Keywords

4.1 Introduction

Newspapers were introduced to Vietnam by the French as a tool for their colonial administration of the country and to instill in the Vietnamese people an attachment to “the motherland” (mẫu quốc). As the colonial authorities provided legal guarantees for the press to operate as a medium of public expression, though under heavy censorship, Vietnamese intellectuals started engaging in journalism in Vietnamese and for different purposes. The Vietnamese periodicals during the French colonial period staged efforts to popularize Western ideas and beliefs, expose and analyze the issues of colonial rule, promote nationalist ideas, and preserve traditional values. They played a key role in fashioning dynamic modern Vietnamese identities. One journal exemplifying these efforts was the weekly newspaper Women’s News (Phụ nữ tân văn). In circulation starting in 1929, Women’s News, after Women’s Bell (Nữ giới chung), first published in 1918, was the second newspaper devoted to women’s issues. It reached a wider audience, discussed a wider range of issues, and lasted longer, proving an unprecedented success. Women’s News “averaged 8500 copies a week for over two years, dropped to 5000 as the effects of the Depression reached Indochina, and then survived at about 2500 copies until finally being shut down by government order in December 1934” (Marr 1981: 220). Its last issue, the 273rd, was released on April 21, 1935. With the supervision of the head publisher, Mme Nguyễn Đức Nhuận, who was financially backed by her husband, “a major Saigon importer, wholesaler and retailer” (Marr 1981: 221), Women’s News convened famous writers in all the three regions of Vietnam (Thiện 2010). The newspaper has been regarded as a landmark in the development of journalism, readership, and for women in Vietnam (Đặng 2008).

Marr (1981) criticizes Women’s News for its conservative stand in advocating a number of traditions unfavorable for women, yet he commends the newspaper as probably the best example of its type in spreading new ideas into Vietnam and advancing women’s educational opportunities. Women’s News has also been recognized for its contributions to the renovation of the Vietnamese language and Vietnamese literature and its display of an anticolonial attitude despite a claimed neutral position (Thiện 2010). These achievements were a function of genuine education. We understand education not as a predefined field but as a process of making space for engagement in the cultivation of subjectivities and/or capacities. By framing journalism in terms of education, we hope to highlight the pedagogy of texts and the nature of truth production in journalism.

Women’s News contained a variety of columns. This chapter focuses on two columns in the newspaper, “Travel Stories” (Du ký) and “Letters for You” (Thơ cho bạn), since they excellently illustrate an educational regime of truth for social reform enacted through journalism in late colonial Vietnam. The two columns, from a first-person perspective, present Vietnamese women who freely navigate the world and the Vietnamese landscape at the time. “Travel Stories,” consisting of two parts, “Going to the West” (Sang Tây; May–July 1929) and “Ten Months in France” (Mười tháng ở Pháp; October 1929–August 1930), lay out Ms. Phạm Vân Anh’s observations during her trip to France, introducing the first Vietnamese woman traveler as the author of a travelog. “Letters for You” (May 1929–February 1930) is a series of letters on Vietnam and the world situation exchanged between Trần Thị Thanh Nhàn and Lê Thị Huỳnh Lan.

The travelog has been confirmed to be written by Đào Trinh Nhất, a prolific, influential male journalist, also the first editor-in-chief of Women’s News. In 2018, it was published in Vietnam as a book, with the name Đào Trinh Nhất in parentheses beside Phạm Vân Anh on the cover (see Nguyễn, Hữu Sơn 2018). Some details in Thanh Nhàn’s writings indicate a very high likelihood that she was performed by Đào Trinh Nhất. Thanh Nhàn, in her first installment, wrote about herself as follows: “In 1926, we were on the Portlios ship, which departed from Saigon on the morning of March 22” (Thanh 1929a: 22). Đào Trinh Nhất’s biography notes that he went to France to study abroad on the same day (“Đào Trinh Nhất” 2021). Travelogs and letter exchanges appeal to authenticity; however, apparently, the authors’ identities behind the texts do not matter much as the texts present themselves to their readers.

Previous studies have brought into view the variety of issues and woman figures emerging from Vietnamese journalism’s presentation of “the woman question” (vấn đề phụ nữ) in the 1920s–1930s (see Marr 1981; McHale 1995; Ho Tai 1996; Đặng 2008; Tran 2011; Aitchison 2018; Nguyen 2020). For example, Aitchison (2018) traces the engagement of Women’s News with historical time and global space to promote two differing ideal feminine models: the reinvention of martial Vietnamese women in historical records such as the Trưng Sisters and Lady Triệu as national heroines and the making of the educated, cosmopolitan, and charitable woman from international news. What matters more to Aitchison is that these ideals were created by a small but active community of female Vietnamese writers during the period. Aitchison mentions Phạm Vân Anh as an example of the latter model; however, she did not attend to the possibility/fact that Vân Anh is not a female writer in real life but just one in the text. While the contents and strategies of the debate on women in Vietnamese journalism in the 1920–1930s have been extensively explored, there is still room for further inquiry and articulation.

This chapter, in examining twenty-nine extant issues of “Travel Stories” and twenty-eight extant issues of “Letters for You,” demonstrates how the two columns, with specific techniques of creating woman personae and discussions, through the forms of travelogs and letter exchanges, have fabricated internationally minded and socially engaged woman figures for a modern Vietnam.

A text always encodes certain invitations for reading. In that sense, it is already pedagogical (Segall 2004). Our textual analysis contributes to an elaborate practice of attention to the pedagogy of journalistic texts and an educational regime of truth that helps understand the nuances of journalistic truths. Educational truths are not those that pursue accurate representations of existing realities but those that are effective in making certain things imaginable as possibilities in real life. They grapple with the art of the possible. We argue that the two columns embodied an educational regime of truth for social reform in modernizing Vietnam during the late colonial period. This chapter will review background issues, analyze the two columns’ educational projects, and characterize the educational regime of truth within which the two columns operated.

4.2 Vietnamese Journalism: The National Question, the Woman Question, and the Pedagogical Question in the Context of Modernization in the 1920s–1930s

4.2.1 French Colonization of Vietnam and the Questions of Modernization

The terms “Vietnam” and “Vietnamese” when applied to the period before 1945 are anachronistic (for many different Vietnams, see Taylor 2013; Goscha 2016), yet they are convenient and relevant to refer to the spaces, cultures, and peoples that are the subject of this chapter. Before the French conquest, despite the plurality of constituent groups and cultures, a unitary S-shaped Vietnam did exist. It was established in 1802 by Emperor Gia Long and consolidated and maintained by the Nguyễn dynasty until violated by the French. Emperor Minh Mạng’s policies of centralization to create one Confucian Vietnam and his attempts to expand the Nguyễn empire amounted to a form of modernity before the French invasion, as Goscha (2016) persuasively argues.

In July 1857, Napoleon III decided to invade Vietnam with the intention of expanding France’s markets and territories in Asia. Upon Napoleon’s command, Rigault de Genouilly and his troop attacked Đà Nẵng harbor in August 1858. In February 1859, they sailed southward, attacked Saigon, and occupied it after two weeks. By 1887, French colonizers had set up a ruling system in Vietnam. They divided the country into three different administrative regions, the protectorates of Tonkin (in the north) and Annam (in the center) and the colony of Cochinchina (in the south), as well as joined Vietnam with Cambodia under French Indochina, which later incorporated two more entities, the Chinese territory of Guangzhouwan in 1898 and the Laotian protectorate in 1899. The recitation of these brief, well-known facts may not suffice to evoke the extent of violence in this process, yet it sets the scene for a focus on the modernization of Vietnam in relation to the West.

The French was very different from the Chinese that Vietnam had been simultaneously learning from and resisting. Apart from superior technological and economic developments, they also claimed superior sociopolitical organization and lifestyles, taking pride in their French republicanism and prioritization of “liberté, égalité, fraternité,” the French national motto made official under the Third Republic. After military supremacy established domination, French hegemony was soon justified by an ideology claiming Western civilization’s superiority and its right to govern over so-called less advanced people in the name of human progress. For the Vietnamese people, Western modernity was too enormous and piercing to ignore.

After the French invasion, the modernization of Vietnam aspired to the West though it went together with a divided attitude toward traditions characteristic of the East’s position in encountering Western colonialism (Marr 1981). How to build a modern Vietnam and fight for its independence was imperative. We call it the national question. Inseparable from Vietnam’s modernization and the national question was how to rethink women’s roles and rights, the woman question. On the one hand, new ideas and lifestyles came to Vietnam. On the other hand, colonial injustices required men to rethink their relationship with women. A cultural reform could take place only if the status of women was reformed. From 1905 to 1910, traditional perceptions about women started to be challenged, but it was not until about two decades later that women began to publicly voice their opinions and participated in organizing related movements (Marr 1981). Women’s News was a pioneer of these movements. In its first issue on May 2, 1929, Women’s News made it clear that “Women’s News is an independent organization dedicated to studying matters relating to women, which are also matters concerning the nation and society. Women’s News does not follow any party, worships truth as God and homeland as religion” (Phụ nữ Tân văn 1929: 6).

4.2.2 Print Journalism as a Space of Public Expression

The introduction of newspapers in Vietnam by the French began with the need for communication among the French administrators, colonialists, and their Vietnamese associates. By the end of the nineteenth century, a series of newspapers were in circulation in Cochinchina. For example, Le Bulletin Officiel de l’Expédition de la Cochinchine, the first French language newspaper, published in 1861, circulated decrees and military reports to French soldiers and officers. In 1863, the French published the Mandarin gazette Le Bulletin des Communes to spread new laws to their associates in Vietnamese villages; Gia Định News (Gia Định báo), a gazette that disseminated official and legal documents as well as articles on Vietnamese culture and agriculture, published in 1865, was the first Vietnamese language newspaper (Phan and Trương 2017). Journalism was then seen as a means of propaganda to exert influence on the indigenous population. The pinnacle of this plot took place during Governor-general Albert Sarraut’s two mandates (1911–14 and 1917–19), at a time when France’s capacity to hold its Asian colonies was in doubt (Peycam 2012). Goscha (2016) summarizes a number of contextual conditions for Sarraut’s collaborationist strategy: the flimsy legitimacy of the French presence in Indochina as alerted by the revolts of 1908 in Vietnam; the series of debates in Paris on French possessions between 1908 and 1911 under the effects of the Dreyfus Affair, energized republicanism, and the advent of a modern, activist press in the Third Republic; the rise of other colonial forces such as Japan, Germany, Britain, and the USA; the great potential of East Asian influence as seen from the fall of the Qing in China in late 1911, the creation of the Republic of China under Sun Yat-sen, and Phan Bội Châu’s search for Chinese republican support for his Go East study-abroad program for young Vietnamese to travel to Japan.

Sarraut was sent to Indochina as governor-general to implement substantial reforms. A francophonie project was initiated “because the Vietnamese knowledge of the French, their culture, and their oeuvres was not sufficiently developed and broadcast, and because the French were not the only ones competing for Vietnamese hearts and minds” (Goscha 2004: 166). Sarraut’s team enacted new press laws and authorized the publication of more newspapers, books, and translations. They enlisted a group of reform-minded Vietnamese allies and placed them in charge of major government-backed newspapers. Among these Vietnamese collaborators were such remarkable men as Phạm Quỳnh, head of Southern Breeze (Nam phong) in Tonkin; Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh at Indochina Review (Đông Dương tạp chí), Central and Northern News (Trung Bắc tân văn), and New Annam (L’Annam nouveau) also in Tonkin; Bùi Quang Chiêu and Nguyen Phú Khai at Native Tribune (La Tribune indigene) in Cochinchina; and later Huỳnh Thúc Kháng at Voice of the People (Tiếng dân) in Annam (Goscha 2016). Through the print press rather than representative bodies (as in the case of other European colonies such as British India, the American Philippines, or Dutch Indonesia), the French opened a narrow space of public debate, where the indigenous could express their needs with a modern instrument (Peycam 2012).

The French government’s attempt met with the rise of a newly assertive, urban Vietnamese middle class that was eager to both publish and consume newspapers. Many of the newspapers discussed new social trends and political events, as well as furthered the growth of the national script, quốc ngữ, the Romanized writing system for Vietnamese. Together with French, quốc ngữ arose as “the ‘language-of-power’ to discuss, re-contextualize, and proclaim both từ mới [new vocabulary] and new ideas” (Nguyen 2013: 16). The different concerns, imaginations, and sentiments of the Vietnamese on the printed page appeared as a constellation of local and global constructs. The intelligentsia became more diverse, yet all of them were attracted to the printing press. The 1920s–1930s witnessed the emergence of a younger cohort of intellectuals, many of whom had just returned from their studies in France. The abolishment of the Confucian imperial exams and the establishment of a Franco-Vietnamese educational system facilitated this younger generation’s proficiency in the French language and access to European ideas and worldviews (Tran 2011). More French influence did not mean more subjugation. Vietnamese journalists had continually exercised their own interests. In the 1920s–1930s, their ownership and activism radiated. The Vietnamese press gradually distanced itself from French interests, even turning into a vigorous forum for anticolonialism (Peycam 2012).

It is worth noting that emerging from the rapid growth of journalism during the late colonial period was not professionally trained journalists, but scholarly literary figures associated with popular newspapers (Cao 2011). A typical example is Phan Khôi, a key contributor to Women’s News. He was not only a writer, critic, and scholar but also a star of the press, who was present at and actively contributed to the vast majority of the greatest controversies of the time. Đào Trinh Nhất was the youngest star among a group known as the Four Greats of the Saigon newspaper village in the 1930s (Thiện 2010). The three others were Phan Khôi, Diệp Văn Kỳ, and Bùi Thế Mỹ. At that time, all forms of writing were published in periodicals. The periodicals were the platform for the emergence and growth of new literary genres and trends, constituting literary journalism. People could not distinguish a journalist from a writer since the distinction was perhaps not necessary (Cao 2011). Many publishers were associated with newspapers. For example, the Self-Reliant Literary Group managed the newspapers Mores (Phong hóa) and Today (Ngày nay) and also the publisher Nowadays (Đời nay). Journals were frequently used as mouthpieces for a movement or an avant-garde point of view. Most did not last long because of censorship, but literary and activist groups kept founding new ones (Cao 2011). Almost the entire intellectual life of the time took place in the print press. People waiting for a periodical’s release of new issues formed a new social force: the readers, who became connected across geographic divides through following the rhythm and substance of the press.

4.2.3 Gender Education: Opening Up Possibilities

Here we address gender education through journalism instead of genders and gender education in schools. According to Marr, in the 1920s–1930s, the woman question became “a focal point around which other issues often revolved” (1981: 191) and women started seeing themselves as a social group with particular interests, grievances, and demands. Vietnamese newsprint made a vibrant medium for debate and dispersion of ideas on the woman question. Comparing a set of writings appearing in Women’s Bell in 1918 with another set published in Women’s News in the early 1930s, McHale (1995) is impressed by a sea change in elite perceptions of the place of women just within fifteen years. The authors of Women’s Bell discussed women’s rights in the context of Franco-Vietnamese collaboration, whereas by the early 1930s, Women’s News columnists had rejected a facile collaborationist attitude and engaged in spirited debates over women’s liberation. By the early 1930s, most newspapers included a column for women (Đặng 2008). Besides Women’s News, other journals for women during the period were Women’s Current Discussions (Phụ nữ thời đàm; 1930–1931, 1933–1934), Progressive Women (Phụ nữ tân tiến; 1932–1933, 1934), New Women (Đàn bà mới; 1934–1936), Ladies (Nữ lưu; 1936–1937), Journal of Household Arts for Women (Nữ công tạp chí; 1936–1938), Vietnamese Women (Việt nữ; 1937), Women (Phụ nữ; 1938–1939), and Female (Nữ giới; 1938–1939) (Đặng 2008).

The woman question that was addressed in these periodicals queried basic institutions and the Confucian standards through which these institutions had been understood. Vietnamese family reform was central. The Confucian norms for behavior between parents and children, husband and wife, brother and sister were examined and challenged. Newspapers discussed premarital virginity and early marriage, polygamy and widow remarriage, and romantic love and free choice of a spouse. Vietnamese traditions and new lifestyles for women, including studying abroad, tourism, fashion, nail painting, dancing, tennis playing, beauty contests, etc., were brought to the print pages. Journalism also created new spaces for women to develop their social, national, and global consciousness. For instance, in resonance with Phan Bội Châu’s reimagining of the Trưng Sisters as national heroines, Women’s News dedicated a special issue to the Trưng Sisters, generating a space to commemorate them, even communicating with them, and hence facilitating a newfound tradition of recognizing them as well as opening the possibility for women to act as leaders of the Vietnamese struggle against colonizers (Aitchison 2018).

International news featured exceptional women from around the world, especially those who assumed roles equal to men and excelled in their careers in Europe, the USA, Japan, and China. Several female journalists became well-known, living examples of women beyond the family, Đạm Phương, Huỳnh Thị Bảo Hòa, Phan Thị Bạch Vân, Nguyễn Thị Kiêm, and Thụy An, to name just a few. Plenty of female names appeared as authors in the print media, yet until now we cannot be sure how many of them were female in real life.

From journalistic sketches, various woman figures made their appearance. One of the most iconic figures of this period was the New Woman, a version of the Western flapper in the 1920s (Henchy 2005; Tran 2011; Aitchison 2018). In Tran’s depiction, “[t]hrough her flashy dress, hair-style, high heels and use of make-up, this modern woman stood in stark contrast to more modest ideals of traditional femininity” (2011: vi). She was there, though many people did not like her. Conservative opinions stood but just as one among many positions. For example, in a forum in Women’s News on “Vietnamese Celebrities’ Opinions on the Woman Question,” Bùi Quang Chiêu and Nguyễn Phan Long opposed women’s fight for equal rights; Phạm Quỳnh and Trần Trọng Kim underscored women’s roles in the family; Phan Bội Châu, Huỳnh Thúc Kháng, Trịnh Đình Rư, Đạm Phương, Phan Khôi, and Diệp Văn Kỳ endorsed gender equality (Đặng 2008).

Differing opinions, facts, and fictions for reimagining the potential of women circulated through an abundance of written forms. Periodicals popularized modern journalistic and literary writing genres, including the news, the interview, the essay, the travelog, the public letter, the free verse, the novel, etc. The number of new genres and their subgenres exceeds our ability to list. While many of these genres had their precedent forms, as they appeared in the print press, they acquired a modern shape. From an educational perspective, different forms, styles, and specific moves of writing constitute the pedagogical question.

In general, in the 1920s–1930s, especially the 1930s, a large, heterogeneous assemblage of gender-related texts enacted a mode of education characterized by the opening up of possibilities, manifesting the flourishing of gender plasticity beyond a binary model of thinking. After reviewing a wide scope of stories coming from all over the world and all appearing in print media in Vietnam in the 1930s, from stories about army women disguised as men, bearded women, women attempting to undertake masculine writing, cases of cross-dressing in literary works, hermaphrodites who embodied a transcendence of sexual dimorphism, to accounts of sex changes and the unknown frontiers of reproductive science, Tran (2011: 36) concludes that “the gendered and sexual body was imagined to be open to different modalities of becoming.” He assumes a correspondence between writings and real life that allows inferring social norms from writings. However, to be more precise, writings participate in fashioning social norms and are only part of “the distribution of the sensible,” to borrow Rancière’s (2004) words. They aim to produce effects rather than just reflect what has already been there.

4.3 Travelog and Epistolary Exchange: Openness and Authenticity

As textual pedagogies, travelog and epistolary exchange pre-inscribe modalities of openness committed to the real. Travel involves moving, creating a distance, meeting and immersing oneself in new things. Exchanging letters means engaging with another person; as a result, ideas flow and are juxtaposed to each other. Both forms of writing are anchored to a sense of authenticity.

4.3.1 Travel Writing

Often classified as non-fiction, a semi-literary genre, the “du ký” or travelog, tells “real” stories based on the traveler’s “real” journeys and experiences. To reassure readers and authenticate their accounts, travel writers use rhetorical gestures such as giving biographical information, emphasizing eyewitness accounts as a criterion of truth, insisting on truthfulness, describing circumstances, and constructing a sense of “being there.”

Studies on modern travel writing in Western culture date the genre to the eighteenth century (Thompson 2011; Bird 2016). The first time the Vietnamese term du ký was recorded dates back to the nineteenth century (Nguyễn 2016), but travelogs were not popularized until the 1920s–1930s, when travel became more accessible due to the expansion of modern transportation networks as well as the growth of a new generation of Vietnamese journalists and intellectuals, the middle class, and urban entrepreneurs who directly shaped and spread a culture of leisure, exploration, and social debate (Nguyen 2013). Travel had likely always been considered a source of wisdom in Vietnam. In the 1920s–1940s, the print press amplified the convergence between travel and knowledge since travelers could publish their travel stories in newspapers disseminated to the increasingly literate Vietnamese population. Through validations for travel, authors of travel stories attempted to carve out the social purpose, intellectual meaning, and cultural responsibility of their writing (Nguyen 2013).

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Vietnamese authors’ travel writing resulting from their encounter with the West had portrayed the customary free and equal interactions between men and women, contrasting the Western manner with the Confucian codes of conduct (e.g., Bỉnh 1968 [1822]; Phạm 2001 [1863]). In the twentieth century, travel writing diversified, yet the observation of cultures still ran as the main thread. Phạm Quỳnh, in his “Diary of Travel to France” (Pháp du hành trình nhật ký), published in Southern Breeze in thirteen episodes, from April 1922 to October–November 1925, expressed his admiration for a female French salon owner and remarked that an equivalent elegant and intellectual Vietnamese female figure could not be found (Nguyễn 2019). While previous scholars’ reactions to Western gender relations were merely amazement, Phạm Quỳnh showed a thorough understanding. He saw not only the bright but also the dark sides of France, including prostitution, poverty, and wealth inequality. Thus, his “Diary of Travel to France” presented a milestone in the development of travel writing in Vietnam (Nguyễn 2019). Travelogs by Vietnamese authors also described gender dynamics in different ethnic groups and regions within Vietnam (e.g., Mẫu, 2007 [1928]; Lang 1941; Mãn 1943a, b).

Traditionally, Vietnamese women did not travel far from their community, and when they did so, it was usually because of a dependency on their husband. By the 1920s, many Vietnamese women in the elite class had traveled far for their own cause. However, we hardly find images of Vietnamese woman travelers in the literature before the 1920s. Previous studies of Women’s News and first accounts of travel writing by women in Vietnam have centered around Nguyễn Thị Kiêm, a real-life female journalist. Her travel together with Phan Thị Nga from the south to the north to promote the readership of Women’s News and women’s rights in 1934 has been well reported. Though Kiêm had her father with her on the trip, the Vietnamese press in general, and men in particular, criticized her for her independence and “immoral” behavior. Mme Nguyễn Đức Nhuận wrote an article in Kiêm’s defense. “We can criticize a woman’s private life as long as we also criticize men,” she said in response to Kiêm’s detractors, stating that she was representing Women’s News on the speaking tour (Nguyễn, Đức Nhuận, Mme 1934: 9).

Writing about her journey, in the form of a letter to a woman named Huê, Kiêm contrasted the manners of women in Hanoi with those of women in the south and paid special attention to the heated issue of women’s suicide. She also brought into view the gap between the rich and the poor and the decadent lifestyle evident in Khâm Thiên’s “District of Female Entertainers” (Xóm cô đầu) (Nguyễn, Thị Kiêm 1934). Through her writings and other endeavors such as public speaking and fundraising, Nguyễn Thị Kiêm exemplified a young, progressive, socially engaged modern woman figure.

Nonetheless, before Nguyễn Thị Kiêm, the “Travel Stories” column in Women’s News had presented a woman figure who was more well-traveled, Phạm Vân Anh. Phạm Vân Anh has been understudied in scholarship, possibly because she was not a prominent real-life character. However, we will argue that it is precisely the case of Phạm Vân Anh that allows us to see the full capacity of journalism in producing truths about Vietnamese women.

4.3.2 Letter Writing

Whether letter writing is a genre of writing is debatable. Letters can be seen as “proto-genres whose distinctive yet infinitely malleable features can be best understood through the social and literary codes of relationship” (Jolley and Stanley 2005: 91). Most commonly, letters appeal to truth and sincerity and tolerate meandering.

In Western culture, during the eighteenth century, regarded as the “Great Age of Letter Writing,” postal routes quickly grew, and the epistolary novel became a hugely popular genre (Curran 2018). Also, for the first time, so-called “personal” letters were published to promote and maintain literary fame (Curran 2018). Letter writers of the time used the format to explore the self and everyday experience. Letters provide enticing insights into other people’s thoughts and feelings. Associated with both domestic seclusion and public self-exposure, they occupy that space between the private and public worlds.

Despite a lack of studies on letter writing in Vietnam, it is safe to affirm the growth of postal routes and the increased popularity of letter writing during the French colonial time. The period also witnessed the publication of letters in newspapers. The letter as a format of writing was often integrated into other genres of writing, with travelog as an example. The letters varied in their personal-public dynamics. “Letters for You” is a series of letters exchanged between women who were supposedly connected in real life and who wrote for each other and also for the public. Some letters were presented as if originally written for personal purposes, though readers could never be sure about that. In another series in Women’s News, “Letters Sent from France,” many letters exchanged between students abroad and family, friends, and lovers back home depict the routine challenges of life abroad (Nguyen 2015). Some were authored by well-known contributors such as Cao Chánh, who also went by the name Thạch Lan, but the majority of the articles, like the other columns, were un-authored or signed by the collective “P. N. T. V” (Nguyen 2015).

4.4 The Educational Projects of “Travel Stories” and “Letters for You”

4.4.1 “Travel Stories”

Even without assuming fundamental alignment of form, style, and attitude with the writer’s gender, to feature a woman traveler as the author of a travelog summons gender performance. The authenticity of her account depends on her gender. In Western culture, while women’s travel may have always posed an implicit challenge to patriarchy, most female travelers and travel writers have typically tended to negotiate rather than confront gender conventions head on (Thompson 2011). In performing femininity on the page, well into the twentieth century, it was common for women to adopt an epistolary or diary format, which suggests that their observations were not originally intended for publication and their moral compass was pointed toward home (Thompson 2011; Bird 2016). Politics, business, and science had long been thought to be issues that only males were capable of discussing, and indeed, they should discuss if they wanted to project a masculine sense of purpose.

“Travel Stories” does not fit in the conforming scheme described above. The motivation for presenting the first woman as the author of an extensive travelog should be understood in the context of modernizing Vietnam at the time. The introduction of a female point of view would fashion a new possibility for Vietnamese women. The writing is meant for publication, introduced as belonging to the genre of travelog. It focuses on matters usually designated for men. “Travel Stories” affirms female authority through profile details, confidence, and sentiment.

The travelog is narrated by Phạm Vân Anh, a young lady on her trip to France. As revealed in the first issue, Vân Anh comes from a wealthy family in Vĩnh Long. Her father is an intellectual who entertains quite a radical mindset. Vân Anh presents her observations during her journey through different countries such as Singapore, India, and France. “Travel Stories” was interrupted for around two months, in August and September 1929. After publishing the first part, titled “Going to the West” (Sang Tây), Women’s News explains in issue thirteen that the interruption is because the author wanted to review her writings carefully before publishing them. The name Vân Anh also appears as the author of articles in some other columns of the newspaper. The lessons of “Travel Stories” reflect the ethos of learning from the West while preserving certain East Asian, Vietnamese traditions, particularly family values. “Travel Stories” taps into the way travel writing has allowed for cultural comparison and contrast as well as the introduction of new scenes.

Vân Anh tells anecdotes and provides her comments to point out or hint at new possibilities for Vietnamese people, especially Vietnamese women. As typical of travel writing, explicit discussion of the meaning of travel is offered. Vân Anh has traveled around Vietnam and sees it as just the first chapter in her exploration of the world. On her trip to the West, she meets Cúc-Tử, a young Japanese lady, and converses with her. Cúc-Tử affirms that Japanese women have become equal to European and American women. They work as lawyers, doctors, pilots, and councilmen, yet the family remains the root of society. Taking good care of one’s family can be how a woman contributes to society. Japan can preserve the soul of their traditional culture and still learn new things. Vân Anh suggests that because both Japanese and Vietnamese are East Asian cultures, knowing about Japanese women’s status might be beneficial for Vietnamese women. The possibility of a worldly yet still “Oriental” woman figure is solidified by the respectful and affectionate relations between these two young ladies from two different East Asian countries.

Vân Anh embodies more radicality as she navigates herself during the trip, confident and engaging with a wide range of social issues instead of a narrow focus on women-specific problems. She must have already attained robust knowledge of France before the trip. While reporting many failures of the West, unsurprisingly, most of the time Vân Anh compliments the innovations of Western society, especially its infrastructure, urban planning, and lifestyles. She praises the neat organization of buildings and the transportation system. She emphasizes the convenience of traveling around Paris with the metro. While avenues, streets, and buildings seem overwhelming at first, she soon gets used to Paris and is excited to travel around the city without having to ask anyone for directions as a map would suffice. This positions the West as an ideal for Vietnam to strive toward. At the same time, a young Vietnamese lady is found in a strange Western setting, eager and fearless. Vân Anh presents herself as a scholar who is capable of envisioning a research project and appreciating art as she visits the National Library and the Louvre Museum. She expresses a mild anticolonial attitude. While staying in Paris, Vân Anh visits an anti-alcohol club and gets to know organizations that promote alcohol abstinence. She acknowledges the importance of these organizations and the danger of alcohol and opium. In a temperate manner, she questions why the French come to civilize a nation and sell to that very nation deadly opium, which is forbidden in France.

Vân Anh uses the first-person pronoun “em,” which helps endear her to her readers as though she was a younger sister of theirs. Rather than a compilation of objective observations, her travelog shows her feelings and emotions. For instance, she feels extremely nervous when informed that there will be a huge storm. In another case, she worries if there would be bad news when receiving a telegram. Here is how she reacts upon hearing a story: “I was shocked, moved beyond measure, it seems that at that time, tears were pouring out in my heart” (Phạm 1929b: 23).

Sentiment is a traditional trope of femininity, generic rather than specific to a woman type. Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh, when performing the woman persona of Đào Thị Loan in “Women’s Words” (Nhời đàn bà) in Sounding the Drum Miscellany (Đăng cổ tùng báo) and Indochina Review (see Nguyễn, Lân Bình 2018), uses a voice that could be described with such Vietnamese words meaning “sharp-tongued” (đanh đá, xéo xắt), which somewhat borrows from an existing woman type in Vietnamese folk culture. While Đào Thị Loan is basically a style of communication and a woman voice, Phạm Vân Anh is radical yet relatable in her very ideality as a woman. She has a purpose for travel: to educate herself. She demonstrates a clear attitude toward education: “In the vast universe, knowledge is boundless. We take what we can learn and accept our human limitations” (Phạm 1929a: 23). She adapts quickly to quốc ngữ and writes well in it. She knows French and is able to communicate with foreigners. She travels widely and is perceptive in observing new surroundings. She learns from foreign cultures in a critical way and respects the beauty of Vietnamese traditions. She cares about her own country but is internationally minded. She is knowledgeable and unafraid to voice her personal opinions.

Vân Anh seems overly ideal, hence somewhat inauthentic, but the point is to fashion an ideal woman figure. Đào Trinh Nhất’s performance of Phạm Vân Anh connects with the East Asian tradition of female impersonation in ancient and premodern literature and is an example of the well-known persona technique in modern journalism; thus, it is possible to read Phạm Vân Anh not as woman but as a man. However, the text is very clear: She is a woman. Phạm Vân Anh is persuasive precisely because she is ideal. The character dwells on the interplay between humility and confidence, traditionality and radicality, groundedness and ideality, man and woman. She is coherent and whole, a shining new, progressive woman subjectivity. This woman can stand for Vietnam, an ideal Vietnam in modernization.

Several articles in Women’s News show an unfavorable attitude to traits associated with the New Woman. Such an unfavorable attitude toward free love, sex, and bodily exhibition might be interpreted as a patriarchal obsession, and the question is whether the focus in “Travel Stories” on social issues presents a male obsession. In our opinion, it speaks to both men and women. Although Đào Trinh Nhất’s performance is didactic for pretending to be a woman, it neither dismisses traditional woman subjectivities nor  imposes a male subjectivity on women.

4.4.2 “Letters for You”

Besides “Travel Stories,” “Letters for You” is another Women’s News column that presents female figures who are internationally minded and socially engaged from the first-person perspective. One is Trần Thị Thanh Nhàn, an editor of Women’s News and from the city, and Lê Thị Huỳnh Lan, a writer for and subscriber of Women’s News and from the countryside. The two women have known each other for some time. Their letter exchange is simultaneously personal and public. The epistolary format is not to associate women with a domestic sphere but to bring social affairs closer to women. The different backgrounds create a sense of women’s sisterhood across contexts and a sense of grounded concerns and experience. Thanh Nhàn’s writing about world issues is based on news from telegrams. Huỳnh Lan reports issues she herself observes in the countryside. As mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, Thanh Nhàn was probably performed by Đào Trinh Nhất. There is a lack of information about Huỳnh Lan as a writer in real life, but the name also appears in other sections as a female journalist from Trà Vinh who directly raises her voice about the woman question and is a donor to a scholarship fund for poor students organized by Women’s News.

“Letters for You” discusses numerous topics including contemporary world issues, the situation of Vietnamese people living abroad, scholarships for poor Vietnamese students, Vietnamese ways of dressing, flood-related issues in the north, the inequality faced by women in the countryside, technological developments, the independent status of nations in the world, world warfare, etc. In a similar vein to “Travel Stories,” the attitude is critical yet temperate. Thanh Nhàn’s choice of what to include in her letter is explained as a matter of being strategic in building women’s consciousness.

I know that there are many stories in the world every day, but I only choose those that are useful for education, for politics, for the intellectual path of our society, and first of all for women. You should understand what I mean. I do not talk nonsense about: the prime minister of this country resigns, the cabinet of that country is set up – these things happen every day, but what is the use of knowing them for us? (Thanh 1930: 23)

The useful story for women’s knowledge in this issue is the redrawing of the world map. The two authors take turns to present their observations of either world situations or Vietnam’s situations. They engage with one another in a respectful manner. The issues discussed in the column were quite bold for women at the time, yet the way they are presented is friendly. The narrators emerge not only as each other’s friend, but also as readers’ confidantes. The authors invoke rhetorical moves that evoke the actual experience of letter writing: waiting and reminding each other about their commitment.

Please try so that you can reply to me on a weekly basis. You have many stories from the countryside to tell. You are just lazy if you do not write me. I hope that we keep our promise of writing to each other. I send you a letter about the world, and you respond with one about the countryside. (Thanh 1929b: 21)

Despite the authors’ different backgrounds, they demonstrate many commonalities. They are both writing in a modest tone whether they are discussing the most updated warfare events or funeral traditions in the rural area. This shared tone and their equal level of knowledge imply no barrier of understanding. The two women do not fit in any existing female stereotypes. If Huỳnh Lan possessed fewer ideal characteristics compared to Thanh Nhàn, i.e., if she appeared stereotypically rural with a less refined articulation, the column might have reinforced prejudices against countryside women.

4.5 An Educational Regime of Truth for Social Reform: The Journalistic Art of the Possible

Marr (1998: 11), when describing the moment when the Vietnamese love affair with the printing press began, chooses the scene of a song exhorting people to read daily newspapers that circulated in Vietnam in 1907:

Truth is the medicine that cures ignorance and darkness,

Truth is the remedy to overcome hunger and cowardice.

According to the anonymous author, any reader might learn about current events throughout the world, share what they learn with others, change lives, and contribute to the country’s strength and prosperity. More importantly, the songwriter established a relationship between the printed page and truth. Journalism appeals to truth. Women’s News claimed that it worshiped truth. It is, however, not easy to define or describe truth. From the two columns, it is possible to understand that truth is predicated on a commitment to real life. This chapter proposes the notion of “educational truth” to reflect upon a mode of truth that journalism enacts. Education is a process of facilitating the development of subjectivities and/or capacities. Educational truths are defined not by their accurate representation of an existing reality but by their effective intervention into the possible. Educational truths do not always mean new possibilities; they can reinforce established norms or enable familiar capacities. The point is that they are effective, committed to real life and do not exclude fiction.

Indeed, there is more than one meaning of fiction. Besides fiction as fabrication and fiction as a literary genre, Rancière (2014: 54) offers the following understanding:

Fiction is not the reverse of reality. It is not a flight of imagination that invents a dreamworld. Fiction is a way of deeply examining reality, of adding names and characters to it, and scenes and stories that multiply it and strip it of its univocal self-evidence.

Fiction in such a sense is essential to the art of the possible and constitutes a mode of educational truth. It allows fabrication.

In the case of “Travel Stories” and “Letters for You,” the education is to open up new possibilities for women and Vietnam. On the woman question, the two columns’ educational truth is that Vietnamese women can be internationally minded and socially engaged. Besides using two modalities of openness, travelog and letter exchange, the columns employ fictive elements in creating the woman personae, who act as the authors of the texts. They are not the authors behind the text, but the authors as texts.

This chapter calls close attention to writing the author. The author’s identity itself is a text deliberately written. The reader also brings into the scene their own text–their previous knowledge. The author, the text, and the reader are on the same ontological plane. Besides showing up as a full-fledged character, in print media the author of a text might appear just as a name, a few letters associated with the title of the text. In modern journalism and literature, a writer is not confined to a fixed number of pen names that follow conventions known to the public. Đào Trinh Nhất adopted an abundance of pen names: Nam Chúc, Viên Nạp, Hậu Đình, Tinh Vệ, Bất Nghị, Vô Nhị, Hồng Phong, Anh Đào, etc. Each name was used to match a particular communicative intent. For example, Hậu Đình and Tinh Vệ, due to their references to classical literature, hint at the status of a person who has lost their country (Nguyễn 2010).

The two columns’ extensive inventions of Phạm Vân Anh, Trần Thị Thanh Nhàn, and Lê Thị Huỳnh Lan apparently blur the distinction between journalism and literature, yet they operate within particular journalistic constraints.

Travelog, letter exchange, and persona are popular forms and techniques of both journalism and literature. Journalism is distinguished from literature in its commitment to reality and society. In literature, as a literary genre, fiction can freely play with fantasies. The fiction writer is entitled to a range of moves that the journalist is not afforded. Pretending to know what is happening in a character’s head is an instance.

Malcolm (1990: 159–60) offers her insight into the journalistic “I” as follows:

The “I” character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike, the “I” of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the “I” of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way… The journalistic “I” is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.

This division between the journalistic and autobiographical first person is perhaps too categorical, but the passage keenly points out the tenuous connection of the journalistic “I” and the writer as well as its presumed impartiality. The narrators of “Travel Stories” and “Letters for You” are carefully crafted as women. These female journalists, while emotional, present analytical observations rather than just express deep-seated beliefs.

Journalistic and literary personae demonstrate that gender is performance. The performances of woman personae in “Travel Stories” and “Letters for You” are not limited to a communication style relatable to woman readers but committed to social reform. The personae not only discuss social reform but also themselves present new possibilities. Other woman impersonations by male journalists such as Đào Thị Loan by Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh or Dã Lan nữ sĩ by Đào Duy Anh, contributor to the column “Women’s Forum” (Phụ nữ diễn đàn) in the newspaper Voice of the People (Tiếng dân) from 1927 to 1929 and translator of The Women’s Movement (Phụ nữ vận động) published by Quan Hải Tùng Thư in 1929 (see Lại 2019), should also be interpreted in relation to their endeavors to grapple with the woman question. They participate in producing educational truths for social reform. In that respect, these woman personae are similar to the woman characters in the Self-Reliant Literary Group’s fictional writings such as Nhất Linh’s Severance (Đoạn tuyệt; 1934) and Cold (Lạnh lùng; 1935), Khái Hưng’s Halfway Spring (Nửa chừng xuân; 1934) and The Escape (Thoát ly; 1938), Khái Hưng and Nhất Linh’s Tempestuous Life (Đời mưa gió; 1934). These literary works, however, focus on women’s private lives and promote woman figures who think and act for themselves, pursue personal happiness, especially romantic love, and do not follow traditional family roles, which valorize Western individualism and advocate for a radical break with tradition. They maintain the male gaze as they consistently position women as men’s romantic lovers. To many readers, Phạm Vân Anh, Trần Thị Thanh Nhàn, and Lê Thị Huỳnh Lan might appear overly male for the social capacities they afford, but making them more womanly by placing them in a domestic space is not relevant. The project of Women’s News also differs from the Self-Reliant Literary Group’s in that their modern Vietnamese woman figures are not detached from Vietnamese tradition. They echo the couplet of lục bát verse, a traditional Vietnamese form of poetry, on the first cover of Women’s News, which stands as the slogan of the newspaper.

Phấn son tô điểm sơn hà,

Làm cho rõ mặt đàn bà nước Nam.

Women’s makeup lends beauty to the rivers and mountains,

Brightening the faces of women of the Southern country.

From attending to the two columns, we understand “phấn son,” or “women’s makeup,” as gender performance. The educational truth of Women’s News lies in gender performance, which embraces the art of the possible, rather than in deep-seated, permanent natures. The feminine touch of women’s makeup lends beauty (tô điểm) to the rivers and mountains/the nation (sơn hà). Simultaneously, it brightens the faces of Vietnamese women (đàn bà nước Nam). The woman question is central and entwined with the national question. Traditional language is (re)articulated with a feminist sense.

We use the term “regime of truth” in a Foucauldian sense, to highlight the specific historical conditions that shape the mode of truth production. The regime operated in the context of modernizing Vietnam under French colonial rule in the 1920s–1930s. A regime of truth always implies specific questions. The persona performance in “Travel Stories” and “Letters for You” carries the woman question of the time and differs from male authors’ assuming feminine personae in East Asian classical literature. In an article titled “A Rebuttal by Mr. Thê Phụng: Women and Literature” (Thê 1929) in Women’s News, the author claims that women are somehow innately incapable of producing great literary works. This claim is inadmissibly misogynistic, yet the author’s justification illuminates the distinction we seek to describe. The excerpt below presents Mr. Thê Phụng’s response to Phan Khôi, often regarded as the father of the New Poetry of the 1930s, who asserts that women should be allowed to produce literature because they could then reflect their own sentiments and, in so doing, exceed their predecessors, the prior male Tang poets.

The male poet has to impersonate being a woman [giả một người đàn bà] in order to speak of himself. To do otherwise would be, first of all, impertinent [trơ trẽn] behavior and a deprivation of pleasure [một thú]. Second, we cannot expect strong talented men [trượng phu hào kiệt] such as Mr. Khuất Nguyên [Qu Yuan], Đỗ Phủ [Du Fu], and Bạch Cư Dị [Bo Juyi] to be lamenting and sobbing. If they lose their appearance [mất cái vẻ] as strong talented men [trượng phu hào kiệt], nobody would pity them, and so they naturally must entrust [ký thác vào] women with this role, because when women sob and lament, there is grace and charm, which makes it easier for people to feel pity [tội nghiệp, xót thương]. (Thê 1929: 14 as translated by Tran 2011: 7)

Tran (2011) provides the translation above as he suggests how classical male poets’ female impersonation is a form of protohomoeroticism and a construction of male femininity. In the classical world of letters, only men could transgress gender boundaries. The practice could potentially leave implications for women or be deliberately used to invent possibilities for women; however, according to Mr. Thê Phụng’s interpretation, it is primarily about and for men. Moreover, the impersonation is to be both welcomed and expected because poetry is about illusion, semblance, and creation. Vietnamese male journalists’ assuming first-person female personae in the 1920s–1930s stay in touch with but also break from tradition in that it aims at fashioning new woman subjectivities, explicitly targets women, and deals with truth. The practice is also distinct from male authors’ inventions of female characters in Vietnam’s premodern literature. Monumental female characters such as the soldier’s wife in Đặng Trần Côn’s Lament of the Soldier’s Wife (Chinh phụ ngâm), the royal concubine in Nguyễn Gia Thiều’s Complaint of a Palace Maid (Cung oán ngâm khúc), and Thúy Kiều in Nguyễn Du’s The Tale of Kiều (Truyện Kiều) challenge social norms and genuinely care about women’s fate; however, they feature tragedy, do not appear in the first-person mode, and resort to references in Chinese literature and traditional conventions of poetry.

The untied knot between the author as a writer in real life and the text that put forth the author as a text and hence a proliferation of inventions in designing the author occurred largely due to the indirect nature of print communication. Nonetheless, the specific directions of these inventions were not totally determined by the medium of communication but shaped by a heterogeneous assemblage of material, linguistic, and affective conditions at the time, a particular dispositif. In line with Foucault (1980), a dispositif is a system of relations that has a dominant strategic function. It “acts” rather than “is,” which has effects but no essence. The dispositif of journalism that the two columns illustrate functions to expand the normative limits of Vietnamese women (đàn bà nước Nam).

Indeed, there is no essential correlation between the status of women and the status of a country. One of the reasons for which Bùi Quang Chiêu opposed women’s fight for equal rights was the assumption that the fight would lead to too much opposition in the society, an excess that should be avoided as men were striving for Vietnam’s autonomy (Đặng 2008). The woman question had its own value, but part of it was the personification of the national question, which indicates a particular colonial situation. Within the rise of the print press, the dispositif of Vietnamese women involves the confluence of French colonial rule and Sarraut’s reforms, Vietnamese and East Asian traditions, Vietnamese anticolonialism, the incubation and growth of Vietnamese nationalism, the expansion of modern transportation networks, economic development in urban areas of Vietnam, and world situations such as the rise of various colonial forces, anticolonial movements, and new genders and bodies emanating from modern cultural shifts in Europe in the wake of the World War I. The pioneer position of Vietnamese journalism in social reform was actualized in relation to the inadequacy of other means under colonial rule. In the article “Vietnamese Celebrities’ Opinions on the Woman Question” in Women’s News, Phan Khôi and Diệp Văn Kỳ consider the issue of women’s equal rights from a legal perspective (Đặng 2008). They hint at the slave status of the Vietnamese people. The Vietnamese were not law-makers but only law-abiding people. The French never allowed a “colonial republic” of any form to emerge (Goscha 2016). Without the power of law in hand, education through journalism, though under heavy censorship, was particularly significant. As Vietnamese journalism, journalism done by and for the Vietnamese, built upon modern, nationalist, and anticolonialist ideas, it refused to advance a singular agenda that closes off possibilities and was committed to the opening up of possibilities. While writing for and reading certain newspapers led to consequences in real life, there was no direct, stable relationship between journalism and real life. Journalism was an art of the possible. Resonating with Rancière’s conception of politics, politics is not the power struggle between parties but the struggle for a new distribution of capacities. Thus, the educational regime of truth in focus is also political. With the rise of rural-based, communist mass movements in the 1930s, newspapers’ place as the primary space for transforming the status quo was gradually marginalized although journalism remained an important tool for different political agendas.

In a consensual context, personae are communication techniques rather than efforts of social reform. In Vietnam, certain newspapers are known for the fictive personae of some of their columns. In the current global context of journalism, prestigious newspapers often require biographical information about the writer of a text. Pen names are still used but the art of using pen names seems to have diminished. In order to create a brand name for oneself as an author in the market, both quantity and variety of writings are needed, and the connection between the textual authors and the writer behind the text should be clear. The increasing commercialization of news media and the rise of fake news have led to an emphasis on fact-checking as a key media literacy skill. While fact-checking is important, we want to draw attention to the distinction between two modes of reading in reading for educational truths: reading for information, which requires fact-checking for accuracy, and reading for inspiration, which involves engaging with fiction, “a way of deeply examining reality, of adding names and characters to it, and scenes and stories that multiply it and strip it of its univocal self-evidence” (Rancière 2014: 54). Attending to fiction trains a critical capacity to interpret what is presented as facts.

4.6 Concluding Remarks

For their consistency and wholeness in performing woman personae, the two columns were successful in fashioning internationally minded and socially engaged woman figures for a modern Vietnam. They embodied a vibrant time in journalism. Hopefully, the way “Travel Stories” and “Letters for You” contributed to the woman question and operated within an educational regime of truth for social reform in the 1920s–1930s can shape an intellectually pleasurable experience. Our articulation of the educational regime of truth aims to lend clarity and nuance to understanding the role of journalism in late colonial Vietnam. By framing journalism as educational, this chapter is also an invitation to look at education beyond the school, the pedagogy of texts, and an inspirational mode of reading.