A thought about competence without agency in relation to Thế Lữ's "Nhớ rừng"

Around ten years ago, I first read Thế Lữ's "Nhớ rừng" in my literature class. The poem follows a caged tiger, once king of the forest, now watching the days pass as ignorant crowds gaze at it like a curiosity. Given the poem was published more than thirty years into colonial rule, I read it as emotional, resentful, nostalgic for a golden age that had been lost.

It's a narrative of mourning something you once had, and despising the hollow imitation of what replaced it.

Almost a century later, having lived in different places and now far from home, I came back to the poem and found myself relating to the tiger, just from a different angle.

Is our grief even sensible?

The tiger's grief is comparative. It lived in the real forest, so it knows exactly what an imitation looks like next to the thing itself. Looking at the zoo's manicured grass and its painted ditch dressed up as a stream, it can name precisely what's missing, because it remembers what wasn't fake.

My generation grew up almost entirely inside a manicured, policed version of nature. We don't have the memory of what we never had, so we can't feel angry when it's taken from us. We never experienced what's best, so when we're sold "wilderness retreats" and told to "live among nature," we take the bait without question.

Like actually, touch some grass

This plays out physically too, not just in advertising. Watching the outward push of affordability toward Western Sydney, further from any coastline or national park, I started noticing that the people priced out of the land closest to nature are often the same people who never got to form a relationship with it in the first place. Ask yourself, when was the last time you actually touched grass, went to the beach, or went to a national park? If it's only once every few weeks, that's exactly what I mean. Nature is so far removed from us that we treat it as a visiting location, something you plan a trip to, instead of something you live inside.

That distance, once it's physical, becomes psychological too. It's part of why so many "natural" disasters go quiet in the public conversation faster than they should. When a flood or a bushfire or a landslide hits land you've never walked on, you don't register it as loss, because you think since that's far away from you, you'll be safe, which is totally untrue considering the current state of our environment.

Learned helplessness

There's a documented pattern where repeated exposure to unpunished wrongdoing doesn't produce outrage. It produces helpless ignorance instead: people know things are going badly, believe they have no power to change it, and either look away or keep feeding the machine.

We understand the mechanism perfectly. We can name exactly how a piece of coastline turns into a resort, how a headland becomes a wall, how a fishing village turns into a corridor of condos nobody from that village can afford. We just don't expect naming it to change anything.

The tiger in "Nhớ rừng" at least has a target. It calls the crowd lũ người kia, that ignorant, arrogant lot, and it means them specifically. My generation's helplessness doesn't get that clean a target, because the chain is too long. There's the developer, the official who signed off, the bank, the buyer who wanted the view, the economy that made the land worth a hundred times what it was. Everyone is a small link, and no one is quite the tiger's lũ người to hold in contempt.

Estrangement from land means estrangement from depth

Estrangement from land mirrors estrangement from effort, craft, and depth. If you never had "best," you don't just accept mediocre nature, you accept mediocre everything, because you've lost the instrument that tells you something is thin.

It's why we consume content for its surface texture instead of its depth, the aesthetic of a thing standing in for the thing itself. It's why relationships and communities get treated as interchangeable, because nothing was ever rooted enough to feel irreplaceable. It's why we're comfortable with the provisional: provisional homes, provisional jobs, provisional selves, because nobody around us modeled permanence long enough for us to know what it feels like to miss it.

And it's nothing new

This isn't a personal failing of my generation. It's the second or third generation effect of displacement: literal displacement from land, economic displacement from rising cost, historical displacement from a continuity that was interrupted before we were born. A tiger raised its whole life in a cage doesn't choose complacency. Complacency is what the cage produces, generation over generation, until nobody left inside it remembers there was ever another way to stand.

Now what? IDK.

The poem ends with the tiger no longer describing anything. It turns and addresses the forest directly, hỡi cảnh rừng ghê gớm của ta ơi, oh fierce and magnificent forest of mine, admitting it will never see it again, that all that's left is a dream pointed in that direction.

The tiger still knows what to call out to. I don't think my generation does, not yet. We were never shown the forest, so we don't have a name for what we're missing, only a low, constant sense that something is off.

If any of this resonated with you, go read "Nhớ rừng" for yourself.