Environmental Travel Narratives in the Magazine Nam Phong

From a young age and thanks to their teachers, Vietnamese children know that in their homeland “rừng vàng, biển 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, this essay analyzes travel stories published in the well-known magazine, Nam Phong (South Wind, 1917–1934), a bridge between traditional and modern cultures. For the readers of the time, it was a magazine that provided knowledge necessary for modern society. ”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 are written by an editor of the magazine or by an occasional contributor to report on a trip to the readers. 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.