Hoang Thang DINH (PhD, Pollical Science, Fellow, Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism)
Political power can rename a city. It cannot rename the collective memory of a people.
Governments may redraw maps, revise administrative boundaries, issue decrees, and proclaim new official identities. Yet history repeatedly reminds us that collective memory obeys a different power paradigm. It is not created by administrative power, nor can it be abolished by administrative power. It is shaped by lived experience, by family stories, by the emotional geography of childhood, by the streets, schools, hospitals, cafés, seasons, departures, and returns through all of which a people slowly comes to recognize itself.
Half a century has passed since the National Assembly of Vietnam officially renamed Saigon as Ho Chi Minh City. From the standpoint of state administration, that decision took effect immediately. From the standpoint of historical consciousness, however, the change of name has unfolded in a far more complex and revealing way.
1. A City May Be Renamed, but Memory of what was Cannot Be Disciplined
There are events that alter the destiny of a nation. There are decisions that change borders, institutions, and even the official name of a city. But there are also realities that neither time nor the power to command can easily erase. Among these realities, collective memory may be the most invisible, yet also the most durable, inheritance of a people.
Fifty years ago, the renaming of Saigon opened a new chapter in Vietnam’s political history. It marked the end of one historical order and the beginning of another. Administratively, the change was clear and immediate. Maps were revised. Documents were updated. The official vocabulary of the state was transformed. Yet the history of administration and the history of a people’s inner moral life do not always move at the same pace or in the same direction.
Today, several generations of Vietnamese have been born and raised without ever seeing the name “Saigon” on their birth certificates or household registrations. And yet the name remains alive in the most natural rhythms of Vietnamese speech. People in the North still say they are “going to Saigon.” People in Central Vietnam still say they are “heading into Saigon.” People in the South still speak of “going up to Saigon.” Across the Vietnamese diaspora — from Paris, Berlin, and Budapest to California and Sydney — millions of Vietnamese continue to speak of Saigon not merely as a place, but as a memory, a longing, and a fragment of their own lives.
After half a century, this persistence of a name can no longer be explained away simply as a a linguistic habit. Nor can it be sublimated under a political attitude. Something deeper is at work. The continued life given to the name “Saigon” reveals the extraordinary resilience of collective memory. It shows that what endures in history is not always what power has officially declared, but what generations of human beings have carried within themselves.
Memory operates according to laws different from those of power. Memory is rooted in childhood, family, neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, streets lined with tamarind trees, old cafés, sudden tropical rains, farewells, reunions, and all the ordinary moments that quietly become part of the soul of a city.
It is precisely those ordinary things that crystallize into personal identity. A city is not only an administrative unit. It is a lived world. It becomes real through the emotional and moral attachments of the people who inhabit it, leave it, remember it, and pass its name on to the next generation. That is why Saigon has survived not merely as a former name, but as a cultural symbol, a style of life, and a spiritual presence through which many Vietnamese, wherever they may live, still recognize something of themselves.
In this sense, Saigon today is no longer only a geographical designation. It has become a moral and cultural reference point. It evokes not simply nostalgia for a vanished city, but poses for all who hear it named a broader question about the continuity of Vietnamese history. What survives after political rupture? What remains after war, victory, defeat, and administrative transformation? Which memories become the property of the nation?
Perhaps the most interesting development after fifty years is that the present itself has begun, cautiously but unmistakably, to return to that memory. When Vietnam’s current leadership recalls Saigon as the former “Pearl of the Far East,” or refers to the time when Singaporeans once came to Cho Ray Hospital for medical treatment, the significance lies not only in those specific remarks. More important is the fact that the memory of Saigon is gradually re-entering official discourse. Memory is overcoming power.
That return is revealing. It suggests that the deeper sediments of collective Vietnamese consciousness never truly disappeared. They merely sank beneath the surface of political history. At certain moments, when a nation begins to search for standards by which to imagine its future, those submerged layers of memory rise again. They become not a burden from the past, but a source of reference for the future.
The same tendency can be seen in education. In recent years, the idea of “liberal education” has been invoked more frequently in Vietnam. Yet any serious attempt to trace the Vietnamese roots of that spirit cannot ignore the educational legacy of Saigon before 1975. This does not require idealizing the past or denying the limitations of that historical period. It simply requires intellectual honesty. Knowledge has no national or party flag. A good school, a capable hospital, and an open cultural environment do not lose their value merely because they emerged under a different political system. If they were achievements of Vietnamese people, then they belong to the unmanipulated inheritance of the Vietnamese nation.
It is at this point that the story of Saigon rises above the question of a city’s name. It asks a much larger question: when does a nation possess enough confidence to regard the whole of its history as a common inheritance?
After war, history is often told in the different languages of the winners and the losers. But after half a century, what remains most important for the Vietnamese is no longer that 1975 line of division. What demands attention is the question of which values still possess enough vitality to accompany the nation into its future. If Vietnamese people still speak of Saigon today with recognition, tenderness, or respect, then what they are recalling is not only a city of the past. They are also pointing toward a possible source of inspiration for the future.
Saigon, therefore, is not merely a name that refused to disappear. It is a reminder that a nation cannot mature by amputating parts of its own memory. A mature civilization does not fear the complexity of its past. It learns to distinguish between political rupture and historical continuity. It knows that the deepest foundations of national identity are not built by forgetting, but by transforming memory into a common inheritance.
2. Healing Begins by Respecting One Another’s Memory
If, after half a century, the name Saigon continues to live naturally in the language of millions of Vietnamese, then the essential question is no longer what the city ought to be called. The more important question is why this memory has proved so enduring. The answer, perhaps, lies not in the name itself, but in Vietnam’s unfinished journey toward reconciling differences in its own history, antagonisms and contradictions within Vietnamese-ness itself.
For many years, Vietnamese society has spoken of national reconciliation as both an aspiration and a necessity. No nation can move confidently into the future while remaining divided by unresolved memories of the past.
Yet reconciliation cannot be achieved simply through commemorative ceremonies, political declarations, or official slogans. Those may express goodwill, but they cannot by themselves restore the moral trust that history has fractured. Genuine reconciliation is not merely a political process; it is, before all else, a cultural and ethical achievement. It begins when citizens become willing to acknowledge the legitimacy of one another’s memories, even when those memories are not identical to their own.
Throughout the years following the war, Vietnamese people have often been encouraged to “leave the past behind” in order to focus on the future. There is undeniable wisdom in looking ahead. But looking ahead does not require erasing what came before.
The past is not a door that can simply be closed at will. It survives within the memories of individuals, families, and communities, and memory has never yielded easily to administrative decree or ideological instruction. No government possesses the authority to legislate remembrance. Political institutions may shape official history, but they cannot fully determine the history that people carry within themselves.
For that reason, no nation can truly heal by amputating part of its own memory. Nor can reconciliation flourish if one group of citizens is expected to forget before it is permitted to belong, while another is encouraged to remember only within officially prescribed boundaries. Healing does not require uniform memories. It requires the moral generosity to recognize that different memories may all belong to the same national experience. Diversity of remembrance is not a threat to unity. Properly understood, it is one of the conditions through which authentic unity becomes possible at a higher level of generalization as to who we really are.
The passage of time offers every society an opportunity to revisit its history with greater calmness and greater intellectual honesty. The Saigon that existed before 1975 possessed both remarkable achievements and undeniable limitations. The Ho Chi Minh City of today likewise represents extraordinary vitality, creativity, and economic dynamism, while at the same time confronting new questions concerning urban development, social cohesion, and the quality of public life. Neither historical period should be romanticized. Neither should be dismissed. Both deserve to be understood as successive chapters in the continuing history of Vietnam.
Only when these different chapters are viewed as parts of one continuous national experience can history become a teacher rather than a battlefield. The purpose of remembering is not to assign permanent moral superiority to one period over another. It is to understand how a nation has evolved, what it has learned, where it has failed, and which achievements remain worthy of preservation regardless of the political circumstances under which they first emerged.
Some Vietnamese scholars have compared the nation to travelers who have not yet fully crossed the symbolic “River of Stars” toward reconciliation. The metaphor is illuminating. Wars may end with military victories or diplomatic agreements, but the currents of memory often continue to flow on for generations before they finally mingle. Territorial peace does not automatically become peace within the human spirit. A nation may rebuild its roads, bridges, and cities within a few decades. Rebuilding mutual trust among memories often requires much longer.
Seen from this perspective, Saigon is no longer merely a story about South Vietnam, nor simply a reminder of an earlier political order. It has become a measure of Vietnam’s own cultural confidence. A mature nation does not fear memory, nor does it require memory to submit to political authority. It understands that the more turbulent its history has been, the more necessary it becomes to preserve every layer of that experience with honesty and compassion. National identity grows stronger not because difficult memories disappear, but because they are gradually woven into a broader and more generous understanding of the nation’s common journey.
Perhaps the time has come to look at Saigon through a different lens—not as a symbol of division, but as an inseparable chapter in the making of modern Vietnam. A people who preserve every layer of their historical memory are ultimately richer than a people who preserve only those memories that conform comfortably to the present. The spiritual resources that enable a civilization to renew itself are rarely created overnight. They are accumulated slowly across generations, deposited quietly within the collective consciousness of a nation, and rediscovered whenever history demands new sources of wisdom.
Ultimately, healing does not mean forgetting. Nor does reconciliation require unanimous interpretations of the past. It asks something both simpler and more demanding: that a nation possess enough moral confidence to accept the whole of its own history as a shared inheritance. Only then can memory cease to divide and begin, at last, to unite.
3. Still Saigon—Still Vietnam
Half a century has now passed. The city bears a different official name, a different skyline, and a different place in Vietnam’s national development. New boulevards have replaced old avenues. New urban districts continue to expand beyond what earlier generations could have imagined. Ho Chi Minh City has become one of Southeast Asia’s most dynamic metropolitan centers and the principal economic engine of the country. History has never stood still, nor should anyone wish to reverse its course. Every generation must build upon the foundations it inherits while creating new possibilities for those who follow.
As nations move forward, what should they carry with them from the past? Economic growth, technological innovation, and institutional reform are indispensable. But civilizations are sustained not only by what they build. They are equally sustained by what they choose to remember. Material progress gives a nation greater capacity. Historical memory gives that capacity meaning.
Perhaps the most revealing question after fifty years is no longer whether the city should officially be called Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City. The more revealing question is why the name Saigon continues to resonate so naturally across generations of Vietnamese, including many who never personally experienced the city that once bore that name. The answer lies neither in geography nor in ideology. It lies in a far more enduring characteristic of human societies. People readily adapt to changing institutions, but they seldom abandon the memories that have become woven into their moral and emotional identity.
That attachment should not be mistaken for nostalgia, nor should it be interpreted as resistance to historical change. Rather, it reflects one of the essential conditions of civilizational continuity. A mature society does not preserve its identity by freezing history. It preserves its identity by allowing each generation to reinterpret inherited memories without destroying them. Historical continuity is not the absence of change; it is the capacity to carry the past into the future without becoming imprisoned by either.
For that reason, no civilization becomes stronger by erasing the achievements or experiences of earlier historical periods. It grows stronger by integrating them into an increasingly comprehensive understanding of itself. Pre-1975 Saigon possessed accomplishments worthy of recognition, alongside limitations that deserve honest assessment. Contemporary Ho Chi Minh City likewise reflects remarkable achievements while confronting challenges that will define Vietnam’s future. Wisdom lies neither in idealizing one period nor condemning another. Wisdom lies in recognizing that both belong to the same unfolding story of the Vietnamese nation.
Vietnam today often speaks of entering a new era of national development. Such an aspiration is both legitimate and necessary. Yet no genuinely new era can be built upon fragmented memories. A nation advances most confidently when it possesses the moral courage to regard the whole of its history as a shared inheritance—to celebrate genuine achievements, to acknowledge painful failures, and to learn from both with equal honesty. This is precisely what may be described as the sedimentation of collective consciousness: those quiet layers of memory deposited over generations within language, culture, social habits, and the moral imagination of a people. They cannot be manufactured by political authority, yet they quietly sustain the continuity of civilization itself.
Seen from this perspective, Saigon is no longer simply the name of a city. It has become evidence of a larger historical truth. Political power may administer the present. Historians may continue to debate the past. Governments may reinterpret national narratives according to changing circumstances. Yet the collective memory of a people ultimately belongs neither to governments nor to historians. It belongs to the civilization itself. No political authority, however powerful, can permanently govern the inner memory of millions of human beings.
Nations reach true maturity not when they cease discussing their past, but when they no longer fear it. They become stronger when they recognize that historical memory exists not to serve the political needs of the present, but to deepen the moral resources with which the future will be built.
Fifty years from now, this city will undoubtedly look different once again. Its skyline will continue to rise, its economy will continue to evolve, and future generations will inherit a Vietnam very different from the one we know today. Yet if those future generations still speak the name Saigon with quiet familiarity and unforced affection, that will not represent the failure of some part of history. It will represent one of a civilization’s deepest victories: the triumph of collective memory over the transience of political power.
Perhaps that is the shortest path by which Vietnam, after enduring so many crashing waves and violent storms in its modern history, may finally guide its national vessel toward the farther shore—not through enforced forgetting, but through using the quiet wisdom of remembering together.