Exile on the Commercial Strip: Vietnam War Memorials in Little Saigon and the Politics of Commemoration

In 1999 Consul General Phong Xuan Nguyen denounced the creation of a Vietnam War memorial in Orange County, California. Although dozens of memorials have been constructed since the dedication of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982, the memorial in Westminster caused particular offense to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam because of its depiction of a South Vietnamese soldier. In a letter to Mayor Frank Fry, Nguyen argued that the project would “dredge up a bitter past … that both sides have decided to leave behind.”¹ In a bid to take control from the Vietnamese refugees funding the project, he suggested replacing the proposed South Vietnamese soldier with a North Vietnamese, thereby transforming the project into a monument to reconciliation between the two nations. In an interview published in the Orange County Register, Nguyen argued, “We should have a statue that represents our relationship today.”² At stake was not only the communist country’s recently acquired standing with the United States but also its tenuous relationship with Vietnamese refugees.

The completion of a memorial by the largest Vietnamese community in the United States challenged the existing discourse on Vietnam War commemoration.³ As the first officially designated Little Saigon, a term that broadly refers to an overseas Vietnamese community but in this case specifies a tourist and redevelopment zone, Westminster’s Little Saigon is considered the capital of the South Vietnamese diaspora. Prominent members of the Little Saigon business and political community initially envisioned a memorial that contrasted sharply with American and Vietnamese narratives of the war that marginalized the contributions of South Vietnamese veterans (Figure 1).⁴ Dedicated in 2003, it is the product of nearly thirty years of predominantly suburban community formation by Vietnamese in the United States. Two years later, a second memorial funded by Vietnamese Americans was installed in a shopping center’s parking lot in southwestern Houston (Figure 2).⁵

Both of these projects appropriate suburban space to make claims about the war’s legacy for Vietnamese refugees within a transnational context. They do so by countering the absence of South Vietnamese veterans in American Vietnam veterans’ memorials and the bulldozing of South Vietnamese military monuments and cemeteries following the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. In response to the official histories produced by the United States and Vietnam, Vietnamese refugees imagine their collective identity as political exiles through explicit references to other Vietnam War monuments in the United States.⁶ The two memorials critique the invisibility of South Vietnamese veterans and their implied inferiority to the American military. They also participate in the resurgence of overtly didactic monument designs since architect Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was selected in 1981.⁷ Architectural historian Dell Upton notes that Lin’s black granite wall inscribed with the names of American casualties has spurred the recent period of “energetic commemoration,” in which monument builders negotiate between

Figure 1.

Westminster Vietnam War Memorial, Sid Goldstein Freedom Park, Westminster, California, dedicated 2003.

Photograph by Erica S. Allen-Kim. Courtesy of Tuan Nguyen.

Figure 2.

Houston Vietnam War Memorial, Universal Shopping Center, 11360 Bellaire Boulevard, Houston, Texas, dedicated 2005.

Photograph by Erica S. Allen-Kim. Reproduced with permission from Thong Pham.

symbolic and literal truths by presenting what they claim are authoritative interpretations.⁸ In the case of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial, additions of an American flag and two figurative sculptural groups, Frederick Hart’s Three Soldiers (1982-84) and Glenna Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial (1984-93), illustrate this impulse toward didacticism.

The memorials in Westminster, California, and Houston, Texas, also participate in this didactic commemorative impulse. More specifically, they express the anticommunist ideology that has dominated the Vietnamese refugee community and shaped its cultural landscapes.⁹ Their respective siting—in a civic center and in a shopping center parking lot—indicates the extent to which refugees have established a presence in suburbs, where the majority...