A young woman in a red hoodie and wide sunglasses stopped her motorbike just past Tree 55 on Nguyen Huy Tu Street in central Hanoi. She snapped a photo with her phone. She stared at the tree again. She lingered with defiance.
No one else was parked there at lunchtime on Tuesday in front of the quiet men in pairs with hints of plainclothes authority — the middle-manager dress shoes, the aviator shades.
Tree 55, as everyone likely knew, was where an 18-year-old student, Do Ngoc Phuong Thuy, better known as Mina, had been hit along with her father by a BMW. She died after being thrown from a motorbike just days before her university exams. That was 15 months ago.
I was there this week to see whether flowers would arrive. The bright bouquets teens and 20-somethings kept delivering, photographing and sharing on social media. The ones the police had recently removed. And if tension hovered in their absence, it was with good reason.
On Monday night, after an eruption of Gen Z outrage and creativity thrust Memorial Tree 55, or “The Tree of Justice,” into the local zeitgeist, Vietnam’s national broadcaster officially confirmed what many had long insisted: A former Communist Party official, Nguyen Sy Cuong, had been behind the wheel of that BMW.
The TV report said Mr. Cuong — who had been vice chairman of the foreign affairs committee in the National Assembly until earlier this year — caused the crash by illegally driving on the wrong side of the road. It also said that he was not prosecuted because he had compensated the victim’s relatives, and they chose not to press charges. The victim’s father, with his face obscured, urged people to move on in the segment, which did not mention that Mr. Cuong’s wife is Vietnam’s minister of culture, sports and tourism.
