Concepts of ‘Individual’ and ‘Self’ in Twentieth-Century Vietnam

Abstract

‘Individual’ (cá nhân) came to the Vietnamese language in the first decades of the twentieth century, along with a host of other evocative neologisms, such as ‘society’ (xã hôi), ‘ethnic group/nation’ (dân tôc), ‘ideology’ (chu' nghĩa), ‘democracy’ (dân chu' chu' nghĩa), ‘science’ (khoa hoc), and ‘progress’ (tiêń hóa). Initially, ‘individual’ was very much the poor relation among these new concepts—merely an irreducible human unit belonging to something else more significant. Thus, each individual was urged to be a loyal citizen of the nation, an eager participant in some new political organization, or a responsible member of society. Individuals were often compared with cells in the body, each one having a legitimate role in sustaining and enhancing the vitality of the organism, but meaningless and incapable of surviving on their own. On the other hand, the danger also existed of individuals acting in a selfish, short-sighted manner, which could jeopardize the larger order of things. Such persons were said to be witting or unwitting perpetrators of ‘individualism’ (cá nhân chu' nghĩa).

Making Class and Gender: (Market) Socialist Enframing of Traders in Ho Chi Minh City

“…Although these trends reflect a growing emphasis on private entrepreneurial initiative, they also reinforce prevailing state policies that link national economic growth to raising population quality (chất lượng) , often defined in individualized terms of knowledge, initiative, and self‐improvement 14 . Similar to suzhi (quality) discourse in China, concern with chất lượng stems from recent calls for scientific birth planning, but it also resonates with Confucian notions of self‐cultivation (Anagnost 2004; Fong 2004; Greenhalgh 2003; Hsu 2007; Kipnis 2006; Marr 2000). Consequently, entrepreneurs’ chất lượng is simultaneously economic and moral.…”

The problem of peers in Vietnamese interaction

“…A similar logic may explain the lack of a literary substitute for the French‐like vous described by Marr (: 788), whereby authors were legitimated in adopting the term tôi to refer to themselves, but uncomfortable in using an audience‐demeaning term such as người (lit. person, but indexing the other's inferiority) for generic address.…”

The anxiety of romantic love in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

“…Popular with urban youth in the 1930s, the Thơ Mới (New Poetry) and Tự Lực Văn Đoàn (Self‐Reliance Literary Group) movements examined conflicts between romance and duty and the cultivation of emotionality, especially love, for the sake of modernizing (Phinney ). The incorporation of Western literary conventions into Vietnamese literature incubated new concepts of the individual that facilitated the spread of socialism in northern Vietnam (McHale ; Marr ).…”