The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse - by Vinh Nguyen (Hardcover)

About the Book

"With the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat were Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished. Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for the story of his lost father. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above a bed of buried truths. To come to terms with the past, Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for decades in broken hearts and guarded silences"--

Book Synopsis

An unconventional memoir of conjuring the uncertain past and a long-lost homeland, and a vital document of one family's journey through world history

With the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat were Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.

Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for the story of his father. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To come to terms with the past, Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for decades in broken hearts and guarded silences.

The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and the lives that could have been. As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, this powerful memoir is timelier and more important than ever, illuminating the stories, real and imagined, that become buried in the rubble of war.

Review Quotes

"Gorgeous and searching, mournful and luminescent, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is a salve and a map. Nguyen has written a gorgeous meditation on being, remembering, and becoming: a stunning work through and through." --Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal

"Blazingly Brilliant." --Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife

"Guided by invention and memory, creation and fidelity, this unforgettable book puts words to what is lost and what survives, while existing, somehow, within all that cannot be salvaged by language. The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is a work of extraordinary grace and beauty." --Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing

"Dreamlike and urgent, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse captures a family history perforated by mystery, where there is no hard boundary between the real and the remembered, the present and the past, filial devotion and writerly betrayal. Every page of this ingenious book, written with tender artistry, filled me with wonder but what lingers is the unexpected love story at its core--the tale of a mother and son, committed to holding, knowing, and enlarging one another. Nguyen is a magical, dazzling writer. This book is a marvel." --Kyo Maclear, author of Unearthing

"In Vinh Nguyen's tour de force memoir, crafted with fierce emotional intelligence and heartbreaking vulnerability, the past is a parallel world where his family can be made whole again. From actual journeys, like his quixotic return to a Thai refugee camp with the aid of social media, to the poignantly fabulistic flights courtesy of fiction's alternative maps, here is a writer forthrightly reaching for all the survival tools available to him. In this homecoming of the self, Nguyen travels through doubt and desire to arrive at the terra firma of the here and now." --Monique Truong, author of The Book of Salt

"Vinh Nguyen's writing blows me away. The talent jumps out. I need this book now, yesterday. We've been needing this book!" --Edgar Gomez, author of High-Risk Homosexual

About the Author

VINH NGUYEN is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Brick, Literary Hub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen's Quarterly, Current, and MUBI's Notebook. He is a nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is the editor of the academic books Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada and The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, and the author of Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. His writing has been short-listed for a National Magazine Award and has received the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction for emerging LGBTQ writers. He lives in Toronto, Canada.