An unconventional memoir that revolves around the death of a refugee father and an exploration of displacement, language, memory, grief, love, war, joy, romance, race, queer sexuality, and family
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 drifting above a bed of buried truths. To find his father-and 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.
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, sinking boats, strange reunions, stunted languages, unspoken conversations, final films, migrating 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.
The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is an intricate exploration of a searching mind. By returning and exploring the past, Nguyen exposes the psyche of a grieving, fatherless man, who is chasing certainty and still searching for resolution. VINH NGUYEN is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Brick, LitHub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen's Quarterly, The Criterion Collection, and MUBI Notebook. He is a non-fiction editor at The New Quarterly, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is 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 and his writing has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and has received the John C. Polanyi Prize for Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Non-fiction for emerging LGBTQ writers.
