sculpture sees between the lines. Now notice an uncanny second posture of raised hands. Emerging from unseen shoulder blades, two additional reverent arms spread like wings. In surrender, this humbling gesture evokes both the horrors of war and the emancipatory release of the divine. The Pure Land is a supernatural landscape of lost clouds and forgotten dreamscape night terrors. Once encased in a casket of trauma, the potent life force of Untitled #6 purports to live again. As if to magically renew her own body, the child’s altruistic mudra teaching posture is doubly imprinted on her own skin. A mirroring shadow of shadows, this interminably generous hand position is written in light along her abdomen. Auto-generative, the circular silhouette tattoo is a twofold echo of darkness. With our heads now bowed, specters from the other side of light begin to beam through Pure Land Untitled #6. Only then can we approach the dancing shadows imprinted on her stomach. In Lê’s fiberglass sculptures, the material plays an ambivalent role. “The combination of the ancient medium of porcelain, with its resilience to time and pressure, and the new, cutting-edge finish of the figures confers a definitive historical narrative to the works,” Lê comments (Paracciani 2019). His keen awareness of loss bends the past, breathes into the atmospheric void of the present, and disorients the prismatic light of the future as he lives in melancholic resistance along with the figures he has created. In The Visceral Logics of Decolonization, Neetu Khanna describes the visceral as “a concentrated site of postcolonial crises,” a potent surface that shuffles “between the materiality and metaphor of bodily life” (2020: 2). Self-conscious organisms of alterity, the crystalline life-formations of The Pure Land are a haptic articulation of this liquescent strangeness. As ruptured embryonic surfaces and latent societal wounds, the limbs of Lê’s project seem to reach out to grasp viewers in a benevolent figure of perichoresis. Khanna also reads the visceral as an “embodied interface that confounds distinctions” (2020: 10). An act of transfiguration, the subversive poetics and communal politics of Lê’s Pure Land activate the phenomenological contours of historical experience: the unborn rise, the dead undead, the living mere simulacra. In this way, the objects of Lê’s work become a redemptive reservoir of humility and grace; their introjected kindness is a reconfiguration of lost selfhood, their dispossession an enactment of liberation. Applying pressure to the “real,” Lê discursively shifts the “creative energy of biological matter without seeking to restore the [racialized] subject to a fictive state of wholeness or integrity” (Khanna

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2020: 30). And any discourse intent to “justly remember” is reversed through a valence of empathy and reception, touch and reorientation (Nguyen 2016: 19). I, too, then ask, importing an alike vernacular of postcolonial theorist Gyanendra Pandey: “When and how do we archive the body as a register of events; or gestures, pauses, gut-reactions; or deep-­ rooted feelings of ecstasy, humiliation, pain?” (quoted in Khanna 2020: 7). Inside Pure Land, an ulterior corporeal logic of occult mysticism blooms. Immersed in this utopian sphere of freedom and nonbinary state of historical resurrection, Lê’s Pure Land suspends narrative progression: pauses and gaps, recursion and futurity replace the linear structure. Instead, a multiplicity of anachronistic ontologies and narrative tropes scaffolds both the form and content of the installation. Rapt with a gothic sense of folk levity in shared suffering, Pure Land revels in its own phantasmatic otherness. In Bakhtin’s words, “dialogic expression is unfinalizable, always incomplete, and productive of further chains of responses: meaning is never closed and always oriented toward the future” (1987: 170). Through Lê’s Pure Land, we witness how the pathos of a work’s creativity can make a world an expressive end in itself. Neither naively idealist nor maudlin, Lê’s melancholic icons drift—their gentle gazing at once confessional and prosecutorial—in a dialogic space beyond the value-­ based demands of blithe market negotiation, utilitarian exchange, or reductive language-based thinking. Ears to the sky and souls to the earth, Lê’s universally resilient objects lift off in a state of ascension.

3  Nature’s Fate: Environmental Conflagration and Photographic Ghosts On red-painted walls hang Lê’s ten large-scale photographs, UV-printed on silver vinyl fabric. Synthetic sheets resembling leathery skin, these watery images secrete questions of living materiality and environmental ruin. In conjunction with re-presenting the myriad scars of Vietnamese social abjection that continue to plague communal order and cultural cohesion, the photography of Pure Land reimagines the inexorable stains of ecological devastation (Fig. 4). Looking closely at Lê’s painterly pictures, we witness a haunted aquatic scene wherein fragmented lotus images and motley slices of vegetal life interfold with historical photographs of malformed fetuses.

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Fig. 4  Đı ̉nh Q. Lê, The Pure Land Untitled #3 (Light from darkness, truth always rises). 2018. UV print on silver vinyl fabric. 116  ×  174  cm. (Credit from Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand)

Superimposed—and acting as a formal bridge between the human and natural environment—Lê’s multilayered (composite and variegated exposure) portrait-landscapes reappropriate the tragic Agent Orange images of Phillip Jones Griffiths (Fig. 5). Whereas Griffiths’ harrowing documentary photography from Từ Dũ Hospital unapologetically shows us the horror, suffering, and tragedy of biochemical violence, Lê’s photographs, instead, present a strange convergence of otherness. A post-apocalyptic union of forgotten human spirits with the flotsam and jetsam of the world’s profuse detrital matter, the large-scale photographs offer an intimate adaptation of the real. Defamiliarizing both the sublime and grotesque, Lê’s photographic portraits meld victim infant bodies and levitational leaves into one; dovetailing, the natural world of earthly debris, dislocated uteri limbs, and virgin skin generate some ulterior cosmology. At stake is not merely the porous membranes of overlain

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Fig. 5  Phillip Jones Griffiths, Deformed Fetuses Preserved in Formaldehyde at the Từ Dũ Hospital, Saigon, Vietnam 1980. (Courtesy of Magnum Photos)

printed images and intertextual interface, but more importantly, the deleterious epidermal stains of skin and infinitely wounded ecological terrain. Call Lê’s suturing vinyl-photography an aesthetics of becoming: to emerge, to surface, to materialize. A form of submergent transmigration, perhaps they also, bespeak an aesthetics of emergency; the micro-gestural profundity of Pure Land, an activating agent of nonhuman thresholds (see Fig. 4). Immersed in Lê’s artistic act of magic, the Vietnamese twentieth-­ century story of dioxin pollutants—a nightmarish memory scape that includes the suffering of children, land destruction, and atmospheric poisons—becomes visually resituated within a landscape of absences and post-­ human actors. In “Untitled #3,” a squeezed fetus hand at far-left quakes with slanting light rays and a nubby bright spot at the center collides with the crevice of a missing shoulder’s fold inside a strand of ripe foliage standing faintly atop an infant’s lost carotid artery shadow. Within the frame, it is as if even discreet internal light sources conjure apparitions of absence. The world speaks. The organic howls. Nature reasserts its primacy.

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The artist commented directly about environmental dislocation and traumatic bodily deformations of Agent Orange in a 2018 interview: “For a long time, Từ Dữ Maternity Hospital [in Saigon] collected the fetuses to study them. These photographs come from that collection. Incidentally when in the 90s I researched conjoined twins the Wall Street Journal estimated a 1000% increase in Siamese twins in Vietnam” (Paracciani 2019). Although photojournalist Phillip Jones Griffiths’ disturbing pictures are some of the only visual documents that remain of these malformed Agent Orange fetuses, Lê’s Pure Land is a kindred evocation of lost souls from this violent past. Reappropriated images, the gothic photographs of compassion collapse any simple logos of legible environmental residue or temporal narrative convention. It was also not by accident the artist selected to mobilize one of the world’s most highly produced plastic materials—temperature-resistant vinyl—when printing the large-scale images. Intermedial visual montage, the translucent UV photographs are thus metonymically entwined with the tactile chemical universe of this high-strength thermoplastic polymer: in other words, form and content alike contain a melancholic pathos of engineered catastrophe and environmental dislocation. Within this viscous melding of fertile biochemical pastes, Lê’s reincarnate Buddhist ethos transfigures warped infant images: Pure Land is an imaginative tableau of reappropriation and regrowth wherein fetal decay is fantastically reborn in an alternative microcosm: Through the photographs I want to express how these children are like the lotus, symbolizing purity from earthly sins in Buddhist tradition, emerging in beautiful full bloom from muddy water. Born of contaminated soil and beneath the water, these children are pure, and they emerge pure. That’s why in the whole show all the figures are children, either fetuses or infants. (Lê in Paracciani)

Comparable to the animate ecological holocaust and narrative elements in Lê’s Pure Land installation, the history of Agent Orange warfare in Vietnam is also a residual eco-palimpsest. During the ten-year period between 1961 and 1971, the United States government and military deployed a program of biochemical destruction on the people and land of Vietnam. Labeled “Operation Ranch Hand,” the aerial bombardment now generally referred to as Agent Orange consisted primarily of six defoliants and herbicides. With their goals of eradicating vegetation,

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defoliating essential crops, and exposing Viet Cong soldiers, US military missions were biologically reprehensible from inception. It makes some kind of degenerate sense that the branded fuselage logo on planes carrying the dioxin canisters read ‘Only We Can Prevent Forests,’ a sinister pun on the US Forest Service’s Smokey Bear (Lewis 2006): 599. Diane Niblack Fox writes, “US military records show that 30–50 percent of the coastal mangroves were destroyed, along with roughly 24 percent of the upland forests and 4 percent of the total crops. The ballpark figure given for chemical devastation of the south as a whole is 10 percent; in some provinces, 50 percent of the vegetation was laid waste” (2013: 213). An anonymous drawing published during the 1960s massive US aerial campaigns of Agent Orange (Fig. 6) is representative of the environmental catastrophe. In this terrifying propagandistic sketch, a lone wanderer, another reductive version of some northern Viet Cong soldier in black pants, is suffocated by the toxic limbs of animate tree branches. A once fecund landscape of green transformed into a barren spectral moonscape. The caption reads: “Deep in the forest no one will know of your death; there will be no one to share in your grief” (Không ai biêt́ tớ i ́ In the hellish cái chêt́ cuả các bạn trong rừ ng sâu: Không ai thư ơ ng tiêc). atomic landscape, two snakes ensnare the feet of the helpless figure, and a virulent arabesque force envelops the scene. The ghoulish bark and phantom ecosystem of this caricature sketch is an X-rated version of the desolate Cà Mau landscape photograph below. This historical picture of a lone child in a barren landscape records the isolated human interaction with this devastated space (Fig. 7). The setting of this anonymous image is the southernmost Vietnamese Delta—a once-­ verdant course of waterways, foliage, and aquatic life—is a region bordering Lê’s familial home. The formal similarities between the Cà Mau picture and Lê’s Pure Land photography are plain: the organic subject matter, black and white tonality, analogous horizontal orientation, exiled human presence, a discreet aquatic site. However, whereas the fright of both arrests our vision by signaling the environmental horrors of Agent Orange, the affrontness of Lê’s photography obfuscates the wider ecological surroundings; in other words, this proximate nearness adjudicates any traditional landscape and instead emotively saturates the frames with the detrital zeitgeist. Lê’s Pure Land photographs are anti-heroic, their remoteness an active animus of erasure where illegibility is paramount and curiosity supreme.

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Fig. 6  Anonymous illustration. Psychological Warfare Posters Promoting the US-South Vietnamese Cause During the Vietnam War, 1965–1969 (photo no. 306-VP). (Courtesy National Archives)

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Fig. 7  Anonymous photograph, Cà Mau. (Courtesy of the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam)

On the contrary, the Cà Mau picture immediately reveals an unadulterated scene of natural horror. Enveloped in this ruinous garden, a viscous pool of water marks the foreground; a sole tree trunk, fallen and parallel, encloses the brackish pond and denotes topographical space; behind and encompassing the lot, some devilish fleet of mangrove boughs extend their shredded limbs upward (anthropomorphically) beyond the muted horizon line. Encased within their wooden skeletal reach and amidst this grove of macabre totems, viewers are offered a glimpse into the uncanny. At the center, however, a lone shirtless young boy—standing just beside and in rhyme with the bulbous and gloomy tree stump—situates us straightaway, albeit demonically disorienting, inside the ground of the living world. An adrift sentinel, it is as if this child is some guardian to our lost earth. To look (or stand watch) within the haze of this metallic delta is to see into the prismatic fissures of an obsidian mirror, a landscape erupted in chemical dioxin vapors. No redemption. The obliterated terrestrial realm—a photograph in situ at the War Remnants Museum in

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Fig. 8  Đı ̉nh Q. Lê, The Pure Land Untitled #8 (Light from darkness, truth always rises). 2018. UV print on silver vinyl fabric. 116  ×  174  cm. (Credit from Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok, Thailand)

Saigon—is only a semblance of the land that was. Yet perhaps lodged, scattered, or sunken, somewhere within the Cà Mau scene of horror lie the emergent seeds of Đı ̉nh Q Lê’s future Pure Land installation. Let us return now to Lê’s pictures. In Untitled #8 (Light from darkness, truth always rises), we singularly confront the muddled primeval palimpsest of Pure Land earth and incarnate (Fig. 8). An infant’s phantom hand reaches to block her eyes. Covering vision from the horrors of life, she lies on her back. Perspectival arrangement implodes in Lê’s photograph as viewers are asked to turn their bodies and torque their heads: only then do we begin to vaguely see the tilted horizontal frame and mournful face of our infant subject. In the foreground and at the far right above her scalp, a fuzzy stem seems to extend upwards; an overlaid image of a different stringy seedling traverses the child’s left arm and leads our eyes to some imprecisely warped diamond plant blossom.

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At the bottom, the silhouette curvature of the baby’s mid-back is a barely visible contour. The faded form accentuated by a ladder of darkened shade lines vertically enshrouds the child’s profile. With knees bent, the infant’s ghostly feet disappear amongst an iridescent nest of silver environmental debris. The vertigo animacy of geologic life in Untitled #8 is a chiaroscuro cloud of grief wherein depth, scale, and size congregate in novel alignment. Meanwhile, the metallic wallpaper-like backdrop is a hallucinatory mosaic abyss of laced ecological shapes. Ceremoniously alone, each of Lê’s ten Pure Land photographs depicts a similar accumulation of suffering. Environment shattered in perpetuity and unknowable lives lost, the artistic work is a liquid nightmare memory only temporarily solidified in material form. Jinah Kim’s analysis of postcolonial grief and memory-building as a structure in Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas (2019) begins with the question, “What kind of transformative politics is enacted when we name the deaths of those considered unworthy of mourning and remembering” (1). I suggest we see Lê’s contiguous subjects—in union with the multigenerational tragedy of chemical defoliants across Vietnam and the technologies of war that made ecological devastation possible—as kindred portraits of “unworthy death.” Even more specifically, I want to mobilize Kim’s notion of transpacific noir, “a genre full of broken and degraded bodies, which makes visible the necropolitical that structures US military dominance in the Pacific arena during and after the World War II era” (68–69). Let us understand Lê’s project, too, as a site of “postcolonial grief,” labeling the scars of Agent Orange as palpable remnants of necropolitical trauma. In excavating “sites of unhealing [as] the locus of both loss and creativity,” Kim presents a reorientation of art and literature that ultimately enables what Gordon calls “transformative recognition” (2008: 66). Correspondingly, Lê’s Pure Land traces this compelling figuration of the ghost in a hungry state of feeding while also reimagining the damaged bodies, fractured landscapes, and misplaced spirits of chemical warfare. “This redemption involves refusing the death sentence and its doom, involves refusing to be treated as if one was never born, fated to a life of abandonment and spectrality” (2011: 15). Lê’s necromantic sculpture and photography, in other words, contest the dominant global narrative of American empire-building and blasé cosmopolitan trends of fetishistic mass-production, and also resist—in their furtive spectrality—the vulgar tropes “upheld by the ritualistic production of the Asian body as one in

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pain and in need of rescue” that impede communal mourning (Kim 2019: 2). From a certain vantage, I want to last read Lê’s Untitled #8 as a prenatal version of the reclining Buddha. In Buddhist theology, the resting posture is often an auspicious indicator of true earthly liberation: the Buddha’s symbolic sleeping pose signals an imminent transfiguration into the Pari-­ nirvana realm of the afterworld. Correspondingly, Lê’s inversion of the holy icon and spiritual precept in Pure Land Untitled #8 intimates a similar transition to a post-karmic state of equilibrium for the angel-victims of Agent Orange. It is not surprising, therefore, that in Buddhist philosophy, the Pure Land is a metaphysical paradise beyond the hills in the West. The religious goal of all earthly beings is to be reborn in this state of bliss: in brief, the Pure Land is a final celestial place beyond samsaric reincarnation, an otherworld of consecrated beings outside of our earthly plane of suffering. Lê’s Lotus Land (1999) is an almost exactly analogous early intervention: a pictorial representation of the trauma and rebirth of Agent Orange, an artistic iteration of cyclical redemption (Fig. 9). In a 2001 interview,

Fig. 9  Đı ̉nh Q.  Lê, Lotus Land (Monsanto & Uniroyal Chemicals), 1999. Fiberglass, polymer, wood, paint. Approximately 36 × 24 × 24 in. (Courtesy of Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica)

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the artist himself explained the pathos of this installation and its tragic approximation of Agent Orange: The piece is about the birth defects in Vietnam as a result of the chemical defoliant [Agent Orange] used by the US Army during the Vietnam War. One of the effects has been a tremendous increase in Siamese twins born in Vietnam … Most of the twins do not survive due to limited expertise and facilities here. I have found that in some villages where the children are born, they are starting to worship them. The villagers believe that the children are special spirits. (Lê, quoted in Roth 2001: 46)

While phenomenologically Lotus Land lacks the emotive gravitas of Pure Land, viewing the two works in tandem exposes the artist’s scope of commitments when reimagining the past: memory and war, meaning and sorrow converge in Lê’s landscapes. The Italian scholar A. Ponzio (2016) argues that “the body as presented by grotesque realism is undefined, unconfined to itself, a body in relation of symbiosis with other bodies, of transformation and renewal through which the limits of individual life— and this is the essential point—are continually transcended” (10). In Lê’s recursively twinning praxis of emancipatory aesthetics and communal rendezvous, he returns to the most prescient forces of his work.

4   Buddhist Cosmology and Vietnamese Ancestral Devotion Without attributing simplistic psychological motivations to Lê’s work, it seems reasonable to conclude that parts of Lê’s personal narrative—most especially his early experiences of communal violence and traumatic psychocultural displacement—have come to inform his artistic output. The visuality of his oeuvre attests to this, and much of his individual artistic work speaks (at times directly and often indirectly) to myriad forms of transnational violence affecting both the landscape and daily life of his youth. In a 2018 Pure Land conversation, Lê’s reflections on time and fragility, materiality and resilience are explicit: I have always been fascinated with porcelain and ceramic. Ceramic is quite fragile, but also very hard, very strong. It is the duality of ceramic. In particular, ceramic can endure through centuries and still look exactly like the day fresh out of the kiln. It has this amazing ability to survive but at the same

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time it is so fragile … Amid this long, drawn-out destruction these 800-year-­ old objects managed to survive. That is what amazes me, this ability to be so fragile and somehow survive. The same could be said of these children, who have had to live with these deformities, so fragile yet so strong and resilient. (Paracciani 2019)

This temporal endurance also informs Lê’s 2001 installation Một Cõi Đi Vê.̀ Deemed an international success, the title Một Cõi Đi Vê ̀ [“An Eventual Return Home”] references both Vietnamese folk singer Tri ̣nh Công Sơ n and Buddhist philosophy. The work began with an intimate, private collection of family photographs and soon developed into a larger installation piece populated with pictures of strangers—the majority of photos purchased from second-hand and antique stores scattered around Saigon at the turn of the twenty-first century. The most compelling visual iteration of this original program was installed at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2018 and entitled “Đı ̉nh Q. Lê: True Journey is Return” (https://sjmusart.org/exhibition/Đı ̉nh-­q-­le-­true-­journey-­return). Using around 1500 old family photographs, Lê created a quilt of visual artifacts and soft memory. A remapping of the past, this cascading vertical tapestry conjures eerily parallel objects of memento mori: a diaphanous bricolage of reappropriated images, fragmented lines of text, and adhesive strings form a liquescent mirage of remembrance. The artist’s resolute commitments to intermedial objects, multivalent narratives, and temporal disjuncture—motifs already on display in this early work—remain emblematic of Lê’s aesthetic sensibilities. During a 2010 Art Info interview, Lê further revealed the pathos and roots of his creative building process in his levitating sheets. “The photo-weaving is a weaving of narratives from three different sources, Hollywood movie images, documentary images, and family pictures woven into this tapestry of memories and fictions that all merge together” (Allen 2010). As in the uncanny mood evoked in The Pure Land, observers are enveloped in an austere space of contemplation. Lê’s persistent preoccupations with memory and loss were again the generative impetus for the project with its devotional mourning nests and reimagined domestic sites of melancholy. A different iteration of heterogeneous communion, these resplendent paper houses of light provide a last resting place for the many nameless, faceless casualties of war. Let us also recall that during the early 2000s, village communal houses and family ancestral shrines were rebuilt across Vietnam. Through a process of efficacious social engagement, the once-forbidden dominion of

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ancestor worship, hungry ghosts, and lost Buddhist souls was reactivated across the contemporary Vietnamese landscape. The Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vư ơ ng’s analysis of splintered time and the ghosts of stillness are perceptive in this case: “In Buddhism, it is believed that when one dies a tragic, emotional, or sudden death, the spirit might not realize it has died at all—and so it’s imperative to remind that person of their present, bodiless state. It is also believed that when the body perishes, one’s hearing ability is heightened, since the spirit becomes more air-like and can therefore hear with its entire being” (2017: 373). Empathically aligned with the lingering shards of time, Lê’s chimerical objects tend to listen in this vibrant web of syncretic cosmology and trans-familial sacred practice. In Vietnamese Buddhism, the concept of the Pure Land is complex. The term refers to both a central sect and a teaching process in Vietnam, as well as a blessed site of Buddhist invocation; the idea is at once celestial and infinite, praxis and custom. In this harmonious otherworld, emancipated Pure Land spirits hover together in a forcefield of benevolence (Fig. 10). The Pure Land is a holy tableau replete with regenerated icons of kindness. “Along with this popular form of Pure Land, there is also a higher aspect, in which Amitabha, the Buddha of Infinite Light and Life, is equated with our Buddha Nature, infinitely bright and everlasting” (Tien Ju 1997: 11). The Vietnamese Buddhist incantation “A Di Đà Phật” approximates this figure of divine synchronicity. Within this meta-­ utterance of unbounded goodness resides the Amida Buddha, an icon of infinite light. A metonymic practice, a sect of beliefs in the Mahayana Buddhist faith, and a sphere of eternal bliss, the Pure Land encompasses this exact sort of polyphonous iteration. Most directly applicable to Lê’s mystic Pure Land installation are the tenets of Buddhist reincarnation in the Pure Land. Lê’s installation The Pure Land, on the contrary, considers the many lost and missing, dead and forgotten persons during the decades of war that engulfed the Vietnamese landscape, psyche, and population. Kwon’s Ghosts of War in Vietnam outlines this spirit world that continues to affect everyday life in Vietnam. Coining the term “ontological refugees,” Kwon relates broken family relationships to supernatural presences: “In the communities of southern and central Vietnam, kinship rarely constitutes a political homogenous entity. These communities’ genealogical unity is crowded with the remains of wartime political bifurcation … Thus, in the ancestor worship of this region, the dead are united in kinship memory and bipolarized in political history” (2012: 88–89). This desire to reclaim

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Fig. 10  Amitabha, the Buddha of the Western Pure Land (Sukhavati). Ca. 1700. (Courtesy of the Met’s Open Access policy)

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the missing, to name again the dead and rehabilitate the living, appears in a variety of common sayings in contemporary Vietnamese communities; for example, “As rivers have a source and plants have roots and seeds, so too do humans have ancestors and altars” [Con ngư ờ i có tô ̉ có tông như cây ̀ This implies that living and dying without comcó cội, như sóng có nguôn]. munity leaves individuals stranded, and spirits trapped in liminal otherworlds transform into abject forces of darkness. In Pure Land, Lê’s necromantic tryst with the spirit world acknowledges the ghosts’ anonymity as an inextricable condition of otherworld agency lodged within the very condition of their meaning. Perhaps the most salient of these various death rites is the ceremonious tiêñ hôǹ ritual, a spiritual cleansing and sacred system of cyclical regeneration that purports to send off deceased souls to the Pure Land after forty-­ nine days of wandering. Liturgical chants, communal prayers, and shared offerings during this seven-week period post-mortem triangulate a transcendent forcefield of goodness and solace, merit and virtue for the deceased. Lê’s visual ontology in Pure Land is a belated activation of a similar path of rebirth. A testimony to otherness and prayerful recognition embraces these forgotten souls in Lê’s Vietnamese dominion of spirits. In motion and with a sensual disposition of undefeated despair, Lê’s Pure Land cohort steps forward into an unknowable parallel world “haunted by historic alternatives: sometimes as nostalgia, sometimes as regret, sometimes as a kind of critical urgency” (Gordon 2011: 7), levitating sarcophagi, Pure Land angel-victims born within mud blossom into eternal bliss. Walking in this ethereal sculpture garden of pure light, museum goers commune with ghosts.

References Allen, Emma. 2010. “Interview with Đı ̉nh Q. Lê.” Art Info. http://cieba.belasartes.ulisboa.pt/wp-­content/uploads/2020/02/Convocarte9.pdf Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984 [1965]. Rabelais and his World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 1987 [1979]. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bubandt, Nils. 2017. “Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 121-141.

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Fox, Diane Niblack. 2013. “Agent Orange: Coming to Terms with a Transnational Legacy.” Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War. Ed. Scott Laderman and Edwin A. Martini. Durham: Duke University Press. 207–241. Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2011. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” Borderlands 10.2. Gale Academic OneFile. 1–21. Accessed 11 June 2020. Gustafsson, Mai Lan. 2009. War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Khanna, Neetu. 2020. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. Durham: Duke University Press. Kim, Jinah. 2019. Postcolonial Grief: The Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas. Duke University Press. Kwon, Heonik. 2012. Ghosts of War in Vietnam. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2013. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. Abingdon: Routledge. James G. Lewis. 2006. On Smokey Bear in Vietnam, Environmental History, 11: 3. 598–603. https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/11.3.598 Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2016. Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Paracciani, Loredana. 2019. “Pure Land: Artist Đı ̉nh Q.  Lê and Loredana Paracciani in Conversation.” https://www.academia.edu/39183788/Pure_ Land_Artist_Đı ̉nh_Q_LE_and_curator_Loredana_Paracciani_in_conversation. Accessed 25 January 2021. Ponzio, A. 2016. “Otherness, Intercorporeity and Dialogism in Bakhtin’s Vision of the Text.” Language and Semiotic Studies 2.3: 1-17. Rose, Deborah Bird. 2017. “Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 51–63. Roth, Moira. 2001. “Obdurate History: Đı ̉nh Q.  Lê, the Vietnam War, Photography, and Memory.” Art Journal 60.2: 38–53. Tien Ju. 1997. Pure Land Buddhism: Dialogues with Ancient Master Sutra. Translation Thich Thien Tam. Committee of the United States and Canada. Vann, Michael G. 2019. “Refugee Gothic: Review of Four Graphic Memoirs of the Vietnamese Diaspora.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 14.3: 137–142. Vuong, Ocean. 2017. “The Weight of Our Living: On Hope, Fire Escapes, & Visible Desperation.” Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees. Ed. Laren McClung. New  York: Norton. 368–379.

PART IV

Communism, Global Markets, and the Environment

Civil War, Socialism’s Underworld, and the Environment Ben Tran

In 2009, Nguyêñ Trí’s daughter was murdered in a love-triangle dispute. During the sentencing of the convicted murderer, Nguyêñ Thị Thùy Trang (no familial relation to Nguyêñ Trí), Nguyêñ Trí and his wife acted with extraordinary compassion. The victim’s mother was holding the four-­ month-­old daughter of the defendant. When the infant began to fuss after seeing her distraught mother behind the horseshoe-shaped stand, the victim’s mother took the child out of the courtroom for fear that the baby would disturb the judge. Meanwhile, when invited to speak after the judge handed down an eight-year prison sentence, Nguyêñ Trí pleaded: Xin tòa xem xét cho Trang ơ ̉ một khía cạnh khác mà giảm án cho cháu nó. Nó ̵ sinh ra trong một gia dình nghèo, cha dã̵ có vợ nhỏ nên cũng bỏ bê chuyện giáo ̵ dục con cái. Chı ̉ dư ợc học dê̵ ́n lớ p 8 nó dã̵ phải nghı ̉ dê̵ ̉ di̵ làm thì sự giáo dục từ nhà trư ờ ng cũng dã̵ trôi tuột hết rồi. Còn mẹ nó phải thứ c từ 1 giờ sáng dê̵ ̉ làm gà mang bỏ mối cho ngư ờ i ta, em trai chı ̉ học lớ p ba cũng phải dậy từ 5

B. Tran (*) Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_9

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giờ sáng dê̵ ̉ làm việc … Đáng thư ơ ng hơ n, con gái của nó phải nhìn dờ̵ i sau ̵ a trẻ khác? song săt́ như thế thì làm sao có thê ̉ phát triên̉ như bao dứ [I ask that the court view Trang’s case from a different angle and reduce her sentence. She was born into a poor family; her father had a mistress and abandoned his responsibilities of raising and educating his children. In the eighth grade she quit school to work, and so the opportunities for an education had slipped away. Her mother wakes up at 1:00 a.m. to slaughter and prepare chickens for the market; her younger brother quit school in the third grade, waking up at five in the morning for work … Even more pitiful, her daughter will have a hardened, painful life; how will she ever be able to grow up like other children?] (Cited in Vũ Mai 2010)1

Newspapers covered the trial, reporting Nguyêñ Trí’s empathy in court. The father did not fault the defendant for his daughter’s murder. Rather, he found fault with the taxing penury and working conditions of a society that failed to support and educate its youth. The family’s inability to overcome poverty and inhumane working conditions contributed to the violence that led to his daughter’s death. Nguyêñ Trí claimed that the sentence was disproportionately severe when compared to Nguyêñ Thi ̣ Thùy Trang’s circumstances. As his wife tried to console Trang’s baby daughter, he reasoned that the imprisonment of the teenage mother would stymie the next generation’s progress. The punishment did not match the circumstances. One year later, as the grief over his daughter’s death was compounded by his son’s drug addiction, Nguyêñ Trí began writing prose fiction. He published a collection of short stories, Bãi vàng, dá̵ quý, trầm hư ơ ng (Gold, Gems, Incense) in 2012, which won an award in 2013 from the Writers Association and Đô ̀ tê ̉ (Butchery) in 2014. In 2015, he published the novel Thiên dư̵ ờ ng ảo vọng (The Fantasy of Paradise). He wrote these works in response to the tragedies he endured as a parent in twenty-first-­ century Vietnam, a Vietnam undergoing vertiginous changes with globalization. In his prose fiction, Nguyêñ Trí mines his own experiences as a worker in a range of grueling jobs: gold prospector, miner, logger, butcher, and motorbike taxi driver, among others. These are vernacular worlds with their own values, terminologies, and idioms (often explicated in the text

1

 All translations are mine, unless noted otherwise.

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with footnotes). Impoverished social outcasts populate these storyworlds, often taking part in criminal activity and violence, and through these worlds, the author explores the very conditions that led to his daughter’s murder. In the same way that Nguyêñ Trí did not blame the teenager who killed his daughter, his prose analyzes the social conditions and historical circumstances of his characters to understand their unfortunate circumstances and their individual conduct. His characters face imprisonment, not only as criminals but also as political enemies; they are sent to prison labor camps due to their past affiliations with the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), or the south Vietnamese state, during the Second Indochina War (what is known in the US as the Vietnam War)—and by extension their affiliation with US forces. After their time in prison, Nguyêñ Trí’s characters are socially and economically marginalized, forced to take on dangerous jobs in underworlds that profit from the illicit exploitation of forests and result in environmental damage. These stories connect contemporary social conditions that result in violence and ecological destruction to the postwar punishment and alienation of the enemy from the Second Indochina War. While it involved an array of other countries and was a primary theater of the Cold War, this military conflict was, at its core, a civil war between the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the southern Republic of Vietnam.2 Some aspects immediately stand out about Nguyêñ Trí’s fiction. The first is his frank and vivid depiction of the idiomatic ways and languages of marginal, illicit worlds. The second is the persistent portrayal of subjects historically linked to South Vietnam’s RVN.3 The third is the focus on how these marginalized subjects survive by extracting resources from the environment. If Nguyêñ Trí began to write after his daughter’s 2009 2  For a discussion of “civil war” in the 1973 Paris Agreement, which reiterated the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Vietnam that the “military demarcation line at the 17th parallel was provisional and not a political or territorial boundary,” see Asselin (Asselin 2002: 196). Asselin also examines Vietnam’s American War as one of many Vietnamese civil wars (Asselin 2018). Hang Nguyen outlines how the Vietnamese civil war became an international Cold War conflict (Nguyen 2012). See Miller and Vu (2009) for a discussion of the Vietnamese agency and history of local conflicts that have led to the civil war. Their essay is an introduction to a series of rich articles in a special issue in Journal of Vietnamese Studies on these topics. 3  This chapter adds to the scholarship on Vietnam’s noir underworld: see works such as Cherry 2019; Firpo 2020; Hoang 2015; Li 2016; Tai 2010. Nguyêñ Trí’s work contributes a history and perspective specific to the forced labor after the Second Indochina War.

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murder, if he wrote to make sense of the social history and dynamics of twenty-­first-century Vietnam, then why does he concentrate on marginalized characters affiliated with the RVN? And what is the connection between these marginalized subjects and the environment? By the time Nguyêñ Trí published his works, Vietnam had undergone significant transformations for nearly three decades, from a command economy to a socialist-oriented market economy. From the mid-1980s onward, Vietnam’s Đôỉ Mớ i or renovation has led to the economic restructuring of social and cultural spheres:4 industrialization of the countryside, rapid development of high-end shopping malls and boutiques, mushrooming of private townships and apartment towers, deterioration of public health and public education, rebranding of marginalized labor by gig economies and apps, and further destruction of the environment. Urban centers like Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City have experienced flourishing growth, becoming global cities of commerce, culture, and shopping. Tourist destinations and resorts are proliferating to meet the demands of global and domestic travelers, becoming more glamorous and sophisticated in taste and being documented Instagram-style. However, Nguyêñ Trí’s writings are a stark reminder of the income inequality surging with economic growth as well as the pollution and ecological destruction accompanying this booming development—all of which compound and have been compounded by the effects of climate change. Vietnam’s air quality has worsened at an alarming rate in urban and rural areas, according to the Air Quality Index, becoming one of the worst in the world (Thang Nam Do 2020; Gia Chinh 2020; Nguyen Quy 2019). City traffic is increasingly mired in gridlock, and landfills are nearly full, leading to the burning of waste along with vegetation fires (Le et  al. 2014), all of which contribute to rising air pollution. Dammed upstream by China and Laos, the Mekong river’s flow into Vietnam’s vast, once-­ fertile delta in the South is succumbing to rising seawater (Eyler 2019: 289–339; Minderhoud et al. 2017; Anthony et al. 2015). Water tables are being depleted in the Mekong delta and other regions. The excessive use of agrochemicals has compromised water and food safety. Toxic industrial 4  For a discussion of the cultural and social aspects of Vietnam’s “socialist-oriented market economy,” see Hayton (2010). On Vietnam’s foreign and political policies during Đôỉ Mớ i, see Elliott (2012). See Fforde and De Vylder (1996) for an approach to Đôỉ Mớ i’s social relations and autonomous markets within the state’s economy that argues how these economic reforms begun earlier from the “bottom up.” See Vu (2017: 237–64) on the postwar failures, collapse of the Soviet Union, and the persistence of socialist ideology.

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and mining materials, from bauxite-alumina to mercury and cyanide leach mining for gold, have entered and poisoned the land, air, and water (Whitney 2013). Massive fish die-offs have occurred over multiple years, both in oceans and in lakes: in 2016, 70 tons of dead fish washed up on the central coastline, while tons of fish died, in subsequent summers, in Hanoi’s West Lake, the city’s largest. Some ecological disasters, such as the 2009 bauxite catastrophe and the 2016 fish die-off, have spurred unprecedented, massive social and social-media protests by citizens, intellectuals, and national luminaries, most notably General Võ Nguyên Giáp. This chapter examines how Nguyêñ Trí’s novel The Fantasy of Paradise, along with his short stories from the collection Gold, Gems, Incense diagnose and analyze a history that has underwritten the social and environmental consequences of twenty-first-century Vietnam’s socialist-oriented market economy. By focusing on characters imprisoned for their associations with the southern Republic of Vietnam, I argue, Nguyêñ Trí’s fiction traces economic disparity and environmental degradation to the lingering effects of the RVN’s war economy, propped up by US aid money, and the postwar treatment of RVN family members, not just veterans themselves, as irrelevant to the national economy and society. The insecurity experienced by Nguyêñ Trí’s characters began under the RVN regime and continued as his protagonists’ livelihoods remained precarious in the postwar social body. Social and economic divisions persisted in the war’s aftermath, as those who were associated with the RVN found themselves incarcerated for reform, or cải tạo. As one of the characters from The Fantasy of Paradise puts it: “Cái sô ́ tù không có chuyện chi vẫn bi ̣ tù” (The fate of prisoners, no matter what happens, still means imprisonment) (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 20). Those who are stigmatized for their affiliation with the RVN are expelled from the social body and thus made expendable, and their lives become more uncertain during the difficult, dire years after the war. Nguyêñ Trí’s work does not avoid the wretched economic state of postwar Vietnam. He highlights how this situation was exacerbated by a population that remained excluded from employment and the social welfare system. Nguyêñ Trí’s characters are constantly “re-educated” and, upon being released, always try and fail to flee the country. Ultimately, they have little choice but to live off of the land. It has been estimated that 100,000 to 250,000 individuals died in the prison camps set up, after the war, by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) (Vo 2004); however, the volumes discussed here do not set his stories in the camps or focus on the deaths or physical violence that

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occurred in them. They trace the afterlife of prisoners who must survive as workers in the forests. Nguyêñ Trí focuses on released prisoners, along with their families, left to fend for themselves, living off natural resources. His narratives trace economic and ecological vulnerabilities in Vietnam’s socialist-oriented market economy back to the RVN’s economic system and the DRV’s postwar treatment of former enemies. Nguyêñ Trí’s writing shows how the vulnerabilities experienced by a marginalized group extend to the environment, as Nguyêñ Trí’s characters turn to the environment for survival. Interrogating the entwinement of Vietnam’s environmental and economic precarity, Nguyêñ Trí’s The Fantasy of Paradise and Gold, Gems, Incense link these uncertainties not to contemporary globalization or Vietnam’s colonial past but to the continuing fallout from the civil war. Nguyêñ Trí’s literary works foreground the historical ramifications of civil war: the corresponding devaluations of human and non-human life. It is in this sense that I read Nguyêñ Trí’s work as environmental writing.5 Pamela McElwee’s insightful work on Vietnam’s “environmental rule” has shown that in Vietnam “environmental interventions have never been exclusively about ‘nature’ or ecology, but rather about people and society” (McElwee 2016: 5).6 Building on her work, I examine how Nguyêñ Trí depicts the parallel postwar management of both human life and the environment. But more than the management of people and society through environmental interventions, the postwar government kept alive a social “other” that was allowed to subsist off forests and land not yet worthy of direct governance or legal regulations and enforcement. It left an underclass to toil in forests that had yet to be of economic value. Nguyêñ Trí’s fiction suggests that this abandonment of expendable populations and 5  Trang Ngoc Hieu and Dang Thi Thai Ha (2018) have observed that in Vietnamese revolutionary literature, nature “stands in for human values or serves human will and desire” (207) while in works depicting wars, “the power of the forest was integrated with the people’s will” (208). They go on to argue that in postwar literature, nature is not reducible to human voice or representation but rather has a voice of its own: “the voice of nature conveys and expresses the states of trauma, threat, and power of the environment” (206). Nguyêñ Trí’s prose, in contrast, shifts the focus onto the state’s postwar policies that made former enemies politically and economically irrelevant, thus contributing to ecological destruction. 6  McElwee goes on to elaborate how environmental policies and reasoning have been instrumental to the state’s preferred outcome: “Environmental rule occurs when states, organizations, or individuals use environmental or ecological reasons as justification for what is really a concern with social planning, and thereby intervene in such disparate areas as land ownership, population settlement, labor availability, or markets” (2016: 5).

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land serves as a precursor to the conditions of labor and the environment in Vietnam’s socialist-oriented market economy. Nguyêñ Trí’s narratives also depict the war’s continuous effects on the families of veterans of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). Family members also served time in labor camps and prisons and then returned to a society and government that deemed them economically and socially superfluous. These characters are turned, as a socially differentiated group, into giang hô ̀ (gangsters), petty criminals, and vagabonds, partly from inclination or disposition, in most cases from the repercussions of war’s circumstances.7 As a narrator in Gold, Gems, Incense speculates, “giang hô ̀ chăć cu ̃ng ít nhiêù kinh nghiệm chiêń trư ờ ng” (gangsters probably have some experience on the battlefield) (55). Many of these characters risk their lives to escape from Vietnam by sea or land. Yet most of Nguyêñ Trí’s characters are not able to flee. They are left behind or are imprisoned for trying to escape. One of two primary protagonists in The Fantasy of Paradise, Nguyêñ Hùng Lâm (also known as Lâm Lạnh, or Cold Lâm because “Mặt lạnh ̀ [His face is as cold as money]; Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 97), was như tiên” orphaned after his parents died in the war. He had no place to call home. After the war, he was wrongly accused and imprisoned for his association with an anti-communist insurrectionist movement, the Bảo long Phục quôć (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 19–20), which took its name from the son of emperor Bảo Đại and operated from 1975 to 1982. Once released, he “không biêt́ ̵ vê ̀ dâu ̵ vì không gia dình” ̵ di̵ dâu (did not know where to go, where to return because he had no family) (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 19). At one point, he became intimate with a woman, and he joined her family in an attempt to leave Vietnam. She and her parents were assaulted and killed while trying to flee. They knew that they might encounter such violence and even death, yet they took the risk to escape their economic and political lot. Failing to flee by sea or find any form of support, these characters work in the forests with hopes of striking it rich. Lâm and Cư ờ ng, a fellow inmate and close friend, are released from prison. The two men travel together, look after each other, and attempt to mine for coal and gold in the forests. They team up with two other characters: Bình Võ and Bá Điệp. The book details the tribulations of mining for gold: malaria, injury, collapsing mines, theft, violence, addiction to drugs and alcohol, and above 7  Nguyêñ Trí attributes this, in small part, to kỳ quái (bizarre) temperament (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 41).

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all the possibilities of returning back to labor camps and prison. The police are a looming threat—this is a fear that has been deeply ingrained in the gangsters. Government officials are aware of the illicit mining; however, they let the gangsters toil in the dangers and uncertainties—up to a certain point. The threat of returning to prison forces the gangsters to check their own behavior. As Lâm warns Cư ờ ng, who is contemplating theft: “Mày không nhớ nhữ ng ngày lao cải à? Nêú còn biêt́ sợ nhữ ng ngày ấy thì bỏ ngay ́ này” (You don’t remember the days of forced labor? If you still kiêủ sông fear those days then abandon this way of life) (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 137). The government’s implementation of forced labor delimits not only the gangsters’ fears, but nearly everything about them. Their entangled pasts with the RVN define who they are, their relationships with each other, their codes of conduct, and their insecure lives. Nguyêñ Trí’s characters have no choice but to sustain themselves by living off the land: ̵ thì dâ̵ ̀u —Biêt́ làm gì giờ . Dạo ấy thất nghiệp, biêt́ làm rừ ng là sai, như ng dói ̉ lại còn bi ̣ bat́ ̆ bớ , tic̣ h gôí phải bò … Mày biêt́ dó,̵ làm rừ ng dã̵ khô,̉ nguy hiêm, thu … Hiêủ không? [—What to do. When unemployed, I knew that working in the forests was wrong, but with hunger the knees have to crawl … You know, it’s miserable to work in the forests, dangerous, then you get arrested, then your things get confiscated. … Understand?] (Nguyêñ 2014: 197)

These characters mine for gold and gems, raise livestock, fell trees for coal or timber, or cultivate cash crops. As Lâm puts it: “Tao dạng kinh tê ́ dân lập nên tự túc tự phát, dân các nơ i vào làm mư ớ n, cũng chı ̉ vừ a no cái bụng. Nêú dính vô sôt́ rét là chêt́ cả nút” (I’m part of the freelance economy [kinh tê ́ dân lập], which means that I’m self-supporting, self-determined. Folks from every region come to work for hire, barely enough to fill their stomachs. If malaria strikes, then the whole lot may die) (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 25). These laborers operate outside state enterprises, with little to no access to healthcare or workers’ rights. A wage is not guaranteed, and an income does not promise much beyond basic necessities, if that. In The Fantasy of Paradise this freelance economy, kinh tê ́ dân lập, is distinct from kinh tê ́ mớ i programs that resettled portions of the population in designated economic zones outside of urban areas. Those who are

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resettled receive an initial income, some land for cultivation, and a housing subsidy. Again, the people most affected by this postwar program were ́ ̀u those associated with former southern RVN regime:8 “như dã̵ biêt—hâ ̵ ́ ́ ́ hêt dân di kinh tê mớ i xứ này xuât thân là vợ con lính và lính cuả trào cu ̃” (as is known, almost all the people of kinh tê ́ mớ i in this area are the wife and children of soldiers or soldiers from the old regime) (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 13). However, the working and living conditions were often intolerable. As Nguyêñ Trí portrays it, those who could afford it either hired others to perform the required labor or simply left the new economic zones. These state policies produced a class of công tác mư ớ n (laborers for hire or contract labor): “Họ vào kinh tê ́ mớ i, chı ̉ nơ i ấy là luôn có nhữ ng ̵ Và thiên hạ gọi nghê ̀ công tác ngư ờ i sẵn sàng làm bất cứ thứ chi dê̵ ̉ xóa dói. mư ớ n” (They entered the new economic zones, where there are always people ready for any job to wipe out hunger. This is known as the profession of công tác mư ớ n) (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 12, original emphasis), the unsalaried labor of an informal economy. The Fantasy of Paradise locates the origins of this contract labor in the RVN experience, “khi Mỹ tràn ngập miêǹ Nam” (when the US flooded the South) (8), with American dollars to prop up the economy and finance the ARVN: “Dư ớ i sứ c mạnh cuả dô̵ la, thị tứ mọc lên vớ i vô vàn âm thanh và du̵ ̉ săć mầu ánh sáng, trong dó̵ có cái ánh black-light cuả khu chứ a thô ̉ dô̵ ̉ hô”̀ (Under the strength of the dollar, city blocks emerged with countless sounds and bright lights, including the black-light of brothels and gambling houses) (Nguyêñ Trí 2015, 8). In this economy, male soldiers earned monthly salaries, but women and youth not enlisted in the military resorted to “công tác mư ớ n,” including sex work.9 Social and economic conditions necessitated công tác mư ớ n work for the family of Cư ờ ng Linh, the other protagonist in The Fantasy of Paradise. Mrs. Linh, his mother, was a sex worker who ended up marrying his father, an ARVN soldier. His 8  Kinh tê ́ mớ i was also a program implemented after the 1954 victory over the French. However, while that iteration was intended to increase workforce labor in the forests, the version after 1975 targeted former enemies for the purposes of “re-education” through forced labor. 9  It is precisely this money that becomes an issue in the story “Giã từ vàng” [Farewell to Gold]. When the protagonist’s father wrongly accuses the son of stealing the father’s salaried money, the character runs away from home and begins his life in the streets. He also attributes his wandering curiosity and sense of adventure to the constant moving that his family did because of his father’s service first to king Bảo Đại and then the Ngô Đình Diệm administration (Nguyêñ 2014: 46–47).

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father died from a grenade while in prison for attempting to go AWOL, and this had repercussions for the family: ̵ ơ ng nhiên thằng dào ̵ ngũ chết là xong, chả có dô̵ ̀ng bạc nào trợ cấp cho Và dư vợ con họ. Mư ờ i mấy năm binh nghiệp xem như công cốc. Thờ i chiến tranh, dã̵ từ ng di̵ qua nhữ ng biến cố lớ n, bà Linh nào có sợ chi. ̵ ̉ dê̵ ́n dư Hàng hóa viện trợ của ông Hoa Kì, ba cái cơ m ăn nư ớ c uống từ du ̵ ̀ thừ a […]. Bà Linh dã nuôi con băng mọi cách. [And of course, it was over when the deserter died, there was no money to support his wife and children. A dozen or so years of military service seemed like lost labor. During war, having experienced a number of upheavals, Mrs. Linh feared nothing. With aid from Mr. USA, food and drink went from sufficient to excessive […]. Mrs. Linh had raised her children by any means.] (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 9)

Before and after her husband went AWOL and died, she hustled to make ends meet from the money that trickled down from US military spending and aid. Living on the fringes of the economy, she resorted to work and dealings in gray and black markets, going about her business with an aggression and ferocity that earned her a reputation for being mean, with a streak of madness. As the war comes to an end, she enters a kinh tê ́ mớ i program right after meeting another man. Cư ờ ng is born, and he too engages in công tác mư ớ n, where he meets his future wife. In this world of work, Cư ờ ng gets upset after being deceived in a business deal and ends up stabbing the swindler. Then off he goes to jail, specifically lao dộ̵ ng cải tạo (re-­education labor) or lao cải (reform labor) (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 16), as the idiom goes. It is forced labor. Cư ờ ng meets Nguyêñ Hùng Lâm in prison, and they are released on the same day. And this is where The Fantasy of Paradise begins. Both eventually end up in the forests to find their own way, though Cư ờ ng’s past relates more to the công tác mư ớ n of kinh tê ́ mớ i than Lâm’s to kinh tê ́ dân lập. Despite the regime changes, Nguyêñ Trí points out how labor markets are similar and even carry over from an economy dependent upon US aid to Vietnam united under the DRV government. The same population on the economy’s fringes continued to be marginalized. The novel’s merger of contract labor in the southern war economy with the centralized postwar economy makes a pointed critique against social and economic exclusion, more so than against any governmental system or political ideology, North or South.

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Once the two protagonists are released from prison, they roam about until they find decent economic prospects. They float about freely, liberated from the responsibilities of family or home—effectively encapsulated by the Vietnamese term for such an untethered life, bụi dờ̵ i (dust of life), yet there are inherent dangers, particularly when the characters are forced to live off the land. Lâm appears resigned to the poverty and insecurities of his forsaken life. Unlike those who find glimpses of hope in the prospect of gold, Lâm knows that this is an illusion—an illusion because of the ̀ Buôǹ cư ờ i thật, ở bãi vàng từ many dangers: “Vấn dê̵ ̀ trư ớ c mat́ ̆ là tiên. ̵ ̵ ̀ ́ ́ ̀ dâu dên cuôi mùa mà không có tiên. Mớ i hay ràng ̆ có ác quỷ trên thiên dư̵ ờ ng là thật” (The issue at hand was money. It’s really funny: to live and work in a gold mine from the beginning to the end of a season and then have no money. It is true that paradise has its demons) (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 160). It becomes clear to Lâm that the tenuous conditions of his underworld life will not change because of material wealth. The goldmine itself becomes a refuge, however temporary, from the powers of the law and the government. He and his peers are free to choose where they settle and work. They are, more or less, free to negotiate the terms (profits, rights, and proprietorship) of their enterprises (which often lead to confrontation and thievery). But they are also vulnerable to suffering, to getting hurt, if not fatally, or to going into debt when the work goes awry and prospects for money get derailed. To survive, these laborers must overcome the vulnerabilities of joblessness, injury, and illness. The forest workers in Nguyêñ Trí’s narratives move from one work site, mine, or field to another. They traffic in informal economies, gray and black markets, in worlds of crime, exploitation, and violence. Nature provides the only means of survival, yet these laborers have no other option than to expose themselves to the dangers of working in the forests. Đa số nhữ ng ngư ờ i tạm mư ợn mạch rừ ng làm lẽ sống luôn ỷ vào vô tận của mẹ thiên nhiên. Họ xả láng cho hôm nay, ngày mai có cái cua ̉ ngày mai. Ngày mai luôn là mư a gió di̵ kèm tật bệnh. Chả một yêng hùng nào không bị rừ ng xanh quật dê̵ ́n quỵ cả hồn lẫn xác. Cái nghiệt ngã của một thợ rừ ng ̵ ợc là tụ nhau vô quán là ai cũng sa vô rư ợu dê̵ ́n lậm. Mư a gió không làm dư nâng chén tiêu sầu [….] Hết khai thác tự do thì vào rừ ng kiếm lóng cây vớ i tư ̵ ợc bảo vệ rừ ng. Đư a một cặp thê ̉ lâm tặc. Và chẳng một lâm tặc nào qua dư ̵ ̵ ̉ cho chung ̀ ̀ cây vê nhà là di qua dăm bảy trạm. Tiên bán cây có khi không du ̵ ́ chi. Chao ôi, dờ i thợ rừ ng chán lăm ngư ờ i ơ i. Đó là chư a nói tớ i bi ̣ băt́ tic̣ h thu xe khi bị truy quét.

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[Most people who borrow a piece of the forest to make their living take for granted Mother Nature’s boundlessness. They indulge in all that is today, tomorrow will provide for tomorrow. There is always some storm tomorrow, accompanied by disease. There is not one swaggering adventurer whose soul and body has not succumbed, collapsed to nature. For every worker in the forest there is the tempting spiral into alcohol. When stormy weather does not allow for work, folks gather at a drinking hole and raise glasses to waste away the sorrows … After taking advantage of these freedoms, it’s back into the forest for some illegal logging. There aren’t any loggers who can bypass forest rangers. One cannot haul out timber without encountering several checkpoints. Any money earned from selling timber may not cover costs. Alas, the life of a forest worker is so demoralizing, dear reader. Not to mention the confiscation of a vehicle upon being searched.] (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 36)

At first, the natural world of the forests seems promising to the impoverished, who believe that working, combined with a bit of luck, may overcome their fate of penury. Nature’s bounty affords the alluring chances of wealth, but it often does not work out that way. Tragedy, violence, alcoholism, drug addiction, and death are omniscient and lurking, ready to pounce at any given moment. Death is always a couple of breaths away in ̵ ́ hầm, phải ròng rã thâu dêm Nguyêñ Trí’s stories: “Ở bãi vàng phải xuông ̵ suôt́ sáng ăn thua du ̉ vớ i thần chêt.́ Thần chêt́ ở khăṕ mọi nơ i, sôt́ rét, sập ́ và nghìn thứ vân vân” (At the gold mines, one has hầm, dứ̵ t dây len xuông to go into the tunnels, spending the night in them until morning, as long as death permits. Death is everywhere: malaria, collapsed tunnels, snapped cables going up and down and a thousand other ways) (Nguyêñ 2014: 24). Poverty and despair leave Nguyêñ Trí’s characters little choice but to risk their lives in makeshift, unsecured goldmines. To survive, to have minimal material sustenance is to work in conditions that are always on the verge of becoming death traps. This shadow world is not completely overlooked by the state, but then again, it is not yet directly ruled or regulated by the state.

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The repercussions of war haunt the lives of Nguyêñ Trí’s characters as an indelible part of their surroundings.10 In Nguyêñ Trí’s stories, the violence enacted against the natural world also persists and haunts their lives. The state’s formation of a subclass composed of former enemies results in environmental harm, and the effect is likened to war’s catastrophic destruction: “Rất nhanh chóng, mảnh dâ̵ ́t vôń hoang hóa, nay hoang tàn, như vừ a di̵ qua một trận cày xéo cuả bom dạ̵ n rải thảm trong chiêń tranh” (It happens quickly, a swath of land once deserted is today destroyed and desolate, as if it had just experienced a blitzkrieg of carpet bombings during war) (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 79). The onus of environmental exploitation and damage, Nguyêñ Trí’s narratives suggest, should not fall on those who depend upon nature for their livelihood, but rather on the state’s willful neglect or punitive abandonment of targeted populations. In Nguyêñ Trí’s writing, there is little nature left that remains separate from law, politics, society, or war. Human life is inextricable from the environment, determining nature’s value and purpose, affecting and changing nature. Nguyêñ Trí’s works depict the influence of society and human history on nature, and conversely, ecological conditions on social dynamics. Furthermore, socioeconomic disparities in class and society exacerbate nature’s risks and dangers. For the author, the environment is at once social and natural. There is a mutualistic relationship between nature and culture: biophysical change does not occur without human intervention. There is no autonomous ecological realm. In his landscape depictions, Nguyêñ Trí explores the

10  In a striking passage that critiques the violence and barbarism enacted by ARVN soldiers, a character explains the violent history of a market named chợ Đầu ngư ờ i (Human Head market):

—Chiêń tranh mà em. Máu chảy, thi ̣t rơ i, ngư ờ i chêt,́ ngư ờ i chêt́ ngày một. Quân dộ̵ i cũ có một lực lư ợng gọi là Thanh niên Chiêń dâ̵ ́u. Môĩ lần truy kích vê,̀ ngư ờ i nào cuñ g mang bên hông hai ba cái dâ̵ ̀u, họ bảo cuả cộng sản, dê̵ ̉ ngoài chợ cho dân chúng xem chơ i. Nên gọi chợ Đầu ngư ờ i. [—It was war. Blood flowed, flesh was sloughed off, people died on a daily basis. The old army [ARVN] had a unit called Militant Youth. Every time they returned from a mission, they would carry with them two or three heads. They claimed that they belonged to the Viet Cong. They displayed them at the market for people to see casually. That’s why it’s called the Human Head market]. (Nguyêñ 2014, 48)

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imbricated history of nature and society in their relationship to war.11 In Gold, Gems, Incense, when a character asks about an area known to have gold and minerals for mining, the response is: “Theo tao, trong thờ i này nó băt́ dâ̵ ̀u từ mấy tay bộ dộ̵ i giải phóng miêǹ Nam” (For me, these times begin with the troops who liberated south Vietnam)(Nguyêñ 2014: 82, original italics). He goes on to explain that these troops traversed the southern regions. They dug tunnels to avoid artillery and mines, discovering rich resources along the way. The soldiers walked and charted the far reaches of the land. Prospectors followed the soldiers, surveying the land and haphazardly starting mines. Impoverished and hungry, people were eager to believe in reports and rumors about lands lined with possible treasure. According to this account, due to military activity there remains little land, if any, that has not been accessed and surveyed by state actors. At the novel’s end, Lâm dies from dynamite that is accidentally detonated in a mine. The miners were arrested. Only with Lâm’s death was there accountability for land use and regulation. As Cư ờ ng gained notoriety in the gold mines, he became more determined to get rich, stealing from others and continuing to work in more dangerous mines. After Lâm’s death, he and his companions quit the gold mines. The death also disrupted the established arrangement that benefited local officials, who were bribed to turn a blind eye to illegal mining. Working conditions are not necessarily the concern of local officials because they earn more from kickbacks. The differentiation of Lâm within the social body goes hand-in-­ hand with the devaluation of the environment, and such abandonment by the government led to the destructive exploitation of nature. The purported human and natural life that officials were supposed to oversee and protect were not worth as much as the payments they received. The narrator of The Fantasy of Paradise says the following about state power, the supposed protectors of the environment, addressing readers, Lâm, and his colleagues: ̀ vớ i chính quyên. ̀ Đư ợc rồi, nói nhỏ không nghe, dê̵ ́n lúc mạnh Đừ ng có nói liêu tay thì chớ có trách. Y như rằng, một phối hợp liên ngành, súng ống hẳn hoi di̵ truy quét. Mâm máng chòi trại họ dô̵ ́t sạch. Ngư ờ i lùa vê ̀ phạt công ích. Cho ̵ dáng dờ̵ i dân chuyên di̵ phá hoại tài nguyên thiên nhiên quốc gia. Giáo dục 11  Greenough and Tsing have helpfully elaborated upon this socio-natural relationship through the double meaning of “landscape” in the “material form (human and nonhuman features) of the land and to the aesthetic standards and legacies through which people observe and know it” (Greenough and Tsing 2003: 15).

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̵ ợc khai thác khi dư ̵ ợc phép. Phải làm một cách bài bản rằng tài nguyên chı ̉ dư và khoa học, chứ không thê ̉ tự túc tự phát. Chúng ta làm như ng phải nghı ̃ dê̵ ́n hậu quả cho dờ̵ i sau chứ ? Lại de̵ rằng, nếu tái phạm sẽ bi ̣ tù vì ăn căṕ tài nguyên là phạm hình sự. [Do not speak carelessly to the government. Fine, whisper so they can’t hear, so as not to regret things when they tighten their grip. Like when they coordinate a sweep, fully armed with guns. They’ll burn down camps and settlements. They’ll rush back to punish the common good. It’s a lesson for folk who set out and destroy the nation’s natural resources. It must be learned that resources can only be extracted with permission to guarantee that things be done methodically and scientifically. It can’t be done in a haphazard, improvisational manner. Shouldn’t we think about the consequences for generations to come? And they’ll threaten: violations will result in prison terms because to steal resources is to commit a crime.] (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 211)

As Nguyêñ Trí goes on to narrate, the government threatens and surveils in the name of protecting natural resources and the environment.12 Time and again, those who have little choice will retreat or be incarcerated, yet they will persist and return to the land. Government officials will lapse back to their ambivalent and indifferent modes of governance, even though they know full well that illegal activity has resumed. Whatever monetary value derives from the illegal exploitation of the land outweighs the protection of the environment and the workers. Behind the thinly veiled gestures of safeguarding the environment are the motives of maximizing economic gain from the land. Workers will be allowed to exploit the land illicitly and pay off officials until the land they control can garner greater income. With this arrangement, laborers 12  Lâm and Cư ờ ng’s team begin their search for gold in Bến Tỷ and then Long Mỹ. The former was privately owned land, but the proprietorship and legitimacy of ownership were ambiguous, even with the evidence of documentation. The latter was considered the state’s land and resources—though its rangers were ambivalent about the protection of the land. The ambiguity of land protection and use presented in Nguyêñ Trí’s novel captures the questions that often emerged after 1986 about who had the rights and authority over the environment (McElwee 2016: 98). This had much to do with shifts in funding for forestry. During Đôỉ Mớ i, forest maintenance was no longer supported by the government. Conversely, NGOs and international organizations became more involved with Vietnam’s environmental protection; they became the source of funding for forest management and designation of natural parks and reserves. After 1986, the value of the forests was no longer derived from timber production but rather from biodiversity preservation and tourism (for a discussion of these issues, see McElwee 2016: 97–134).

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illegally working in the forests become responsible for the environment’s well-being and productivity. It is necessary for forest workers to understand and appreciate the environment. Individuals should appreciate what they have and make the most of what they have. As Lâm states, Lâm rất tin việc mình làm: ̵ Hồi tôi lao cải, dâ̵ ́t xấu thờ i tiết khăć nghiệt mà cây diê ̵ u ̀ chịu —Tin di. ̵ ợc, huống gì dâ̵ ́t bazan như ơ ̉ dây. ̵ Tuy dâ̵ ́t màu hết, như ng tốt xấu do con dư ngư ờ i mình. [Lâm very much believed in this own work: —Believe it. When I was doing forced labor, the earth was barren, the weather brutal yet cashew trees persisted. If only the earth was as rich as it is here. The earth may be colorless, but whether it is rich or not depends upon us.] (Nguyêñ Trí 2015: 183)

There is an illusion here of individual abilities and responsibilities. As Lâm’s story and the ensuing destruction of the environment play out, the veneer of individual responsibility and will power in nature fails to overcome past and present economic and civil divisions. Politically and economically alienated, Nguyêñ Trí’s characters must survive on their individual efforts and accomplishments. They have few, if any, other means to sustain themselves. These are narratives about the promises and risks of individual self-determination within nature. The state expelled its former war enemies from the body politic and state economy, relegating them to nature. The abandonment of former enemies results in ecological ruin, and the marginalization of one social group doubles as the destruction of the environment. Nguyêñ Trí’s works persuasively show that with environmental damage, it is necessary to consider the aftermath of civil war in the transformation of former enemies into a subclass. In Wars and Capital, Alliez and Lazzarato analyze civil wars as a significant part of socioecological history,13 characterizing the Anthropocene as a geological era in which human violence and conflict have impacted Earth’s geology and ecosystem: 13  Alliez and Lazzarato write, “Politics is no longer, as in Clausewitz, the politics of the state but politics of the financialized economy interwoven in the multiplicity of wars that move and hold together the war of destruction in action with wars of class, race, sex, and ecological wars that provide the global ‘environment’ of all the others” (Alliez and Lazzarato 2018: 281).

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The Anthropocene is not only a universalism that distributes responsibilities indiscriminately even though ‘we know who is responsible’; it is also a theory that evacuates conflict, struggle, and war by transferring them to a diplomatic obligation for results strangely posed by its most advanced fringe as the key to re-politicizing ecology. The first function of power, which consists in denying the existence of the ongoing civil war, is perfectly ensured by the Anthropocene in its appeal to a generic humanity raised to the rank of new subject of a natural history that it has dangerously ‘hystericized.’ (Alliez and Lazzarato 2018: 356; original emphasis)

Alliez and Lazzarato view the Anthropocene as conflicts, waged for the expropriation of resources and the accumulation of capital. The ecological destruction of war bleeds from conflicts—or wars—of class, race, gender, and other social formations. The social differentiation that derives from civil wars not only makes enemies more vulnerable in nature but also does damage to the environment. For Alliez and Lazzarato, military conflicts constitute a chain of different wars: from wars on the environment to wars waged along various social divisions. These two thinkers critique the interlocking factors of capitalism: how the capitalist economy is propelled by the state’s never-ending civil war. Obviously, these factors, particular to capitalism, are incongruous with the DRV’s command economy and its subsequent transition toward a socialist-oriented market economy. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the perpetuation of civil wars and the environment warrants consideration. In Nguyêñ Trí’s narratives, US economic aid and the military destruction of the environment during the Second Indochina War are significant factors in the social and economic conditions of globalizing Vietnam, but in the foreground is the state’s transformation of former enemies into a subclass within the social body. This confluence of US financial and military imperialism, civil war, and the Vietnamese government’s postwar policies provides contexts and histories to the unfolding narrative of the environment and geopolitics in Vietnam.

References Alliez, Éric, and Maurizio Lazzarato. 2018. Wars and Capital. Transl. Ames Hodges. South Pasadena: Semiotexte. Anthony, Edward J, Guillaume Brunier, Manon Besset, Marc Goichot, Philippe Dussouillez, and Van Lap Nguyen. 2015. “Linking Rapid Erosion of the Mekong River Delta to Human Activities.” Scientific Reports (October): 1–12.

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Asselin, Pierre. 2002. A Bitter Peace Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement. The New Cold War History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 2018. Vietnam’s American War: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cherry, Haydon. 2019. Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City. New Haven: Yale University Press. Elliott, David W.P. 2012. Changing Worlds: Vietnam’s Transition from Cold War to Globalization. New York: Oxford University Press. Eyler, Brian. 2019. Last Days of the Mighty Mekong. London: Zed Books. Fforde, Adam, and Stefan De Vylder. 1996. From Plan to Market: The Economic Transition in Vietnam. Boulder: Westview Press. Firpo, Christina Elizabeth. 2020. Black Market Business: Selling Sex in Northern Vietnam, 1920–1945. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gia Chinh. 2020. “Air Pollution Forces Vietnam to Cough up $13 Billion a Year.” VnExpress International. January 24. https://e.vnexpress.net/news/news/ air-­pollution-­forces-­vietnam-­to-­cough-­up-­13-­billion-­a-­year-­4042039.html. Greenough, Paul, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. 2003. “Introduction.” Nature in the Global South: Environmental Projects in South and Southeast Asia. Ed. Paul Greenough and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Durham: Duke University Press. 1–23. Hayton, Bill. 2010. Vietnam: Rising Dragon. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2015. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Oakland: University of California Press. Le, Thanh Ha, Thi Nhat Thanh Nguyen, Kristofer Lasko, Shriram Ilavajhala, Krishna Prasad Vadrevu, and Chris Justice. 2014. “Vegetation Fires and Air Pollution in Vietnam.” Environmental Pollution 195 (December): 267–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2014.07.023. Li, Kevin. 2016. “Partisan to Sovereign: The Making of the Bình Xuyên in Southern Vietnam, 1945–1948.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 11 (3–4): 140–87. https://doi.org/10.1525/jvs.2016.11.3-­4.140. McElwee, Pamela D. 2016. Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Miller, Edward, and Tuong Vu. 2009. “The Vietnam War as a Vietnamese War: Agency and Society in the Study of the Second Indochina War.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 4 (3): 1–16. Minderhoud, P S J, G Erkens, V H Pham, V T Bui, L Erban, H Kooi, and E Stouthamer. 2017. “Impacts of 25 Years of Groundwater Extraction on Subsidence in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam.” Environmental Research Letters 12 (6): 064006. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-­9326/ aa7146/pdf.

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Nguyen, Lien-Hang T. 2012. Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam. The New Cold War History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Nguyen Quy. 2019. “Pollution Kills over 71,300 in Vietnam in a Year.” VnExpress International. December 24. https://e.vnexpress.net/news/news/pollution-­ kills-­over-­71-­300-­in-­vietnam-­in-­a-­year-­4030833.html. Nguyêñ Trí. 2014. Bãi Vàng, Đá Quý, Trầm Hư ơ ng. Ho Chi Minh city: Nhà xuất bản Trẻ. ———. 2015. Thiên dư̵ ờ ng ảo vọng. Hồ Chí Minh: Nhà xuất bản Trẻ. Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. 2010. Passion, Betrayal, and Revolution in Colonial Saigon: The Memoirs of Bao Luong. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thang Nam Do. 2020. “Bold Action Needed to Address Vietnam’s Air Pollution.” East Asia Forum. March 24, 2020. https://www.eastasiaforum. org/2020/03/25/bold-­action-­needed-­to-­address-­vietnams-­air-­pollution/. Tran Ngoc Hieu and Dang Thi Thai Ha. 2018. “Listening to Nature, Rethinking the Pat: A Reading of the Representations of Forests and Rivers in Postwar Vietnamese Narratives.” Southeast Asian Ecocriticism: Theories, Practices, Prospects. Ed. John C. Ryan. Lanham: Lexington Books. 1–23. Vo, Nghia M. 2004. The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. Vũ Mai. 2010. “Ngư ờ i Mẹ Teen ‘hồi Sinh’ Khi Đư ợc Giảm Án.” VnExpress, November 9. https://vnexpress.net/nguoi-­me-­teen-­hoi-­sinh-­khi-­duoc-­giam-­ an-­2179814.html. Vu, Tuong. 2017. Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Whitney, Heather. 2013. “Vietnam: Water Pollution and Mining in an Emerging Economy.” Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal 15 (1): 25–57.

Ecologies of Coffee Sustainability in the Central Highlands Sarah G. Grant

To me, Da Lat has two distinct images: one of industrialization and commercialization, and another of nature. The city is slowly putting on layers of cement structures, gaudy shops and long queues leading to sought-after Instagram backgrounds. Nonetheless, there exists, in a land far away from downtown, a peaceful farming community filled with workers, the sound of tractors and many stories told on the green patches of fresh produce and tea. —Nguyen Hoang Ky Anh (2019)

1   Coffee and the Question of Sustainability On a sunny day in 2018, I hiked the lesser known, “more natural” route to the summit of Langbiang Mountain, on the outskirts of Đà Lạt in Lâm Đồng province, with a new acquaintance named Phư ơ ng. The most

S. G. Grant (*) California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_10

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popular well-traveled route to the peak is not environmentally friendly; it is a bait-and-switch that involves buying a ticket and hopping into a Jeep, only to race quickly to a false peak, accessible primarily by paved road. With the Jeep route, one gets the beautiful views without the sun exposure and the strenuous experience of hiking in the mountains. The paved road allows visitors to tackle the mountainous region, reaping the rewards of an incredible view, photo opportunities, and cloud-lined vistas in minutes, instead of the hours it might take hikers. For many domestic Vietnamese tourists, the peak is a far cry from their homes on the coast or in the big cities, but it is also quintessentially Central Highlands. Along with large swaths of agricultural land, waterfalls, extractive industries, and ethnic minority communities, the mountains frame the region and its lore. Phư ơ ng, a local university student and someone deeply familiar with the agricultural landscape of the province, convinced me that although it would be difficult, taking the backroad trail to the “real” summit would be much more rewarding—the views, flora and fauna, and absence of other hikers would make the pain worthwhile. Besides, Phư ơ ng said, “It will feel like a getaway from traffic, work and life.” I was surprised to hear her talk about traffic and stressful life in a place like Đà Lạt. Despite these “two distinct images” of Đà Lạt, it does not compare to the traffic, pollution, and rampant urban development of places like Saigon and Hanoi. In fact, Đà Lạt itself is often perceived and sometimes described as “comfier, simpler and quieter” (Nguyen 2019) than the city (often a reference to Saigon). It turns out that Phư ơ ng and young adults like her—university students who are actively involved in student volunteer clubs, hiking organizations, and environmental groups—are adamantly opposed to the paved roads and Jeeps winding up the mountain. The paved route is “for the tourists from Saigon,” Phư ơ ng says. Her ideas about the environment and what constitutes nature are shaped by the social media groups she participates in and the regular conversation tables she attends at local cafés. One group, “Cuộc phiêu lư u trong tự nhiên” (Adventures in Nature) is part student organization, part social hiking group, and part volunteer club, mostly comprised of Vietnamese students who organize local group hikes and share articles and blog posts about the environmental problems plaguing the country.1 Students like Phư ơ ng are keen to develop a more 1  All names and private groups (such as a private Facebook groups or Instagram handles) are pseudonyms to protect the identity of these individuals and groups with the exception of notable artists, popular figures, or other publicly available material.

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sustainable way of life through their mindful consumption and environmental habits. She considers activities like hiking and camping in the mountains a mode of appreciation and preservation, even sustainability. If Phư ơ ng can cultivate a love of nature among her friends and classmates, perhaps the future of the Central Highlands looks brighter, if not cleaner. This land “faraway from downtown” is, however green, a symbol of industrial agricultural development for consumption across Vietnam and for export markets around the world. It is green; however, it is anything but sustainable. The term sustainability, sự bêǹ vữ ng, is as complicated in Vietnamese as it is in English. The common “three e’s” of the western concept of sustainability—environment, economy, and equity—mean different things to different people across agricultural industries in Vietnam, including the coffee industry. Although Phư ơ ng may feel strongly about protecting her own mountainous backyard and the natural world she values so much, not everyone equates sự bêǹ vu n ̛̃ g with the environment. For example, in the Vietnamese coffee industry, sustainability initiatives are often shared by US and Europe-based sustainability programs funded by international financial organizations such as the World Bank or international non-profit organizations such as the Rainforest Alliance. These visions of sustainability are often imposed on farmers, framing the environmental part of the sustainability equation in terms of long-term economic outcomes. In many commodity coffee-farming spaces in the Central Highlands where sự bêǹ vu n ̛̃ g is understood to be a western model of sustainability tied to long-term income and quality of life improvements, any environmental preservation is a secondary consideration, perhaps an incidental byproduct of “sustainable” coffee livelihoods. Farmers, however, are acutely aware of this and I occasionally heard farmers talking about a not-too-distant future ́ For example, Tình, a man in his 40s where coffee is simply “over” (hêt). who had been farming outside of Đà Lạt since the 1990s, often shared similar sentiments when I visited his farm or met him in town. He knew that coffee would not last forever, because “how could it?” (làm thê ́ nào). Between the regular fertilizer inputs, pesticides, battles with coffee berry borer (Hypothenemus hampei), and the increasingly unpredictable dry and rainy seasons, Tình was convinced that coffee would not be a reliable source of income for his children in the future, although it had enabled him to buy land, build a house, and support his family to date. Although Tình never explicitly referenced the ways agricultural inputs directly impact the ability to farm coffee in the future, he certainly knew that the more

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fertilizer and pesticide he used on his land, the less reliable his long-term coffee future was. Although Đà Lạt seemed green and natural, for coffee farmers like Tình, the coffee-producing areas surrounding the town had everything to do with cash crops, agricultural inputs, and economic livelihood. Sustainability was not a phrase Tình used, nor did he elaborate on what a sustainable future as a coffee farmer looks like; Tình already knew that his future in coffee was finite, whether he framed it in environmental terms or not. When monetary incentives drive sustainability initiatives, it is no wonder that the “e for environment” side of the equation is deprioritized, even as most people working in the industry, including farmers, know that the future of coffee does depend on viable soil, access to water, and other climate contingent variables. If the three e’s are imagined as a long-term solution to sustaining cash crop production in a place like Vietnam, many farmers and young environmental studies students do not see it that way. A Vietnamese coffee agronomist once summed up his understanding of sustainability to me by stating that farmers must prioritize either the environment or their economic well-being and quality of life, not both. He believed that coffee farmers, especially in Đăḱ Lăḱ province, were often in the coffee industry for the possibility of a better life rather than the possibility of shaping a new, environmentally sustainable coffee industry in Vietnam. A better life might mean leaving coffee behind for a different industry at some point. Sentiments like this were often confirmed by small farmers who had transitioned into the coffee industry from other cash crops. Even a relatively wealthy Lâm Đồng province coffee magnate, “Bảo,” once told me and a local MARD representative that he could farm, essentially anything, “cà phê, trà, bơ , cũng dư̵ ợc” (“coffee, tea, avocado, anything is fine”). Like many farmers who entered the coffee industry, not because they liked coffee but because they saw a financial opportunity, Bảo could have grown anything so long as it brought in a steady income. However, unlike most coffee farmers in Vietnam, Bảo, with his collection of vintage jeeps and ostensibly limitless resources, had the financial means to pivot when coffee was no longer a viable cash crop. Indeed, several years after I first met Bảo, I heard that he was no longer growing much coffee and had invested in several hectares of organic tea somewhere around Bảo Lộc. With his resources, he certainly could have invested in environmental initiatives or explored the local agricultural development projects around drought and pest-tolerant coffee varieties or fertilizer reduction, but Bảo demonstrated that sometimes coffee becomes

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unsustainable when it no longer garners a certain income or the market appears dismal. In Vietnam, sustainable coffee (cà phê bêǹ vu n ̛̃ g) often accompanies the term “sustainable development” (phát triên̉ bêǹ vữ ng), which raises larger questions about whether agricultural development— especially land and labor-intensive agriculture such as coffee—is ever sustainable. Regardless, sustainability as a concept and value-added application materializes in diverse ways across Lâm Đồng province. For young adults like Phư ơ ng, sustainability materializes through reusable straws and reducing plastic waste, riding bicycles, or walking instead of taking a motorbike, and promoting her vision of a sustainable lifestyle through social media platforms and dialogue with friends and student peers. She has cultivated a mundane, everyday environmentalism that speaks to her hobbies, allows her and her friends to enjoy the mountainous region, and upholds the very coffee industry that Phư ơ ng’s family is embedded in. Sustainability is about the environment and the future, rather than questioning the agricultural (and other) industries that necessitate conversations about sustainability in the first place, Phư ơ ng’s concerns about consumption are primarily about packaging, plastic bags, and straws rather than the agricultural inputs in the Lâm Đồng coffee and vegetable industries that acutely damage the surrounding soil and waterways. By resisting common modes of development in the region and more cosmopolitan trends around conspicuous consumption, these students are actively forging a community of environmentally savvy youth while engendering new local identities for young adults living in the Central Highlands. Phư ơ ng is happy to attend university in a town that, in her view, accommodates other students who love nature and value the environment the way she does. At the end of the day, she wants to promote a sense of environmental responsibility in Vietnam, even as she regularly drinks the commodity coffee that takes such a toll on the surrounding lands. My hike with Phư ơ ng did not disappoint as we encountered plants, insects, horses, and birds throughout the four-hour trip to the peak. Only at the summit did we run into other hikers who were also, incidentally, university students from the area. Phư ơ ng flipped her hat backward, threw her hands up in achievement, and sighed in relief, “Look at how beautiful it is—some days you can see all the way to the coast.” We sat down to eat tangerines and chat about the growing hiking, camping, and backpacking culture in the province. An increasing number of Vietnamese youth from the cities come to Đà Lạt to hike, camp, and “escape to nature,” as Phư ơ ng

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puts it.2 For Phư ơ ng, who grew up working on her family’s coffee farm a mere twenty kilometers from the center of Đà Lạt, going home or hiking Langbiang was an escape from her dark dormitory, classrooms, and the dated restaurant where she worked. The natural world, in Phư ơ ng’s own romanticized view, afforded opportunities to see new plants and animals, whether or not they were “naturally occurring.” Of course, the pine trees that make the Langbiang hike so spectacular are a product of the long French colonial presence in the region and somehow simultaneously distinctly Đà Lạt and distinctly European (see Jennings 2011). And the view, however beautiful, consists of industrial grade coffee as far as the eye can see, primarily planted in a period of agricultural development in the 1990s. The small coffee farm that Phư ơ ng’s family owns, despite also originating in the late 1990s, is still a product of colonialism, remade into a neoliberal project of the market economy and global coffee industry, entangled with recent land-clearing initiatives for industrial agriculture across the province. As Michitake Aso points out, “[p]lantation practices have been difficult to reform because they have been built into natural and social systems” (2018: 9). The soil of the Central Highlands and the Coffea robusta so commonly grown in Vietnam retain its history, even as coffee plantations no longer exist in that form. Aso remarks that “[i]t is sometimes difficult to distinguish between contemporary multinational companies operating plantations and the previous plantation complex” (2018: 8). Even small farms on an industrial scale can be difficult to distinguish from plantations (then or now), especially when considering declining soil fertility and the attributes of cash crop production and export. Phư ơ ng, for all of her hiking excitement, was well aware of this history, the perception of nature in Đà Lạt, and the contrived natural beauty of vegetable and flower greenhouses lit up at night. She was aware that many of the horses dotting the mountain were bred for the tourism industry—nature-themed wedding photos and horse-drawn carriage rides are in particularly high demand during the dry season. She knew, at least peripherally, that despite a growing café culture in Đà Lạt and cities across the country, most of the

2  Motorbike “road trips,” referred to in Vietnamese as di̵ phư ợt, to the mountains and more remote provinces of Vietnam are becoming increasingly popular among Vietnamese youth and young adults. The trips are often designed to provide a different view of Vietnam through camping, visiting less populated and less traveled “off the beaten path” routes of the country. Đà Lạt is a popular stopover to di̵ phư ợt.

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coffee produced in Vietnam is for export. Even if Phư ơ ng was detached from this industry, her family was in regular contact with coffee collectors. The natural world Phư ơ ng inhabits and imagines is remarkably close to the industrial farming world where nature manifests in a different, contested way. In fact, these worlds are entangled in the Central Highlands, where a small coffee farm is part of a larger ecology of coffee sustainability that thrusts a colonial history of coffee production into dialogue with contemporary coffee culture, transnational environmental movements, and local narratives about place and agriculture. This chapter focuses primarily on the latter. For all the publicly available development documents and well-funded projects about coffee production and sustainability in Vietnam, it is Vietnamese farmers and young, budding environmentalists and journalists who articulate the importance of place and land in understanding how to define sustainability and ask an important question: is coffee production ever sustainable? This question raises key points about what a sustainable coffee industry might look like. Indeed, some farmers who know that the coffee they grow is intimately tied to the environmental degradation of the region strategically use coffee as a platform to move away from agriculture altogether. Tình, who explained that he knows coffee is not forever, and that “fertilizer is bad for the soil,” demonstrates that coffee remains an opportunistic cash crop for his family and the hope that his daughters will attend university and find employment outside of the difficult (khó) agricultural industry. I argue that narratives like Tình’s and others who question the sustainability of coffee are a mode of resistance to international development projects and illuminate a point that Kristina M. Lyons makes about the ways in which alternative (not better, not worse) modes of agricultural thinking and being in the world “highlight the built-in expectation of vulnerability present in an ecological sense of being in the world” (2020: 134). Vulnerability is present in the narratives I discuss throughout this chapter. The story template for Vietnamese coffee, agriculture, and the environment at the present moment is framed by local experiences of climate change-related loss; national narratives supported by development firms who frame the future of Vietnamese coffee in terms of GDP and the financial impact of climate change (see Tatarski 2016); and Vietnamese journalists who recognize the cultural significance of agricultural production in the Central Highlands, even as it rubs against the notion of sustainability and an environmentally sound future for those most vulnerable in

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the region. There is also an ethnographic thread from my own research on the Vietnamese coffee industry. Phư ơ ng’s story is particularly important as an ethnographic narrative because it illustrates how the many parts of lived experience in the Central Highlands inform the whole ecology of coffee sustainability in Vietnam. Ecologies of sustainability and recent narratives about climate change in the Vietnamese coffee industry illuminate the ways the environment is imagined in the Central Highlands region of Vietnam. This environment is one with a complex history, commingling with ongoing controversies over land use, resource extraction, agricultural production, ethnic minority livelihoods, and state/international development projects. Using the coffee industry and Vietnamese environmental writing as lenses, this chapter examines the ecology of coffee sustainability as it shapes and is shaped by the way agricultural communities interact with their environments and perceive climate change-related realities. In doing so, I question the trope of “industrialization and commercialization” on the one hand, and “nature” on the other (Nguyen 2019: n.p.) and tease out the blurred line between nature and agricultural landscapes in the Central Highlands, where coffee and other agricultural commodities (e.g., tea, cabbage, artichoke) are valorized even as they are environmentally destructive.

2  Ecological Reality and Environmental Imagination in the Central Highlands Da Lat has now gotten fat, with streets stretched way out, houses recklessly thrown up. Motor scooters have all stolen the peace of morning. —Phan Nhiên Hạo (2020), “Đà Lạt, 1989–2002”

Đà Lạt, or Đà Lạch (water of the Lạch people), as the Indigenous origin story goes, is also known as the “city of fog” and the “flower capital of Vietnam.” It is the capital of Lâm Đồng province in the southernmost region of the Central Highlands. More commonly, Đà Lạt is referred to as “Little Paris” or “Little Switzerland,” the “honeymoon capital of Vietnam” or the “city of 1,000 pines.” Occasionally, the old men drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in local cafés refer to it as the city of sadness—beautiful ̵ như ng mà buôn). ̀ The anthropogenic change referenced in but sad (dẹp Phan Nhiên Hạo’s poem “Da Lat, 1989–2002” is an iteration of this

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sentiment, reflecting on the implications of development and the foggy mornings turned smoggy and noisy. Đà Lạt, despite its developed tourism infrastructure and conspicuous agricultural production industry, is often represented visually as pristine, with agricultural landscapes appearing as natural landscapes. Greenhouses chock full of agricultural products and requisite agricultural inputs—pesticides and fertilizers—become beautiful, firefly-like specks on the landscape at night. Nguyen Hoang Ky Anh’s (2019) photo essay about Đà Lạt juxtaposes the bustle of town with a new kind of nature: agricultural production and tractors. In one photo, the quintessential Đà Lạt fog and terraced landscape with greenhouses are also speckled with trees and rising mountains off in the distance. This photo and others in the essay allow agriculture to exist in the natural world because agriculture in places like Đà Lạt seems peaceful and quiet rather than intense and destructive. The photo essay ends with an image of luxury lakeside villas, shrouded by pine trees and mountains and carefully manicured flowerbeds reminiscent of Đà Lạt’s “Little Switzerland” moniker. These villas, the cabbage farms, and the tractors depicted in the photo essay, perhaps unwittingly, narrate a life that is anything but “simpler” than one in Saigon. Coffee in the Central Highlands, even as it stretches to the horizon in some cases, also narrates the complexity of intensive commodity agricultural production. In the Central Highlands, the scale of small farming exists in a way that can no longer be considered environmentally small or simple. Millions of coffee trees materialize as a singular substance, coffee. In Sarah Besky’s “Monoculture” lexicon, she states that “[w]hen agriculture reaches for economies of scale, plants become plant; think of the singularized nouns soy, cotton, and rubber. In monoculture, both botanical varietals and variety in the landscape disappear” (Besky 2017). These transformations, although sometimes venerated in visual celebrations of the region (lush farms of flowering coffee trees or bright red cherries), are still monoculture, and no one knows monoculture like a commodity coffee farmer. Recently, however, some farmers are pushing for crop diversification as a response to increasingly uncertain rainy seasons, fluctuations in market prices, and other barriers to financial stability for the small farmer. Đà Lạt resides in the Vietnamese imagination as a place of respite; the flower and honeymoon capital of Vietnam, although misty and cold at times, is relatively temperate at nearly 1500 meters above sea level. Eric Jennings opens his history of the city by stating that “for a city of some 160,000 inhabitants, Đà Lạt today has achieved an almost mythical and

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remarkably varied reputation: it is at once a site of romance, education, privilege, leisure, pilgrimage, and science—the latter thanks to its U.S.built experimental nuclear reactor” (2011: 1). Đà Lạt and the surrounding Central Highlands are a contested site of agricultural production and perceived natural beauty where the very environment and atmosphere that make Đà Lạt unique are its undoing when it comes to environmental sustainability. Climate change and persistent drought are a threat to farmers’ livelihoods, and Vietnamese media regularly turn to the Central Highlands to explore the implications of drier dry seasons and unpredictable rainy seasons. For example, in a Tuôỉ Trẻ article about greenhouses, agriculture, and climate change in Đà Lạt, Dr. Vũ Ngọc Long of the Southern Institute of Ecology warns “[K]hông chı ̉ tôi mà nhiêù nhà khoa học dã̵ cảnh báo vớ i ̵ cơ quan chứ c năng rằng nhà kính dã̵ và dang phá huỷ cảnh quan mộng mơ và ‘sứ c khỏe’ hệ sinh thái cuả Đà Lạt” (It’s not only me but many scientists have warned officials that greenhouses are destroying the dreamlike landscape and health of Dalat’s ecosystem) (Vinh 2018; translation mine). The greenhouses, coffee, tea, and terraced vegetable farms that make up Đà Lạt’s “dreamy” look are direct contributors to temperature increases and water pollution in the region even as they set Đà Lạt apart from other towns in the province and Central Highlands. Like other cash crops in the region, the ecological reality of coffee is that no matter how it is produced in Vietnam, it is an environmental challenge and one that questions the very definition of sustainability. According to the narrative espoused by many tour guides, books, and urban-dwelling Vietnamese, Đà Lạt is unlike the rest of the country. For the influx of domestic tourists, it is a reprieve from the pollution and crowds of the city, in theory. Domestic and international tourism materials chronicle the town’s temperate weather and diverse natural features. Indeed, the Langbiang Plateau and its peaks frame the city while the lakes, waterfalls, and rivers accentuate the native flora and fauna. Đà Lạt, however, like many places in the Central Highlands, is primarily a city of agricultural production. The “city of flowers” moniker stands today because of the biannual flower festival and growing floriculture and export industry in Lâm Đồng province, not because native flowers adorn the mountains. For all the nicknames and stories of natural beauty, Đà Lạt is also a city primed for rapid environmental change, destruction, and the lived implications of climate precarity. And yet, the Central Highlands are often framed as an untamed frontier, far from urban, “developed” Vietnam. It is this misconception about what constitutes development that renders the

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Central Highlands even more vulnerable to environmental destruction and change. This misconception also highlights a paradox about Vietnam’s coffee success story: Vietnamese coffee and those who drive the industry, as with any agricultural commodity, play a role in exacerbating climate precarity and acute environmental damage. At the very least, the more “successful” the coffee industry, the more environmental pressure placed on people and land.

3   Coffee Sustainability and Emerging Environmental Movements It is nearly impossible to travel around the Central Highlands without seeing some form of cash crop production—coffee is a ubiquitous cash crop, spanning multiple histories of French colonialism, war, Eastern Bloc relations, and 1990s foreign investment and development initiatives. The Central Highlands are  a region comprising five provinces, recognized within Vietnam for its fertile basalt soil, prime for extensive industrial agriculture, and chock-full of natural resources, flora, and fauna. It is Lâm ́ however, that live in the Vietnamese popular imaginaĐồng and Đăḱ Lăk, tion as coffee-producing places. These two provinces, despite their shared borders and proximity, are at cultural and developmental odds, although each province is significant in the world of industrial agriculture and commodity cash crop production. Lâm Đồng is represented in popular Vietnamese media as idyllic; still a home of intellectuals and artists, of high-quality Coffea arabica, produce, mulberries, and a growing organic ́ on the other hand, is represented as farming and dairy industry. Đăḱ Lăk, a frontier of industrial agriculture, economic booms and busts, and ethnic ́ minority politics (Tan 2000). Đăḱ Lăk’s capital city, Buôn Ma Thuột, draws coffee buyers and other industry professionals seeking to manage and capitalize on the sun-baked coffee trees. Climate change is critical in Đăḱ Lăḱ and other Central Highlands provinces as persistent droughts literally reshape the rivers and waters that irrigate coffee farms. Yet environmentalists in Vietnam and elsewhere are reluctant to take up the question of large-scale industrial coffee agriculture in the Central Highlands, perhaps because it is so embedded in thousands of livelihoods and part of larger state-led agricultural development initiatives. Coffee is a system of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) that will undoubtedly impact ethnic minorities and poor farmers before anyone else when the climate crisis worsens.

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Coffee embeds communities of farmers in the monoculture and perpetuates a paradox—without coffee, there is no livelihood but with coffee, these livelihoods are short-lived. Where “bad environmentalism” (Seymour 2018) abounds in the West, young adults in Vietnam are trying out popular movements, often circulating their concerns on social media. Seymour (2018) defines the concept of bad environmentalism to move beyond the fatalistic, despair-oriented doom of climate change to a different tact of environmentalism, or environmentalism that carves out space for less discussion and more alternative modes of engagement such as humor, or in the case of Phư ơ ng, seemingly mundane nature walks. Privy to a growing hashtag-inspired environmental awareness, and increasingly attuned to larger global environmentalism, many young Vietnamese are actively looking for ways to express their deep concerns about the most pressing climate change emergencies in Vietnam while having fun and building community. Informed about the nuances of climate change in Southeast Asia or not, young students like Phư ơ ng are driven by the excitement of a camping trip and the vistas on a hike first, and the possibility of creating environmental change through nature appreciation second. Phư ơ ng and her friends are blurring multiple lines, between nature appreciation and environmentalism, for example, but in the process, having fun and recognizing that fertilizer and pesticide-­ intensive cash crops like coffee are an integral part of the perceived Central Highlands beauty and local livelihood. With the exception of intermittent ethnic minority protests in the early 2000s (see McElwee 2000), there is not an active environmental resistance to coffee in the Central Highlands, despite the environmental impact of the industry. Between #trashtag social media challenges that spread across Vietnam in 2019 (See Vinh 2019), protests against urban development projects in Hanoi, or #ToiChonCa (#IChooseFish) in the wake of the 2016 Formosa Hà Tı ̃nh Steel mill toxic spill, there is no shortage of environmental activism around a multitude of issues in Vietnam, including viral videos and hashtag challenges.3 However, the disconnect between this burgeoning “bad environmentalism” and everyday industrial agriculture is widening. The coffee industry and swaths of coffee land devoid of activists across the 3  See Chapman (2017) for more on the “rising environmental awareness” across issues in Vietnam. Also see Nguyen (2020) for an overview of environmental activism “as an arena of contestation in Vietnam’s state-society relations” and popular discourses of nature conservation (2020: 33).

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Central Highlands speak to this disconnect. Someone like Phư ơ ng could resist coffee production because it will undoubtedly alter the landscape she loves to hike with her friends, but she also understands coffee’s socioeconomic role in the region. The “naturalness” of the Central Highlands is situated subjectively as the striking features of the landscape or attractions on long hikes through the mountains. These narratives open the possibility for inquiry into how environmentalism is shaped and reshaped by nascent forms of environmental activism and understandings of monoculture and its environmental impact. How do monoculture, nature, and people commingle in the Central Highlands? I am hesitant to draw a parallel between plantations and the small coffee farm holder system in Vietnam, but the legacies in the soil and emergent “forms of life” (Li and Semedi 2021) surrounding Vietnamese coffee are remarkable. Like earlier “non-confrontational political” urban environmental movements that concentrated on social media, such as the “Tree Hug Movement” in Hanoi (Geertman and Boudreau 2018), attention to environmentalism in Đà Lạt emerges from young adults building a sense of community and global connection around a shared appreciation for the environment writ large. Environmental sustainability through recycling practices and organic farming initiatives are also popular among young Vietnamese in Đà Lạt. New Facebook pages and university student volunteer and hiking clubs take on an environmentalist slant as students share visual and text-based posts about their experiences in and appreciation of nature. These posts define nature in Đà Lạt through narratives about a resilient, pristine natural world in which commodity agricultural production is allowed to exist. For example, Phư ơ ng and her friends once shared a Facebook invitation to join a student hike on the outskirts of Đà Lạt with the caption “xem cà phê, cây thông và dộ̵ ng vật hoang dã” (“look at coffee, pine trees, and wild animals”). By allowing commodity agricultural products like coffee to exist within this natural world, a new form of precarity for already marginalized ethnic minority farmers, or any farmer without the means to intercrop or pivot beyond coffee emerges. When coffee becomes valued as part of the natural world, as part of the “natural” landscape of the Central Highlands, environmental sustainability in agriculture is disconnected from this vision. Coffee, both the burgeoning “specialty coffee” varieties grown in the highest altitude areas of Lâm Đồng province and the plentiful Coffea

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robusta grown in lower-altitude, shadeless farming areas, are part of a distinct ecology in which state, environment, climate change, and variable ideas of “sustainability” intersect. The state, specifically the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) is ever-present in discussions about coffee development. At the same time, Vietnamese state and popular media regularly publish news and content about the devastating effects of climate change-related drought on Vietnamese coffee production and the domestic industry at large. It is the foreboding narratives about the environment coupled with the veneration of Vietnamese coffee in cafés across the country that partially construct the ecology of coffee sustainability in Vietnam. For Vietnamese and other regional scholars writing about coffee in Vietnam, there is not yet a clear emphasis on the environmental implications of coffee development, even as sustainability persists as a buzzword. In Coffee in Vietnam’s Central Highlands (Phan et al. 2007), contributors explore the historical, anthropological, and economic dimensions of coffee in the Central Highlands. One chapter, authored by H’Wen Niê K’Dăm (2007), clearly outlines the perceived “problems”—poor farmers do not study agronomy or care about coffee quality—in coffee-farming villages in the Central Highlands and ends with recommendations to further expand the industry. The expert economist and agricultural development perspectives on Vietnamese coffee often espouse the concept of sustainability while they eschew sustainable practices. This should not come as a surprise as “sustainability” is an often-used term in the coffee industry at large, with little consensus about what it really means, or how it is practiced or implemented. Translating sustainability is a job that often falls to the non-experts or translators who are hired specifically to turn the presentation of an international development organization into commensurable ideas for a Vietnamese audience. Although there are occasional coffee sustainability conferences and workshops in Vietnam, there is rarely attention to the ways in which the term “works” or does not, in Vietnamese. Sự bêǹ vu n ̛̃ g, the Vietnamese word for sustainability, combines “solid” and “strong” ̀ with “secure” or “stable” (vữ ng) to impart a sense of long-lasting (bên) endurance. When encountered in the Vietnamese coffee industry at farmer training seminars or workshops, or in certification scheme audits, Sự bêǹ vữ ng is meant to evoke a Western framework of sustainability that emphasizes building towards a sustainable environment and agricultural economy. After all, “sustainability is an English word” (Maldonado et  al.

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2016), and the ability to translate this concept is no easy task. Jerome Whitington points out that in Laos, Sustainability refers not simply to environmental protection, but to questions about how economic growth happens, with special attention to complex articulations of ecology and economy for a country heavily dependent on agriculture and fisheries for its base economic safety net. Clearly, the term ‘sustainability’ does not refer to actual outcomes or to sincere intentions. (2018: 45–46)

In Vietnam, where agricultural development projects proliferate and environmental rule shapes the value of people (ethnic minorities), forests, and agriculture (McElwee 2016), sustainability operates differently in narrative form and policy practice. In popular media spaces, sustainability and environmental projects often take on a distinctly social focus. The online content producer and digital media pioneer Saigoneer regularly features dual Vietnamese-English language articles about the environment and Vietnam. Recent reports range from “informal recycling workshops” in Saigon (Selkin 2020) and urban sustainability projects (Tatarski 2019) to the many climate change-related problems in the Mekong Delta (Tatarski 2020). Although the target audience of digital media publications like Saigoneer is a mix of Vietnamese and foreign nationals, the dedicated “environment” section focuses on the pressing societal issues that readers living in Vietnam care about. Given recent climate change-based initiatives in Vietnam, it is no surprise that popular media focus on the ways that local communities are experiencing and grappling with climate change and anxiety.4 Dual-language state media like VN Express International also regularly feature stories about environmental destruction, namely air and water pollution from manufacturing, as well as feel-good stories about environmental activists who blaze the trail for future generations. For these readers, however, the tricky problem of monoculture emerges again—coffee is singular, erasing the complexity of the Central Highlands growing region and the many varieties of coffee propagated and ingenious solutions to everyday farming problems developed throughout the region.

4  See McElwee et al. (2017) and McElwee (2015) for interdisciplinary scholarship on climate change in Vietnam.

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4  Ecologies of Vietnamese Coffee The Central Highlands and its soil, atmosphere, and water are environmental actors in the ecology of Vietnamese coffee. The region is shaped by a long history of destruction, extraction, and abuse. Like rubber (see Aso 2018) and other colonial cash crops, coffee (Coffea Arabica and Coffea robusta) is also entangled in colonial and post-colonial histories of labor, ethnic minority politics, and exploitation. The commodity coffee (Coffea robusta) grown in Đăḱ Lăḱ and parts of Lâm Đồng is part of a unique coffee ecology that has drawn significant media attention to Vietnam and its large-scale coffee production. In this narrative process, Vietnam emerges as both a success story and a failure. The success lies in becoming the second-largest producer of coffee in the world—an arbitrary geopolitical title that erases ethnic minority displacements and the violence of colonial history and contemporary cash crop production. The failure lies in the lack of effective sustainability initiatives in the coffee industry—large-scale commodity coffee production is especially destructive for long-term land use and the surrounding environments.5 An ecology of Vietnamese coffee must also include the multiple narrative forms that describe coffee-growing land and café culture in Vietnam. These narrative forms—Vietnamese travel writing, blogs, social and popular media—that evoke a harmonious relationship between human and nature, especially in places like Đà Lạt, position coffee aesthetically and culturally. Indeed, cafés all over Đà Lạt and Buôn Ma Thuột take great pride in the coffee they use and the fact that it is locally produced. Coffee growing requires, at a bare minimum, decent soil, irrigation, and sunlight. It often requires agricultural inputs, very specific soil, particular kinds of irrigation, processing facilities, economic savvy, and experience, let alone specific knowledge about how to navigate agricultural and climate-related disasters. Whereas the coffee-growing highlands are admired in much popular literature about Vietnam, environmental writing is beginning to recognize what is and is not sustainable in agricultural production. Unlike a conspicuous environmental disaster such as a toxic spill, commodity 5  The environmental destruction that comes with coffee production also includes the capitalism of consumption. The primary consumers of Vietnamese coffee are not Vietnamese. The global Vietnamese coffee industry is built on export, transportation between the Central Highlands and southern ports in Sài Gòn, and the shipping industry that facilitates trade between Vietnam and western Europe, East Asia, and North America (the primary regions where Vietnamese coffee is consumed).

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coffee production wreaks slow havoc on the earth and laboring bodies. Above all, commodity coffee production, as the industry continues to expand, requires land, converted from the complex classification schemes and forest management projects and the larger question of environmental rule in Vietnam (McElwee 2016). On the surface, the narrative of coffee production in Vietnam is a success story, if success is measured in terms of production volume and world rankings for production and export. As the story goes, the rapid rise of coffee production in Vietnam is a marker of agricultural prowess; the Vietnamese state’s capacity to navigate complicated global commodity markets that are often stacked against producers like Vietnam and the sheer recognition that there is a world of consumers eager to buy cheap commodity-grade coffee are the highlights of this story. At its core, however, the narrative of coffee production in Vietnam is a story of extraction. At times coffee is a means of economic development, but it is also the byproduct of a longer history of the Central Highlands in which ethnic minorities have been displaced from their land, forests cleared and replaced by cash crops, and fertility and nutrients depleted from the soil, rendering it much less productive for future agricultural production or subsistence farming. Although the Central Highlands are narrated as a beautiful frontier in Vietnam, industrial agriculture and extraction have  permanently altered the landscape. In addition to the environmental impact of agricultural production, natural resources such as bauxite are frequently extracted from the earth in the Central Highlands. Jason Morris-Jung’s comprehensive examination of the bauxite mining controversy in the Central Highlands foregrounds the Vietnamese perspective through participant observation and interviews with many activists and scientists about the politics of mining. Morris-Jung describes a workshop held in the Central Highlands province Đăḱ Nông: At the Đăḱ Nông workshop, Nguyên Ngọc spoke about the “cultural” impacts of bauxite mining on the M’Nông people of the Central Highlands. For Nguyên Ngọc, bauxite mining was like “standing before a life or death decision.” Not only did it spell disaster to the ethnic minorities of the region, but it threatened the socio-cultural and geographic bonds that bound the Central Highlands to the Vietnamese nation. (2015: 72)

For Central Highlands-based writers like Nguyên Ngọc, bauxite mining represented more than a discursive threat to those living in the region,

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including many ethnic minority groups. Bauxite mining in all its controversy highlights the role of extractive industries in uprooting communities, their culture, and their future in the process. Like other extractive industries that remove metals, minerals, and oil from the earth, bauxite mining has grave environmental and human impacts (Abdullah et  al. 2016; O’Mahony 2019). The bauxite mining controversy in Vietnam— specifically opposition to extractive mining—introduced a new kind of “performative” and “oppositional” politics to Vietnam (Morris-Jung 2015). As Morris-Jung establishes, there was no shortage of Vietnamese opposition in the media and other public venues during the 2008–2009 controversy. The opposition emerged in a very public way, weaving together concerns over environmental impacts, the proposed influx of Chinese migrant labor, and the Central Highlands as a place. Like bauxite mining, coffee production in the Central Highlands has generated oppositional perspectives on socio-cultural impacts of large-­ scale agricultural production. Coffee may not be extractive in the literal sense—coffee production does not remove natural resources from the earth—but byproducts such as chemically produced fertilizers and pesticides strip the soil of vital nutrients and adulterate nearby water sources with toxic irrigation runoff. Coffee also exploits labor in complicated and uneven ways as Vietnamese and ethnic minority coffee farmers are subject to fluctuations in the global coffee market, climate-related variances in production volume, and the difficult manual labor that defines the annual coffee harvest. Coffee is not the only fraught agricultural industry in Vietnam, but it is slowly beginning to facilitate dialogue about unsustainable farming practices and the simultaneous cultural significance of coffee consumption and cafés. Vietnamese creative artists and activists are also engaging in dialogues about the environment, becoming powerful shapers of environmental narratives in Vietnam. Themes of excess, waste, environment, and cultural identity shape the work of artists like Võ Trân Châu (see Factory Contemporary Arts Centre 2020), while interrelated ideas about nature and imagination, animals, and environment influence the work of Tuấn ̃ Tuấn Mami’s In One’s Breath—Nothing Stands Still is Andrew Nguyên. also critically engaged with extraction, capitalism, and the environment (see Lovatt 2020 and Robert 2019). These artists and their colleagues approach the environment in Vietnam through a variety of visual and material forms.

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The Bảo Lộc Project, hosted and sponsored by a large coffee export company, took place over several weeks in the Lâm Đồng province town of Bảo Lộc in 2007. The Bảo Lộc Project was meant to bring artists together with community members in a space that held important symbolic significance for the region—a coffee export warehouse and processing facility. Bảo Lộc is described on the official project website as “Bảo Lộc ̉ khởi dâ̵ ̀u cuả dãy Trư ờ ng Sơ n” (the beginning of the Trư ờ ng Sơ n là diê̵ m mountain range). Indeed, it is a coffee and tea-producing town, albeit without the attention that Đà Lạt receives in Vietnamese media and travel writings. It is a town that is often passed through without much of a stop, as the leading Vietnamese bus companies stop for lunch or a quick restroom and coffee break on long drives up from the city. In this passage, it is hard to miss the vast greenery of coffee and tea planted to the horizon and obviously an important part of the local agricultural economy. The Bảo Lộc project website also optimistically boasts that “the town of Bảo Lộc is one of the centers of Vietnamese coffee” (là một thị xã cuả tı ̉nh ̀ Bảo Lộc dư̵ ợc xem như một trong nhữ ng trung tâm cuả ngành Lâm Đông, công nghiệp cà phê Việt Nam). The introductory essay from the Bảo Lộc Project catalog states that “[t]he Bao Loc Project had no grand aims of social change … Rather, art functioned here as a place of symbolic communication and exchange within the notional, social and cultural realm” (Hadju n.d.). Sponsored by a large export company and experimental farming station, however, it draws attention to the ways in which capital flows into the community through agricultural development plans and flows out, extracting labor and soil nutrients alongside the coffee that is produced. If there were no aims of social change in the Bảo Lộc Project, simply focusing on coffee draws attention to the environmental implications of industrial agriculture in the Central Highlands.

5   Conclusion Environmental narratives about coffee production and sustainability in Vietnam have only recently questioned the institutions that perpetuate environmental destruction and exacerbate climate change-related experiences. These narratives also draw parallels between the lived experience of the Central Highlands and extractive industries from natural resource mining to agricultural production that reshape ecosystems in the region. The paradox of coffee in Vietnam is that coffee’s destructiveness is

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celebrated culturally, as Vietnamese coffee gains international notoriety as a popular drink, and the café, in many urban areas, has also come to symbolize creativity and possibility for many youths. In Đà Lạt, cafés can serve the purpose of connecting patrons (often young adults) to nature—coffee with a view and coffee on a coffee farm are major selling points. An “environmentalization of agriculture” (Cattelino 2019) has yet to take place fully in Vietnam, but the idea seems to be circulating among proponents of agricultural sustainability and those who think carefully about the interrelationship between future livelihoods, environment, and the economic role of industrial agriculture in the present. The work of visual artists is already drawing attention to the connection between Central Highlands ecologies and the environmental implications of capitalist extraction. In Phư ơ ng’s world, the landscape of the Central Highlands is ideally natural, and it does natural work—it promotes a particular kind of life and produces a world in which agriculture is produced not as currency but as life-giving. For me, the small plots of coffee, carrot, and artichoke interspersed with pine trees and horses along our hike are a reminder that the natural world is deceptive and always mediated. Flowering coffea, fragrant with delicate white flowers, in much of the coffee-producing regions of Vietnam is only as productive as the chemically produced agricultural inputs it absorbs. When we hiked up the mountain, we passed through coffee farms with berries in varying stages of ripeness; the barbed wire protecting the farms was evidence that the alternate forest route we walked led actually across a privately owned farm. From on high, we could see the careful demarcation between crops, high-use motorbike paths, and eroding, terraced vegetable farms. Paths like these are the “between” that Celia Lowe describes in Wild Profusion: Natures are ‘made’ at the intersection of humans with their particular social histories, and plants and animals with their unique evolutionary and ecological histories. Neither ‘science’ nor ‘society’ will tell us all the interesting things one might want to know about these natures. To proceed further, one must travel along a path between the human and the wild profusion. (2006: 3)

For all Phư ơ ng’s romantic ideas about “escaping to nature,” she was the one who pointed out the small fires and wisps of smoke curling across the valley—farmers were clearing land for new cash crop plantings. Perhaps Phư ơ ng recognized that her own family is complicit in this clearing of land and the irreversible anthropogenic impact of agricultural commodity

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production. The inseparability of nature and culture in ecological relationships reminds us that when the term sustainability is invoked by farmers, international organizations, or local environmentalists, they are operating under very precise understandings of what constitutes their respective livelihoods and values about the environment. Ethnographic narratives emerging from environmental anthropologies of Southeast Asia are particularly attuned to these entanglements, providing nuanced understandings of late-industrial environments and development schemes in Southeast Asia.6 Nevertheless, an interdisciplinary engagement across environmental anthropology and the environmental humanities in Vietnam will further our understanding of environmental change and the ways in which narrative forms are used by activists and draw our attention to the complex ecologies of coffee sustainability.

References Abdullah, Noor Hisham, Norlen Mohamed, Lokman Hakim Sulaiman, Thahirahtul Asma Zakaria, and Daud Abdul Rahim. 2016. “Potential Health Impacts of Bauxite Mining in Kuantan.” The Malaysia Journal of Medical Sciences 23.3: 1–8. Aso, Michitake. 2018. Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897–1975. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press. “Bảo Lộc Project.” n.d. http://baolocproject.org/. Accessed 21 February 2020. Besky, Sarah. 2017. “Monoculture.” Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights (28 June). https://culanth.org/fieldsights/monoculture. Accessed 11 November 2021. Cattelino, Jessica R. 2019. “From Green to Green: The Environmentalization of Agriculture.” Journal for the Anthropology of North America 22.2: 135–138. Chapman, Nicholas. 2017. “Rising Environmental Awareness in Vietnam.” Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 21. https://kyotoreview.org/yav/rising-­ environmental-­awareness-­vietnam/. Accessed 25 July 2021. The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre. 2020. “Press Release: Leaf Picking in the Ancient Forest: A Solo Exhibition by Võ Trân Châu.” https://factoryartscentre.com/wp-­content/uploads/2020/02/Press-­release_Leaf-­Picking-­in-­the-­ Ancient-­Forest.pdf. Accessed 8 May 2020. Geertman, Stephanie, and Julie-Anne Boudreau. 2018. “‘Life as Art’: Emerging Youth Networks in Hanoi and the Tree Hug Movement.” City and Society 30.2: 210–236. Hạo, Phan Nhiên. 2020. Paper Bells, translated by Hai-Dang Phan. The Song Cave.

6

 For recent examples see Parreñas (2018), Porter (2019), and Whitington (2018).

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Hadju, Sue. n.d. “Sue Hajdu, The Bao Loc Project.” http://www.suehajdu.net/ curatorial_thebaoloc_project.html. Accessed 27 May 2020. Jennings, Eric Thomas. 2011. Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina. Berkeley: University of California Press. K’Dăm, H’Wen Niê. 2007. “Coffee Production in Vietnam’s Central Highlands Provinces.” Coffee in Vietnam’s Central Highlands: Historical, Anthropological and Economic Perspectives. Ed. Thanh Phan, H’Wen Niê K’Dăm, and Ikemoto Yukio. Ho Chi Minh City: Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City Press. Li, Tania Murray and Pujo Semedi. 2021. Plantation Life: Corporate Occupation in Indonesia’s Oil Palm Zone. Durham: Duke University Press. Lovatt, Philippa. 2020. “(Im)material Histories and Aesthetics of Extractivism in Vietnamese Artists’ Moving Image.” Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, 4.1: 221–236. Lowe, Celia. 2006. Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lyons, Kristina M. 2020. Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners and Life Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Maldonado, María García, Rosario García Meza, and Emily Yates-Doerr. 2016. “Sustainability.” Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights (30 September). https:// culanth.org/fieldsights/sustainability. Accessed 11 November 2021. McElwee, Pamela D., Thuyen Nghiem, Hue Le, and Huong Vu. 2017. “Flood Vulnerability among Rural Households in the Red River Delta of Vietnam: Implications for Future Climate Change Risk and Adaptation.” Natural Hazards 86.1: 465–492. McElwee, Pamela D. 2016. Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ———. 2015. “From Conservation and Development to Climate: Anthropological Engagements with REDD+ in Vietnam.” Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change. Ed. Jessica Barnes and Michael Dove. New Haven: Yale University Press. 82–106. ———. 2000. “Coffee, Christianity and Conflict: An Update on the Central Highlands of Vietnam.” Mekong Update and Dialogue 4 (3): 2–4. Morris-Jung, Jason. 2015. “The Vietnamese Bauxite Controversy: Towards a More Oppositional Politics.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 10.1: 63–109. Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nguyen Hoang Ky Anh. 2019. “Tractors and Cabbages: A Different Da Lat Away From Urban Chaos.” Saigoneer (18 June). https://www.saigoneer.com/ vietnam-­travel/16751-­photos-­tractors-­and-­cabbages-­a-­different-­da-­lat-­away-­ from-­urban-­chaos.

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Nguyen, Quang Dung. 2020. “From Cyberspace to the Streets: Emerging Environmental Paradigm of Justice and Citizenship in Vietnam.” IIAS Newsletter 86: 31–33. O’Mahony, Jennifer. 2019. “Bauxite Mining and Chinese Dam Push Guinea’s Chimpanzees to the Brink.” Mongabay. https://news.mongabay. com/2019/05/bauxite-­mining-­and-­chinese-­dam-­push-­guineas-­chimpanzees-­ to-­the-­brink/. Accessed 3 May 2020. Parreñas, Juno Salazar. 2018. Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Durham: Duke University Press. Phan, Thanh, H’Wen Niê K’Dăm, and Ikemoto Yukio. 2007. Coffee in Vietnam’s Central Highlands: Historical, Anthropological and Economic Perspectives. Ho Chi Minh City: Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City Press. Porter, Natalie. 2019. Viral Economies: Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robert, Christophe. 2019. “In One’s Breath—Nothing Stands Still: A Multimedia Exhibition in Hồ Chí Minh City.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 14 (2): 145–154. Seymour, Nicole. 2018. Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Selkin, Jim. 2020. “Tracing the Reincarnation of Plastic Waste in Saigon’s Informal Recycling Workshops.” Saigoneer (19 April), https://saigoneer.com/saigon-­ environment/18608-­tracing-­the-­reincarnation-­of-­plastic-­waste-­in-­saigon-­s-­ informal-­recycling-­workshops. Accessed 8 May 2020. Tan, Stan B-H. 2000. “Coffee Frontiers in the Central Highlands of Vietnam: Networks of Connectivity.” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 41.1: 51–67. Tatarski, Michael. 2016. “Vietnam Faces Dilemma on Forests as Climate Change Threatens Coffee Crops.” Mongabay (December 1), https://news.mongabay. com/2016/12/vietnam-­f aces-­d ilemma-­o n-­f orests-­a sclimate-­c hange-­ threatens-­coffee-­crops/. Accessed 6 June 2020. ———. 2019. “Loài Plastic: To Eradicate Plastic Items, Treat Them as Invasive Species.” Saigoneer (19 August). https://saigoneer.com/saigon-­ environment/17240-­l o%C3%A0i-­p lastic-­t o-­e radicate-­p lastic-­i tems,-­t reat-­ them-­as-­invasive-­species. Accessed 8 May 2020. ———. 2020. “Dams, Sand, Rice: The Life and Possible Death of the Mekong Delta.” Saigoneer (1 March). https://saigoneer.com/saigon-­ environment/18401-­d ams,-­s and,-­r ice-­t he-­l ife-­a nd-­p ossible-­d eath-­o f-­t he-­ mekong-­delta. Accessed 21 April 2020. ́ ảm dạ̵ m lấn lư ớ t màu Vinh, Mai. 2018. “Nhà kính bao vây Đà Lạt, màu trăng xanh.” Tuôỉ Trẻ (25 June). https://tuoitre.vn/news-­20180625083110606. htm. Accessed 25 July 2021.

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———. 2019. “Vietnamese Youth Take on #Trashtag Challenge.” Tuôỉ Trẻ (15 March). https://tuoitrenews.vn/news/lifestyle/20190315/vietnamese-­ youth-­take-­on-­trashtag-­challenge/49283.html. Accessed 25 July 2021. Whitington, Jerome. 2018. Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

PART V

Environmental Literature in Vietnam

Environmental Travel Narratives in the Magazine Nam Phong Nguyen Phuong Ngoc

From a young age and thanks to their teachers, Vietnamese children know that in their homeland “rừ ng vàng, biên̉ bạc” [the forest is gold, the sea is silver]. But are they really aware of these resources and their limitations? As adults, are they ready to take care of them, as well as of the earth in general, beyond the boundaries of Vietnam? With these environmental issues in mind, I will analyze travel stories published in the well-known magazine Nam Phong (South Wind, 1917–1934), a bridge between traditional and modern cultures. This corpus of a thousand pages shows some dominant topics of environmental narratives in the history of twentieth-­ century Vietnamese literature and points to the connections between conceptions of nature and the emergence of Vietnam as a modern nation.

N. Phuong Ngoc (*) IRASIA (Institute of Asian Studies), Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_11

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1   Nam Phong: A Focus of Cultural and Intellectual Life From 1 July 1917 to the end of December 1934, Nam Phong was published monthly, with contributions in Vietnamese and Chinese, but also in French starting with volume 64 in October 1922.1 For the readers of the time, it was a magazine that provided the knowledge necessary for modern society: “With its articles of a very high intellectual scope, of a great richness both in content and form, of a pleasant variety touching on all fields, the magazine has gradually become the link between the ancient Chinese culture and the new European culture. Phạm Quỳnh’s entire team thus contributed to building the foundations of the new Vietnamese literature” (Durand and Nguyen 1969: 116). “Du ký,” literally “to travel” and “to note,” is a specific genre in Nam Phong. In between journalistic reports and literary essays, such travel stories were written by an editor of the magazine or by an occasional contributor to report on a trip to the readers.2 In colonial Vietnam, these Western-style reports were a new phenomenon. Before radio and TV, this text signed by Song Cử entitled “Royal Journey to the South” is a true report without images. After the account of the preparations, the beginning of the journey on 14 February 1933 is narrated as follows: 8 giờ rư ỡi, quan Khâm sứ qua chầu. Ngài ngự ra cửa Đại cung môn lên xe ̵ ban ́ ̆ bảy phát li ̣nh. Các quan tùng Giá theo thứ tự dã̵ khải loan. Trên kỳ dài ̵ dê̵ ù lên xe di̵ theo. Buôỉ mai ấy tạnh ráo, không nang ́ ̆ không mư a, khí săṕ dặt trờ i ấm, dê ̃ chịu. ̵ Mũi Né; 9 giờ 20, dèo ̵ Phư ớ c Tư ợng; 9 giờ 35, dèo ̵ Phú gia. 9 giờ 15, dê̵ ń dèo [At half past eight, the Senior Resident came to present his respectful greetings; the Emperor drove up to the Great Gate. Seven blows were delivered from the flag tower. The mandarins who accompanied His Majesty followed the royal carriage in the set order. That morning, the weather was pleasant, with no rain and little sunshine.

1  Nam Phong’s complete collection of 211 volumes was digitized (CD-Rom) by the Institute of Vietnamese Studies, Westminster, California, in 2009. For a general presentation, see Pham Thi Ngoan 1973. The magazine‘s index was produced by Nguyêñ Khăć Xuyên in 1968. 2  In Vietnamese, the word “ký,“ a narrative written on the occasion of a trip, precedes “ký sự“ (note, facts), then “phóng sự,“ the current term for reportage, which seems to have appeared only in the 1930s.

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At 9:15 we arrived at the pass Mũi Born; at 9:30 am, at the pass Phư ớ c Tư ợng; at 9:35 am, at the Phú Gia pass.] (Song Cử 1933: 222)3

There is a real willingness to convey information gathered in the field. Nguyêñ Đôn Phục, sent by his magazine to cover the inauguration of the construction of a technical school in the village of Thư ợng Cát, wrote about the new profession of journalist: “những nhà văn hào xư a nay dã̵ có học thuật, dã̵ có tư tư ơ ̉ng, tứ c là con ngư ờ i làm tai măt́ cho quôć dân” [the writer has a very great responsibility: writers have always been the eyes and ears of the people, because they possess knowledge and ideas] (Nguyêñ Đôn Phục 1922c: 183). Nam Phong features sixty-two stories by Vietnamese authors in this category, of different lengths, published in a single issue or across several issues, and totaling about one thousand printed pages. They are signed by about forty people, including the Nam Phong team: the editor-in-chief Phạm Quỳnh, eight senior editors, and about thirty external collaborators. These collaborators are individuals who had the opportunity to travel (mostly in their work) or who described the environment of their living and working places. These authors bring news about environmental issues to readers’ attention. In their accounts of actual journeys across the country, what environment do the travelers writing for Nam Phong describe? From what point of view? Are they aware of the impact of human activities on the environment? The travel narratives include realistic descriptions of lands, rivers, mountains, and trees. For example, we can read in Trần Quang Huyến’s “The Journey to Laos”: Sáng ngày 29, tàu ngư ợc dòng lên, sông khúc quanh queo, bên núi bên rừ ng, có quãng hai bên bờ , nhữ ng tảng dá̵ lớ n chı ̃a tua tuả ra sông, chô ̃ nư ớ c chẩy ́ ̆ cá sấu, con bơ i trên reo, chô ̃ hai dòng xô lại. Trong khúc sông ấy, thư ờ ng lam mặt dòng, con phơ i mình trên bãi cát. Lại một quãng rừ ng, biêt́ bao nhiêu cò ́ ́ xóa một khúc sông. trăng, bay như bư ơ m bư ớ m, trăng [On the 29th in the morning, the boat went upstream, the river twisting between the forest and the mountains. In some places, large rocks pointed towards the river, [and] the water ran faster or two currents joined in a crash. In this section of the river, there were a lot of crocodiles, one floating on the water, another warming itself on a sandbank. In another place, after

3

 All translations from Vietnamese are mine.

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a forest, a lot of cranes were flying like butterflies and the whole river turned white.] (Trần Quang Huyến 1922: 193)

Nam Phong’s readers can then imagine the landscape they will see if they take the same itinerary. But the way in which the environment is described can also tell us much about these authors’ and their readers’ perceptions of the environment.

2  Nature, Serenity, and Spirituality In the account of his travel to the village of Ngọc Tân, Nguyêñ Đôn Phục (pen name Tùng Vân), a well-known Confucian scholar and the most prolific author of travel stories, writes that “vây khi ta ơ ̉ giữ a dâ̵ ́t phôǹ hoa, muôń tìm một nơ i u nhã thanh khoáng, dê̵ ̉ nuôi cho con tâm lấy cái tính tình cao nhã” [living in this great town, we want to find a quiet place so that [his] heart could become serene”] (1922a: 212). In another story, he describes the first moments of seeing a mountain landscape: ̵ cỏ xanh xanh, làn ̀ hô,̀ dã̵ trông thâý dợt vừ a mớ i trong mâý giây phút dô̵ ng ̵ ́ ̀ ́ ́ ́ ơ ̉ trong mây, gà dâu biêng biêc, dâu non nhâp nhô, sư ờ n núi quanh co, chó căn ̵ ̃ ́ ̉ ̀ kêu ơ ̉ bên dông, cải quan ngay ra cái khí săc thái cô; mà cái tung tích hông trần, nghe ra hình dã̵ li cách xa xa. [In just a few minutes, I started to see green grass, mulberry trees, mountain peaks showing up, mountain sides that twist and turn, dogs barking in the clouds, roosters crowing in the valley. It immediately gave the impression of an ancient world, and it seemed as if our earthly body was slowly moving away.] (Nguyêñ Đôn Phục 1922b: 393)

Narrating his journey to “the five levels of the mountains,” he describes his impressions as if he were entering the kingdom of the Immortals: “mây ̀ lai, như ng trông ra liêǹ vớ i núi, núi liêǹ vớ i trờ i; tuy chư a phải là cõi Bông cũng có phần phêú diêủ ’từ dó’̵ dần dần bư ớ c vào giai cảnh” [the clouds are over the mountains, there is a seamless transition between clouds and mountains, between mountains and sky; there is not yet paradise, but it feels like some divine realm] (Nguyêñ Đôn Phục 1925: 41). What does the author mean? In classic Vietnamese literature written in hán, Chinese characters, or in nôm, demotic characters, many poems oppose the serenity and the pleasure of living close to nature to the noise of the town and crowds of people. Such poetry expresses the sensations of

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a Confucian scholar who chooses freedom from social obligations. In contrast to the Confucian culture represented by the royal court, the simple life in the midst of nature presents an alternative. To stay in touch with nature, the Vietnamese Confucian scholar living in the town or the countryside is pleased to have in his courtyard some plants and a bonsaï-size mountain with bonsaï trees, a little bridge, and a small pagoda. This natural setting expresses an idea of nature as a place outside the human sphere, that is, the area where humans live in groups. In the mind of inhabitants of the delta, mountains are the place where they can experience a miraculous encounter with the Immortals who sometimes come there, for example, to play chess on a large flat stone called “chess table” (Nguyêñ Đôn Phục 1925: 53). To achieve serenity, Buddhist pagodas are also built in the mountains, far away from the crowd. The same motif emerges in Nguyêñ Thế Hữu’s account of his trip to Mt. An Tử. Like a modern tourist, he intends to visit the pagodas scattered in the mountains and describes the itinerary through the forest to the mountain top in detail (Nguyêñ Thế Hữu 1926: 443–453). In spite of long walks on difficult mountain paths, the author happily encourages readers to make the same journey to purify their minds. Phạm Quỳnh connects this traditional idea with a new one, maybe influenced by Western culture. The high mountains are the places where humans can elevate their thoughts. On the way to the imperial capital Huế, he describes the landscape of the delta: ̀ bằng, dâ̵ ́t bằng giờ i phẳng, bát ngát mênh mông, ngư ờ i phong cảnh dâ̵ ́t dô̵ ng dứ̵ ng giữ a như giam mình trong cái ngục nhớ n … khao khát nhữ ng cảnh núi ̵ lý thì nhữ ng bậc anh tài hùng ́ khi khu. Theo sách dịa non cao thẳm, gò dô̵ ng ̀ kiệt thư ờ ng sinh ra ơ ̉ gân nơ i cao phong tuấn lı ̃nh : măt́ nhìn nhữ ng cảnh tư ợng nhớ n nhao, lòng tất rộng rãi mà trí tất cao sâu. [The landscape of the plain where the earth is flat and the sky is smooth, is immense and edgeless. A man is there like a prisoner in a huge jail … We deeply love other sceneries of high mountains, deep valleys, and numerous hills. According to the geomancy books, the heroes and remarkable personalities are often born in the places near to great scenery: this vision causes them to have great ideas in their minds.] (Phạm Quỳnh 1918: 198)

All the authors discussed here indicate that nature makes them feel happier and more peaceful. Their narratives portray different types of environments, from the urban areas where people live in large crowds, and the

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countryside where peasants live among fields and trees, to the mountains where no normal human lives. The Vietnamese words thiên nhiên (nature) or môi trư ờ ng (environment) did not exist yet at the time: these descriptions refer to trees, lands, rivers, and mountains. Do our authors, and their readers, have an idea like the wilderness?

3  The Wasteland of Wild Nature For Phạm Quỳnh, as for any Vietnamese people living in the plain where “dâ̵ ́t bằng giờ i phẳng” [the earth is flat and the sky is smooth], land without humans is quite abnormal (1918: 198). On his way to Huế in 1918, he discovers uncultivable lands for the first time: phong cảnh buôǹ rầu, lặng lẽ : toàn thi ̣ là một rải dâ̵ ́t hoang, xa xa mớ i có một ́ ̆ xóa, trong là rẫy núi xanh thôn lạc na ̆m ba nóc nhà lơ thơ ; ngoài bãi cát trang om. Cái xe bon bon chạy giữ a tư ơ ̉ng như con thú rừ ng lạc vào trong sa mạc, ̀ ngoài xa nữ a là bê ̉ khơ i một màu xanh ngăt, ́ sóng kinh hoảng mà chạy cuông, ̀ ́ ́ rạt gân bờ trông như một rải bạc trăng xóa. Phong cảnh ây tư ơ ̉ng nhữ ng lúc ́ sấm trên núi họa vớ i tiêng ́ sóng ngoài khơ i, thì kinh bão bê ̉ mư a ngàn, tiêng ́ hãi biêt́ chừ ng nào ! Hoặc buôỉ chiêù mặt giờ i dã̵ xê,́ cây cỏ rầu rầu, nghe tiêng ̵ kêu giữ a bãi trư ờ ng xa, thì thê thảm biêt́ chừ ng nào ! … con chim lạc dàn Miêǹ hải tần dó̵ không phải là dâ̵ ́t ngư ờ i ơ ̉ dư̵ ợc. [to the left the blinding white sand, to the right the dense green forest. The car drives fast in the middle, like a forest animal lost in the desert, panicking and running like crazy. Even further to the left, the ocean is deep blue, the waves crashing on the shore in white foam. In this place, let’s imagine a storm on the ocean and a rainfall in the mountains, the thunder in the heights and the sound of the waves: all of this should be frightening! Let’s imagine one more evening when the sun went down, the trees withered from the heat, the cry of a lonely bird having lost its flock, all of this should be tragic!] (Phạm Quỳnh 1918: 200)

Phạm Quỳnh does not see the beauty of this wild nature, as a traveler would today. From his anthropocentric point of view, this land between the mountains and the ocean belongs to the people and must be fertile to feed them. Seeing it from the car, the landscape saddens him: “phong cảnh buôǹ rầu, lặng lẽ : toàn thi ̣ là một rải dâ̵ ́t hoang, xa xa mớ i có một thôn lạc năm ba nóc nhà lơ thơ … Miêǹ hải tần dó̵ không phải là dâ̵ ́t ngư ờ i ơ ̉ dư̵ ợc” [The landscape is sad and silent: the whole country is a wasteland in which you can see from afar a hamlet with a few houses … this land by the sea is not a place where man can live] (1918: 200).

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Another traveler on his way in the opposite direction, toward Vientiane, the capital of Laos, feels the same sadness about a desolate landscape uninhabited by humans as he travels by boat up the Mekong: Vừ ng ô dã̵ khuất non tây, khí núi che mờ mặt nư ớ c, cảnh chiêù hôm như giục ́ tấm lòng! Tàu ghé ngu ̉ bên bãi cát, hai bên rừ ng xanh. Đêm van̆ g vẳng tiêng ̀ trông lên thì rừ ng vư ợn hót, nghe rõ buôǹ rứ t. … Chúng tôi ơ ̉ trong thuyên, ́ thác chảy xa xa, dê ́ kêu ti tı ̉, nghı ̃ cảnh vừ a xanh núi mù mi ̣t. Đêm nghe tiêng ̀ ́ buôn vừ a nhớ nhà, chung quanh nhữ ng nư ớ c non ngư ờ i, vẩn vơ cảnh văng nên vài câu thơ . [The sun sets behind the mountains to the west, the cold mist covers the surface of the water, the twilight landscape saddens the human soul! The boat stopped to sleep on a sandbank on the side between two green forests. At night in the distance the monkeys sang a melancholy song…. We were inside the boat, seeing only forest and green mountains in the fog. At night one could hear the sounds of waterfalls in the distance, the sad songs of crickets. This landscape made me sad and made me think of my home country that  I missed in the middle of these foreign waters and mountains.] (Trần Quang Huyến 1922: 195)

In the eyes of these first Vietnamese travel writers, wild nature is not safe and appears perfectly useless in the absence of human purposes. In fact, despite the fact that three-quarters of Vietnamese territory is covered by forests and the coastline is 3200 kilometers long, Vietnamese people are predominantly peasants cultivating rice in the deltas and living in huge settlements.4 But the idea of wilderness as adventure and discovery is known to the literati: some Vietnamese scholars have certainly had a look at Robinson Crusoe. In his “Notes of a Wandering Traveler,” the Confucian scholar Nguyêñ Bá Trác writes that he had a chance to read this novel in its Chinese translation and deeply admired the spirit of adventure in this Englishman (1920–1921: 141).5 But the stories published by Nam Phong are accounts of real travels. The travelers, who are fully immersed in the modern and Westernized twentieth century, perceive the forest and the coasts they see on their journeys as available for their use, and wild nature in and of itself holds little attraction for them. 4  This is the vision of inhabitants of the plain; minority ethnic groups in the mountains of Vietnam have different ideas about the mountains (see Hardy 2003; Choowonglert, this volume; Nguyêñ Thị Kim Ngân, this volume). 5  Nguyêñ Bá Trác indicated that Robinson Crusoe is known in Vietnamese as Hoang dả̵ o cô ̵ dông [Lonely Island] (1920–1921: 141).

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4  Escape from the City The expressions “nghı ̉ mát” (relax in the cool) and “trôń nóng” (escape from the heat) are recent inventions in the Vietnamese language, expressing a practice that emerged with the construction of modern urban centers. Huỳnh Thi ̣ Bảo Hòa is delighted that “thanks to this stay in the mountains to relax [she] discovered a place of great beauty,” Bà Nà, a “climate station” thirty kilometers from Tourane (today’s Đà Nẵng) built by the French as a holiday resort in 1919 (Huỳnh 1931: 559).6 Her stay lasted several days, but one- or two-day trips were more common for those who enjoyed the countryside as a nearby place for relaxation. As one author explains: “hôm ấy trờ i nóng như nung, lại thêm nhà bạn ơ ̉ giữ a phô ́ phư ờ ng chật chội, bụi cát tung mù … tôi muôń rằng ta nên tìm chô ̃ thanh ̵ cao thoáng dãng, thu hấp lấy không khí thuần chất tinh lư ơ ng dê̵ ̉ nuôi cho ̀ ̉ linh hôn thân thê” [It was a hot day, like in an oven. I was at a friend’s house in the center of town. There was no space and the streets were covered … I had to find a way to freshen up … I wanted to look for a place high up where we could breathe some fresh air] (Trần Thuyết Minh 1922: 29). Before climate change as we know it today, people already suffered from intense heat in Vietnamese cities. Hanoi’s old quarter, for example, with its narrow tube houses that include both shops and apartments, is now a tourist sight, but has no trees or vegetation. Rain was therefore considered Heaven’s gift, “mư a kim ngọc” [precious like pearls]. One ̵ author notes simply that leaving the city for “nay ra chôń quang dãng nhà quê thì trong mình khoan khoái” [an open place in the country, you feel a lot better] (Phạm Văn Thư 1925: 37). In Hanoi, people sought out urban lakes for cooler air. The well-known writer Nguyêñ Mạnh Bổng mentions being unable to sleep because of intense heat one summer and deciding to “Ngày là ha ̆m bảy, tháng cuôí mùa hè, vừ a xong mấy trận mư a to, mát dư̵ ợc vài hôm mà khí nóng nực vẫn còn như dô̵ ”́ [go and get some fresh air on the banks of the lake] (the Lake of the Restored Sword in central Hanoi) with a neighbor (Nguyêñ Mạnh Bổng 1919: 355). In these descriptions of urban spaces, the authors did not criticize a particular kind 6  Huỳnh Thi ̣ Bảo Hòa is also the author of a novel called Tây phư ơ ng my ̃ nhơ n [The Western Beauty] published in Saigon in 1927, probably the first novel written in Vietnamese by a woman.

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of urbanism for the environmental conditions. A city built according to the Western model was clearly a sign of modernity, as can be seen in Phạm Quỳnh’s admiration of Saigon, “the Pearl of the Far East,” or Paris, “the City of Lights.” The solution for the exhausted city dweller is to escape the city. In other cases, though, the travel writers did connect human activities directly to environmental conditions. At the mountain site of the famous Perfume Pagoda, the rubbish from human gathering destroys the beauty of nature, as Phạm Quỳnh finds out to his disappointment: “tư ơ ̉ng bư ớ c chân ra cửa dộ̵ ng là tiện thị dê̵ ̉ mình vào nơ i cảnh mộng nào … như ng chửa bư ớ c chân ra cửa thờ i cái mộng cảnh dã̵ tan rôi,̀ mà chı ̉ ngửi thấy nhữ ng ́ mùi xú uê ́ … thật là cảnh chân vớ i cảnh mộng cách xa nhau nhiêù lăm” [I had imagined that the opening of the cave would bring us to a dreamlike landscape … but before I reached the opening, I felt foul smells … in fact the reality is far from the dream] (Phạm Quỳnh 1919: 369). Instead of the expected mountain landscape with beautiful trees and flowers, inhabited by Immortals, Phạm Quỳnh finds evidence of human presence and lack of hygiene. Even so, he just notes the situation but does not intend to take any action. He is annoyed that he does not find the landscape he had dreamed of, but not that nature has been damaged by human action. This perspective is typical: the environment is not considered from an ecocentric point of view by any author discussed here. For the Nam Phong authors, nature is there to be exploited by humans.

5  The Economic Uses of Nature Quite often, therefore, the interest of the travel writer is not the description of nature in its own right, but from the point of view of economic development. Phạm Quỳnh, saddened by unused coastlines, waxes enthu̵ phận Thừ a Thiên thì phong cảnh siastic over cultivated fields: “Vào dê̵ ń dịa ̵ ̵ ́ thây khác ngay. Làng xóm dông dúc, ruộng lúa xanh rì, không phải dâ̵ ́t bỏ hoang như trên kia nữ a” [In Thừ a Thiên province the landscape is quite different, the villages are of an intense green, it’s no longer wasteland] (1918: 202). Later in his fifty-four-page report on his month of travel in the South, he shows great interest in the economic development of the different provinces (Phạm Quỳnh, 1918–1919, 1918: 268–285, 1919: 20–32, 117–140). He writes several pages on the possibilities of

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developing the Mekong River delta, especially how to dry swamp areas for farming. As an intellectual who considered himself a guide for the Vietnamese people, he is very much concerned with the opportunities that the South can offer to migrants from other, poorer regions. He explains, for example, that “Miêǹ Đông … phần nhiêù là dâ̵ ́t cao nguyên, không cầy ̀ cao su, trông ̀ cà cấy gì dư̵ ợc, trừ tı ̉nh Chợ Lớ n ơ ̉ dư ớ i, còn thư ờ ng chı ̉ trông phê mà thôi” [the east of the delta, except for the Cho Lon region … is mostly uplands that are unsuitable for rice cultivation but are used for rubber and coffee plantations], and that the western delta is more suitable for farming (1919: 28). He was also interested in the influence of the environment on human nature. His idea about the South must seem a bit strange to us, but his contemporaries undoubtedly agreed with him: “làm ăn dê,̃ ́ như ng vì dê ̃ quá mà ngư ờ i sinh ra lư ờ i biêng” [where it is easy to make a living people become lazy] (1919: 22). Phạm Quỳnh’s remark shows a widespread idea at his time that is connected to the colonial project. In the mind of French colonialists, economic development (“mise en valeur”) had to benefit Indochina’s settlers and the metropolis. In the minds of Vietnamese intellectuals such as Phạm Quỳnh, it had to serve the Vietnamese people. Food shortages occurred over the whole history of Vietnam, including the colonial period.7 Phạm Quỳnh set the tone by describing catastrophic flooding in the north delta: Sông Nhị Hà dư̵ ơ ng lên, tin báo lụt dã̵ thấy truyêǹ lại nhiêù nơ i. Ngôì trong xe lửa trông ra có chô ̃ mênh mang nhữ ng nư ớ c. Thôi cái nạn lớ n hàng nam ̆ năm nay cu ̃ng lại không tha cho dân xứ Bać ̆ ! Trư ớ c khi tạm biệt dâ̵ ́t Bać ̆ Kỳ, nhìn lại cái cảnh nư ớ c bùn trờ i nặng kia mà thư ơ ng cho bọn nông dân xứ Bać ̆ mình, thật là cất dâ̵ ̀u không nôỉ vớ i ông Thuỷ vư ơ ng cay nghiệt! [The Red River was rising, and floods were being forecast everywhere. From the train, you could see water running all the way through some places. Alas, once again this year, the great scourge fell upon the people of the north! Before I left Tonkin, before the sad landscape of muddy waters and threatening skies, I took pity on the peasants of the north who could not cope because of this cruel Water Genie!] (Phạm Quỳnh 1918–1919: 269)

7  Food shortages were certainly one reason for the Vietnamese revolution in 1945. The great famine in 1945 killed about 2 million people in North Vietnam. In the colonial period, intellectuals such as the anthropologist Nguyêñ Văn Huyên, a member of the EFEO (French School of the Far East), sounded the alarm (see Nguyen Phuong Ngoc 2012).

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Nguyêñ Trọng Thuật expressed similar sadness in “Nam du dê̵ ń Ngũ Hành Sơ n” [Southern Journey to Mt. Ngũ Hành Sơ n] about a landscape: “Thoạt trông thì thật là dẹ̵ p mà nghı ̃ ra thì mớ i biết là buồn. Buồn vì ̵ ợc” [At những cồn cát ấy khó có thê ̉ trồng cây dê̵ ̉ làm cho sống ngư ờ i dư first glance, it looks really beautiful, but when you think about it, it’s sad. Sad because those sand dunes are hard to plant trees and do not permit the people to live] (1933: 439). At that time, no one thought that the environment had to be protected. Nature was considered unlimited and always at humans’ disposal. Problem-solving focused on how to exploit natural resources and protect communities against natural disasters. The dynamism of Vietnamese modernization at the beginning of the twentieth century (see Gantès and Nguyen Phuong Ngoc 2009) also found expression in travel writing. For example, in the “Chronicle of the Province Tuyên Quang,” Nguyêñ Văn Bân hopes to provide useful information to entrepreneurs and expresses his wish to see his text used as a model to contribute to the development of the northern mountain provinces (1920: 144). The well-known ̵ côt́ chı ̉ di̵ du li ̣ch Confucian scholar Đặng Xuân Viện declares, “tôi dây phong cảnh mà thôi” [the purpose of [his] travel is enjoying beautiful landscape], but he also writes about the manufacture of tobacco for water pipes, salt harvesting, and sea fishing at the locality he visits (Đặng Xuân Viện 1931: 70). For his part, Nguyêñ Trọng Thuật describes a “không khí ́ ̆ [very hot] place where “Duy có thứ cây dư ơ ng … mớ i chi ̣u ơ ̉ dó̵ nóng lam” ̉ nôi” [only the filao tree can live]: this tree is very useful because “làm gô ̃ ̵ dóng tàu làm nhà” [it will be used in boat and house construction] (1933: 439). The environmental perspectives in Nam Phong travel stories, therefore, diverge fundamentally from our contemporary point of view. As I have shown, nature is seen as beautiful and powerful, but wild nature is considered unsafe and useless. For Vietnamese at the time, the challenge was to live or just survive in a hostile environment. The Western model of mastering nature offered itself as a perfect solution. It is no surprise, then, that in his famous 165-page account of a trip to France and his 25-page report of a visit to Paris, Phạm Quỳnh mentions no environmental issues but admires the cities and French intellectual life (1922–1925, 1922). Two students living in France, similarly, talk about daily life in their articles but

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pay no attention to environmental issues (Thôn Đảo 1926; Tùng Hư ơ ng 1932). Nevertheless, the environment is a key element for these authors when they talk about their own country.

6  Nature, Colonialism, and the Vietnamese Nation The words that refer to the “home country” in Vietnamese, which were created in the colonial period of the 1920s and 1930s and are still in use today, are all linked to natural elements: water (nư ớ c), land (dâ̵ ́t), mountain (non, núi or sơ n), and river (sông or giang). Water is the most common and is used alone or in combination with other words: dâ̵ ́t nư ớ c (land and water), nư ớ c non (water and mountain), non nư ớ c (mountain and water). The expression nư ớ c ta (literally water, we) translates to “our country,” and the phrase nư ớ c Nam (literally water, south), Southern country, allows the Vietnamese to define themselves in relation to China, which is defined as the “Northern country.” The description of these elements—land, river, mountain, forest, sea—plays a key role in the emergence of the idea of a modern Vietnamese nation. Several Nam Phong travel stories narrate visits to iconic landscapes. ́̆ Lake Ba Bê ̉ (Three Seas), for example, is known as “một nơ i danh thang” [place of great scenery], as famous as the Perfume Pagoda, or the Master’s Pagoda and the temple of Eight Lý Kings (see Hoàng Văn Trung 1922; ́ 1921; Phạm Văn Thư 1925, among others). Everyone Lê Đình Thăng knows the names of the twenty-four landscapes of the imperial capital of Huế (“24 cảnh Thần Kinh”), including the Perfume River and the Royal Mountain. Sightseeing is a tradition among Confucian scholars who enjoy visiting natural sites (“thiên tạo,” built by Heaven) as well as human-built ones (“nhân tạo”). This kind of narrative, whether told traditionally or as a modern reportage, offers readers a great diversity of content (see Đạm Trai 1919: 353; Đặng Xuân Viện 1931: 222–225, among others). Đông Hồ, a well-known southern writer, takes the reader on a tour of his region: the island Phú Quốc, then the province Hà Tiên (Đông Hồ 1927; Đông ̉ 1930). Hồ and Nguyêñ Văn Kiêm But what is new is the inclusion of non-scenic landscapes—the ordinary lands, rivers, and mountains of “our country.” In 1920, a delegation of Southern personalities went to the North for a few days’ visit. The boat trip made them discover the scale and shape of their country: “trong mấy ́ dãy bờ bê ̉ nư ớ c Nam ta, dài dằng dặc cao xừ ng xực” ngày dư̵ ợc ngăm

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[during those days we had a chance to admire the seaside of our country … it is enormously long and enormously high] (Phạm Quỳnh 1920: 126). For all these travelers, it was the first time that they saw their home country with their own eyes. The view of the high mountains and the long coastlines instilled them with pride. Thirteen years later, Nguyêñ Trọng Thuật explains the importance of the environment for loving the home country in these terms: “Đi lư ợn một bờ bê,̉ một triêǹ sông, trèo lên một ngọn núi cao, một cánh rừ ng rậm, lòng yêu mêń dâ̵ ́t nư ớ c càng thêm thấm thía” [Walking along a beach or the shore of a river, climbing a high mountain, crossing a dense forest, all of this deepens my love of our country] (1933: 437). During this trip, he visited a place with a beautiful view of the ocean: “Đứ ng dâ̵ ́y trông ra bê ̉ Thái Dư ơ ng, một trờ i một nư ớ c bao khaṕ ̆ ba mặt núi, mây mờ sóng bạc, thật là một cảnh kỳ quan cuả vũ trụ. Một nơ i xem bê ̉ thú nhất cuả nư ớ c ta” [There you can see the Pacific Ocean. The sky and the water are surrounded by high cliffs on three sides, in the fuzzy clouds and silver waves. This is a world wonder. A place to watch the sea, the most interesting in our country] (1933: 568). The mountains and rivers are often linked to history. In their journey to Hanoi, the Southern delegation visits the Temple of Literature, Văn Miếu, and expresses emotion at standing in “dứ̵ ng trong ‘rừ ng bia’ dư ớ i bóng cô ̉ ́ ̆ [in the “forest of doctors’ stelae”; the shadow of old thụ âm thầm hiu hat” trees, silent and sad] (Phạm Quỳnh 1920: 127). Nguyêñ Đôn Phục describes a landscape near the ancient capital of the Viet people: ́ ̆ bãi cát mênh mông; trông vê ̀ phía tây băc, ́ thì non xô núi ngọn lau hiu hat, ́ chạy, rõ ràng Tản Viên và Tam Đảo hai ngọn núi ngất trờ i ơ ̉ kia (...) Huông chi cánh bãi này lại dô̵ í ngạn vớ i dâ̵ ́t Mê Linh … Chao ôi! giang sơ n ấy, anh hùng ấy, hào kiệt ấy, tra ̆m nam ̆ nghìn nam ̆ , bao giờ dã̵ mất; tram ̆ na ̆m nghìn ̵ năm, ai nỡ dã quên. [The reeds are sad, the sandbank is wide; looking northwest, you can see the mountains far away; those are clearly Mt. Tản Viên and Mt. Tam Đảo, which point to the sky … oh, in a hundred years or in a thousand years, these heroes in this country, can they disappear? In a hundred years or in a thousand years, who can forget them?]. (1922c: 184)

One cannot understand these descriptions without some understanding of Vietnamese history. In the Temple of Literature, the names of generations of “doctors,” winners of the Mandarin examinations, are inscribed on the

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stelae, proof of the long existence of a literate and civilized country. Mt. Tản Viên and Mt. Tam Đảo remind travelers of the country’s protective gods. The reeds refer to the tenth-century valiant king Dinh Bo Linh: his qualities revealed themselves already in his childhood when he played fighting games with his friends, waving reeds like flags. The sadness expressed in these examples, as in several other texts, is obviously not due to the landscape itself but to the emotions of travelers thinking about the situation of their country, which had lost its independence, despite the king in Hué. At no time is the word “colonialism” or “dependence” used, but the authors make the readers share a desire for independence. Nguyêñ Đôn Phục is more explicit: “nghı ̃ dê̵ ń cuộc hải tang” [I think of the eternal process of transformation which means that a field is now where the ocean once roared]. His emotion intensifies when he realizes that this field is in front of Mê Linh, an emblematic place in the history of Vietnam from which the two Trung Sisters started the revolt against the Chinese invaders in the first century. The well-known historian Trần Trọng Kim, in an account of travel in Hải Ninh, the region of contemporary Hạ Long Bay, asks directly about the decadence of his people: “Ấy cu ̃ng là một ngọn sông, hai bên bờ cỏ, giữ a một giòng nư ớ c bạc, chẳng khác gì ngọn sông khác, thê ́ sao mà linh thiêng thê?́ … con cháu ngày nay sao mà nhu như ợc hèn hạ thê ́ này” [It is the same river running between two grass shores, this silver water is similar to other rivers, but why it was so sacred? … and why are we such cowards?] (1923: 283). The river Bạch Đằng, similar to Mt. Tản Viên, is witness to the life of the Vietnamese people. Mountains and rivers in these narratives become, by virtue of their long existence, testimonies to the perennial existence of a people, despite the vicissitudes of time.

7  The Modernization of Travel Narrative Elements of nature also play an important role in the history of Vietnamese literature. Modern writing breaks with traditional literature by describing nature as it is, not as it is described in books. In fact, Nam Phong authors frequently use the phrase “wonderful as a picture.” On the way to the Perfume Pagoda, Phạm Quỳnh, for example, describes nature as “coi thật như một bứ c tranh sơ n thuỷ cuả tàu” [beautiful as a Chinese picture] (1919: 364). The beauty of the landscape before the traveler’s eyes is recognized as beauty because of its correspondence to a picture. Similarly, Phạm Quỳnh describes the Đèo Ngang (Ngang Pass) using a line from

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one of the most famous ancient poems in Vietnamese, “Cỏ cây chen dá̵ lá chen hoa” [Grass and trees mix with rocks, leaves mix with flowers] (1918: 200), but that does not make the reader believe that there were many flowers.8 Another traveler on the way to a village similarly enjoys the land̵ êm dê̵ m ̵ trên ̀ … giải toàn một tấm cỏ non dặt scape: “con dư̵ ờ ng thẳng dẹp ̵ ̵ ̀ ̀ một cánh dông muôn màu có dư , hoa mâu du ̉ thứ ” [the road goes softly straight ahead … a carpet of young grass posed in the field multicolored with various plants] (Trần Thuyết Minh 1922: 30), but the reader does not care whether the description is accurate or not. Most stories published by Nam Phong rely on more or less realistic ́ descriptions of nature because they are based on real trips. Lê Đình Thăng, for example, gives a simple description such as “Núi càng cao, gió càng mát, cảnh lại càng xinh” [The higher the mountain is, the fresher is the wind and the more beautiful the landscape] (1921: 516), and Phạm Văn Thư indicates that “chı ̉ bát ngát nhữ ng ruộng nư ơ ng và còn lại mấy cái gò dâ̵ ́t” [there are also wide fields and some small low hills] (1925: 38): these are authors’ efforts at realistic description. Evoking the view on his arrival in Huế, Nguyêñ Tiến Lãng does not refer to a classic poem, but describes ̵ nhữ ng bứ c tư ờ ng cũ cuả thành Huê,́ dã̵ lộ ra trên what he saw: “Này dây nhữ ng bụi tre chi chít, nhữ ng túp lêù tranh, nhữ ng bờ rào xanh tôt,́ nhữ ng ́ dâ̵ ̀y dư̵ ờ ng” [There are the ancient cây hoa phư ợng cánh dỏ̵ rực rơ i xuông walls of Hue citadel below the thick bamboos, the huts with thatched roofs, very green hedges, flamboyant with red flowers lining the roads] (1934: 82). But the most modern writing is that of two very young authors, Mộng ̵ c Tuyết and Trúc Phong, who were students at the private school Trí dứ học xá in Hà Tiên in the extreme south of the country. They published their stories in 1934, the last year of Nam Phong’s existence. In her narrative about the island Phú Quốc, Mộng Tuyết does not use references to Chinese or Vietnamese classical literature and does not visit scenic sites as her teacher, Đông Hồ, did. Instead, she describes ordinary scenes in simple words: ̵ nhữ ng con ́ Ngôì trên ca-nô dòm xuông: Nư ớ c trong như lọc thấy tận dáy, ̵ chang chang sứ a biên̉ ngo ngoe dang bò, chúng nó sinh hoạt trong các thê ́ giớ i ́ ̆ dê̵ ̉ phơ i lư ớ i, thuỷ tinh. Gần mé bãi, trên dàn cây cuả ngư ờ i thuyêǹ chài cam 8  The line comes from the famous nineteenth-century poem called “Qua Đèo Ngang“ (Arriving at Ngang Pass) by Bà Huyện Thanh Quan.

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̵ chim nhạn dậ̵ u ríu rít rửa lông, nghe tiêng ́ chèo bơ i bì bõm gật mình một dàn ́ cât cánh một loạt bay vù. [Sitting in the canoe, we look down: the water transparent as if it were filtered, we see the bottom where the jellyfish are moving; they make their living in a glass world. On the beach, a fishing net is drying on an installation of tree branches set up by a fisherman. A flock of swallows happily cleaning their feathers is surprised by the sound of the canoe’s paddles and flies away.] (Mộng Tuyết 1934: 440)

After walking a dirt path to reach the creek called Đá (Stone) because of a large number of rocks, the travelers visit a pagoda on a hill and then go down to the sea to watch the sunset and moonrise. They spend most of the night walking around in boats, then on the beach, talking about literature. In the morning they go home by sailboat. The second part tells the story of this two-day return trip because there was no wind, a great adventure for these young men and women. What is new in this young woman’s account is the attention paid to the surrounding nature and environment. Instead of the historical and cultural knowledge that we can read in the travel accounts of older and classically trained authors, she describes what she sees around her with love for the scenes of a simple everyday life. ̉ (New Year’s Eve Trip on the Ocean), Trúc Phong, in “Têt́ chơ i biên” reports on a five-day ocean trip during which the travelers visit some islands and meet some people, but the goal is the journey itself. The pleasure is simple and described in short, matter-of-fact sentences: Gió di ̣u dần. Thuyêǹ tớ i hòn Đư ớ c. Hòn rất khô khan. Không có gì hay. Đô ̃ thuyêǹ lại dê̵ ̉ nghı ̉ trư a và chờ gió di̵ hòn Nghệ. Đêń 3 giờ , có gió nam, thôỉ cũng vừ a. Lại lấy neo di̵ nữ a. Định, thì di̵ hòn Nghệ, như ng vì gió ngư ợc ́ du, cũng không phải cần gì chô ̃ nhất không di̵ dư̵ ợc, vả chăng trong cuộc phiêm ̵ dịnh, nên thuyêǹ cứ dê̵ ̉ cho di̵ theo chiêù gió. Bấy giờ , mặt trờ i dã̵ xê.́ Sứ c nóng cũng dịu dần. Buông măt́ trông ra thì ̵ là hòn Ông, hòn Bà, hòn Rê,̉ kia là hòn nhan nhản nhữ ng hòn là hòn : dây Nghệ, hòn Son, hòn Mâm xôi, hòn Heo, v.v. [The wind is fading. The boat arrives at Duoc Island. This island is very dry. Nothing interesting. We stop the boat for a midday break and wait for the wind to reach Nghe Island. At 3 o’clock the south wind rises, enough. We lift the anchor to continue. We want to go to Nghe Island, but the wind is contrary, so it is not possible anymore, which is not serious on this trip whose goal is not a precise destination. We let the boat go according to the wind.

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At that moment the sun goes down. The heat is less intense. Looking outside we see a huge quantity of rocks: here are the rocks called Sir, Madam, Son-in-law, there are the rocks called Curcumin, Red Earth, Glutinous rice plate, and Pork, etc.] (1934: 195)

These descriptions contribute, on the one hand, to the new Vietnamese writing with new images and sensations. On the other hand, they help construct the Vietnamese nation by describing the real landscapes of the country and by expressing emotions in view of the ordinary things of the environment that the narrator discovers while traveling. In summary, the travel stories in the magazine Nam Phong capture Vietnamese environments in the first half of the twentieth century, before the wars which devastated the country. Today, the hectares of forest destroyed by napalm and Agent Orange have grown back, but economic development has inflicted other serious environmental damages. Vietnamese people no longer suffer from famine, but the white beaches and yellow sandbanks described by the travelers in Nam Phong are now all covered with aquaculture farms, residences, and equipment for tourism. Reading these stories highlights how seriously the natural environment has been damaged, but also how much the thinking about the environment has changed in Vietnam.

References Đạm Trai. 1919. “Ký núi Dục Thuý” [Story of the Journey to Mt. Dục Thuý]. Nam Phong 28: 353. ́ tích” [Beautiful locations of Đặng Xuân Viện (Thiện Đình). 1931. “Tây Đô thăng Tây Đô]. Nam Phong 160: 222–225. Đông Hồ. 1927. “Thăm dả̵ o Phú Quốc” [Visiting Phú Quốc Island]. Nam Phong 124: 531–550. ̉ 1930. “Cảnh vật Hà Tiên: [Landscapes of Hà Đông Hồ, and Nguyêñ Văn Kiêm. Tiên], Nam Phong 150: 445–462, 151: 575–586, 152: 42–52, 153: 168–176, and 154: 250–257. Durand, Maurice, and Nguyen Trân Huân. 1969. Introduction à la littérature vietnamienne. Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose. Gantès, Gilles de, and Nguyen Phuong Ngoc, ed. 2009. Vietnam: Le moment moderniste. Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence. Hardy, Andrew. 2003. Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam. Honolulu: Hawaii University Press.

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Hoàng Văn Trung (Nhạc Anh). 1922. “Ba Bê ̉ du ký” [Story of Travel to the Lake ̉ Nam Phong 55: 21–31. Ba Bê]. Huỳnh Thi ̣ Bảo Hoà. 1931. “Bà Nà du ký” [Story of the Journey to Bà Nà]. Nam Phong 163: 552–559. ́ Lê Đình Thăng. 1921. “Bài ký chơ i chùa Thầy” [Story of Travel to the Thầy Pagoda]. Nam Phong 48: 514–517. Mộng Tuyết. 1934. “Chơ i Phú Quốc” [Visiting Phú Quốc] Nam Phong 198: 440–443 and 199: 22–24. Nguyêñ Bá Trác. 1920–1921. “Hạn mạn du ký” (Notes of a Wandering Traveler). Nam Phong 38 (1920): 134–144, 39 (1920): 219–232, 40 (1920): 303–322, 41 (1920): 385–403, 42 (1920): 457–467, and 43 (1921): 21–35. Nguyêñ Đôn Phục (Tùng Vân). 1922a. Du Ngọc Tân ký [Story of the Journey to Ngọc Tân]. Nam Phong 57: 213–215. ——— (Tùng Vân). 1922b. Du Tử Trầm Sơ n ký [Story of the Journey to the Mountain of Tử Trầm Sơ n]. Nam Phong 59: 392–400. ——— (Tùng Vân). 1922c. Cuộc di̵ quan phong làng Thư ợng Cát [Official Visit to the Village of Thư ợng Cát]. Nam Phong 63: 182–192. ——— (Tùng Vân). 1925. Cuộc di̵ chơ i năm tầng núi [Travel to the Five Levels of Mountain]. Nam Phong 91: 40–54. Nguyêñ Khăć Xuyên. 1968. Mục lục phân tích tạp chí Nam Phong [Analytical Index of Nam Phong]. Saigon: Bộ Văn Hóa Giáo Dục. ́ [A Nguyêñ Mạnh Bổng (Hội Nhân). 1919. Đêm tháng sáu chơ i Hô ̀ Hoàn Kiêm Walk Around Hoàn Kiếm Lake One Night in the 6th Month]. Nam Phong 28: 355–357. Nguyen Phuong Ngoc. 2012. A l’origine de l’anthropologie au Vietnam. Aix-en-­ Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence. Nguyêñ Thế Hữu (Kiếm Hồ). 1926. “Hành trình chơ i núi An Tử” [Travel to the mount An Tử]. Nam Phong 105: 325–334 and 106: 443–453. Nguyêñ Tiến Lãng. 1934. “Lại tớ i Thần Kinh” [Another Visit to the Capital Hué]. Nam Phong 200: 79–83 and 204: 57–58. Nguyêñ Trọng Thuật. 1933. “Nam du dê̵ ́n Ngũ Hành Sơ n” [Southern Journey to Mt. Ngũ Hành Sơ n]. Nam Phong 184: 437–448 and 185: 555–570. Nguyêñ Văn Bân. 1920. “Bài ký phong thổ tı ̉nh Tuyên Quang” [Chronicle of the Province Tuyên Quang]. Nam Phong 32: 143–150. Phạm Quỳnh. 1918. “Mư ờ i ngày ở Huế” [Ten Days in Hué]. Nam Phong 10: 198–222. ———. 1918–1919. “Một tháng ở Nam Kỳ” [A Month in the Cochinchina]. Nam Phong 17 (1918): 268–285, 19 (1919): 20–32, and 20 (1919): 117–140. ———. 1919. “Chảy chùa Hư ơ ng” [Pilgrimage to the Perfume Pagoda]. Nam Phong 23: 349–370. ———. 1920. “Cùng các phái viên Nam Kỳ” [Together with the South Delegates]. Nam Phong 32: 125–128.

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———. 1922. “Thuật chuyến du lịch ở Paris” [Account of a Trip to Paris]. Nam Phong 64: 250–274. ———. 1922–1925. “Pháp du hành trình nhật ký” [Diary of a Trip to France]. Nam Phong 58 (1922): 253–261, 59 (1922): 333–338, 60 (1922): 423–426, 63 (1922): 226–231, 65 (1922): 329–338, 66 (1922): 433–437, 68 (1923): 98–102, 69 (1923): 188–190, 70 (1923): 272–276, 73 (1923): 14–20, 75 (1923): 193–196, 77 (1923): 396–403, 79 (1924): 6–12, 80 (1924): 99–104, 83 (1924): 369–374, 84 (1924): 462–466, 85 (1924): 32–36, 86 (1924): 110–112, 88 (1924): 301–308, 89 (1924): 378–382, 90 (1924) 476–482, 91(1925) 6–12, 92 (1925): 109–112, 93 (1925): 220–226, 94 (1925): 320–326, 95 (1925): 411–416, and 100 (1925): 306–311. ̀ Lý Bát Đế” [Visiting the Temple of Phạm Văn Thư . 1925. “Một buổi di̵ xem dê̵ n the Eight Ly Kings]. Nam Phong 91: 37–39. Pham Thi Ngoan. 1973. “Introduction au Nam Phong.” Bulletin de la Société des Etudes Indochinoises (BSEI) 2–3. Song Cử. 1933. “Ngự giá Nam tuần hành trình ký” [Account of the Royal Travel in the South]. Nam Phong 182: 221–235 and 183: 333–339. Thôn Đảo. 1926. “Học sinh An Nam ở bên Pháp” [Vietnamese Students in France]. Nam Phong 112: 631–635. Trần Quang Huyến. 1922. Ai Lao hành trình [Story of a Journey to Laos]. Nam Phong 57: 189–197. ̵ [Story of a Journey to Nam Tống]. ́ du dàm Trần Thuyết Minh. 1922. Nam Tông Nam Phong 61: 29–35. Trần Trọng Kim. 1923. “Sự du lic̣ h dâ̵ ́t Hải Ninh” [Story of the Journey to the Land of Hải Ninh]. Nam Phong 71: 383–394. ̉ [New Year’s Eve Trip on the Ocean]. Nam Trúc Phong. 1934. “Tết chơ i biên” Phong 207: 194–200. ̵ ờ ng Nam Pháp” [On the Way to France]. Nam Tùng Hư ơ ng. 1932. “Trên dư Phong 176: 257–269.

Gender and Environment in Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư ’s Narratives Kim Lan Cao

1   Introduction Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư occupies an important position in Vietnamese literature with over twenty volumes of short stories, one of which has been adapted into the film The Floating Lives (directed by Nguyêñ Phan Quang Bình, 2010, based on the short story “Endless Field”). However, it was not until this short story won the 2018 LiBeraturpreis Award in Germany that her name began to reach foreign readers. Although she has become one of the fifty most influential women (Forbes Vietnam 2019), her influence consists not of economic achievements, but profoundly humane viewpoints on human and nonhuman beings that are presented in her narratives. In a ̃ simple narrative style, Nguyên’s stories reflect deeply on humans and nature in Nam Bộ, the South of Vietnam. Because of increasing enviroñ thoughts and perspective touch on the most mental concerns, Nguyên’s important and pressing issues of humankind and have turned her into the most distinguished environmental writer in Vietnam. Each of her works

K. L. Cao (*) Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences (VASS), Hanoi, Vietnam © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_12

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not only fascinates readers with its diction and structure but is also imbued with the humanistic spirits of human beings and the environment. In two ̀ bất tận (Endless Field, 2005; translated 2019) and narratives, Cánh dô̵ ng Khói trờ i lộng lẫy (Fabulous Clouds in the Sky, 2010), the most distinctive feature is the strange coincidence between the fates of women and nature that are both imbued with the identity of the Nam Bộ land. Also, the vivid reality of human beings and landscape in Nam Bộ provides persuasive evidence to recognize the difference or “gap” between the literary practices in certain areas and Western literary theory. The concept of “place” or “area” in South Vietnam has once again provoked calls to reevaluate “Asian perspectives” in ecofeminism in a more open and diversified way. The protagonists of Endless Field are both women who associate with nature in a completely different way from ordinary people. Nư ơ ng in “Endless Field,” a ten-year girl, accepts a nomadic life on a boat that takes her from field to field, day after day, with her father and younger brother, ̀ Nư ơ ng and Điên ̀ discovered their mother having sex with another Điên. man so as to alleviate their poverty, which caused their father to burn their house and move far away from their village, giving up normal life. Living on a boat and earning an income by raising ducks, Nư ơ ng and her family are “more nomadic than any other duck herder in these fields” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 61). Living with her father’s coldness and hatred for many years, with no home and no friends, Nư ơ ng accepts that she is wounded in many different ways. However, she still grows up to be a beautiful girl with tolerance and a warm heart. In Fabulous Clouds in the Sky, the protagonist Di is a young woman who wants to preserve the beauty of nature and human beings and works as a researcher at the Heritage Center. However, a big gap separates her real life from slogans on her office walls such as “Preserve the beauty of humanity as you would your heartbeat” or “A large soul is needed to realize the beauty of life” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 91). Dissatisfied with her father’s patriarchal behavior toward his daughters and disappointed with her lover’s calculation and powerful ambition, Di moves far away from the city and kidnaps her younger brother, Phiên, to live with her in the wilderness as mother and son. This story is not told in its chronological order but alternates between present and past, reality and dream in the protagonist’s own voice. Di and Phiên seem to have a peaceful life in the desolate land, but that life only lasts for a very short time. Modern life quickly invades even the wildest places, breaking the harmony of people’s natural life. As Di experiences losses and stagnation, her suffering parallels changes in

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nature. When nature is destroyed, it implies for her that the beauty that she has tried to uphold is disappearing ever more. Both protagonists tie their life to nature and live harmoniously with it. When they are in pain, they are shielded and protected by nature: for example, ducks understand and sympathize with Nư ơ ng’s suffering, and faint smoke in the early mornings and late afternoons as well the rhythm of the flowing river soothe Di’s losses and pain. When nature is threatened, it is women who save it: Sư ơ ng, another female character in Endless ̀ from a horrible act of jealousy Field, who was saved by Nư ơ ng and Điên revenge, sells her body to officials of the avian flu team so as to save Nư ơ ng’s family’s duck herder, and Di works hard to preserve the beauty of nature, among other examples. In their suffering, nature and women find and depend on each other. In ecofeminism, the parallels between women and the natural environment as two oppressed subjects have become a key framework for research. Using the insights of feminist theory as a foundation, ecofeminists examine the relationships between gender, ecological risks, and the nonhuman world. In Ecofeminist Philosophy, a book that analyzes issues from forestry and farming to health and environmental justice, Karen J. Warren highlights: “While all humans are affected by environmental degradation, women, people of color, children, and the poor throughout the world experience environmental harms disproportionately. Nature is, indeed, a feminist issue” (2000: 16). Like other ecofeminist theorists, Warren postulates that the analysis of social injustices is the basis for addressing environmental crises and the relationship between humans and nature. Ecofeminist philosophy has also been extended to issues of environmental ethics, animal rights, and spiritual life. All ecofeminists agree that “there are important connections between the unjustified dominations of women and nature” (Warren 2000: 2), although they disagree on “both the nature of those connections and whether some of the connections are potentially liberating or grounds for reinforcing harmful stereotypes about women” (Warren 2000: 21). These differences are not hard to understand, deriving as they do from different types of feminism such as liberal feminism, Marxist feminism, radical feminism, and socialist feminism: “ecofeminist positions are as diverse as the feminisms from which they gain their strength and meaning” (Warren 2000: 21). Nevertheless, the key point remains the so-called logic of domination (Warren 2000: 24): men’s and women’s different experiences with nature will lead them to different ways of knowing about the natural world.

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Emphasizing feminism as the starting point of their approach, many ecofeminist scholars show that gender differences, male-dominated views, and patriarchal ideology are central to explaining relationships and seeking reconciliation between humans and nature. For example, Lawrence Buell, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber argue: “Ecofeminist discourse generally argues that the exploitation of nature and that of women are intimately linked, some ecofeminists claiming ‘a parallel in men’s thinking between their “right” to exploit nature, on the one hand, and the use they make of women, on the other’” (2011: 17). However, other studies of gender and the environment by Sherry Ortner (1974), Charlene Spretnak (1989), Catriona Sandilands (1999), and Sue V. Rosser (2008) emphasize that ecofeminism is “based not only on the recognition of connections between the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women across patriarchal societies,” but also “on the recognition that these two forms of domination are bound up with class exploitation, racism, colonialism, and neocolonialism” (Gaard and Murphy 1998: 2–3). Thus, although the connection between women and nature has been recognized everywhere (Ortner 1974), ecofeminism still requires more nuanced analyses of the causes of environmental degradation (Buell et al. 2011: 17–19). The patriarchal system and male domination as characterized by ecõ feminist theories are central issues in Nguyên’s short stories. Women’s lives and suffering are connected with the exploitation of nature by mutual dependence. Therefore, taking an ecofeminist approach, this chapter focuses on Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư ’s two stories “Endless Field” and “Fabulous Clouds in the Sky” to examine the convergent destiny of women and nature, the mechanisms of their abuse, and the environmental questions that Nguyêñ addresses in her stories. Her narratives not only portray humans’ fate and environmental questions but also create interactions between natural and human worlds by focusing on their losses.

2   Humans’ Tragic Destiny: Endurance and Resignation as Female Virtues ̃ Nguyên’s storytelling is both strange and fascinating, foregrounding human love and pain in the ordinary lives and small affairs of Nam Bộ people. In this space of Nam Bộ (South Vietnam), the fates of women and nature overlap and connect through the same “virtue.” Women’s happiness and suffering are associated with the arid land, with gentle or fierce

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springs, and with wind and sunshine in the vast and mysterious land of Nam Bộ. ̃ stories have tragic lives. They Almost all women characters in Nguyên’s experience the instability, pain, and loneliness associated with poverty, living their lives with resignation and endurance as well as compassion and ̀ mother in Endless Field, who tolerance. One example is Nư ơ ng and Điên’s left her children for her husband and “eloped with another man” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 32) because of shame when she knew her having sex with another man had been witnessed by her kids. All her life is replete with sighs that “were long, expansive in their sadness, dripping one by one like teardrops” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 31). She sighs when her husband’s boat returns to the dock because “she knew he would have to leave in a couple of days” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 31). She sighs “when taking a bath, as water flowed over pomelo flower white skin.” She sighs “when she sat to sew and mend her children’s clothes.” And “whenever the fabric boat stopped by,” she also ̀ sighs, “fingering her two empty pockets.” She sighs even “when Điên ̃ asked her for money to buy candy” (Nguyên 2019a: 31). Her entire life is dominated by poverty and hunger. She worries about “the rice container” when it is empty (Nguyêñ 2019a: 29) during her whole life.1 Like other women, “the rice container would always haunt them, whenever they think about illness, fixing up the house, or saving up for their children’s marriage” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 27). She feels sorry to see her beauty gradually fading, feeling “old age creeping” upon her, “slash[ing] away bits of [her] youth” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 26–27). Characters such as Nư ơ ng’s mother are women who have never been a “true wife.” “Not once during their entire lives would [their husbands] say a kind or loving word to their wives. They did not know how to caress, to be soft and sensitive. When needed, they just flipped the women over, satisfied themselves, then snored away with their backs turned” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 63). She is a woman from Bàu Sen who has been abandoned by her husband, “always on a mission with her conical hat over her head, looking for this shaman or that medium to concoct a spell to bring back her run away husband” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 47).2 Finally, her husband abandons his mistress and chases after another one. 1  The “rice container” or “rice vat” is where rice, the main family food staple, is stored in rural areas of Vietnam. It also used to appear in children’s games, where they used Panama cherries as rice, coconut shells as bowls, and pretended to eat until they were full. 2  This character has no name in the story. The author refers to her by her region of origin, Bàu Sen, to distinguish her from other women.

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“Three rice harvests passed with her [the wife] going to the fields alone. Raising her daughter alone. Looking into the mirror alone, touching and loving herself” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 49–50). ̀ These female characters fall for a man such as Út Vũ, Nư ơ ng and Điên’s father, who “would calculate beforehand and wait until they felt enough love, enough pain, enough embarrassment, and then he would abandon them at the right moment” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 62). Nư ơ ng’s mother is not alone in following this pattern: “One woman had just sold her small shop. Another had just bid her last words to her husband and children. There was one girl who was about to get married, with firewood, big and small logs, waiting in a stack next to the kitchen… All of them blindly trusted and loved” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 63). But women are also carried off on a houseboat, “their way back home blocked” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 63), or they become prostitutes who yearn for a good and loving life, but end up instead in humiliation, pain, and bitterness. They are poor rural women with their little children “huddled around a pot of boiled sweet potatoes in the fading light of the day” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 14) while their husbands spend all their money on momentary pleasure with poor urban prostitutes. Against this background, Nư ơ ng’s natural beauty seems pointless, given her miserable circumstances, and simply foreshadows her future of having to marry, having “a bunch of annoying kids” and breaking her back “working in the field or garden until [she is] nothing but empty cicada’s shell” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 89) with a broken heart. Nư ơ ng embodies suffering and resignation through her compassion and love. Living a nomadic life on a boat with her brother and her spiteful father, she has to make a multitude of sacrifices, including “the right to farewells” and to “look back longingly at hands waving” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 65). She suffers the blows her father metes out to reduce the pain in his heart when he is confused and bored in the cold field. “I let Father beat me so his heart could stop aching for a bit” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 40). And she just knows that she and her brother “got beaten because [they] were [their] mother’s children” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 40). Other sacrifices that she resigns herself to include sinking “deeper and deeper into a lack of intimacy” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 64), moving far away from ordinary people, and giving up the habit of dreaming. She accepts that she cannot “become attached to anyone, so when it was time to uproot ourselves again and move to yet another field, another canal, we would not miss anything” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 61). She resigns herself to a life of poverty bound to the cold, lonely, and cruel desolation of her father.

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She learns duck “language” to the point where people look at her and her brother “like we had lost our minds” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 70) and accepts that they have to “learn many things on our own.” “What we did not know, we tried. What we did not understand, we put into a pile in our hearts. Sometimes, to thoroughly understand something, we had to pay a very high price” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 81). Nư ơ ng’s most cruel and painful sacrifice is that she accepts being raped as a lesson in “physical contact between bodies” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 100)—the only thing she has never experienced, with haunting, terrifying memories. For a long time, the two siblings have to try things they “did not know,” try to learn how to survive. However, for Nư ơ ng, this lesson of physical intercourse generates a throbbing pain and “mind-numbing sting” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 101), turning a girl into a woman with horrifying experiences.3 A pained, torn, and crumpled body feeling “something little yet agile like a tiny mosquito larva, swimming inside” marks Nư ơ ng’s tragic life (Nguyêñ 2019a: 102). Although she seems to be dying with a battered body that remains on the field, she only thinks of the consequence: she is afraid and cries at the thought that she might be pregnant. That means she must continue to accept it (as a “bitter pill” and also her “habit”) (Nguyêñ 2019a: 102). All this endurance and resignation is a constant in the fates of Nư ơ ng and other women characters. They are gullible, patient, loving, and also instinctive in a “fierce, painful, wild, bitter, grim” world (Nguyêñ 2019a: 193) where men have always oppressed them. Even when a man’s life is on a downward trajectory, he continues to be “a hurting beast”: “he would laze around, savoring the taste of his last prey while plotting and fantasizing about his next one” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 62). In Fabulous Clouds in the Sky, Di’s life is not passive, but it, too, follows a melancholy pattern. Her life “was left incomplete” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 97)4 during childhood when her mother died in a car accident and she, “in bewilderment,” “caught [herself] wearing a white headband and walking in her funeral, which had very few attendees” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 97). From that point onward, for all the questions “dwelled inside [her], never to be 3  In Vietnamese cultural tradition, women’s virginity is a very important thing. The point when a girl has sex for the first time is a turning point in her life because it marks the transition from girl to woman. 4  I use Chi P. Pham and Chitra Sankaran’s translation Khói trờ i lộng lẫy (Glorious Unsullied Smoke) for this chapter. However, because their translation is forthcoming, it is impossible to quote with the exact number of pages, so the quotations from this story are based on the Vietnamese original.

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answered,” she “had to find [her] own equilibrium” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 98). Living with a father who would only give love to his son, Di “began searching for solutions to questions, herself” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 98) and compares a woman’s life to a water-fern floating on the river as early as the age of fourteen. Faced with her father’s patriarchal manners and her lover’s power ambitions, Di chooses to disappear. Living alone for ten years in the assumed role of an outcast young mother, Di experiences a great deal of loss and suffering as she is “naked and exposed without means or support” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 114), and “had bathed in the river of sorrow all alone” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 114). Her greatest loss is her inability to stop her brother from being captivated by the modern world. Phiên gradually moves away from the simple and pristine beauty Di has been trying to preserve, and finally, all that remains for her is a cold and lonely life. Not only in Endless Field and Fabulous Clouds in the Sky, but also in ̃ many other stories, women’s lives are marked by tragedy, sufferNguyên’s ing, and poverty. These women have small dreams and little desire for love. They are weary and injured by men’s games and ultimately abandoned in shame. Examples include Bé in “White Alcohol” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 76–87), who hopelessly waits for her partner, and a teacher who experiences tragedy and pain in a rebellious pupil’s wicked prank in “Feelings on the String” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 43–54). In “A Dry Heart” (Nguyêñ 2018: 153–161), Hậu enters an asylum after finding out that her husband is the very person who hired another man to kill her because he has a mistress. In “The Line of Memories” (Nguyêñ 2018: 128–142), a woman loses her child and then spends her entire life drifting in memories, quietly hurting and missing the man who now lives with someone else. Her life sinks into unlimited sadness as continuous as a constantly flowing ̃ female characters, in other words, is always river. The destiny of Nguyên’s far from happiness. These women fall in love, give their love to others, and wait for their men while they suffer: Hảo in “The Wispy Wind” (Nguyêñ 2018: 29–39), Đào Hồng in “The End of Beauty Season” (Nguyêñ 2018: 91–104), Nga in “Loving the Persicaria Odorata” (Nguyêñ 2018: 17–28), Bé in “White Alcohol” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 76–87), and Di in “Fabulous Clouds in the Sky” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 88–141). Sometimes these women try to break out of the bondage and unhappiness in their lives. Nư ơ ng’s mother becomes unfaithful to her husband because she cannot bear having always empty pockets (Nguyêñ 2019a: 31). The women who have affairs with Út Vũ resist their husbands who not only have “a knack for drunkenness,” but are “also prone to use their

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fists to exert authority” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 63). The woman from Bàu Sen does not accept losing her husband to another woman. The “whore” Sư ơ ng, despite being beaten and bruised, still dreams of getting rid of the dust. Nư ơ ng, although she was raped, still dreams of her child, and “surely she would name it Thư ơ ng, Nhớ , Dịu, Xuyến, or Hư ờ ng” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 102).5 And “the child would have no father, but it would definitely go to school and live happily for the rest of its life, because its mother would teach” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 102). Di abducts her brother Phiên and flees to a deserted place to punish her father and her lover in Fabulous Clouds in the Sky (Nguyêñ 2019b). Although their fates may be pulled “out of one quagmire” only to be pushed “into another, equally deep one” (Nguyêñ 2019a) and they may still be overwhelmed by confusion and suffering, at least their efforts signal a strong desire for self-assertion. In reality, these women’s endurance and resignation originate from Confucian ideology, which has severely impacted women in Vietnam as part of traditional culture. However, the difference here is that the women’s endurance and resignation are always accompanied by love and tolerance: they suffer but never feel resentment towards anyone. This endurance and tolerance, in some places, especially modern life in large cities, might be criticized, but for people in Nam Bộ rural areas, they persist as principles of maintaining a harmonious and stable family, and society as well. ̃ stories resist the dominant sysAlthough female characters in Nguyên’s tem to a certain extent, they are still women who depend on men in some ways. This reality may be caused by a trace of Confucianism or traditionally moral principles of women’s virtues. Nguyêñ does not explain or give any vision of how the oppression of women and nature might end in her stories. She just describes phenomena, showing them to elicit questions from readers. Imaginations of women’s lives in Nam Bộ land seem to be in a vicious circle.

3  Looking at Animals: Nature’s Resilience in a Broken Human World As Nguyêñ describes them, all details and dimensions of Nam Bộ are closely connected to human lives in their misery and insecurity: meandering rivers, endless fields, a deserted garden, a boat, a vegetable raft floating 5 ́  “Thư ơ ng,” “Nhớ ,” “Di ̣u,” “Xuyên,” and “Hư ờ ng” mean “affection,” “nostalgia,” “sweet,” “grace,” and “rose,” respectively.

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on a river, smoke from a kitchen, a straw, a vat of rice, drought, rain, and ̃ stories, that harmofierce weather. But it is through animals, in Nguyên’s nious relationships between humans and nature are established. The stories focus on the tragic lives of women, but the lives of animals, especially ducks, follow and parallel women’s destinies. Buell, Heise, and Thornber point out that: the figure of the animal in the environmental imagination is … associated, more than other tropes or symbols, with underlying tensions and stark contradictions: animals are evolutionarily connected more closely to humans than other parts of nature, but they are also often figured as separated from humans by a fundamental boundary. They invite reflection on humans’ imbrication into ecosystemic networks, but the usual focus on charismatic mammals and birds also blocks understanding of ecosystems. (2011: 29)

Furthermore, ecofeminists have pointed out that “[f]or most ‘white’ male writers, dark-skinned people and women are inevitably close to animals, associated with matter, body, and ultimately the degradation of undifferentiated merging with nature” (Westling 1996: 151). Contemporary humans’ connection with animals through agriculture “raises urgent questions not only about animal ethics but also about environmental impacts, given the significant contribution of animal farming to pollution and clĩ stories, a flock of ducks, mate change” (Buell et al. 2011: 31). In Nguyên’s particularly a short-tailed duck, transcends principles of behavior for animals to become a character and an artistic sign in the text. Nguyêñ does not create a fable in which the short-tailed duck is endowed with human ̃ stories open up a language and behavior. Rather, the ducks in Nguyên’s portal to a non-anthropocentric world. They represent human–animal fusions in which humans and animals are understood equally. Obviously, the flock of ducks in Endless Field is livestock designed for human sustenance. The ducks become humanized, however, when it turns out that they can understand humans, and when they even save humans from suffering and loneliness. The first time the ducks’ language appears is in Sư ơ ng’s imagination. They are irritated, pecking at her feet every time she crosses over her fence: “Why are you here? To slash our portions? Not only is our trough now filled with tasteless rice husks—kinda sucks to meet our maker—we also have to lay eggs to serve you” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 15). Then, leading a lonely nomadic life with silent wounds in their hearts, ̀ have to intentionally seek out a “new language” and a Nư ơ ng and Điên

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new world with “no jealousy or resentment “ in the ducks’ “small heads” that “only had enough space in their brains for love” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 70). This small world only exists through the communication between the two siblings and the ducks—a world of mutual support. This occurs the first ̀ get lost in the middle of a field because of late time that Nư ơ ng and Điên afternoon rains and nightfall, “all around [them] rain. Patches of gardens became more distant and unclear” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 37). The children, in tears, cannot find their way back home, and only the ducks “remembered ̀ from the way back” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 37). They rescue Nư ơ ng and Điên ̃ darkness and fear and make them feel “on cloud nine” (Nguyên 2019a: 37). In response, the ducks are also protected and loved by Nư ơ ng and ̀ Although Điên’s ̀ tearful pleadings do not save the ducks from being Điên. buried alive because of the officials’ suspicion that they are sick, his affirmation that the ducks’ voices “are healthy, no diseases” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 74) shows sympathy and understanding. No one can believe the communication between two siblings and ducks but it still exists in a primitive and natural connection between humans and animals. The principle of this interaction is listening and understanding. The humans learn duck language by learning “how to love our ducks” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 71), and ducks learn human language by hearing and sympathy. A blind duck, in particular, is portrayed as “ extra sensitive.” Other ducks may be confused and “stare[] with suspicion” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 71) when Nư ơ ng sings a random song, losing her breath and trying to fix her voice. But the blind duck even recognizes the beating of Nư ơ ng’s heart: “[h]er voice might be different, but the sound of her heart is the same. Very similar. Quivering, sniffling, as if it was about to drop” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 71). Although Nư ơ ng feels like she “swallowed a bitter glob of saliva” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 71) when she sees her brother perk his ears up to “catch what the ducks were saying” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 71), she understands the true cause of this peculiar relation. Their father’s coldness made Nư ơ ng and her brother “so fed up with humans that we switched to enjoying the company of ducks” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 71). Furthermore, when Nư ơ ng realizes that “ducks would never cheat or force themselves on another” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 81), “the shame of being human suddenly filled our noses with a vengeance” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 81). In Nư ơ ng’s situation, interacting with ducks makes her hope that such companionship will end in less pain than that of humans. Humans and birds find each other as the ducks show their sym̀ pathy with Nư ơ ng and Điên.

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While animal studies scholars often focus on the direct violence humans impose on species taxonomically close to them (mainly mammals and birds), Nguyêñ looks at nature in her own way. She does not highlight “the ways in which human societies damage habitats and species ranging from micro-organisms and plants to insects and amphibians, systemically even if unintentionally” (Buell et al. 2011: 32). Instead, her portrayal of ducks suggests a different way of thinking about the world of farm animals. On the one hand, they are associated with the ups and downs of human life, especially women who are also heavily impacted by the effects of climate and environmental changes, as I will show below. On the other hand, images of scrawny ducks on barren fields who are buried alive during the epidemic illustrate the harshness and brutality of the male-­ dominated system. The connection that Nguyêñ establishes here is an overlap between suffering humans and suffering animals. In the avian flu epidemic, when ducks are buried alive, they suffer and move in the dark holes, “breathing through the pain of their broken and tangled up necks” ̀ huddle close by in tears, “sensing (Nguyêñ 2019a: 76), Nư ơ ng and Điên the shorter and shorter breath of the last remaining duck” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 77). Nư ơ ng’s heart “broke over those tiny creatures that were able to penetrate [her] heart” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 77). The most painful thing for children is to see how their friends, not animals, are tossed “into sacks and hurled … into those holes” while “they were still alive, struggling, and screaming” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 75). However, human sympathy does not stop there. When the ducks are gathered and hurled into the holes, the other duck herders also “huddle[] into a spot,” lamenting their property and money. It is an unbearable risk because “they could feel the fatigue and their poverty casting a net around them” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 75). This risk pushes the poorest people in this land into despair or even suicide: one of the herders is found “near to the edge of one hole, his open eyes staring unblinkingly at the sky,” and “a bottle of pesticide was tossed next to his body” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 77). ̃ In Nguyên’s stories, humans’ and animals’ sufferings are undeniably interconnected. Furthermore, in the avian flu epidemic, another problem is also unveiled: the patriarchal system’s power. On the assumption that “[i]t is better to kill in error than to pardon in error” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 74), male officials can decide to bury the ducks regardless of whether they are ill or not. Bargaining attempts and trade-offs between the government ̀ lives and their officials and Sư ơ ng, who wants to save Nư ơ ng and Điên’s family from hunger, reveal themselves as “something cruel, barbaric even”

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(Nguyêñ 2019a: 85). In order to protect the flock of ducks, Sư ơ ng continues to prostitute herself to government officials, still subject to male domination. At this moment in the narrative, both women and animals become goods to be traded to maintain the patriarchy. Thus, the epidemic is a connective point that Nguyêñ establishes, in which humans’ and animals’ sufferings intermingle throughout the story under male domination. Short-tailed ducks, blind ducks, and flocks of ducks, then, function in ̃ stories as a means of connecting humans with nature. But the Nguyên’s advent of the avian flu epidemic in “Endless Field” adds another dimension to their narrative meanings. The screams of ducks being buried alive on the land turn into a painful metaphor for the relations between dominating and dominated groups. The execution of live ducks because of avian flu also causes the human characters to listen with empathy: It took half a day to fill the holes completely. Through the mushy soil, I could still hear my ducks breathing through the pain of their broken and tangled up necks, all the while asking one another why humans were so cruel. And then, silence. In that hair-raising silence, I could hear the voice of the blind duck, perhaps already accustomed to darkness and still holding on. (Nguyêñ 2019a: 76)

̃ tendency to humanize animals in her stories not only highlights Nguyên’s the significance of environmental awareness but also invites readers to imagine harmonious relations between humans and nonhumans. As the ethologist Frans de Waal has argued, “[t]o endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us” (1997: 50). Nguyêñ uses anthropomorphism to portray ducks as more than mere livestock: they are friends of humans. ̃ Nguyên’s story “The Anxious Gaze” (2018: 51–66) represents this connection clearly. The relationship between a lonely old man and a short-­ tailed duck transcends human–animal distinctions, each becoming a natural creature on an equal footing with the other. Although the short-tailed duck does not have a human appearance, its language, gestures, and especially its soul are full of a quasi-human spirit. This duck is quite thoughtful and understands Mr. Hai’s loneliness and circumstances: “How poor are you? The duck is even happier” (2018: 63; translation mine). Even when Mr. Hai tries to cover his feelings of longing for the woman he is waiting for, the short-tailed duck still realizes: “God, why do you still have to hide

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it up to now? I’m a duck but, to be honest, I’m not shy” (2018: 64; translation mine). The duck here functions as a witness to the desolate life of the old man. However, when a man named Thơ , who lives alone and is “glued to his headset all day long” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 105) in “Fabulous Clouds in the Sky” proclaims, “I am a duck studying human language” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 105), it shows humans’ deadlock and loneliness. The harmony between the human and nonhuman worlds seems to be shaken. The human character in this case wants to live an animal’s life because he has fallen into despair and is consumed by loss, sorrow, and fragile compassion. As these examples show, the portrayal of relationships between animals ̃ and humans thereby takes on a completely different shape in Nguyên’s stories than in representations of charismatic animals such as whales, tigers, bears, and wolves in much environmental literature, where such animals are associated with the cultural identity of certain places or nations and ̃ by contrast, with the symbolic power of forests and nature. Nguyên, focuses on lowly livestock whose primary function is to provide food for humans, but which is here elevated to the status of humans’ friends. Based on mutual understanding and sympathy, this relation illustrates a posthumanist perspective on humans “as one species among others rather than one with special privileges,” and this narrative about humans and nonhumans projects “a vivid sense of a still possible common life and future from which we can continue to build” (Haraway 2008: 129). Significantly, Nguyêñ places both humans’ and farm animals’ suffering in the context of climate change and environmental disasters. When “the aggressive dry season seemed to gather all of the sun’s heat and pour it down upon us. Young rice plants withered in the field. Their stalks shriveled like ashes suspended from joss sticks, crumbling in our hands” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 5), when the landscape is dotted with “scorched dry canals” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 18), when “the water turned to a dark yellow color” and “was sour with alum” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 19), human life enters into crisis, and animals share such difficult times. “Without water, [the ducks] dragged their feet and could not go far. Their eggs became scarce; the ones they did lay popped out substance-less, with thickened shells, elongated shape, and stale taste” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 18). The greatest disaster for both is the appearance of the avian flu epidemic. For impoverished rural people, the strange phrase “avian flu” takes away all their hopes and governmental officials’ decision to “toss the ducks into sacks and hurl[] them into the holes” is a calamity (Nguyêñ 2019a: 75).

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Nature inflicts epidemics and natural disasters on humans, but environmental storytelling also highlights the disasters that humans inflict on ̃ nature. In Nguyên’s stories, epidemics are a core event that not only reveals human characters’ properties but also connects humans with nature in a special way. In creating animal characters with some human-like features, the writer pursues two aims. On the one hand, she forces us to rethink nonhuman life in its coexistence with human life. On the other hand, instead of rare animals in texts such as Li Ke Wei’s Chinese Tiger or ̃ small and trivial animals metaphorize Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, Nguyên’s the poor inhabitants of Nam Bộ whose habitat they share.6 In his famous essay “Why Look at Animals?,” first published in 1977, John Berger recognized the duality of the relationship between humans and animals and the reasons why humans push animals to the margins. The process of forcing their existence to the margins leads to the reality that “[w]ith their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is companionship offered to the loneliness of man as species” (Berger 2009: ̃ stories corresponds with Berger’s 6). The portrayal of animals in Nguyên’s point of view. Berger asserted that this “unspeaking companionship” was based on humans’ inability to talk to animals, an inability that is overcome only in stories about exceptional beings such as the mythological Orpheus, “who could talk with animals in their own language” (2009: 6). In ̃ stories, on the contrary, it is lowly peasants and nomadic chilNguyên’s dren who choose to learn the language of ducks. Their language-based exchange with farm animals offers a different “speaking companionship” that alleviates the humans’ loneliness and hidden injuries. A key characteristic of this speaking companionship is that it emerges from the human characters’ voluntary or involuntary rejection of normal social life when they are faced with tragedies or situations with no other ̀ trajectory in “Endless Field” as well means of escape, as Nư ơ ng and Điên’s as Mr. Hai’s in “The Anxious Gaze” show. Thus, changing one’s perspective to that of animals is not only a change in human behavior but also a return to equal relationships between species.

6  For more detailed ecocritical analyses of Chinese Tiger and Wolf Totem, see Nguyêñ Thi ̣ Tịnh Thy (2017: 466–500 and 359–428, respectively).

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4  Unhappy Endings: The Degradation of Nature and the Oppression of Women Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư writes centrally about human lives rather than engaging in explicit environmental reflection. But the lives of her characters in Nam Bộ are closely linked to the slightest fluctuations in water and every piece of dry soil. Nature in her stories is not only portrayed as harsh but also subject to gradual changes. Climate change and environmental destruction turn both humans and farm animals into its victims. If the bird flu epidemic is one disaster through which Nguyêñ explores humans’ experience of nature, drought is another. Humans begin to feel that they are living in “an unusually hot dry season” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 16): the sun spins “as if turning people into dry rocks” and “the aggressive dry season seemed to gather all of the sun’s heat and pour it down upon us” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 5). Droughts assail fields and water: “The dry season came early. So it was quite sunny for long stretches” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 17). Where Nư ơ ng’s family pitches its tent, “the water had condensed into an ominous jaundice color” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 18). Water scarcity forces humans to entertain small fantasies: for example, a young man wishes “that my mother could bathe to her heart’s content before she dies” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 17). In addition, increasing urbanization has heavily impacted the environment. “The fields became the cities. The fields changed the taste of the water from refreshing to cringingly salty” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 95), and “the rice stalks died before they started to bloom. Due to the water shortage, people could not grow beans or melons” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 18). Even during the rainy season, along the bank of the river, “[i]ronically, the villages here had no water to use” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 17). “Their bodies festered with scabies, kids scratched themselves until their skin bled. The villagers traveled by boat to buy water, holding their breath on the way back in fear that the extravagant liquid would spill out during the long trip” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 17). But the most devastating natural changes come with the disappearance of dunes due to human intervention, the death of ducks due to avian flu, and the broader disappearance of natural beauty that some of the characters desperately seek to preserve. In Endless Field, women’s lives are mostly characterized by unhappiness, suffering, resignation, and endurance. Sometimes they act to escape their tragic situations, but most of these protests remain ineffective. However, in Fabulous Clouds in the Sky, the women are portrayed as less

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resigned and helpless. Like nature, they begin to protest in their own way. If “[n]ature punished humans by disappearing without trace” (Nguyêñ ̃ female protagonist punishes her men in a similar 2019b: 131), Nguyên’s way by beginning “[her] journey of disappearing” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 131). In this short story, although women and nature seem to be dominated and depend on each other, they have the same way to resist the dominant power. Nature, in Nguyêñ ‘s Fabulous Clouds in the Sky, does not take revenge through water scarcity, dry soils, and drought, as in the story Endless Field. Neither does it punish human abuse by raging storms or an angry river that sweeps everything away, as in Trần Duy Phiên’s Remaining Hundred Years (2016). In this story, nature chooses another method of punishment. If “humans punish nature by humiliating and destroying it,” nature avenges itself on humans “by disappearing” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 118). People realize that the beauty of nature that they are preserving is no longer complete: “An essential part of them had already died. They had lost their elusive fragrance, their power to move us” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 120). Nature’s disappearance hurts humans and makes them ask questions of persistence and loss, existence and non-existence. They worry “whether Chớ p forest, the Lac Deo Chinese swamp cypress, the folk-singers of Tai Nát tribe, and the stream that they had once got stuck in because of flooding, still existed or had disappeared” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 119). They seek an answer to the question “what was of lasting beauty and what aspect of life would disap̃ pear?” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 98). In Nguyên’s perspective, disappearance is nature’s revenge, a topic she is obsessed with: “The grass you walk on will disappear soon. The river you bathe in will vanish soon. One day soon, you will no longer hear the chirping of birds at dawn. Your dear ones will die one day” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 125). Obviously, humans suffer the consequences of their own exploitation of nature. Di and her colleagues have to face loss and change every day. They are forced to make their choice, “not demanding anything,” while “adjusting to the pain of loss” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 107). This reality seems to make all of them “apathetic” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 107). However, some of them cannot stand these changes along with the disappearance of nature. Nhứ t, Di’s friend, who works at the same institution, gives up his job and does not come to their office. “He scowled, upset” because “villages and hamlets around the river that he was passionate about were no longer the same” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 106); Trúc, the Heritage Center’s former staff member, “had resigned” because “industrialists had taken over Thổ Sầu steppe, mining ores, turning it into a big industrial site” (Nguyêñ 2019b:

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119); and Di really feels loss when “the xáng cơ m arrived on the island, berthing itself on the shores and breathing smoke” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 132) and when the barges cross the river repeatedly, resembling “hot bodies that scratched the smooth surface of the water… crude, wild creatures that sucked all blood and bone out of the living river, injuring its innards and ripping open its delicate soul for the world to gaze at” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 140). The xáng cơ m has effectively eroded Di’s last home, depriving her last family and “destroying [her] sentimental connections” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 140). Working at the Heritage Center, Di’s feelings of loss grow by the day because more than anyone else, she realizes that “[t]he various marvels that had been collected in the archive room of the Heritage Museum were the forlorn, helpless and despairing signs of a lost civilization that seemed to cry out mournfully against the gradual disappearance of past sounds and artifacts that we would never again encounter” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 100). Nature punishes humans in its way of disappearing, suffer̃ female characters, Di holds the ing in silence. Similarly, among Nguyên’s most extreme views about finding and preserving what she perceives as the beauty of both nature and humans. Wanting to hurt her father who loves his son but treats his daughters like chickens and to escape from an estranged lover, Di chooses to disappear into the wilderness, as mentioned earlier. This life also allows her to immerse herself in nature, avoid urban life and noisy cities, and nurture her brother away from all pretense and ̃ stories, so suffering of urban human life. If nature disappears in Nguyên’s do some of her ill-treated women. Living in the wilderness, Di tries to keep her brother Phiên’s charming, “childlike nature, intact, a wild, unfettered childhood” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 122), which she believes is the purest form of nature. Phiên grows up without formal schooling because Di believes that “school kills childhood,” and that children attending school are “robbed of their childhood, like sad and weary adults”(Nguyêñ 2019b: 122). Hence, Phiên’s childhood is always busy with sauntering “through the village,” “breathing the aroma of smoked-chicken,” stopping by “houses that smelt of tasty food cooking,” listening to “crazy Thơ to the opera on the radio, standing either on one leg or on all fours, depending on whether he wanted to be a crane or a dog that day,” and his afternoon siesta could be in “anyone’s bed or hammock” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 123). Phiên becomes a sensitive and thoughtful boy and he always cares for the life of “poor things” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 123). However, like Di, Phiên gradually comes to realize that the wild island is not enough for him. “He was lonely but didn’t know to hide

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it” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 124). Di’s resistance leads to complex and unforeseen consequences. She feels more and more alone as she recognizes that all values she had sought to preserve slip away from her day by day. Phiên, her brother—a symbol of the purest and liveliest human beauty that Di tries to preserve—begins to be attracted by modern life. She realizes that the best world for a fourteen-year-old child is “a warm and caring family, with a father who doted on him and pampered him”; “the best of schools, attractive toys, cute girls, a life filled with modern gadgetry, internet shops, and streets lined with game galleries” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 140)—experiences that she deprives Phiên of. She also understands an important truth. Her little brother, “whom [she] had brought up to be better than [her] father and all the other men in [her] life, was also damaged … in fact, handicapped” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 140). Phiên even does not know “how to express anger” although “his inner agony was revealed by his violently trembling body” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 140). Social life may be cruel and unjust, but by raising him completely separated from it, Di deprives Phiên of the ability to cope with difficult situations and kills his human emotions. ̃ portrayal of humans’ search for Thus, a paradox emerges in Nguyên’s harmony with nature. Some of her characters seek out and try to preserve the beauty of nature and their own integrity with it. But this in principle meaningful quest never reaches its goal, leaving the characters bewildered and saddened. Di ultimately recognizes the futility of her efforts at a moment when she tries to retain smoke in her hands as a last gift to her younger brother: “when I tried to grasp it, all I caught were my own fingers clasping each other” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 141). The search for nature and the flight into the wilderness ultimately remain as inconclusive as the female characters’ quest for a life free from pain and oppression. ̃ short stories, then, both women and nature continue to In Nguyên’s live under patriarchal domination, to the point where their resignation and endurance become inherent qualities, like their regional identity. But this does not imply that the male characters achieve control or happiness. Men actively shape their own lives, but what they achieve, in the end, is only adversity, powerlessness, and persistent pain as a result or “karma” of what men have done. In Endless Field, Út Vũ serially humiliates and abandons women and prevents them from returning home (Nguyêñ 2019a: 62–63). The women who experience this abuse are unaware that “behind the square-jawed handsome face, there only existed a black void, ready to suck in anyone who was careless” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 64). Living with the pain of his wife having left him for another man, Út Vũ avenges himself by

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hurting women. Each time he abandons a woman, he “was like an animal that returned to its lair after a fulfilling hunt. He would laze around, savoring the state of his last prey while plotting and fantasizing about his next one” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 62). But in the end, that “beast” has to experience extreme pain  – “my father’s face was smeared, I was not sure if it was blood or alum” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 100) – when helplessly witnessing Hận and Thù—characters whose names mean “hate” and “enemy,” respectively—rape his daughter Nư ơ ng before his eyes. Furthermore, his daughter’s unconscious screams “asking for help” are not directed at him but ̀ which deeply hurts Út Vũ. He realizes at this Nư ơ ng’s brother Điên, moment that his daughter has forgotten him (Nguyêñ 2019a: 100). The man who has ruined so many women’s lives is ultimately punished by witnessing his own teenage daughter being humiliated and raped. Furthermore, in Fabulous Clouds in the Sky, the father who never experienced a sense of loss and has displayed no emotion toward his daughters ends up spending his days in profound unhappiness. Di’s confidant, a “forest-addicted” man, finally becomes the Director of the Heritage Centre and works in a luxurious and ordered room “filled with velvet chairs, austere and immaculate” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 127), but it seems that the loneliness in his spirit never disappears: “there were more lights and he ̃ male characters was more distant” (Nguyêñ 2019b: 127). While Nguyên’s do possess power, their coercions and dominations only lead them to dead ends of loneliness and misfortune.

5  Conclusion If ecofeminism argues that “the battle for ecological survival is intrinsically intertwined with the struggles for women’s liberation and other forms of social justice” (Hay 2002: 75), the fight for women’s freedom and happĩ ness in Nguyên’s stories operates according to a specific mechanism. Women’s resignation, endurance, and even their protests are imbued with tolerance and implicit hope. Even when she feels pain and fear, Nư ơ ng in Endless Field still imagines a good prospect for her child: “That child. Surely she would name it Thư ơ ng, Nhớ , Dịu, Xuyến, or Hư ờ ng. The child would have no father, but it would definitely go to school and live happily for the rest of its life, because its mother would teach, that as a child, sometimes you should forgive the sins of adults” (Nguyêñ 2019a: 102).

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Through this pattern, Nguyêñ creates a completely different form of environmental narrative. That difference begins with women’s lives and ̃ the connection between humans and nature. In Nguyên’s stories, dust, soil, water, farm animals, and even sunshine become entities attached to a human being, and they particularly coincide with women’s fate. In that world, all loss, resurrection, tolerance, suffering, hopelessness, and even abuse towards women have existed in the breath of earth, of waves, of wind, the miserable struggle of dry soils, and the immense generosity of the sky. All are associated with human beings, operating quietly in living life. ̃ discourse on the environIf we look for a special nuance in Nguyên’s ment, it is the discourse of those who are disempowered. With its portrayal of patriarchal ideology, it is a discourse focused on human suffering ̃ stories is typically not a and confusion. However, resignation in Nguyên’s sign of helplessness but rather an illustration of women’s resilience. Women and nature, in these stories, are tied together through mutual protection and interdependence. As vulnerable subjects, nature and women understand each other and encounter each other without resentment. While in Nguyêñ Khăć Phê’s Cross in the Deep Forest, nature turns mad because of man’s brutality and takes revenge on human actions (see ̃ Nguyêñ Thị Tịnh Thy 2017: 324–339); nature in Nguyên’s fiction avenges itself for its degradation by disappearing, in parallel to the female characters. Human and environmental loss and human and environmental resilience are portrayed as intertwined, particularly women’s resilience. But even male characters, as I have shown, suffer if they do not seek to live ̃ ecofeminist critique, therefore, highin harmony with nature. Nguyên’s lights the degradation of nature and the oppression of women, but also the toll that patriarchal structures take on men.

References Berger, John. 2009. Why Look at Animals? London: Penguin. Buell, Lawrence, Ursula K.  Heise, and Karen Thornber. 2011. “Literature and Environment.” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36: 417–440. De Waal, Frans. 1997. “Are We in Anthropodenial?” Discover (July): 50–53. Forbes Vietnam. 2019. Công bô ́ danh sách 50 phụ nữ ảnh hư ởng nhất Việt Nam năm 2019 [List of the 50 Most Influential Women in 2019]. https://forbesvietnam.com.vn/tin-­cap-­nhat/forbes-­viet-­nam-­cong-­bo-­danh-­sach-­50-­phu-­nu-­ anh-­huong-­nhat-­viet-­nam-­2019-­5474.html.

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Gaard, Greta, and Patrick Murphy. 1998. “Introduction.” Ecofeminist Literary Criticism: Theory, Interpretation, Pedagogy. Ed. Greta Gaard and Patrick Murphy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1–13. Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hay, Peter. 2002. Main Currents in Western Environmental Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ̃ Ngọc Tư . 2018. Cánh dô̵ ng ̀ bất tận [Endless Field]. 41st ed. Ho Chi Nguyên, Minh City: Tre Publishing House. ———. 2019a. Endless Field. Trans. Hung M. Duong and Jason A. Picard. Ho Chi Minh City: Tre Publishing House Tre Publishing House. ———. 2019b. Khói trờ i lộng lẫy [Fabulous Clouds in the Sky]. 3rd ed. Ho Chi Minh City: Tre Publishing House. ̃ Thi ̣ Ti ̣nh Thy. 2017. Rừ ng khô, suôí cạn, biên̉ dộ̵ c … và văn chư ơ ng [Dry Nguyên, Forest, Dry Stream, Poisonous Sea… and Literature]. Hanoi: Social Science Publishing House. Ortner, Sherry. 1974. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” Woman, Culture, and Society. Ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 68–87. Rosser, Sue V., ed. 2008. Women, Science, and Myth: Gender Beliefs from Antiquity to the Present. Santa Barbara: ABC CLIO. Sandilands, Catriona. 1999. The Good-Natured Feminist: Ecofeminism and the Quest for Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Spretnak, Charlene. 1989. “Towards an Ecofeminist Spirituality.” Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism. Ed. Judith Plant. London: Green Print. 127–52. Trần, Duy Phiên. 2016. Tram ̆ nam ̆ còn lại (Remaining Hundred Years), Young Publishing House, Ho Chi Minh city. Warren, Karen J. 2000. Ecofeminist Philosophy: A Western Perspective on What It Is and Why It Matters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Westling, Louise. 1996. The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

When the City Speaks Up: Nature, City, and Identity in Lê Minh Hà’s Phô ́ vẫn gió Trần Tịnh Vy

1   Place and Identity Formation Since its emergence in the early 1990s, ecocriticism or “literary ecology” has put an emphasis on studies of the relationship between literature and physical environments. While scholars varied in their terminology regarding ecocritical phenomena, they all shared an interest in examining the expression of nature in literature, including land, place, and wilderness; the relationship between humans and nature; the role of physical settings in the novel; and the influence of environmental crises on literature and culture, among others (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996: xix). Over three successive waves of ecocriticism, urbanism has remained marginal in theory and application. While the city “is associated with processes of replacing rather than harboring the natural and the wild” (Gersdorf 2016: 1), ecocriticism, especially in the United States, has focused primarily on wilderness and rural areas. However, Lewis Mumford’s, Yi-Fu Tuan’s, and

T. T. Vy (*) University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_13

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Lawrence Buell’s research has suggested that the distinction between “the urban and the wild, between environments created and inhabited by humans, and environments created by natural forces and inhabited by nonhuman animals, plants, and other living creatures” does not always hold up (Gersdorf 2016: 1). In his landmark study The Culture of Cities (1938), Mumford saw the city as not only “arise[n] out of man’s social needs and … both modes and their methods of expression” but also the product of the earth and of time (1938: 4). He recognized the city’s position in nature as comparable to that of “a cave … or an ant-heap” (1938: 5); that is, he defined a human-­ built object as a natural object, “a conscious work of art” that acknowledges the abstract and imaginary existence of a concrete object. Buell (1995) analyzed six common metaphors for the relationship between nature/environment and urban space that also value the relationship between the city and the natural environment. From classic metaphors that view the city as part of an “urban-nature binary” or as a “holistic macro-organism” to the more creative vision of the city as a fragmentary assemblage, a palimpsest, as a network, or as an apocalypse, Buell explored the varying and sometimes contradictory relations of urban spaces to natural environments (Buell 2010). In line with theoretical accounts that view urban spaces as integrated into biological systems, research on people-place bonding has focused on the relationship between physical places and residents’ identity formation. Since the first discussions on the relationship between place and identity amongst geographers in the 1970s (Duncan and Duncan 2001: 41), recent approaches to the relationships between people and the external world have seen identity not as “a matter of sheer self-consciousness but as interactive awareness of one’s place” (Casey 2001: 406). The concept of place-identity, developed by Harold M.  Proshansky, suggests that self-­ identities develop and extend to “the very spaces and places in which they are found” (1983: 57). Proshansky defined place-identity as individuals’ complex cognitions about the physical world in which they live: “The cognitions represent memories, ideas, feelings, attitudes, values, preferences, meanings, and conceptions of behavior and experience which relate to the variety and complexity of physical settings that define the day-to-­ day existence of every human being” (Proshansky et  al. 1983: 59). In addition to Proshansky, Cooper (1974), Relph (1976), Buttimer (1980), and Tuan (1980) share underlying assumptions about the sense of

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belonging that a person has about place and the “unselfconscious state” that comes with this sense of belonging. In general, these theoretical accounts of place-identity provide a basis for understanding the interrelationships between the mind and the external worlds through the body. A place engenders a sense of attachment or belonging for the individual; a place helps the individual to define who they are, strengthening self-identity and even altering the individual. The subtle interactions between ecological systems, manifested through both natural and human-made components and residents’ formation of self-­ identity, ground a theoretical framework for my examination of the sense of place and its relationships to individuals’ identities in Lê Minh Hà’s novel Phô ́ vẫn gió (The Street is Still Windy). Vietnamese novels in the post-war and Đôỉ Mớ i periods show a change in writing from an ecocritical perspective. Not only humans but also nature in some novels concerning post-war traumas, such as Nôĩ buôǹ chiêń tranh (Sorrow of War) by Bảo Ninh, Chim én bay (Flying Swallow) by Nguyêñ Trí Huân, and Phô ́ (Streets) by Chu Lai, are described as victims of war, which is apparent through shabbiness and damage by bombs. Similarly, in the works from the renovation period, such as Đi tìm nhân vật (Looking for Characters) by Tạ Duy Anh, Biên̉ và chim bói cá (Sea and Kingfisher) by Bùi Ngọc Tấn, Sông (Rivers) by Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư , Ruôì là ruôì (Fly is a fly) by Đỗ Phấn, Chúa dâ̵ ́t (Lord of Land) by Đỗ Bích Thuý, and Thiên dư̵ ờ ng ảo vọng (Paradise of Illusion) by Nguyêñ Trí, subtle changes in the material and spiritual lives of residents from rural to urban are portrayed in parallel with the process of urbanization, showing the writers’ ecological consciousness in identifying and analyzing the characters’ psychological crises (Nguyêñ Thuỳ Trang 2018: 26). Lê Minh Hà’s novel shares the same theme with works that emphasize the drawbacks of modernization and consumerism, seeing them as the main causes of ecological imbalance. Focusing on characters’ ambivalence between old and new urban spaces and cultural values makes Phô ́ vẫn gió typical amongst its type of ecologically oriented  novels. This novel also raises urgent questions of identity and cultural crisis behind the narratives of urban architecture and environmental crises. In particular, the characters’ feelings of alienation in Lê Minh Hà’s novel are doubled by both industrialization and migration processes. This chapter pays special attention to a particular type of setting in the novel, which is argued to contribute significantly to the formation of an individual’s identity. This is an urban space, and the place in which the

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characters reside is created mainly in the process of informal urbanization. As Rocco and Ballegooijen state, informal urbanization, to a greater or lesser degree, is considered illegal, at least by governing authorities (Rocco and van Ballegooijen 2019: 4). By informally expanding their land use, dwellers are not able to access resources and claim their rights as citizens as a result. Even more, since land is taken unlawfully and taxes are not paid properly, informal settlers are stigmatized as criminals, meaning the settlers’ legitimate property ownership is denied. Additionally, the law can become an instrument to suppress the liberties of residents when illegality is considered by them as the norm (Rocco and van Ballegooijen 2019: 5). Approaches to informal urbanization, in general, have developed in two directions. While the more critical perspective views informal urbanization in terms of political exclusion, inequality, and poverty (Holston 2008), the emancipatory perspective (Ballegooijen and Rocco 2013; Neuwirth 2006) considers informality as “a practice that fosters autonomy, entrepreneurship, and social mobility” (Rocco and van Ballegooijen 2019: 1). However, as shown in my analysis, issues of informal urbanization are not that simple. Particularly, not all informal settlements are characterized by their insecurity of tenure, poor infrastructure, or lack of basic service, although their expansion of land use is considered illegal or illegitimate: some of the residents own houses legally. The informality here is manifested through their legitimizing of housing areas that were not at first owned by them. In other words, informal urbanization is grounded firstly on formal urbanization. The complexity in the legalization of land use is argued as a consequence of the inadequacies in the distribution of land use rights in a specific socio-political and cultural setting. The uneven distribution of land use rights, the absence of effective bureaucracies, and transparent sanctions can all explain the ineffectiveness of informal urbanization. Born in Hanoi in 1962, Lê Minh Hà left for Germany in 1994 but purposely chooses Hanoi as her recurrent inspiration for writing.1 Throughout four collections of short stories, Trăng goá (Last Quarter of the Moon, 1998), Gió biêć (Beloved Wind, 1999), Nhữ ng giọt trầm (Drops of Silence, 2005), and Nhữ ng gặp gỡ không ngờ (Unexpected Meetings, 2012); two novels, Gió tự thờ i khuất mặt (Wind from the Unseen Time, 2005), Phô ́ vẫn gió (The Street is Still Windy, 2014); and 1  When I asked Lê Minh Hà in personal exchange why Hanoi is always the setting of her fiction rather than Germany, she queried back, “Why not Hanoi?” This answer implicitly confirms that Hanoi as the storyworld space is her deliberate choice.

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one collection of vignettes, Thư ơ ng thê ́ ngày xư a (Beloved Old Days, 2002), Hanoi functions in Lê Minh Hà’s writing not only as a creative and imaginary but also an emotive place that holds “considerable social, psychological and emotive meanings for individuals and for groups” (Easthope 2004: 135). On the one hand, the connection to Hanoi, a place that functions as a synecdoche for “homeland” in Lê’s fiction, establishes a strong tie to the past, a condition for diasporic consciousness on the part of mobile subjects (Cohen 2018: 18). On the other hand, the prominence of Hanoi in Lê Minh Hà’s writing highlights the significance of home (Proshansky et al. 1983: 60) for diasporic subjects, which creates an affective link between uprooted residents and a remembered place (McDowell 1999: 71), as well as the way in which a human sense of belonging in a given place arises out of the imagination. There are some major reasons for reading the novel Phô ́ vẫn gió through the lens of place-identity formation. First, the novel vividly describes the protagonist’s active involvement in dwelling-places that range from her own to her friends’ and neighbors’ home-spaces. Phô ́ vẫn gió can be understood as a sequel to the earlier novel Gió tự thờ i khuất mặt. Both novels revolve around the life story of Ngân, a young and sensitive protagonist living in a collective dormitory around the Renovation period (Thờ i kỳ Đôỉ Mớ i) in 1986. In the final chapter of Gió tự thờ i khuất mặt, Ngân decides to leave Hanoi with her husband. In Phô ́ vẫn gió, the author lets her heroine return to Hanoi. The protagonist’s encounter with different places is represented vibrantly through her observational experiences amongst Hanoi’s architectural legacies, experiences that combine perception, emotion, memory, and imagination. Hanoi’s buildings, observed through the “insider” focus of the protagonist, show themselves to be full of meaning not only in terms of how they shape residents’ sense of belonging but also how they structure identities and representations of places. Representations of places, “mental pictures produced by people’s experiences, attitudes, memories, and immediate sensations toward a place” (Relph 2008: 56), reveal with a great deal of detail how informal urban transformation can ruin individual images of places by creating mass identities. After her return, the protagonist is exposed to two opposite faces, old and new Hanoi, that leave her disappointed and distressed. The flashbacks work well to portray the juxtaposition of the elegant and charming Hanoi of the past with the chaotic

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Hanoi of the present, thereby interrogating the impact of the war and the effectiveness of current urban planning. In this chapter, I will focus on the interactive relationships between nature, city, and identity along different dimensions. I will first analyze the distinctive living spaces in Hanoi’s government-subsidized society, consisting of the villa space, the old town space, and the collective dormitory space so as to demonstrate the inhabitants’ different levels of social privilege. Residents’ corresponding lifestyles are good illustrations of Relph’s “identity of place,” according to which a particular place possesses a persistent individuality or distinction that differentiates it from other spaces. This analysis of place identity is followed by an examination of urban expansion that has taken place in Hanoi, which I will show is the consequence of unreasonable migration policies. Metaphorized as a “conscious work of art,” the city of Hanoi developed a brand-new image through its Đôỉ Mớ i architectural styles, its citizens’ conversion of public spaces into private spaces, and the replacement of the natural environment by housing. The various confrontations that occurred during the urban expansion, of neighbors with neighbors and humans with the environment, also illustrate social and ecological drawbacks of urbanization.

2  Residence and Social Status in Phô ́ vẫn gió

Protagonist Ngân’s narration in Phô ́ vẫn gió starts with typical architectural spaces in Hanoi: street-side houses (nhà mặt phô)́ and dormitory/ ̉ The street-side spaces indicate the social collective houses (nhà tập thê). status of two of Ngân’s close friends: Béo (Fat) lives in a French-style villa and Thái Hằng resides in an Old Town area.2 Thanks to her parents’ high ́ gần như trọn vẹn tầng hai một biệt social rank, Béo and her family “sông ́ thự trong phô” [lived almost entirely on the second floor of a mansion on the street] (Lê 2014: 14).3 The “almost” is due to their sharing the villa with another family, which I will discuss in more detail later. But they have private bathrooms and toilets, which identifies them as middle-class. Béo’s toilet, therefore, is described in loving detail: “vì trong măt́ một cô bé con nhà bình dân, cái nhà xí là minh chứ ng cuả ‘một phần cuả chu ̉ nghı ̃a xã hội 2  The Old Town or Old Quarter comprises the unique streets and architecture of old Hanoi. The area is famous for its trade in local handicrafts and traditional medicine. It is also considered the most expensive part of Hanoi. 3  All translations from Vietnamese are mine unless otherwise indicated.

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[in the eyes of a commoner girl, the toilet is evidence of a part of socialism)] (Lê 2014: 14), where people “ngôì trong dó̵ dọ̵ c Paris sụp dô̵ ̉ dư ớ i ́ chiêù rọi qua vòm sấu vào thẳng khung cửa sô”̉ [sit to read The ánh năng Fall of Paris in the afternoon, while sunlight shines through the dracontomelon tree straight into the window frame)] (Lê 2014: 14).4 Privileged citizens who live in street-side houses not only include high-­ ranking officials but also those who view themselves as more educated and noble than provincial residents by virtue of their places of birth. Thái Hằng’s family, which has its roots in Hanoi and identifies as Hà Nội gôć (originating from Hanoi), belongs to this group. These Hanoi-an, metaphorized by Lê Minh Hà with images of “cành to rê ̃ dài nhiêù dờ̵ i” [great branches [and] long roots over generations], are assumed to symbolize the cultural values and identities of the capital. Domestic migrants working in Hanoi, likewise, tend to remain in the city in the hope of acquiring permanent residency and sharing the hidden pride of being “công dân thu ̉ ̵ [citizens of the capital]. dô” Thái Hằng’s four-generation family lives in a beautiful house with two floors spanning two blocks in the Old Town. The front of the first floor is shared by Thái Hằng’s grandmother and her son (Thái Hằng’s uncle), while Thái Hằng’s unmarried aunt lives in the back. The second floor is occupied by Thái Hằng’s and another uncle’s families. Again, a private kitchen and toilet are featured as indisputable privileges: ̵ Dù gì thì cả dạ̵ i gia dình còn có một cái sân sau, một gian bếp mấy nhà họ ̵ a ngay cả khi nấu ăn hàng ruột thịt tha hồ quay mông vào nhau mà múa dũ ́ và một nhà vệ sinh sạch sẽ không cần phải ý tứ ve cùng một lúc, một nhà tăm vẩy mấy mẩu báo loanh quanh gần cửa chờ tớ i lư ợt mình như ơ ̉ bất kì số nhà nào trên phố cổ hay khu tập thê ̉ dờ̵ i dâ̵ ̀u nào ơ ̉ Hà Nội. [After all, the whole family has a backyard, a kitchen for all the relatives to gather together while cooking at the same time, a bathroom, and a clean toilet. They do not have to wave the newspaper around the door and wait for their turn like in all the other Old Quarter houses or in the old collective dormitories of the early generations in Hanoi.] (Lê 2014: 70)

The houses owned by the narrator’s friends, “the Other” minority, contrast with the collective dormitory houses where the narrator and the “Us” majority live. Ngân lives in a three-block dormitory where her entire 4  The Fall of Paris (1942) by the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg describes the decay and collapse of French society between 1935 and 1940.

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family is assigned to a studio that measures 14 square meters, exactly the same as Béo’s bathroom. While Ngân buys only fifty grams of peanuts for her lunch, Béo’s family stores entire sacks of peanuts. Pepper, which is only distributed to Ngân’s family on holidays, is scattered in Béo’s family’s wardrobes to prevent cockroaches. Similarly, an affluent lifestyle dominates in Thái Hằng’s house. Supported by their Việt kiêù relatives, Thái Hằng’s family does not buy groceries at the merchant’s shop but purchases food on the black market, which is more expensive and refined: ́ dậ̵ u mỏng thơ m lừ ng chứ không chua chua như cửa “dậ̵ u phụ là miêng ́ là rau mầm chứ không phải rau xơ ” [Tofu is a hàng mậu di ̣ch, rau muông thin and aromatic piece, not as sour as those sold at trade shops, water spinach has baby leaves and is not raw] (Lê 2014: 166). The narrator perceives wealth through a distinctive odor in Béo’s house, an airy scent ́ dây ra chạn bát, hơ i quần áo giặt mãi “không ám hơ i dầu, hơ i nư ớ c măm không khô hay hơ i ngư ờ i” [without smells of oil and fish-sauce interweaving in dishes, the smell of wet laundry and people] (Lê 2014: 188). Even more significantly, her friends’ prosperity and sophistication embody the beauty of Hanoi-an, “bao ngư ờ i Việt Nam di̵ xa vê ̀ gần dê̵ ù phải một lần ̵ thất vọng sâu xa vê ̀ ngư ờ i dang ̵ ́ ở Hà Nội tìm tớ i dê̵ ̉ rôì vì thê ́ mà dâm sông bây giờ ” [which attracts people living far away to come back and to be deeply distressed about the current Hanoi-ans] (Lê 2014: 166).

3  Class Identity and Conflict in Lê’s Urban Space Distinctive domestic spaces serve as perfect backgrounds for my examination of contrasting identities, with which they are closely associated for individuals and groups in Lê’s novel. At first sight, the identities of the inhabitants seem to portray simplified and homogeneous identities linked to particular spaces. But the similarities and differences between places as well as the characteristics of a particular place and the identity that a person or group has in that place are worth examining more closely (Relph 2008: 45). My analysis, therefore, focuses both on likely and unlikely identities of the domestic spaces illustrated through their inhabitants. The quarrels among neighbors for ownership of specific homes, in particular, illustrate personality traits of the dwellers that might be “mismatched” with their dwellings. The toilet, an indicator of the inhabitant’s affluence, functions as a place to highlight patterns of human behavior. While Béo’s private restroom appears like an ideal reading room in spite of its broken toilet seat,

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what happens in shared latrines explains why a private restroom is imagined as a symbol of the socialist paradise. In brief, the tenants in Ngân’s dorm do not take care to clean up after themselves after using the latrine, leaving the task to a cleaner instead. So, when flushing water is unavailable, the latrine is flooded with Nhân Dân, Thanh Niên, Tiêǹ Phong or Thiêú Niên newspapers. The shared corridors between apartments are another place that shows tenants’ poor sense of hygiene: they sweep dust out of their apartment and “rấp lại bên cánh cửa chờ nó lang thang trong hành lang và hy vọng bụi nhà mình dạt dư̵ ợc vào cửa nhà khác” [sneakily put it by their doors and wait for it to drift into the hallway and hope the dust of their apartments can be washed into other apartments] (Lê 2014: 123). Residents quarreling with each other about domestic spaces provide another example of how inhabitants’ behaviors correspond to the places they inhabit. A lack of emotional connection characterizes the street-side houses, which reveals itself in residents’ sarcastic quarrels, conducted as if they were total strangers to each other. By contrast, the tenants in the collective dormitory still share their daily lives with the neighbors even when entire families attacked each other just a few days earlier. These contrasting portrayals rely on common prejudices about different social groups: the villa residents behave reservedly and modestly, whereas the dorm-dwellers act aggressively and informally. But the behavior of some characters associated with villas and dormitories runs counter to such clichés and offers examples of more complex and flexible identities interactively formed between individuals and their cultural environment. The wife of the (anonymous) department chief, a high-ranking official, officially occupies much of the second floor in Béo’s villa but is not satisfied with her privilege. She surreptitiously seeks to appropriate shared spaces: for example, she turns a corner of the villa’s yard, which used to be bicycle parking, into her outdoor kitchen. Even more egregious, she converts a shared hallway between the two families’ spaces into her private closet, where she places a dresser and then stores trifles on top of it, and “trư ớ c cánh cửa tu ̉ bà còn chất thêm ghê ́ gãy và du̵ ̉ trăm thứ bà giằn” [in front of the cabinet, she puts broken seats and a hundred other things] (Lê 2014: 59]. Those who live downstairs at the French villa also confront fierce com̀ Như , petition. On the first floor lives the extended family of Mrs. Thiêu consisting of her daughter’s spouses and her second husband’s family, who share the same household. The conflict between them culminates on the

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̀ Anh, Mrs. Thiêu ̀ Như ’s daughter, and her ex-husband build a day Thiêu ̀ Như ’s second husband’s, wall to separate Uncle Khánh’s, Mrs. Thiêu abode from the rest of the villa. The wall, which shapes “bứ c tư ờ ng xây ̵ ngay chân cầu thang nga ̆n dôi ̵ cái hành lang vừ a cao vừ a vòng cung dón rộng” [the arc at the foot of the staircase to separate a tall and wide corridor] (Lê 2014: 109), is identical to a brick wall in the countryside. It ̀ Anh’s and her stepfather’s implies a declaration of war between Thiêu families because the stepfather does not contribute to living expenses. Although the visible wall is finally taken down, another invisible wall, ̵ derived from jealousy and greed, rises up instead: “Bây giờ , giu a ̛̃ gia dình ̵ ̵ ̀ dó là một bứ c tư ờ ng có thật và một bâu không khí sục sôi dứ ng ngoài cũng thấy nhột nhạt” [Now, in that family, a wall is real and a heated atmosphere is also real that even outsiders are afraid of] (Lê 2014: 114). The fight over living spaces derives not only from a scarcity of housing but also sheds light on the inhabitants’ identities. Without blood relations, familial cohesion might be challenged due to the shortage of material benefits and emotional bonds, regardless of how long members live together under the same roof. The mismatches between dwelling places and inhabitants’ expected identities manifest themselves not only in the people living in villas but also those living in the dorm, who, surprisingly, observe their neighbors’ prosperous lives freely in the hope of experiencing them. The narrator, a Hanoi-an living in the dorm, the “Other” in either this or that space, uses the public latrine but dreams about Béo’s private restroom. She reads literary books and listens to foreign music to “làm thứ c dậy nhu n ̛̃ g khát khao” [wake up her desire] (Lê 2014: 143) while her neighbors entertain themselves by merely chatting with each other. She totally refuses the mediocre life that the place where she lives seems to predestinate her for: “Tôi không muôń yêu như bạn bè, không muôń có một chàng trai nào thấy ̀ tôi mặt mũi dỏ̵ tư ng bừ ng lệch ngư ờ i nách mấy cái chậu nhôm móp chông ̀ lên nhau cùng nhữ ng áo quân vừ a giặt rau vừ a rửa gạo vừ a vo, tay kia cô ́ xách theo xô nư ớ c lên gác” [I do not want to love like my friends do, do not want to have a guy who sees me having a red nose and face, trying to carry several aluminum pots piled up together and washing clothes and washing rice with one hand while the other hand tries to carry the bucket of water upstairs] (Lê 2014: 140). Her desire is not so much living in a more luxurious place as being recognized as an authentic Hanoi-an, with the socio-­ cultural values that accompany this identity.

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In short, the portrayal of living spaces in Lê’s novel does not establish any simple correspondence between places and inhabitants’ identities. Lê’s descriptions illustrate both clichéd patterns of socially expected behavior and divergences from them to reflect individual characters’ complex experiences of place. This complexity is complemented by the emergence of an urban mass identity in Hanoi through its rapid expansion of living spaces. This representation of the city not only reflects residents’ assertion of themselves towards their neighbors but also the assertion of urban dominance over the natural surroundings.

4   Privatization and the Creation of Meaning Relph’s concept of place identity includes three fundamental components: physical setting, activities, and meanings (Relph 2008: 47). All three components are prominent in the second part of Lê Minh Hà’s novel. The meanings of places, rooted in human intentions and experiences, not only provide a particular place with a distinctive character (Relph 2008: 45), but also shape the observer. These components are interwoven in Lê’s portrayal of Hanoi’s urban character, which stands out by its rapid transformation. This urban identity arises not just from “selective abstractions of an objective reality” but from intentional interpretations of “what is or what is believed to be” (Relph 2008: 56). In this sense, Hanoi emerges in Lê’s novel as a huge public construction project in which the narrator detects urban decay in almost every corner of the city. The narrator’s gloomy view of Hanoi combines an insider with an outsider perspective. This division between inside and outside essentially differentiates between the immersion or the distance that a person experiences with a place, whether “you look upon a place as a traveler might look upon a town from a distance” as an outsider or “you experience a place, are surrounded by it and part of it” as an insider (Relph 2008: 49). Ngân is neither insider nor outsider, or she might be both. As a Hanoi-an, although she lives in a dormitory, she experiences the spirit of Hanoi through French mansions with their soft lights, sweet music, and a quiet aloofness that makes the city alluring. As a citizen returned from diaspora, she experiences the city as an audio and visual cacophony with its harsh sounds, ugly buildings, and undetermined smells. The image of a beautiful Hanoi, however authentic it is to the narrator, lies in the city’s past, illusions, and memories. Its urban ugliness, however much it frustrates and disappoints Ngân, is as genuine as its more attractive aspects. The closer she is to her

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memories of the city in the past, the more she has to confront its realities in the present. In this sense, she is both an insider and an outsider at the same time. Hanoi’s architectural transformation is illustrated through several encroachments that have taken place both in the collective dormitory and the villas with street views. Urban sprawl, mostly caused by the occupants’ desire for increased living spaces, manifests itself in the non-standardized design of buildings, faded communal relationships, and threatened ecosystems, and even more significantly in the human degradation and the fading spirit of places that were bartered away for this expansion. With these transformations, Hanoi has lost its former meanings and turned into a city characterized less by place than placelessness. Urban expansion starts in the dormitories, where the occupants’ demand for private space is more urgent than for those who live in spacious mansions. The embankment fenced by green bamboo stems and the children’s former playground are now used as lodgings for some households. Patchwork house blocks are erected, clamping the old dike tightly, permeating the whole area with smells of freshly painted fences instead of scents of grasses. Not only spaces on the ground but also those higher up are taken over by residents. An old woman selling cakes in the dormitory is one of the pioneers: although her retirement causes her financial problems, it provides her with an abundance of time and money-making ideas. She converts the ample mezzanine at the top of the stairs, which used to be a public place, into a place to sell sticky rice by stacking up cardboard boxes. With scant rays of sunlight piercing the cardboard, this appropriation turns a previously spacious and airy hallway into a stifled and cramped space. This woman’s strategy for private place-making soon becomes a model for those who are eager to create more living space. Some families quickly move to occupy a terrace space that belongs to no one in particular by creating lofts and mezzanines. New rooms emerge for a newly married son and his wife or a daughter’s late marriage: ̵ ợc phân thêm kèm phần không dư ̵ ợc chia Nhà dư ớ i kiên cố hoá phần bếp dư như ng do nhanh nhẹn mà có, nhà trên kết hợp, phá cái ban công tự khoan tự lăṕ xây tiếp thành hai tầng, nhà trên nữa tận dụng cái mái mua cọc săt́ dựng khung quây thành bốn bứ c tư ờ ng, lợp giấy dầu lên, thế là cũng thêm chỗ chui ra chui vào, khi cần biến ngay thành phòng tân hôn cho thằng con trai cư ớ i vợ.

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[The family on the first floor strengthens the kitchen occupied not by distribution but agility; the family on the second floor also made renovations, breaking the self-assembled balcony and expanding it into two more floors; those living on the third floor make use of the roof, buying iron piles to frame a wall, roofing over this place with kraft paper, then having, at least, an abode for living, which could be turned into a room for the newly married son if needed.] (Lê 2014: 92)

Such unplanned and unauthorized restructuring of buildings, despite its efficiency for the occupants, alters building design, destroys the original architecture, and turns them from modern apartment buildings into degraded vertical shantytowns over the years. Many informal reconstruction projects described in Lê’s novel, starting with the dormitories, give rise to a different Hanoi with disorganized streets, grotesque buildings, and stifling heat. The old Hanoi was envisioned in the narrator’s imagination with brightly colored foliage and the intense aroma of blackboard tree flowers signaling the beginning of fall. But these romantic images are mere memories in the new Hanoi that surrounds Ngân, with water overflowing onto the streets and the unbearable smell of rubbish. The strong link between scents and memories causes her to feel regret and nostalgia for the good old days: “Từ ng ngày, tôi nhìn ́ thấy sự dô̵ ỉ thay cuả Hà Nội trong sự dô̵ ỉ thay cuả khu tập thê ̉ nơ i mình sông, ̉ chôm ̉ mọc lên tội nghiệp y như nhữ ng cánh dô̵ ng ̀ qua nhữ ng mái nhà lôm ̵ khi nhìn từ cửa sô ̉ máy bay và qua cái công ́ sau quê bị căt́ xẻ tơ i tả chı ̉ dẹp nhữ ng cơ n mư a” [Every day, I see the change of Hanoi through the alterations that have occurred in the dorm where I live, through the rickety roofs that sprout like paddies in the countryside which were severely cut down and only look nice if seen from an airplane window; and through sewage drains after the rain] (Lê 2014: 193). While desperately capturing the “hơ i thở tàn” [withered breath] of the old Hanoi hidden behind the blazing looks of the new Hanoi (Lê 2014: 241), the narrator finds herself ́ dâ̵ ̀u mùa drifting between the old city with its “mái ngói thâm nâu, “côm vı ̉a hè,” and “hoa sữ a” [deep brown roof tiles, early season young green rice on the sidewalk, and the blooming flowers of milkwood trees], and the new one characterized by “nhữ ng xe rau xe bánh mì mậu dịch vẻ hợm hı ̃nh cuả các cô bán gạo ở cửa hàng lư ơ ng thực” [carts selling vegetables and bread, the superciliousness of the women selling rice at the food store] (Lê 2014: 227).

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The new face of Hanoi emerges not only from restructured dormitory buildings but also from the reshaping of French-style villas. Joining the ́ (Mrs. “interest groups” of those competing for living spaces is Mrs. Năng ̀ Sunshine), Mrs. Thiêu Như ’s private attendant. Her first move in the villa is basically the same as those who expand their land properties in partial secrecy, that is, transforming public into private places. In her case, the place is a common yard that soon becomes her small but private room ̀ Như for permission to build a within the villa. Then she asks Mrs. Thiêu four-level house near the entrance of the villa for her own use.5 Not only the vacant spaces inside but also outside of Béo’s villa are gradually diminished. Béo’s wealthy neighbors, who already have spatial privileges but want more, apply to acquire the vacant piece of land next to the villa. From the moment they finalize their construction, the ecological surroundings change. The urban space affirms its prevalence over the enví ronmental spaces through Mrs. Năng’s wider and wider vegetable garden, which does not show her closeness or proximity to nature at all. Instead, she gradually plants from inside to outside of her space in the hope of gaining more farming (or living) places. Natural surroundings become narrower and narrower due to the sudden appearance of the four-level ́ house and the chief official’s property, located between Ms. Năng’s house and the dracontomelon tree in the yard. The old tree gets stuck between ́ the wrought iron doors surrounding the newly built houses. Ms. Năng’s vegetable garden is finally razed and replaced by her new house to confirm her land ownership. The expansion of living spaces, again, affects the old villa. The airy and windy courtyard with its imposing dracontomelon tree, which used to be Ngân’s favorite spot to listen to Tri ̣nh Công Sơ n’s music, has become a mere memory. The courtyard is now an outdoor kitchen, with water ́ xoong chậu va nhau” splashing everywhere, clanking “loảng xoảng tiêng ́ [sounds of cookware crashing into each other], and Mrs. Năng’s rude ́ laughing and chatting (Lê 2014: 116). Mrs. Năng, who is characterized as casual, aggressive, and pragmatic, stands out in this setting of a French-­ style mansion now used for collective-dorm living. She is not only a typical example of a socialist Hanoian but also a socialist agent who seeks to 5  In Vietnam, a four-level house is a construction with a roof and walls for living, with a floor area of less than 1000 square meters and only one level. It is considered the lowest of six levels by the Vietnamese and is customarily thought of as temporary, dilapidated, and shabby.

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́ spread the collective way of life. Mrs. Năng, along with the chief officials, is characterized by rudeness and greed and affirms their “victory” over their noble competitors. In this unequal battle, Béo’s family is squeezed into a corner of the yard, living quietly and poorly under the shadow of the old tree. Because of these changes in urban texture, Ngân finds herself ̵ quy cu ̉ và sang cả còn alienated from her beloved city in the end: “Vẻ dẹp ̵ sót lại ở Hà Nội quanh nhữ ng ngôi nhà này dã sứ t mẻ mất rôi.̀ Khi ấy tôi ̵ biêt́ rôì cái sự cơ i nớ i kỳ quái này còn tiêṕ diêñ ở một chiêù kích khác và dâu dê̵ ń lúc dó̵ thì tôi dã̵ thành ngư ờ i lạ ở chính thành phô ́ cuả mình” [The formal and luxurious beauty which were left around these houses in Hanoi had already been chipped away. At that time I did not know this weird extension would continue in another dimension and by then I had become a stranger in my city] (Lê 2014: 116). Space has been appreciated by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan as the indisputable locale for true awareness of life’s values. Tuan particularly considers the home as the most intimate place, whose inhabitants tend to resent criticism of it, no matter how plain, ugly, or boring it might be. Affect rather than calculating intelligence creates the inhabitants’ connections with their home place and its scents, sounds, and settings (Tuan 1998: 145). Affect differentiates the insider from the outsider. But Hanoi, in the narrator’s view, is now full of paradoxes. At the moment she feels alienated from it, she turns herself from insider to outsider. Hanoi in its contemporary form is no longer her home, and she no longer identifies herself with it. But the narrator is not the only one who cannot find a home. The latter part of the novel engages with the “lost generation,” those who are nostalgic for the old Hanoi that is exposed to the rottenness and decadence of contemporary society and gives rise to failure and alienation. This does not mean that Lê finds nothing positive in contemporary life, but rather that she wants readers to focus on alienated and degraded characters. In the process, she foregrounds how the characters’ identities align with the changing structures of the buildings they inhabit. As French-style architecture is replaced by larger modern buildings, the owners of the elegant colonial villas are gradually replaced by people of more limited means. The narrative focus shifts from buildings to their inhabitants to elucidate both the place-based identities of the occupants and the city’s changing identity. In addition, several characters are portrayed in their struggles between appearance and being, maintaining their lives either hopelessly or

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miserably through dramatic changes over time. This sad picture of human fates also raises the question of how many “dark and muted colors” we really need in the past to draw the seemingly brighter comprehensive picture of urban transformation in the future. In Lê’s novel, the wealthy and educated people who consider themselves the “original” Hanoi-ans, give way to the Hanoi citizens who have migrated to the capital from other regions, which leads to a social reversal. Those who thought of themselves as the “real” owners of the city are pushed to the sidelines and turn into an “othered” group in the new ̃ an educated woman who speaks perfect Hanoi. An example is Ms. Liêu, French but has lunch with other workers in the canteen. Another example is Khôi, Thái Hằng’s talented uncle, whose life used to be associated with ̵ thánh thót ngân dài dêm, ̵ phô,́ văng, ́ dàn ́ Hanoi’s spirit as “tiêng … mùi sen ́ ̉ tàn hư ơ ng còn vư ơ ng trong miêng xôi buôi sáng, … mùi sư ơ ng quyện mùi ̵ lá dô̵ t́ chiêù dâ̵ ̀u thu thành phô ́ săṕ lên dèn” [the sacred sound of music in an empty city for a long night, the fragrant odor of the lotus left in the sticky rice in the morning, and the smell of fog mixed with the smell of burning leaves at the beginning of autumn when the city is about to light up] (Lê 2014: 232). He lives like a soulless human being. He migrated illegally from Iran, then moved to France and Canada. Several years of living overseas ended when he returned to Hanoi, married, and opened a small cafe for a living. Similarly, Thái Hằng’s grandmother, the most powerful woman in the family, no longer sits majestically in front of the house to watch the grandchildren going in and out, but now lives quietly like “một cái bóng già trong căn phòng cửa sô ̉ khoá kín chı ̉ có dộ̵ c cái cửa ra vào ngoảnh vê ̀ phía sân trong” [an old shadow in the locked window room, which only has one door facing the courtyard in the back] (Lê 2014: 224). The same happens with Bảo, Thái Hằng’s cousin. The young man, who was educated in a music conservatory, chooses to work overseas as his way out. However, his work abroad seems not to evoke any sense of pride in Ngân, but instead a feeling of grief about Vietnamese people who fundamentally change their lives only to find themselves struggling in exile: những ngư ờ i sinh ra dê̵ ̉ làm nghệ thuật mà lại chống số mệnh bằng một quyết ̵ ̵ dịnh tha hư ơ ng dê̵ ̉ dô̵ ̉i dờ̵ i, cho mình và cho cả gia dình và từ ng ngày lo toan ́ gói bánh cho cái cửa hàng nhỏ làm sinh kế vui buồn vớ i giá chai nư ớ c măm, ̵ u của dao gặp thớ t. phơ ̉ khô hay tiếng lóc cóc vô nhịp diệ [Those who were born to do art but decide to fight against their fates by living in exile in order to change their lives, for themselves and for their

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whole family, and then every day worrying about their small shop, feeling happy or sad or based on the price of a bottle of fish sauce, a pack of dry noodles, or the clatter of knives as they make contact with the chopping board]. (Lê 2014: 200)

All disorder and irregularities that occur in the city and to its citizens, instead of being seen as alterations that happen randomly, are associated with changes in social structure at a particular moment in Vietnamese history. In particular, the narrator interprets the fast-changing conditions in Hanoi as a consequence of the “dộ̵ ng cựa thuở dó,̵ thuở ngư ờ i Hà Nội ra ́ ngư ờ i di̵ và dư̵ ợc thay máu bằng một lớ p ngư ờ i khác, ngư ờ i kháng chiên, ́ ́ chiên thăng” [old motions, the time when Hanoians departed and were replaced by another class of people, the resistance, the winners] (Lê 2014: 87). Ngân identifies migrations from North to South Vietnam known as “takeover” (tiêṕ quản) and from South to North Vietnam commonly ́ as fundamental causes of the distincreferred to as “regrouping” (tập kêt) tions between old and new citizens in Hanoi. To me, calling them “distinctions” probably understates the cost of this social change. The informal expansion of living spaces, degraded natural environment, and deformed buildings are all surface effects pointing to a deeper urban crisis silently. On the surface, people’s financial difficulties illustrate suffering caused by the social transition from a subsidy economy to a socialist-oriented market economy. The turmoil that occurs in Thái Hằng’s house on the occasion of a change in national currency is one example: “Buôỉ tôi,́ tô ̉ công tác xộc vào nhà nó, xông thẳng lên tầng. Bôń bao tải tiêǹ toàn mệnh giá to dư̵ ợc khuân qua cửa nhà Thái Hằng ra phô,́ lên xe.” [In the evening, the work team rushed into [Thái Hằng’s] house and went straight upstairs. The four sacks of large denominations of money were carried through the door and put in the car] (Lê 2014: 212).6 Ngân’s own case serves as another example of how shame and humiliation are experienced by the poor: no matter whether she is a student or a government official, her monthly food rations do not change at all. Her starvation salary, which is just one of the innumerable consequences caused by the exhaustion of state-led development and the failure of the wage-price 6  Vietnam underwent three currency changes in 1975, 1978, and 1985. In 1975, all currency of the Republic of Vietnam valued at over VND50 was replaced. A second currency change in 1978 was seen as one of the ways to eradicate the capitalist economy of South Vietnam and to reduce the black-market economy. The last currency change in 1985 was part of the government’s wage-salary reform program (for more detail, see Letwin 2014).

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reform program, causes her to live a precarious life in the present and drowns her in profound disappointment.7 Urban crisis does not manifest its impacts only economically. The trajectories of several characters illustrate the negative effects of urbanization on human identities. The turmoil that occurs in Thái Hằng’s family is an example. Bảo, Thái Hằng’s cousin, dies suddenly. His father has an extramarital affair with another woman. The husband of Phư ơ ng, Thái Hằng’s aunt, also has a girlfriend and files for divorce. Thái Hằng herself divorces her husband and seeks a chance to work abroad. Ngân’s friend Béo’s family is no longer as prosperous as before. Marrying a man who lacks talent but is full of arrogance, Béo moves to live with him in what used to be a garage of her mansion, finding solace in studies of mystical science. In the dormitory, young people die either of drug addiction or HIV infections, which also highlights the difficult lives of the younger generation in this period of history. In summary, theories on place-identity offer us a way to see how place identities have been challenged through time. In Lê Minh Hà’s novel, the declining trajectories of Hanoi residents parallel frequently the degradation of the urban and natural environments, which showcases the connection of human experiences with their surroundings. This analysis of city, nature, and identity in the novel illustrates how marginalized others have been integrated into the mainstream due mostly to urban expansion. The informal expansion of living spaces in Vietnam has been shown as the response of the residents not only to their neighbors but also to the natural environment. And through these battles for spaces, the roughness and shabbiness of informally constructed buildings emerge as Hanoi’s new identity. The meanings of places in Lê Minh Hà’s narrative also show how human identities are shaped not only by where we live but also by how we live. Exploring the complex elasticity of identities associated with places, therefore, sheds light on studies of identities affected both by historical forces and human decisions.

7  Price-wage reform is the economic reform in Vietnam in 1985 that transformed the economy into a socialist-oriented market economy. This reform led to the subsequent economic crisis.

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References Ballegooijen, Jan van, and Roberto Rocco. 2013. “The Ideologies of Informality: Informal Urbanization in the Architectural and Planning Discourse.” Third World Quarterly 34.10: 1794–1810. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buell, Lawrence. 2010. “Nature and City: Antithesis or Symbiosis?” Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment. Ed. Stefan L. Brandt, Winfried Fluck, and Frank Mehring. Tübingen: Narr. 3–20. Buttimer, Anne. 2015 [1980]. “Home, Reach, and the Sense of Place.” The Human Experience of Space and Place. Ed. Anne Buttimer and David Seamon. Abingdon: Routledge. 166–87. Casey, Edward S. 2001. “Body, Self and Landscape: A Geophilosophical Inquiry into the Place-World.” Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. Ed. Paul. C.  Adams, Steven D.  Hoelscher, and Karen E.  Till. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 403–425. Cohen, Robin. 2018. “Four Phases of Diaspora Studies.” The Routledge Diaspora Studies Reader. Ed. Klaus Stierstorfer and Janet Wilson. Abingdon: Routledge. 17–21. Cooper, Clare C. 1974. “The House as Symbol of the Self.” Designing for Human Behavior: Architecture and the Behavioral Sciences. Ed. John Lang, Charles Burnette, Walter Moleski, and David Vachon. Stroudsburg: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross. 130–46. Duncan, James S. and Nancy G. Duncan. 2001. “Sense of Place as a Positional Good: Locating Bedford in Place and Time.” Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies. Ed. Paul. C. Adams, Steven D. Hoelscher, and Karen E. Till. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 41–54. Easthope, Hazel. 2004. “A Place Called Home.” Housing, Theory and Society 21.3: 128-138. https://doi.org/10.1080/14036090410021360. Accessed 16 March 2021. Gersdorf, Catrin. 2016. “Urban Ecologies: An Introduction.” Ecozon@ 7.2: 1–9. https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2016.7.2.1151. Accessed 16 March 2021. Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, ed. 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Holston, James. 2008. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lê Minh Hà. 2014. Phô ́ vẫn gió. Hà Nội: NXB Lao Động.

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Letwin, Brian. 2014. “A Look at Vietnamese Currency through History.” https:// saigoneer.com/old-­saigon/old-­saigon-­categories/2931-­a-­look-­at-­vietnamese-­ currency-­through-­history. Accessed 26 March 2021. McDowell, Linda. 1999. “Home, Place and Identity.” Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Ed. Linda McDowell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 71–95. Mumford, Lewis. 1938. The Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace. Neuwirth, Robert. 2006. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. New York: Routledge. ̵ n 1986–2014 từ góc Nguyêñ Thuỳ Trang. 2018. Tiêủ thuyêt́ Việt Nam giai doạ nhìn phê bình sinh thái. Huế : Đại học Huế. Proshansky, Harold M., Abbe K.  Fabian, and Robert Kaminoff. 1983. “Place-­ identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 3: 57–83. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0272-­4944(83)80021-­8. Accessed 16 March 2021. Relph, Edward. 2008 [1976]. Place and Placelessness. Los Angeles: Sage. Rocco, Roberto, and Jan van Ballegooijen. 2019. “The Political Meaning of Informal Urbanization.” The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanization. Ed. Roberto Rocco and Jan van Ballegooijen. New York: Routledge. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1980. “Rootedness versus Sense of Place.” Landscape 24.1: 3–8. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Escapism. 1998. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Political Dimensions in Vietnamese Ecofiction Chi P. Pham

This chapter contributes to the postcolonial orientation in ecocriticism by examining political allegories in three Vietnamese short stories—“Kiêń và ngư ờ i” [The Ants and the Man, 1990], “Môí và ngư ờ i” [The Termite and the Man, 1992], and “Nhện và ngư ờ i” [The Spider and the Man, 2012] by Trần Duy Phiên (born 1942). This chapter reads these stories as literary embodiments of the historical and theoretical need for the postcolonial perspective in ecocriticism. It analyzes the complex relations of humans and nature in the context of national modernization so as to show that postcolonial ecocriticism provides a necessary framework for understanding environmental narratives from Vietnam. The dynamic between global and local environmental, economic, cultural, and social forces in writings from postcolonial India, Australia, and South America has suggested the mutual dependence of the two literary approaches,

C. P. Pham (*) Institute of Literature, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi, Vietnam e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7_14

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postcolonialism and ecocriticism.1 But, as Ursula K. Heise has observed, while “shared risk” across the world makes necessary the building of theoretical bridges between different strands of literary study, different cultural frameworks of understanding still remain a “shaping influence” in the engagement with ecological crisis (2008: 158). Engaging with this idea, this chapter will argue that Vietnamese environmental stories specifically reflect and inflect the political and economic conditions of present-day Vietnam: they consider how modernization and nation-building result in the collapse of nature, the human body, and political ideology. In other words, environmental narratives from Vietnam articulate national allegories, whose analysis calls for a postcolonial approach.

1   Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Vietnamese Environmental Literature Since the late 1990s, theories and practices of ecocriticism have tended to be more politically engaged than in its earliest phase. Many environmental historians and ecocritics have argued against ecocentric positions and called for more engagement with issues of race, class, gender, and national identity in their fields. That is, environmental literary approaches must engage with serious and urgent questions of social and environmental justice; they must address institutional, economic, cultural, and political factors that involve social, cultural, and physical disasters in “unjustifiably dominated groups” including women, people of color, children, and the poor. Michael Cohen has asserted that ecological literary criticism must be politically engaged, that is, it must inform actions dealing with rising environmental crises (Cohen 2004: 24–27). Similarly, Dana Phillips has stated that traditional ecocriticism was lingering in “the wilderness of signs”; he has urged ecocritics to address present-day “complexities of acid rain, global warming, and a host of other environmental ills” (Phillips 1999: 599). Likewise, Lawrence Buell has pointed out that ecological literary criticism should focus more on the impoverished and socially marginalized and the voices of victims of environmental injustice (Buell 2009: 112). Or, as Terry Gifford has summarized it, ecocritics have moved into new 1  Maxwell has foregrounded the need for postcolonial criticism to engage with the realities of growing greenhouse gases and the highly aggressive phase of global capitalism (2009: 14). This dynamic condition relates to what Heise describes as an “eco-cosmopolitan awareness” (2008: 90) and Buell calls “ecoglobalist affects” (2007: 227).

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directions for ecocriticism including ecofeminism, toxic industries, urbanization, globalization, ethnic and national identities, and environmental justice (Gifford 2008: 15). Emphasizing political aspects of ecological and environmental narratives, ecocritics have considered that “environmental problems cannot be solved without addressing issues of wealth and poverty, overconsumption, underdevelopment, and the notion of resource scarcity” (Heise 2010: 251–2). In other words, they have moved toward the merging of postcolonial criticism with ecocriticism. Moreover, since the turn of the millennium, postcolonial scholars have attempted to bridge the gaps between ecocriticism and postcolonialism, “two of the most dynamic areas in literary studies” (Nixon 2005: 233). Rob Nixon, Graham Huggan, Helen Tiffin, and Anne Maxwell, the pioneers of “green” postcolonial studies, stress that these two literary schools of thought share the common task of addressing environmental crises and the marginalization of dominated groups as a result of lingering colonial legacies in postcolonial states (see Estok 2014; Huggan 2004; Nixon 2005; Huggan and Tiffin 2007; Maxwell 2009; Tiffin and Huggan 2010). Notably, these ecocritics emphasize the growing globalization and its resulting environmental, social, and cultural effects in postcolonial countries as the historical context that requires green postcolonial criticism.2 Historically complex contexts associated with the formation of Vietnamese environmental literature potentially suggest a rather different approach to postcolonial criticism. It is not possible to see in the history of Vietnamese literature a tradition of ecological literary work in general and ecofiction in particular. There has been a huge body of Vietnamese literature about the nonhuman world since medieval times, but it does not exist as a literary movement, group, or genre with a clear nature- or environment-­oriented philosophy or statement. It is not until the 2010s, when ecocriticism, a Western literary theory, was introduced to Vietnam, that concepts of “văn học sinh thái” (ecoliterature) and “văn học môi trư ờ ng” (environmental literature) began to make their impact on literary life in Vietnam. In other words, ecocriticism, initiated in Western scholarship, urges Vietnamese scholars to strive to formulate a definition of Vietnamese environmental literature. In 2017, the American Embassy in Hanoi and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences co-organized the first 2  As Huggan and Tiffin suggested at the time, the terms “postcolonial ecocriticism” and ““green postcolonialism”“ were used interchangeably (2010: 23).

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conference on literature and environment in Vietnam, entitled Ecocriticism: Global and Local Voices. The conference attracted 102 presentations discussing possibilities of implementing ecocriticism in reading Vietnamese narratives of different genres to awaken ecological awareness in the Vietnamese public (Viện Văn học 2017). In January 2018, the ASEAN Association of Literature and Environment held its second workshop, entitled Ecologies in Southeast Asian Literatures: Histories, Myths and Societies, in Hanoi. Major contributors to this conference are Vietnamese scholars who examine ecological and environmental orientations in Vietnamese literature (Pham et  al. 2019). Besides the two international conferences on ecocriticism, a number of workshops and local conferences about ecocriticism and Vietnamese literature have been organized in Vietnam. Through these academic events and associated publications, Vietnamese scholars, largely those in the field of literary studies, have attempted to seek out environmental literary works in Vietnam and characterize them in order to construct identities of Vietnamese environmental literature (Hồ Sơ n 2020). Specifically, Vietnamese scholars examine the ways pre-modern human beings interacted with and thought about the environment in pre-modern literary, philosophical, and historical texts and ask if pre-modern ecological thought is relevant to present-day ecological and environmental concerns (Trần Thị Thanh Nhị 2018: 394–402; Đặng Thị Thái Hà 2018: 731–732). For modern and contemporary literary works, Vietnamese literary scholars largely ask how they present and react to environmental pollution and ecological destruction caused by modernization and indus̀ 2018; Nguyêñ Thi ̣ Ti ̣nh Thy trialization in Vietnam (Bùi Thanh Truyên 2017). Connecting presentations of nonhuman worlds in modern Vietnamese literature with modern nation-building, Vietnamese scholars have apparently approached ecocriticism as an addition to the mainstream Vietnamese ideology about literature. According to this ideology, literature must be a material force that reflects and shapes realities, specifically engineering the souls and minds of Vietnamese citizens who realize the modernization and industrialization of the country for the goal of socialism. As such, environmental literature, by the Vietnamese definition, is oriented towards criticisms against modernizing processes of Vietnamese nation-building. The continuing modernization associated with Vietnamese nation-­ building suggests “a specific flavor” of postcolonial ecocriticism when being implemented in approaching Vietnamese environmental literature.

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Modernizing processes in Vietnam are derived from its hybrid postcolonial condition. “The history of French colonialism and communist dependence resulted in the confluence of two idealized modernities”—colonial and socialist—in postcolonial Vietnam (Raffin 2008: 339). This hybrid modernity has left its legacy of progress in postcolonial Vietnamese nation-­ building. It relies on the colonial production of scientific and ethnic knowledge for social engineering while it officially adopts the Marxist-­ Leninist ideology of modernization and industrialization as the essential step for the nation to move from “feudalism through capitalism to communism” (Schlesinger 1966: 11; Raffin 2008: 330; Pelley 2002: 5). Although some political reforms have occurred since 1986, modernization and industrialization still form the principal policy in postcolonial Vietnamese nation-building. In Anne Raffin’s words, in spite of the openness to the capitalist economy since the late 1980s, the Vietnamese government continues to take Marxist-Leninism seriously, resulting in the fact that “communist modernity is one element of Vietnamese postcolonialism” (Raffin 2008: 342). The continuing ideal of a communist modernity in postcolonial Vietnam shapes the quest for the control of nature and society through science and technology. Specifically, on the basis of this Marxist-Leninist ideology, Vietnamese nation-makers have encouraged Vietnamese citizens to exploit natural resources without limit as a way to reach socialism. Nature and nonhumans are considered not to have any rights, so they can be used to produce wealth and generate profits; economic development comes first, and the protection of the environment follows later (Culas 2019: 120). Management of environment and ecology in modern Vietnam has not been primarily concerned with the environment or ecology but with people and society: that is, states, organizations, or individuals use environmental or ecological reasons as justifications for social planning and political control (McElwee 2016: 1–15). Officially identified as an instrument in nation-building by the Vietnamese government, Vietnamese literature eulogizes acts that indicate the victory and the power of human ̵ n tử 2009). Generations beings over the natural world (Tạp chí cộng sản diệ of Vietnamese have been taught in school that Vietnam has “forests of gold” and “seas of silver” as well as fertile land (Vietnamese Courier 1984: 20). Anyone who attends the socialist schools in Vietnam would know by heart the rhyme “our hands can make up everything/ with human strength, soil and stones can transform into rice,” an excerpt from the famous poem “Song about Breaking Soil” (“Bài ca vỡ dâ̵ ́t”) by Hoàng

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Trung Thông (1925–1993), a well-known revolutionary writer. Vietnamese literary works, either about the nonhuman or the human world, reflect and attend to the political orientation of environmental policies that all serve the path to “progress,” “development,” and “modernity” of the country. The appearance of ecocriticism in Vietnam challenges the mainstream Marxist-Leninist ideology of ecology and environment and foregrounds counter-narratives of modernization and industrialization in Vietnamese environmental literature. Folktales and folk songs as well as medieval literature are considered by Vietnamese scholars to offer a model of analogy-­ based relations between human and nonhuman species. Some representatives of this model are the legend about the fetus of one hundred eggs, the worship of rice tree practice, epic scenes of ethnic minority people’s respect for plants, motifs of human–animal marriage in fairy tales, or the works full of catalogs of native plant species written by royal officials such as Trần Nhân Tông (1258–1308), Nguyêñ Trãi (1380–1442), Nguyêñ Du (1765–1820), and Nguyêñ Khuyến (1835–1909) (Nguyêñ Huy Bı ̉nh 2017: 256–270; Đoàn Thị Thu Vân 2017: 332–346). Such analytical categorization aims to challenge the official modern perception of nature as merely a resource for exploitation. Vietnamese ecological critics emphasize representations of rural lives in pastoral poems and prose from 1930 to 1945, highlighting idealized escapes from the environmental pollution and mental exhaustion of modern spaces (Trần Mạnh Tiến 2017: 437–449). According to Vietnamese scholars, environmental protest occurs more directly in post-1986 Vietnamese literature, such as criticisms of massive deforestation and large-scale agricultural and industrial pollution for economic and social development. Fictions by Nguyêñ Minh Châu invite audiences to respect the nonhuman world by presenting animals that are imbued with human emotions and are examined from human ethical and moral perspectives. Nguyêñ Ngọc Tư ’s works provoke concerns about rapid deforestation as a by-product of modernization and industrialization and its socially and morally associated problems (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 3). Đỗ Phấn describes Hanoi as full of people and cars, crowded and cramped: “Đứ ng gió. Không khí oi ả như bám chặt lấy cả một rừ ng ̵ ngư ờ i chậm rãi len nhau mà di.̵ Có cảm giác nhữ ng khoảng cách dã̵ dông ̵ dặc lại hòa vớ i ngư ờ i làm một. Nhúc nhích. Nhúc nhích” [Stand in the wind. The sweltering air seemed to cling to an entire forest of people slowly walking together. There is a feeling that the distances have frozen

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into one person. Move. Move] (Đỗ Phấn 2009: 170). These short sentences emphasize the loss of space and fresh air in the modern city.

2  Trần Duy Phiên and Vietnamese Ecofiction

In Vietnam, Trần Duy Phiên is widely appreciated as the most prolific writer of environmental literature. What makes Trần Duy Phiên, a Vietnamese author unknown to international critics, a writer of interest to ecocriticism is that this field of research has provided the theoretical ground on which he has been officially recognized as the first modern Vietnamese author who focuses on environmental themes in his literary works, and indeed as the founder of environmental literature in Vietnam. Without the integration of ecocriticism into Vietnamese literary studies since the early 2010s, concepts such as văn học sinh thái (ecoliterature), thơ sinh thái (ecopoetry), or truyện sinh thái (ecofiction) would not have influenced Vietnamese literary thought. In that case, Trần Duy Phiên would have been forever a marginalized author, an author from the Republic of Vietnam (1954–1975) whose writings would be officially banned by the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the political regime that took power in 1975. Under this government, even if an author of the former regime continued writing, his works were normally declined for publication. Evidently, as a South Vietnamese writer, Trần Duy Phiên experienced social exclusion in the early days of the Socialist Republic: from the latter half of the 1970s to the first half of the 1980s, he was forced to confine himself to his hometown in Kontum, a province located in the Central Highlands region of Vietnam. He had to withdraw from the writing and teaching that he had done under the former regime and take manual jobs of various types to earn a living. The author recalls his struggle for survival due to the socialist government’s intensive distrust of people from the former Republic of Vietnam, of people growing up in so-called governmentally uncontrolled remote mountain areas (Trần Hữ u Lộc 2018; Trần Duy Phiên 2013). Moreover, the dominance of propaganda in socialist art and literature that the Vietnamese government forced writers and educators to adhere to depleted his creative ability and passion. Trần Duy Phiên did not take up his pen again until the early period of Reform (1986–1991), when the government allowed freedom of creativity and critiques of Vietnamese society (Trần Duy Phiên 2013). Presenting negative aspects of and tragedy within the socialist society became typical

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of the new wave reportage in Vietnamese writing (see Nguyen Tuan Ngoc 2004). It is in this context that Trần Duy Phiên resumed writing. His trio of stories “Kiêń và ngư ờ i” [The Ants and the Man, 1990], “Môí và ngư ờ i” [The Termite and the Man, 1992], and “Nhện và ngư ờ i” [The Spider and the Man, 2012] were produced in this period and published in a marginal provincial newspaper in Central Vietnam. As noted in the re-typed manuscript provided by the author himself, “The Ants and the Man” was completed on February 23, 1989, and published in the newspaper Đất Quảng [Quang Land] in September-October 1990. “The Termite and the Man” was completed on March 3, 1989, and was published in the journal Cửa Việt [Viet Door] in May 1992 (Trần Duy Phiên 1992). And due to political criticism of the published stories in the series, the third story, “The Spider and the Man,” despite being written in 1989, was not published until October 2012 in the journal Sông Hư ơ ng [Huong River].3 The appreciation of Trần Duy Phiên as the author with the clearest environmental consciousness in modern Vietnamese literary history, and particularly of these three stories, did not start until an environmentally oriented approach to literary studies was adopted in Vietnam in the late 2010s. During two international conferences on ecocriticism in 2017 and 2018 as well as in numerous workshops and local conferences on this theme in recent years, Vietnamese scholars, mainly in the field of literary studies, have attempted to identify and trace literary works that may be said to be environmentally oriented. In this context, Trần Duy Phiên has risen in stature in modern Vietnamese literature: thanks to his works, scholars could propose strong arguments about environmental literature in Vietnam in the present and the past. Specifically, Trần Duy Phiên’s works have provided Vietnamese ecocritics with a case study to examine how much Vietnamese environmental literature fits the more general characteristics of Southeast Asian environmental literature that John Charles Ryan has characterized as an “upshot” of the cultural influences of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Indigenous beliefs in animism and the sacredness of nature (Ryan 2018: 9–12). Broadly speaking, Vietnamese ecocritics have interpreted Trần Duy Phiên’s three stories as relying on conventions of Asian nature writing along with minute details about the sensory experience of nature, deep understandings of natural 3  This retyped manuscript was shared with me by Dr. Nguyêñ Thị Tịnh Thy (Huế University) through an email exchange on 8 December 2016.

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rhythms, and particularly emphases on the unity of humans and nature (Nguyêñ Thi ̣ Ti ̣nh Thy 2015; Nguyêñ Thùy Trang 2016, 2017). In other words, the three stories convey traditional images of Asian ecological harmony: as Karen Thornber has pointed out, “Asian authors in general have long idealized humans’ interactions with their nonhuman surroundings” (Thornber 2012: 199–200). This chapter highlights the three stories’ classic ecofictional patterns, but focuses on the political orientations that intertwine with the environmental perspective, particularly conflicts around government policies that seek to integrate remote Highlands people and their land into the nation’s modernization. As such, the chapter argues for national allegories as an important characteristic of Vietnamese ecofiction, engaging with postcolonial ecocriticism. Specifically, Trần Duy Phiên’s three stories follow the format of typical eco-narratives. The characters are obsessed with the idea of leaving cities to be near nature, which Western ecocritics see as “a form of refuge from our right-angled, human-made environment” (Slovic 2009: 104). The setting of “The Termite and the Man” is entirely a place next to the forest, near the hills, and in the middle of a small valley’s mist where the leaves ring out in the morning sunlight; the northwest mountain tops are bright and clear; in the southeast valley, the fog descends as though clouds were falling onto blades of grass and onto the row of wet green orchids, cacti, and mums alongside the road. “The Ants and the Man” is set in a suburb next to a forest, a place where “mountains flood our eyes,” and houses are located on the slope of the mountain. The characters—students and modern professionals in engineering, accounting, and business—feel that nature quenches their thirst for peace of mind and satisfies their imagination and curiosity about the wildness and mysterious power of nature. Detailed descriptions of nature idealize and celebrate natural environments. Moreover, the three stories thematize through fictional narrative the movements that Scott Slovic focuses on in his book Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility. The main characters are urban men, either anxious or traumatized in life; they find solace and respect in nature; and significantly, they discover a broader framework of life in the system of ecology. Failing in business and in personal life, these men migrate to the forest and to mountainous suburban areas. There, as described in “The Termite and the Man,” they contemplate the entanglement of humans and nature: clothes not only protect human beings from the heat and the cold and make people look beautiful, but they also

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present humans’ effort “to stand out from Nature. But can people really separate themselves from Nature? Not really!” (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 24). They realize the human responsibility and the ethic of care towards the environment because “[a]ny unexpected change in the environment can impact the ecology as a whole” (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 26) or “Forests feed termites. Termites feed chickens. Chickens feed you [human]” (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 20). These observations correspond closely to central concepts in traditional ecology that were taken up by ecocriticism, including “ecosystem,” “webs,” “chains,” “pyramids,” and “niches,” which were used to emphasize assumptions of harmony, balance, and community between humans and nature (Gifford 2008: 17, Kerridge 2006: 535). In Trần Duy Phiên’s stories, nature appears to transform men of social failure into men of environmental philosophy and responsibility; as such, nature functions “not just as the stage upon which the human story is acted out, but as an actor in the drama [where it] occupies a dominating status in the plot of the story” (Glotfelty 1996: xxi). In this way, Trần Duy Phiên’s stories correspond to the criteria of a nature-­ oriented literary work that Buell defines in his book The Environmental Imagination (1996: 7–8). Interestingly, all three stories include a scene in which the characters strip off their clothes in nature to indicate their enlightenment about correct attitudes toward the environment. For example, in “The Ants and the Man,” human characters wake up in terror to discover that termites have destroyed all their clothes and anything that can be used to cover their bodies, such as blankets, towels, nets, and curtains. In their nudity, the characters recognize the termites’ rightness and humans’ wrongs: “forest land is the homeland of the termites,” and termites attack humans because farm construction “level[s] the ground, digging up and crushing mounds of termites’ nests, killing their ancestors” (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 32). Presenting the dangers of nature in the face of humans’ spatial invasion to emphasize the harmony of human and nature, the three stories embrace characters typical of classic environmental fiction that international ecocritics have characterized based on English writings (Gifford 2008: 17; Kerridge 2006: 535).

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3  The Politics of Vietnamese Ecofiction Nevertheless, Vietnamese environmental literature is never literature on the environment alone. It follows what Pamela D. McElwee addresses as “environmental rule” in her book Forests Are Gold: Trees, People, and Environmental Rule in Vietnam (2016), where she argues that labor force and development have shaped what Vietnamese policy-makers identify as environmental “problems,” how they define environmental “truth,” and how they conduct environmental programs. “Environmental rule” occurs when states, organizations, or individuals use environmental or ecological reasons to justify changes in social planning. McElwee points out that this way of generating “environmental rule” in Vietnam is particularly explicit in remote highland areas where the state has applied strategies of environmental and natural resource protection in order to reorganize land ownership and population settlement and to search for labor availability and markets (McElwee 2016: 10–61). Environmental narratives in Vietnam engage with these environmental policies. The three selected stories emerged out of the political and economic context of Vietnam between 1980 and the early 1990s, during which the Vietnamese government vigorously implemented policies that aimed to modernize the Central Highlands through a program of “clearing the wilderness” (khai hoang) and its derivative, entitled “building new economic zones” (Xây dựng các vùng kinh tê ́ mớ i). This program attempted to relocate lowland and city residents in general and farmers in particular to supposedly “empty” or “virgin” forest areas to clear lands and cultivate them for cooperatives and the agro-industrial complex (McElwee 2016: 76–7; Evans 1992: 280–82). The program ̵ phư ơ ng và các cơ sơ ̉ sản xuất còn dâ̵ ́t bỏ hoang, ́ khích mạnh mẽ các dịa khuyên bỏ hóa, nhận thêm lao dộ̵ ng và dân cư dê̵ ́n khai khẩn, dô̵ ̀ng thờ i khuyến khích mạnh mẽ các tổ chứ c tập thê ̉ hoặc cá nhân ngư ờ i lao dộ̵ ng ơ ̉ những nơ i thiếu dâ̵ ́t canh tác và số nhân khẩu phi nông nghiệp thiếu việc làm tự bỏ vốn dâ̵ ̀u tư ̵ và công sứ c cua dê̵ ́n các vùng có dâ̵ ́t hoang ̉ mình là chính dê̵ ̉ chuyên̉ gia dình hóa sinh cơ lập nghiệp. [strongly encourage[s] organizations, collective groups and agriculturalists in areas that lack cultivated land and unemployed non-agriculturalist householders to invest their own labor and capital to move to wild land areas for living and developing]. (translation mine)

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This strategy is stated in Decision 254-CP, entitled Khuyêń khích khai hoang phục hóa [Encouragement to Clear the Wilderness and to Recover Civilization] issued on June 16, 1981, by the Governmental Committee (Chính phủ 1981). Decision 254-CP, in fact, forms part of the nationally implemented governmental program initiated in the 1960s and further developed with Decision No. 95-CP on March 27, 1980, entitled Đẩy mạnh khai khẩn các vùng dâ̵ ́t hoang hoá lớ n dê̵ ̉ xây dựng các vùng kinh tê ́ [Strongly Developing the Cultivation of Large Unused Land Areas for New Economic Zones] (Chính phủ 1981). This politics of governmental intervention in less developed areas, particularly in the Central Highlands, provided the context in which Trần Duy Phiên wrote and published his three eco-narratives. Growing up in Kontum, a region of mountainous old-growth forests in central Vietnam and the place of settlement for many relocated people from the lowlands and “more developed” areas, he experienced the most radical and traumatic social, cultural, and natural transformations in his homeland that were triggered by governmental programs of “clearing the wilderness.” Trần Duy Phiên has a special attachment to forests in particular and to remote mountain areas in central Vietnam more broadly; his writings, including memoirs and novels, are frequently set in the forest highlands of central Vietnam, home to many ethnic groups as well as many animal and plant species. Therefore, he was able to hear, see, and feel directly the negative impacts of urban and lowland citizens’ migration to and interventions into forests in particular and so-called wild or empty areas in general (Trần Hữu Lục). In this context, Trần Duy Phiên’s portrayals of harmony between humans and nature suggest political dimensions. They embody the criticism of industrialization and modernity that not only environmental critics of English literature such as Gifford (2008, 2012) and Cohen (2004), but also environmental critics of Vietnamese literature and other Asian literature such as McElwee (2016), Grant Evans (1992), Thornber (2012, 2014), Simon Estok (2014), John Charles Ryan (2018), Tran Ngoc Hieu, and Ha Dang (2018) have asserted. All the stories by Trần Duy Phiên follow a similar environmental narrative: modern individuals attempt to intervene into wild ecosystems and nonhuman lives, modernize them, and exploit them for economic benefit; but in the end, nonhumans take revenge on humans and successfully force them out of their territory. The characters in Trần Duy Phiên’ stories stand in for the lowland and urban

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people who relocate to remote areas for purposes of modernization that end up exploiting and destroying resources and spaces, as McElwee and Evans have pointed out. Mr. Bảy in “The Termite and the Man,” for example, is an engineer equipped with cutting-edge knowledge about modern agriculture. He seeks to establish a chicken farm in a forest with the ambition of becoming a millionaire, introducing modern, industrial-­ style agriculture: the farm is secured with iron wall frames and security nets; it is organized in terms of labor division, egg production, hybrid chickens adapted to the weather and environment, and food processing; and it is maintained with pharmacy micronutrients and modern methods of hygiene and disease prevention. Trần Duy Phiên’s descriptions of chicken farming and egg production abound with references to mechanization, automation, and accumulation—terms that are typical of modern farming operations: hens look like “egg-producing machines” and “Grand Nu was like a machine” (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 18). This portrayal of Mr. Bảy’s agricultural venture echoes the governmental program for “Building New Economic Zones” in the 1980s and 1990s; this program, as mentioned earlier, encouraged lowland and urban citizens in general and farmers in particular to relocate to and develop forest areas. Mr. Bảy embodies the introduction of machines, science, and technology into remote forest areas, which reflects the governmental scheme that aims at a modern homogeneity of the nation. This forced modernization program undeniably indicates what Evans, an expert on ethnic politics in what was formerly Indochina, calls “internal colonialism” in postcolonial Vietnam (Evans 1992: 274). The program caused large-scale waves of lowland and city resident migration to the highlands in the 1980s (Evans 1992: 281), where they pursued livelihoods as farmers, traders, and laborers, while keeping in mind the official mission of civilizing and modernizing their local neighbors (Schoenberger and Turner 2008: 674). Negative impacts of this migration on nature, such as deforestation and biodiversity loss, led to the creation of many government-sponsored environmental programs (McElwee 2016: 100–102), but these environmental interventions were “never exclusively about ‘nature’ or ecology, but rather about people … about seeing and managing people” (McElwee 2016: 5). This means that ecological management in Vietnam “was intended to bring the remote highlands under greater state control through the influx of Kinh migrants [lowland people]” (Schoenberger and Turner 2008: 674). In other words, the environment or ecology functions only as a label through which the Vietnamese

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government justifies its control of all social groups. And it is undeniable that the aim of this control is to force all groups to participate in the state’s pursuit of modernization and industrialization; migrants from lowland cities relocate to remote areas not as protectors of nature but as settlers, land owners, and laborers, who are equipped with knowledge of modern economy and technology (McElwee 2016: 50–72; McElwee 2008: 182–213). As such, environmental management in Vietnam is associated with the government’s internal colonialist programs. But in Trần Duy Phiên’s stories, modern people fail in implementing their knowledge and technology to modernize and exploit the so-called uncultivated areas. This critique of modernity in defense of remote local worlds is dramatic in “The Ants and the Man,” which features fierce and exhausting struggles over land between ants and humans. The city people in the story decide to move to the forest near a farm for a living; the family moves in the dry season, building fences and planting crops. The cultivation of the new land is described with excitement and determination: “labourers toiling together, adults and children in a rush to complete our project.” They cut down the trees, turn the soil, and sow seeds, resulting in “lush green growth which cools our eyes” (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 38). The settlement in the remote area also provides the family with solace for distressed and repressed feelings as well as space for spiritual meditation, given that the family members want to escape from the deceitful lives of the city. However, the relocation is based on the twisted assumption that there is no ownership of land in the forest, and that ownership of land is only applicable to urban spaces. The mother in “Ants and the Man” is indeed aware of respecting nature; she says, “The forest belongs to them [the ants], not us” and that “our place is in the market, in the city … we have registered and paid tax for it” (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 44). However, humans break away from their respect for nature as they invade the ants’ territory in their ambition to make a profit and achieve spiritual satisfaction. The invasion is explicitly presented in the story as being supported by modern insect-killing chemicals. The father announces that modern humans must understand that “[t]he wilderness does not belong to anyone. Land here is free”; “[o]nly land in the city is owned”; and “[t]he city is created by humans and constructed in the wild” (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 44). Humans assert land ownership through “modern science and progressive technology,” as clearly stated by the husband character in the story (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 44), and those who do not

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believe in the dominance of humans over nature are seen as “even more backward than the feudalists” (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 44). In another example from the story “The Ants and the Man,” the ants identify human beings as their enemy and try to defeat them at any cost. Innumerable ants besiege the whole family of the farmer, who raises crops in the supposedly ownerless land. Garden, house, gate, and even the clothes of the farmers are filled with and destroyed by the ants. “Ants are thick as rice husk, spreading throughout like sand,” and “ants set up a commanding position, sticking all over” to entrap the whole family and drive them to hunger and despair. The family members cannot find a way to escape because “the ants were lying in ambush on all sides … [humans] could not estimate from which direction they would land their troops” (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 50). Even “experts and scientists” of the “Company of Animal and Plant Protection” cannot cross the ant-made barrier to save the captives. They realize that neither “the insect spray gun” nor “insecticide” can rescue the family. They even consider applying “modern tools” such as a “plane” or “a truck with electric appliances” to overcome the ants. In the end, human characters are forced to use fire, a solution that also destroys their entire property: “fire shooting up the rooftop of our house;” “right in the middle of the haystack, a column of smoke snaked up to the treetop;” and in the end, “the wind blew the fire all over the garden, spreading it over the cultivated land” (Pham and Sankaran 2021: 53). In the story “The Termite and the Man,” the narrator also emphasizes ways that characters implement scientific knowledge to exploit natural resources so as to reduce production costs and increase economic profits. Termites, native insects of the forest, are used as food for the chickens. Mr. Bảy and Grand Nu calculate that without the available natural resource of termites, they will not be able to establish a farm in the forest because termites compensate for the lack of the necessary labor force and the cost of materials. They set up a lighting system throughout the thousand-­ square-­meter farm to attract termites. At night, termites rush through the metal nets, falling down like “a wind cascading across a rice field,” while chickens continuously catch them. Some chickens jump up high to catch termites, opening their wings while falling on others’ heads; they even jump to catch termites stuck to other chickens’ heads and tails. “There is a saying that blindness is like chicken eyes, but here the chickens are not blind at all. Their eyes are as sharply bright as stars [while eating termites].” The result is that the farm space is filled with termite wings: “In

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the corners, termite wings pile up in a thick layer, some are mixed with husks, and some are entangled in walls and nets,” while the “egg production of hens increases up to one and a half times. The time for raising chickens for meat is also shorter.” In these stories, the main characters are prototypes of modern society; they confidently dominate nature with machines and chemical substances in an effort to generate more economic profits. However, in the end, nature attacks humans and successfully forces them out of its territory. In other words, these stories are about the defeat of modern citizens at war with nature. Respecting local creatures and realizing the failure of machines, science, and technology in conquering nature emerges as the main lesson of Trần Duy Phiên’s stories, which aim, like other environmental literature, at redirecting human minds to a realization of their humble position in nature and of the impossibility of complete human control of nature regardless of increasing mechanization (Cohen 2004: 11). More importantly, the stories join the long-standing tradition in Asian literature of presenting the “humanist intervention into ecodegradation” (Thornber 2012: 435) as well as the ecological challenges posed by postwar modernization. In other words, Trần Duy Phiên’s environmental narratives are potentially relevant to those East and Southeast Asian countries where rapid postwar industrialization has caused immediate social and environmental challenges (Estok 2016: 1–15; Ryan 2018: 13–15). But Trần Duy Phiên’s stories do not articulate their criticism of ecological degradation by way of focusing on endangered species and biodiversity loss, as many other Southeast Asian environmental narratives do (Ryan 2018: 1–9). Instead, they foreground the interactions of humans with common insects including termites, mosquitoes, and ants. One might also find in Trần Duy Phiên’s environmental narratives what Thornber calls “ecoambiguity” in her book about East Asian environmental literature (2012). The concept describes ambiguous ways in which human interactions with nonhuman beings are portrayed in creative works from China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. Trần Duy Phiên’s characters display conflicting attitudes and behaviors toward nonhuman beings and nature in general: they appreciate the wildness of nature and value their idealized harmony with it; at the same time, they consume nature and turn it into products for capital accumulation. Nevertheless, these stories tend to emphasize the violence and destruction in the way humans implement modern knowledge to exploit natural resources. The mass deaths of termites, ants, and mosquitoes in the stories are portrayed as a modern

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phenomenon, a consequence of the application of scientific and industrial methods to traditional agriculture. Contextualized in Vietnamese postwar modernization projects, including programs for wilderness clearing in remote areas in general and the Central Highlands in particular for cooperatives and agro-industrial complexes, the failures of Trần Duy Phiên’s characters with all their modern knowledge and equipment signal the failure of those programs: the lives of people in the new economic zones “have been hard,” and “the need for self-sufficiency in food … has resulted in the heavy destruction of forests” in these areas (Evans 1992: 282). The resistance of native insects in the stories suggests the social, cultural, and economic specificity of the so-called wild areas that the modernization projects aim at. Narratives about human failures in the face of local insects’ attacks are meant to instill in readers respect for the ecological and social characteristics of even allegedly wild areas. As Gerald Hickey makes clear in his book Free in the Forest: Ethnohistory of the Vietnamese Central Highlands 1954–1976 (1982), societies in the forested areas have their own dynamic social and cultural practices, and they are neither “living fossils” nor blank slates for postwar Vietnamese policy-makers, modern citizens, and organizations who wish to force them onto the national path toward “progress,” “development,” and “modernity.” Therefore, Trần Duy Phiên’s environmental stories focus on the dynamic modernization of postwar Vietnam, rather than foregrounding listening to nature as a way of negotiating with the past or portraying nature as a mediator among beings in dealing with war traumas, as many other Vietnamese environmental narratives do (Tran Ngoc Hieu and Dang Ha 2018: 205–228).

4  Trần Duy Phiên’s Environmental Fiction and the Resistance to Globalization ̀ Duy A broader historical context for the modernization themes in Trân Phiên’s environmental stories may help to further locate their social and political engagement. Trần Duy Phiên is an author who forms part of the dominant Marxist literary tradition in Vietnam;4 his works were written and published in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Vietnamese government carried out vigorous social and economic reforms to ensure nationwide 4  See Pham (2021) for the Marxist tradition in South Vietnamese literature before 1975. The Marxist approach sees texts about the natural world as metaphors for “a displacement of others” and for “unstated desire and political sentiment” (Kerridge 2006: 532).

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modernization and industrialization. In addition, his stories feature details about the products of large international manufacturing and trading companies. In “The Termite and the Man,” globalizing economic forces are signaled by “Martini wine,” “Heineken beer,” “Lemon soda,” “shiny Japanese porcelain objects,” and “Honda motorbikes.” These products are described as commonly used on the farm. Similarly, in “The Ants and the Man,” globalizing forces are present in the frequent references to ant-­ killing tools and chemicals. And in “The Spider and the Man,” computers and memory sticks play a role. Through such elements, Trần Duy Phiên’s stories appear to reflect the connections between globalization, continuing extraction of local natural resources, and global environmental crises that have been analyzed by Huggan (2004, 2009), Huggan and Tiffin (2007), Maxwell (2009), and Nixon (2005) in their discussions of postcolonialism and environmental crises. However, the imported commodities and modern machines in Trần Duy Phiên’s stories are less related to the global environmental crises and economic systems that are the concern of green postcolonialists, than to Vietnam’s own shift to socialist-oriented capitalism, a form of postcolonial capitalism since the 1986 reform. At that time, the Vietnamese government started pursuing a policy of economic liberalization to “create favorable conditions for the building of socialism and defending the homeland” (75 Years of the Communist Party of Vietnam: 809). Vietnam’s promotion of engagement with global capitalist relations and the transformation of the state sector to a private capitalist sector led to the growing presence of foreign and domestic capitalist companies. A typical characteristic of globalization in contemporary postcolonial Vietnam is that it aims to achieve modernization and industrialization as an essential condition for completing socialism and national hegemony. As emphasized in the Political Report at the 8th Congress of the Communist Party (1996), globalization is promoted as an important factor that will “create a favorable environment for the task of national construction and defense” (75 Years of the Communist Party of Vietnam 949; emphasis added). In general, maintaining the socialist state and national unity while encouraging globalization constitutes a central principle of nation-building in present-day Vietnam. On the surface, with their references to international commodities, Trần Duy Phiên’s three stories appear to conform to the mainstream ideology of nation-building in Vietnam. But a deeper look at the connection of these products with the natural surroundings reveals a criticism of the government’s policies. Global commodities are presented as tools to

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support humans in their attempts at invading and exploiting nonhuman species in industrialized farming (as in “The Ants and the Man” and “The Termite and the Man”), and they signal the power of modern humans (in all three stories). The presence of the natural world in the stories calls into question the ideology of a future modernized Vietnam, which is implicitly presented as a destructive force in relation to ecological systems. And successful attacks of nonhuman creatures against modern human beings as invaders and exploiters of nature metaphorically present the failure of the idealized industrialization of the nation. Criticism of the Vietnamese government’s modernization project is even more explicit in the characters’ high social status and education. As I mentioned earlier, the characters are engineers, accountants, officials, and students who embody the notion of an idealized Vietnam as modernized and globalized in the reform era. Chiến, the main character of “The Spider and the Man,” is a perfect representative of the ideal modern Vietnamese youth. He is a talented student, winning prizes in national competitions. In the entrance exam for graduate school, he achieves the top position at two universities and completes his degree in computer engineering as the first of his class. Chiến is a high-achieving intellectual: his university recruits him to be a teaching assistant, then sponsors him to study abroad, and later he returns with an excellent PhD degree. He also possesses talents in entertainment as a melodious singer and proficient painter. Chiến is an active citizen, ambitious in earning money quickly: upon his return from overseas, he is determined not to return to academia and decides to work for a company to earn more money and have greater freedom. The main character here embodies the image of “new [Vietnamese] people” that the Communist Party has constantly emphasized in its campaign for national industrialization. As asserted at the 7th Congress (1991), the new Vietnamese people in the era of the “nư ớ c công nghiệp” (industrialized country) are intellectual, active, energetic, and creative; they must possess revolutionary morals, love for country, and faith in socialism; and they must have professional skills and practical abilities (Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam 1991: 81). In the field of literature, the party’s theoreticians still adhere to Marxist-Leninist ideology. Accordingly, literature must inform new Vietnamese people while fighting against any obstacles to the nation’s socialist construction and independence (Đảng cộng sản Việt Nam 1993: 54–55), and it is expected to build up the Vietnamese people’s morals to serve the country’s industrialization and modernization. Constructing his environmental stories around main characters with high education and

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social status, Trần Duy Phiên appears to conform his imagination to the mainstream idea of “new Vietnamese.” But these “new” characters are labeled “parasites” by the main character of “The Ants and the Man,” and they are largely defeated as they face the revenge of nature. Thus, Trần Duy Phiên’s three eco-narratives reflect and evoke existing public resentment of national modernization and industrialization projects. Criticizing modernization and industrialization as destructive forces and inevitable failures, Trần Duy Phiên eco-narratives actually resonate with rising public anxiety about the “postcolonial condition” of Vietnam—a Vietnam that is nominally free from colonial rule but is still living the legacy of neo-colonialism (cf. Young 2012: 600). That the goals of modernization and industrialization are themselves an embodiment of the colonial legacy in Vietnam is broadly agreed upon by scholars of Vietnamese studies: these nation-building goals grew out of Vietnamese intellectuals’ faith in the promises of progress and modernity that were introduced by the French government in colonial times (Peycam 2012: 6; Marr 1981: 138–139). Moreover, the description of men enthusiastically establishing their own businesses definitely parallels the emergence of capitalists in present-day Vietnam as the consequence of a blind acceptance of capitalism and the market economy since the Reform (Fforde 2007: 213). In particular, the portrayal of modern men violently invading other creatures’ lands and killing nonhuman beings for their own activities alludes to exploitative capitalists. Men in power in postcolonial Vietnam resemble men in power in colonial Vietnam who exploited the nonhuman world for maximum economic benefits (Frédéric 1998: 59–86). The term “parasites” refers to investigating officers who are indifferent to people being attacked by ants in “The Ants and the Man,” the story that is most explicitly critical of “new Vietnamese” capitalists. Mainstream socialist realist literature in Vietnam has a long tradition of associating capitalists with blood-sucking creatures such as vampires, leeches, and lice (Marr 2013: 169–170; Pham 2021: 32–56). Trần Duy Phiên’s eco-stories, therefore, evoke in the audience a paradox in postcolonial Vietnam’s nation-­building: the confluence of colonial and socialist modernity, which functions as an essential condition for the attainment of socialism, also catalyzes the emergence and continuation of exploitative capitalists, whose existence threatens socialist goals. As such, Vietnamese ecofiction articulates a critique of Vietnamese nation-building by foregrounding the resulting collapse of nature, the

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human body, and political ideology. Such historically complex connections of postcolonial nation-building in Vietnam with ideas of modernity, socialism, and national hegemony call for a reading of national allegories in modern Vietnamese eco-stories. In other words, through allegorical strategies, Vietnamese eco-narratives offer an environmental portrait that is deeply engaged with human experiences of class, gender, and national identity. Postcolonial ecocriticism as it has developed over the last two decades is best suited to explore such dimensions of social criticism in Vietnamese eco-narratives. Modern environmental literature in Vietnam, therefore, combines the social, political, and ecological aspects whose combination has been the recent focus of ecocriticism.

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Index1

A Affect, 11, 45, 81, 118, 133, 154, 170n3, 202, 310, 311 empathy, 57 Agent Orange, 1, 20, 182, 184–186, 191, 193, 194, 198–200, 271 Agriculture, 2, 4, 7, 13, 15, 21, 48, 54, 230, 233–235, 237–241, 243, 245, 247, 248, 284, 329, 333 agricultural development, 233 agricultural land, 91 farming, 48, 81, 91, 99, 154, 231, 235, 239, 241–243, 245–247, 264, 277, 284, 310, 329, 335 monoculture, 237, 241 small farmers, 232 small farms, 237 Swidden, 4 swidden agriculture, 3, 4

Air, 2, 85, 104, 149, 166, 182, 212, 213, 243, 262, 322, 323 American War, 1, 2, 5, 19, 20, 98 Animal/animals advocacy, 133, 134 emancipation, 125 and mercy release, 18, 109–135 studies, 286 welfare, 111, 114, 117, 121, 122, 125, 126 Animism, 39n3, 324 Anthropocene, 24–28, 224, 225 Anthropocentrism, 40, 115, 129, 132, 135, 147, 155, 260, 284 Anthropology, 7, 12, 13, 42–44, 48n6, 249 Ants, 330–332, 336 Århem, Nikolas, 47–49, 55 Autonomy, 67, 80, 300

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 U. K. Heise, C. P. Pham (eds.), Environment and Narrative in Vietnam, Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41184-7

343

344 

INDEX

B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 187, 190 Bauxite, 213, 245, 246 Becoming, 37, 53, 105, 151, 192, 212, 220, 234n2, 244, 246, 287, 329 Berger, John, 289 Berque, Augustin, 17, 37, 44, 49–53 Biggs, David, 3 Biggs, Christopher, 2n1, 3, 4n2, 5, 6 Biodiversity, 2, 25 biodiversity loss, 6, 329 and conservation, 14, 18, 41, 110, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 122, 134, 135 Birds, 2, 18, 71, 113, 115, 116, 120, 121, 124–127, 130, 132, 133, 233, 260, 284–286, 290, 291 Buddhism, 109, 110, 112, 183, 202, 324 Buell, Lawrence, 284, 286, 298, 318, 318n1, 326 Bu Gia Mập National Park, 41 C Cà Mau, 194, 196, 197 Cannibalism, 73, 74, 78 Capitalism, 50, 225, 244n5, 246, 318n1, 321, 334, 336 Carson, Rachel, 2, 8 Cát Tiên National Park, 49 Central Highlands, 15, 21, 65–85, 149, 229–249, 323, 327, 328, 333 Children’s literature, 19, 165–179 Chim Phóng Sinh, 110, 114, 126, 128, 132 China, 7, 25, 39n3, 40, 97, 112, 113, 212, 266, 332 Cinema, 149, 158n15, 161 slow, 158, 158n15

Cities, 262–263 and air quality, 212 and crowding, 238 and pollution, 238 and traffic, 212 and trash, 116 See also Urban/urbanization Civil War, 20, 209–225 Climate change, 2, 7, 14, 25–28, 212, 235, 236, 238–240, 242, 243, 243n4, 262, 284, 288, 290 Coal mining, 215 Coffee, 21, 229–249, 264 Cold War, 211, 211n2 Colonialism, 26 French colonialism, 3, 5, 21, 99, 168, 239, 321 internal colonialism, 330 Communism, 1, 2, 4–6, 16, 19, 20, 23, 47, 168, 215, 321 Confucianism, 283, 324 Conservation, 18, 21, 23, 36, 42, 44, 49, 82, 109–135, 240n3 Corruption, 6, 21 Cosmology, 25, 38–40, 42, 43, 54–56, 69, 191, 200–204 Crime, 86, 219, 223 Cronon, William, 9 Đ Đại Việt, 67, 92, 94, 95, 97 Đà Lạt, 21, 229–234, 234n2, 236–238, 241, 244, 247, 248 Dao, Daoism, 46, 112, 113 Defoliants, 20 Deforestation, 2, 4–6, 13, 46, 79, 82, 154n13, 166, 167, 220, 322, 329 Deity, 18, 72, 83, 90, 93, 97, 98, 100–106, 185, 186, 188

 INDEX 

Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), 4, 12, 211, 213, 214, 218, 225 South Vietnam, 211 Déry, Steve, 43, 44, 54 Descola, Philippe, 37, 39n3, 40, 44, 50 Đinh Thanh Sang, 41, 50, 53 Đinh, Tuấn Vũ, 19, 146, 156, 158 Discourse, 10, 25, 37, 83, 89–107, 116, 123, 144–148, 156, 160, 161, 190, 240n3, 295 Disease, 13, 18, 56, 149, 151, 152, 220, 285, 329 malaria, 149, 151, 155, 215, 216, 220 Đổi Mớ i (economic reform policy), 2, 91, 146, 169, 212, 299, 301, 313–314 Dournes, Jacques, 66, 68–69, 74, 76 Ducks, 103, 276, 277, 281, 284–290 Dư ơ ng Thị Bích Ngọc, 42, 44, 54 E Ecocriticism, 7, 12, 14, 15, 147, 165–167, 297, 317–326, 337 postcolonial ecocriticism, 317–337 See also Environmental humanities Ecofeminism, 276, 277, 294, 319 Ecology, 3, 5, 6, 15, 17, 24, 28, 38, 51, 89, 106, 147, 166, 214, 225, 229–249, 297, 321, 322, 325, 326, 329 Economics, economy, 2, 6, 20, 22, 38, 55, 89, 91, 92, 99, 106, 107, 132, 146, 169, 212–219, 212n4, 224, 225, 231, 234, 237, 242, 243, 247, 313, 313n6, 314n7, 321, 330, 336 capitalist economy, 225 Market economy, 225 new economic zones, 217, 327 new economy, 80, 81

345

Ecopedagogy, 19, 165–179 Ecophobia, 147–153 Empirical, empiricism, 17, 37, 39 Environmental activism, 8, 9, 23, 240, 240n3, 241 Environmental anthropology, 7 Environmental history, 7 Environmental humanities, 3, 7–16, 24, 249 Environmental Humanities journal, 8 Environmental justice, 8, 277, 318, 319 environmental injustice, 318 Environmental injustice, 2 environmental racism, 8 equity, 231 Environmental policy, 327 Environmental rule, see McElwee, Pamela D. Epistemology, 17, 42 Ethics, 14 consequentialism, 110, 111, 114 deontology, 110, 111, 114, 127, 133 and narratives, 110, 111, 114, 115, 124–133 virtue, 111, 116, 122, 127–130, 132–134 Ethnicity, ethnic minority groups, 3, 4, 42, 96, 246 Ethnography, 42, 90 Extraction, 4, 236, 244–246, 248, 334 F Farming, 48, 81, 91, 99, 154, 239, 241–243, 245–247, 264, 277, 284, 310, 329, 335 Feudalism, 99, 321

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INDEX

Film, 7, 9, 10, 19, 24, 26–28, 110, 143–153, 148n9, 156–161, 275 war movie, 144 Fish, 18, 66, 113, 114, 116, 117, 119, 122, 123, 129, 130, 132, 135, 213, 313 Flooding, 5, 82, 264, 291 Folk narratives, 69, 73, 75 Forest, 2, 9, 66, 70, 157 jungle, 176 and logging, 220 and management, 43, 46, 54, 223n12, 245 and restoration, 83 sacred forest, 70, 71 See also Deforestation Forest spirits, 17, 65–83, 85, 97 French colonialism, 3, 21, 99, 239, 321 French School of the Far East, 67, 68, 264n7 G Gaard, Greta, 178 Gammage, William, 9 Gender, 7, 22, 225, 275–295, 318, 337 Geneva Agreements (1954), 211n2 Ghosts, 11, 38, 70, 73, 75, 77, 79, 184, 187, 190–200, 202, 204 Globalization, 334 Gold mining, 219, 220, 222 Gordon, Avery, 185, 187, 198, 204 Government, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 13, 14, 17, 20, 21, 23, 39, 69, 80, 82, 91, 100, 103, 150, 168, 193, 214–216, 218, 219, 222, 223, 223n12, 225, 286, 287, 313, 313n6, 321, 323, 325, 327, 330, 333–336 Gustafsson, Mai Lan, 184, 187

H Hanoi, 7, 12, 16, 22, 39, 46, 116–120, 122, 123, 132, 143n1, 168, 212, 213, 230, 240, 241, 262, 267, 300–303, 300n1, 302n2, 307–314, 319, 320, 322 Haunting, 185, 281 Health, 7, 109, 149, 212, 238, 277 human, 1, 117, 120, 122 History, 2, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16, 20, 24, 37, 54, 55, 66, 67, 78, 80, 81, 90, 93, 95, 99, 100, 103, 145, 145n6, 146, 157, 159, 166, 186, 187, 193, 202, 211n3, 212, 213, 221, 221n10, 222, 224, 225, 234–237, 239, 244, 245, 248, 255, 264, 267, 268, 313, 314, 319, 321, 324 H’mông, 107 Hoàng, Cầm, 46, 47, 49, 55, 105 ̀ Cư ơ ng Thô ̉, 80 Hoàng Triê u Ho Chi Minh City, 1, 7, 12, 24, 26, 27, 115, 116, 120, 125, 171, 192, 193, 196, 197, 201, 212, 230, 237, 243, 262n6, 263 Homeland, 95, 144, 170–174, 178, 301, 326, 328, 334 Huggan, Graham, 319 Humans, 9, 10, 12–14, 16–19, 21, 23–26, 36n2, 37–45, 49–51, 53, 55, 70, 72–79, 96, 97, 105, 111, 114, 118, 120, 121, 125, 127, 129, 130, 132, 144, 147, 152–161, 166, 170, 172, 174–177, 191, 194, 204, 214, 214n5, 221, 222, 222n11, 224, 244, 246, 248, 257, 259–261, 263–265, 275–293, 295, 297–299, 301, 302, 304, 307, 308, 312, 314, 317, 320–322, 325, 326, 328, 330–333, 335, 337

 INDEX 

347

J Journalism, 9, 11, 256 Jungle, 68, 79, 148, 150–152, 157, 160, 168, 171, 174–178 Justice, 2, 8, 23, 27, 277, 294, 318, 319

L Labor, 75, 99, 211, 211n3, 212, 214n6, 215–218, 217n8, 224, 244, 246, 247, 327, 329, 331 Land, 257, 310 land ownership, 69, 81, 327, 330 land reform, 6 land use, 222 representation of land, 271 Land, ownership, farming, agriculture, 43, 214n6 Language, 8, 9, 14, 40, 57, 69, 72, 75, 81, 82, 90, 93, 95, 100, 103, 112, 146, 159, 169, 170, 183, 185, 211, 243, 262, 281, 284, 285, 287–289 Laos, 91–94, 100, 212, 243, 261 Larsen, Svend Erik, 172 Lê, Đı ̉nh Q., 20, 24, 181–204 Lotus Land, 199, 200 The Pure Land, 20, 181–204 Lê Minh Hà, 297–314 Phố vẫn gió, 297–314 Lê Trang Tông, 67 Lê Trọng Cúc, 38 Literature, literary studies, 7, 12, 14–16, 19, 21, 22, 24, 35, 38, 94, 103, 161, 165–179, 198, 214n5, 244, 255, 256, 258, 268–270, 275, 288, 297, 318–324, 327, 328, 332, 335–337

K Khmer Rouge, 181, 182 Kim, Jinah, 198, 199 Kinh, 3, 4, 4n2, 16, 36, 39, 46, 47, 56, 67, 80, 81, 93, 100, 107, 329 Kohn, Eduardo, 37, 44, 50 Kwon, Heonik, 202

M Magazine, 21, 147, 255–271 Maître, Henri, 67, 68 Malaria, 149, 151, 155, 215, 216, 220 Market economy, 2, 20, 22, 92, 146, 169, 212–215, 234, 313, 314n7, 336 Marxism-Leninism, 12, 47, 56

Hunting, 16, 47, 48, 78, 86, 91, 97, 155, 157 Hy Văn Lư ơ ng, 57 I Identity, 10, 18, 22, 51, 52, 76, 83, 90, 92, 103, 106, 109, 124, 125, 130, 145, 173, 174, 185, 230n1, 233, 246, 276, 288, 293, 297–314, 318–320, 337 Imprisonment, 125, 133, 210, 211, 213 Indigenous peoples, history, politics / Indigeneity, 48, 67, 69, 81, 83, 84 Industrialization, 2, 6, 12, 15, 16, 22, 26, 166, 171, 212, 236, 299, 320–322, 328, 330, 332, 334–336 Inequality economic, 101 social, 10, 101

348 

INDEX

Maxwell, Anne, 319 McElwee, Pamela D., 2–6, 13, 20, 23, 47, 49, 93, 214, 214n6, 223n12, 240, 243, 245, 321, 327–330 Media, 10, 17, 18, 24, 79–82, 109–135, 143, 147, 166, 230, 233, 238–244, 246, 247 Medicine, 56, 149, 174, 302n2 Mekong Delta, 2, 3, 4n2, 5–7, 13, 26–28, 212, 243 Memory, 1, 19, 20, 22, 81, 145n6, 155, 165–179, 183, 186, 187, 192, 198, 200–202, 281, 282, 298, 301, 307–310, 334 Mercy release, 18, 109–135 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 183 Mesology, 17, 49, 51–53, 57 Metaphysics, 40, 77, 79 Milieu, 37, 51–53 Military, 2, 5, 13, 19, 21, 80, 97, 148, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 182, 193, 194, 198, 211, 211n2, 217, 218, 222, 225 Mine bauxite, 245, 246 gold, 219, 220, 222 M'nông people, 72, 245 Modernization, 6, 12, 14–16, 18, 22, 23, 265, 268–271, 299, 317, 318, 320–322, 325, 329, 330, 332–336 Moi, 68, 75 Monkey, 19, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 160, 261 Mumford, Lewis, 297, 298 Mư ờ ng, 3, 46, 93–99, 107 N Nam Phong, 21, 255–271 Narrative little, 145, 145n6, 146 narrator/storyteller, 10, 11 point of view, 257

readers, 10 theory, 7–11 Nation, 9, 12, 81, 124, 157, 173, 245, 255, 266–268, 271, 329, 335, 337 homeland, 167, 171–173, 255, 266 national allegory, 318, 337 nationalism, 19, 145, 172 nation-building, 318, 334, 336, 337 patriotism, 173 National parks, 17, 36, 43, 54 Nature, 3, 4, 6, 9–14, 16–25, 36–57, 36n2, 66, 70, 72, 74, 77–79, 83, 96–99, 102–104, 106, 111, 114, 129, 130, 132, 144–150, 147n8, 153–161, 165–179, 190–200, 214, 214n5, 219–222, 224, 225, 230, 231, 233–237, 240, 240n3, 241, 244, 246, 248, 249, 255, 258–261, 263–270, 275–278, 283–295, 297–314, 317–319, 321, 322, 324–326, 328–333, 335, 336 New economy, 80, 81 Ngô Đình Diệm, 6, 217n9 Nguyêñ Đình Thi, 144, 168 Nguyêñ Khánh Dư , 19, 146, 156, 158 Nguyêñ Ngọc Thuần, 19, 167, 169–171, 173–175, 177, 178 ́ Măt́ Vừ a Mở Cửa Sô ̉, 19, Vừ a nhăm 167, 169 Nguyêñ Thị Thùy Trang: murder trial, 209 Nguyêñ Trí, 20, 21, 209–221, 211n3, 214n5, 215n7, 223–225, 223n12, 299 Bãi vàng, d á̵ quý, trầm hư ơ ng (Gold, Gems, Incense), 20, 210 Đô ̀ tê ̉ (Butchery), 210 ̵ ờ ng ảo vọng (The Fantasy Thiên d ư of Paradise), 20, 210 Nguyêñ Trọng Thuật, 265, 267 ̃ Nguyên-Võ Nghiêm-Minh, 26 Nư ớ c 2030 (film), 26

 INDEX 

Nixon, Rob, 8, 319 Nonhuman, 9, 12–14, 17, 23, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44, 48, 50, 55, 151–156, 158–161, 192, 214, 222n11, 275, 277, 287–289, 298, 319–322, 325, 328, 332, 335, 336 O Ôn Khê Nguyêñ Tấn, 66, 67, 75 Ontology, 17, 37, 39, 39n3, 40, 44, 49–51, 53–56, 111, 147, 190, 204 Ortmann, Stephan, 2, 3, 6, 36 P Paris Agreement (1973), 211n2 Patriarchy, 287 Permanent Archaeological Mission of Indochina, 67 Phạm Quỳnh, 256, 257, 259, 260, 263–265, 267, 268 Phạm Văn Đồng, 172 Phenomenology, 183, 189, 200 Philosophy, 5, 7, 12, 14, 16, 24, 25, 44, 52, 145n6, 174, 199, 201, 277, 319, 326 Photography, 6, 20, 24, 182, 184, 187, 190, 191, 194, 198 Phu Pha Dùa, 97, 98, 102 Place, 8–10, 12, 18, 20, 22, 24, 25, 43, 47, 51, 55, 66, 74, 75, 90, 93, 95, 97, 98, 102–104, 106, 107, 115, 132, 135, 144, 148, 151, 152, 154, 155, 160, 166, 167, 170–172, 175–179, 187, 199, 201, 215, 230, 232, 233, 235, 237–239, 244, 246–248, 257–260, 262, 264–268, 276, 283, 288, 297–311, 314, 325, 328, 330

349

placelessness, 308 representations of place, 106 sacred places, 106 sense of place, 154, 167, 171, 172, 179, 298, 299, 301 spirit of place, 308 Plantation, 99, 234, 241, 264 Plastic, 18, 111, 114, 116, 122–124, 132, 133, 193, 233 Police, 46, 216 Pollution, 2, 6, 16, 111, 114, 117, 122, 123, 134, 135, 145, 166, 178, 212, 230, 238, 243, 284, 320, 322 Porcelain, 187, 189, 200, 334 Postcolonial/postcolonialism, 106, 189, 190, 317–337 ecocriticism, 317–321, 325, 337 grief, 198 studies, 7, 22, 25 Poverty, 2, 22, 167, 210, 219, 220, 276, 279, 280, 282, 286, 300, 319 Pure Land, 20, 181–204 Pyne, Stephen, 9 Q Quan Sơ n, 90–93, 94n1, 95, 100, 103, 105–107 R Republic of Vietnam (RVN)/North Vietnam, 1, 20, 80, 148n9, 151, 153, 211–214, 216, 217, 264n7, 313, 313n6, 323 Resources, 4, 5, 12–14, 17, 18, 25, 39, 41, 52, 82, 89, 90, 92, 95–99, 104, 105, 114, 144, 157, 158, 211, 214, 222, 223, 223n12, 225, 232, 236, 239, 245–247, 255, 265, 300, 319, 321, 322, 327, 329, 331, 332, 334

350 

INDEX

Reunification, 80 Risk, 5, 7, 25, 52, 74, 155, 215, 220, 221, 224, 277, 286, 287 Ritual, 18, 38, 43, 48, 56, 76, 89–107, 111, 112, 124, 126, 130, 204 River, 7, 16, 19, 26, 52, 91, 100, 103, 104, 115, 116, 119, 123, 132, 133, 144, 148n9, 151n11, 153, 156–158, 161, 166, 171, 173, 178, 204, 212, 238, 239, 257, 258, 260, 266–268, 277, 282–284, 290–292 Rural, 22, 45, 91, 130, 171, 212, 279n1, 280, 283, 288, 297, 299, 322 Ryan, John C., 8, 14, 16, 166, 324, 328, 332 S Saigon, see Ho Chi Minh City Science, 18 Science fiction, 11, 26 Sculpture, 20, 24, 182–184, 187, 189, 198, 204 Second Indochina War, 153n12, 211, 211n3, 225 Settlement, 13, 94, 214n6, 223, 261, 300, 327, 328, 330 Seymour, Nicole, 240 Slovic, Scott, 325 Socialism, 5, 12, 23, 99, 209–225, 303, 320, 321, 334–337 Social media, 24, 119, 121, 213, 230, 233, 240, 241 blogs, 244 Society, 8, 14, 15, 21, 26, 39, 48, 51, 55, 57, 82, 83, 90, 107, 115, 145, 166, 174–177, 210, 213–215, 221, 222, 248, 256, 283, 286, 302, 303n4, 311, 321, 323, 332, 333

Soil erosion, 13 Soldiers, 97, 98, 100, 102, 144, 148–155, 148n9, 150n10, 157, 158, 160, 169, 172, 173, 194, 217, 221n10, 222 Species, 4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 18, 23, 25, 51, 111, 114, 117–120, 131, 133–135, 161, 176, 286, 288, 289, 322, 328, 332, 335 invasive and native, 118 Spirituality/spirits, 20, 38, 40, 45, 47, 65–83, 85, 95, 97–107, 124–128, 144, 152, 157, 159, 181–204, 258–261, 276, 287, 294, 307, 308, 312 good and evil, 17, 73, 74, 77, 79 Surveillance, 158 Sustainability, 14, 17, 18, 21, 35, 42, 96, 99, 176, 177, 229–249 Swidden agriculture, 4, 13 Symbol/symbolism, 19, 43, 50, 54, 66, 90, 121, 174, 187, 188, 231, 284, 293, 305 T Tai peoples, 92, 95, 104, 106 Tai Thanh Hóa, 100 Tày, 3, 36 Thái, 3, 46, 47, 55 Thornber, Karen, 15, 25, 284, 325, 328, 332 Tiffin, Helen, 319 Tourism, 92, 223n12, 234, 237, 238, 271 Trần Duy Phiên, 22, 291, 317, 323–326, 328–330, 332–337 “Kiến và ngư ờ i,” 317, 324 “Nhện và ngư ờ i,” 317, 324 Trần Phư ơ ng, 19, 146, 151, 156, 158 Trần Trọng Kim, 112, 268

 INDEX 

Trauma, 20, 149, 154, 156, 158, 161, 170, 183, 187, 189, 198, 199, 214n5, 299, 333 Travel, 256 travel narratives, 11, 244, 256 travelers, 261, 271 Trư ờ ng Sơ n, 67, 144, 144n2, 146, 147, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155, 160, 161, 247 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 297, 298, 311 Tư Mã Hai Đào, 18, 90, 93–95, 97, 100–106 U Unification, 20 Urban/urbanization, 6, 8, 16, 22, 24, 45, 81, 123, 166, 171, 212, 216, 230, 238, 240, 241, 243, 248, 259, 262, 280, 290, 292, 298–300, 304–308, 310–314, 319, 325, 328–330 V Value, 13, 18, 42, 44, 45, 54, 78, 83, 84, 90, 105, 110, 111, 114–116, 123, 125, 128–130, 132–135, 171, 210, 214, 214n5, 221, 223, 223n12, 231, 233, 243, 249, 293, 298, 299, 303, 306, 311, 332 Viet Cong, 19, 148–151, 148n9, 153, 157, 161, 194, 221n10 Việt-Kinh, 43 Vietnam War, 1, 143, 156, 159, 168–170, 195, 200, 211 See also American War; Second Indochina War Villages, 19, 23, 43, 48, 66, 69–72, 76–78, 81, 83–86, 94, 95, 97–99, 103, 104, 170, 171, 173–176,

351

200, 201, 242, 257, 258, 263, 269, 276, 290–292 Violence, 156, 158, 182, 183, 185, 191, 200, 210, 211, 213, 215, 219–221, 221n10, 224, 244, 286, 332 slow violence, 158, 239 W Warren, Karen J., 277 Waste, 2, 6, 26, 133, 194, 212, 220, 233, 246 Water, 2, 5, 13, 16, 26, 27, 52, 70, 72, 76, 86, 96, 99, 103, 104, 113, 113n1, 116, 122, 132, 150, 151, 155, 156, 160, 166, 173, 193, 196, 212, 213, 232, 236, 238, 239, 243, 244, 246, 257, 261, 264–268, 270, 279, 288, 290–292, 295, 304–306, 309, 310 dams, 5 water management, 5 Western science model, 36, 37 modernity, 36, 37, 49, 50, 57 ontology, 49 world, 50 Wilderness, 9, 22, 43, 68, 156, 260, 261, 276, 292, 293, 297, 318, 327, 328, 330, 333 Williams, Raymond, 90 Women, 22, 103, 132, 147–153, 155, 157, 217, 270, 275–284, 279n2, 281n3, 286, 287, 290–295, 309, 318 Y Yang and malai, 17, 73, 77, 79, 80