A compelling and inventive memoir about one family’s escape from Vietnam and the father’s mysterious disappearance along the way. This is an intricate exploration of a searching mind, shedding light on the psyche of a grieving son, as he chases certainty and seeks resolution.

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 was Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.

Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for answers. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To find his father—and anchor himself in the present—Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for years in broken hearts and guarded silences.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and imagined lives.

Part fractured reminiscence, part invented history, and part fictional fabulation, Nguyen’s story is about learning to live with what’s already lost and the memories of what might have been.

VINH NGUYEN is a writer and educator. His work appears in Brick, LitHub, the Malahat Review, PRISM International, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, the Criterion Collection and MUBI Notebook. A non-fiction editor at the New Quarterly, he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant and diasporic writing. He is the editor and author of three academic books, Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada; The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives; and Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. Currently, Nguyen is a cultural consultant and consulting writer for the hit CBC sitcom Run the Burbs. His writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and shortlisted for a National Magazine Award, and he received the John C. Polanyi Prize for Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in non-fiction at the Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.

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“Blazingly brilliant.” — Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife

"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

“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

“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

“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: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets