- ホーム
- > 洋書
- > 英文書
- > Politics / International Relations
Full Description
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.
