Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam

Fifty years after the Fall of Saigon and twenty years after her family’s emigration to America, Minh Nguyen returns to her native Vietnam to find out what’s left of the old revolutionary project. In Memorial Park, a collection of essays pairing travelogue and criticism, Nguyen encounters relics of proletarian romance and vestiges of totalitarian control amid an evermore corporatized society. Along the way, she considers how contemporary artspeak confuses state censors, the rise of luxury “Smart Cities” as they supplant socialist housing complexes, and the enduring appeal of propaganda signs that once promised utopia. Her investigations reveal a nation at odds with its past, caught between preserving its socialist legacy and embracing capitalist transformation. Driven by a diasporic curiosity that seeks discovery over dwelling on loss, Memorial Park refuses nostalgic idealism or reflexive condemnation. Instead, Nguyen takes seriously the legacy of Vietnamese liberation by naming what it has become—and what it decidedly is not. The result is a nuanced portrait of contemporary Vietnam and a meditation on how we inherit, understand, and ultimately reckon with radical histories that shaped our world.