Interview by Innas Tsuroiya
Portrait by Nathan Bajar

IT Early on in the book, you admit that the initial romantic view you had of the revolution was only possible at a distance. Has this view changed over time? 

MN Innas, we first met in 2023 in Yogyakarta, where you used to live and I was visiting for the first time. My trip to Indonesia was romantic, in a related way. I’ve always been inspired by Indonesia’s leftist history, specifically the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) being the third largest communist party in the world at one point, and astonishingly non-ruling. They were scapegoated and brutally extinguished, and now villainised. Though Indonesian and Vietnamese communism have shared genealogies and both reached the heights of their powers around the 1950s and 1960s, their afterlives in public memory have played out as opposites. In Indonesia, you have the Museum of the Indonesian Communist Party’s Treachery, while every state museum in Vietnam celebrates the communists. The challenge in Vietnam is reading between the lines of state historisation, but for me, also about treating its political history with more earnestness than the generally anti-communist diaspora would. The book began somewhere between those two positions, and that’s still where I am. 

IT Speaking of time, I want to ask you about chance. You mentioned the randomness of US immigration that changed your family’s trajectory, and a Tumblr ad for a Vietnamese radical history workshop that opened your mind. How does chance play a part in transforming individual and social worlds? 

MN Our lives are so randomly determined in a sense, what kind of family you’re born into, even where you migrate. The chance of your life gives you a certain experience, and then there is what you do with that. It’s what draws me to autobiographical yet sociological writing like Leslie Feinberg, or Annie Ernaux, or Didier Eribon. If there is no agency in chance, writing about your position in the world is a way to claim some. 

IT The way language is cunningly wielded in the pursuit of political objectives, or to evade them altogether, can sometimes shape a nation’s literary tradition, as illustrated by one of your essays. The same goes for art and visual culture. As a critic, do you find this generative? 

MN I’m constantly ambivalent, to be honest. I think that the mutability of language is strategic, but I also want words to have real repercussions in the world. 

IT I find your remark that “the diasporist is also just a tourist in the end” humorous and intriguing. Is that why you choose to combine criticism with travelogue? 

MN Working with my friend Leon as the editor really shaped the book. He knows my style well, and what I’m trying to say even when I haven’t fully expressed it. We both love clean, direct writing. I am more emotional in my drafts and he distills it. There’s a psychoanalytic method where the analyst stands behind you and speaks as if they’re you, and you can refute the statements or adapt them. Our editorial relationship is kind of like that. He’d write lines and I’d think, I would never say that, or, that is what I would say if I were more bold. I value writing as a practice of becoming more bold. We’re both Sagittarians who love travel writing, and intellectualising romance. When I was staying at the condo I describe in “Red City Smart City”, I couldn’t stop journalling about how sensorially psychedelic it was. The thing that you can’t stop writing about, that you need to process – that should be your subject. “Criticism”, “travelogue”, “memoir”: these are marketing labels, ways to communicate the book in simple terms. The form just makes sense to me, temperamentally. It feels like an album – there are sad songs, clangorous ones, ambient interludes. 

NW The stakes presented by Memorial Park are well-defined. What does the research process involve, and what’s on the cutting room floor? 

MN There are periods when I write a lot. I’m outgoing and sociable, but also intensely sensitive. Writing is a way to talk all day and be alone all day. I wrote a lot of the book in six months. I had gotten a 295 grant and quit my job, blowing through all the money. It pains me to think how much I spent, but that’s what grants are for. So you can experience being free, being aristocratic, not needing to work in order to live, even briefly. As with all of my writing, for every page there are five on the cutting room floor. Associations, derivations, segues… A text needs a certain discipline in its direction, where it’s bringing the reader and why. 

IT How has the reception of Memorial Park been, so far? 

RT People keep telling me they read the book in a day. At first this made me wince a bit, because I certainly took longer than a day to write the book. I recently gave the book to a friend who proceeded to read half of it in front of me. That brought me squirmish pleasure. I’ve been having a complex time with the attention. I want to be widely read, and yet I’m uncomfortable being perceived. Or rather, I want the writing to be scrutinised, not me. But when you write about yourself, you sacrifice that choice. 

IT Optimism is erotic, so I want to ask about this sort of optimism. What gives you hope? Who do you write for? 

MN “Optimism is erotic,” the line you’re quoting, opens the second section of My North Vietnamese Friend. I was referring to how optimism (utopianism) as a rhetorical style of communist aesthetics made so much experimentation possible. Erotic as in generative, fertile. I like that line because it reminds me of Björk lyrics. I write for people trying to understand the world better. I write for young people, who I love. I write about art and artists but I don’t write for the art world as a primary audience. In fact I am constantly trying to steer myself out of it. .