Lý Toét in the City: Coming to Terms with the Modern in 1930s Vietnam

The emergence of popular journalism in 1930s Vietnam allowed for new forms of commentary on a transformed urban life, among them caricatures featuring LB Toét, a villager bewildered by his encounters with the modern city. This article uses the LB To t cartoons that appeared in the weekly journal Phong Hóa [Mores] as a window on urban attitudes toward the modern. It suggests that the illustrations reveal a considerable ambivalence toward modernity on the part of Phong Hóa's editors, despite their rhetorical commitment to the new and the modern.