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