A compelling memoir about one man’s harrowing escape from Vietnam and the mystery of his father’s disappearance along the way

With the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the 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 mysteriously vanished in the open waters.

Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for answers. What he discovers is a sea of questions and buried 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. The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is the intricate exploration of a searching mind. By returning to the past, Nguyen sheds light on the psyche of a grieving person who chases certainty and seeks resolution.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, Nguyen takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes and sinking boats. Along the way he examines strange reunions, stunted languages and unspoken conversations, and explores final films, migration photographs and impossible decisions.

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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