The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse
A Memory of Vietnam
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
New Quarterly editor Nguyen (Lived Refuge) reflects on his father's life and his own experiences as a Vietnam War refugee in this inventive memoir. In three sections ("What's Remembered," "What Happened," and "What Might Have Been"), Nguyen takes a nonlinear approach to his family history. The first third focuses on the mysterious death of Nguyen's father at the end of the Vietnam War, and the author's resolve to track down the Thai refugee camp where he, his mother, and his siblings lived in the mid-1970s, after the war ended. In the next section, Nguyen delivers lyrical snapshots of his father's life before the war, blending various family stories to approximate the truth. In the final third, Nguyen extrapolates what his father's life might have been if he'd managed to flee Vietnam, immigrate to the United States, and live to old age. Toward the end, Nguyen locates the refugee camp, but finds that doing so leaves him cold and "without reliable truth," boldly denying readers easy catharsis. Instead, he nimbly transports readers to a blurry past and immerses them in the biographical ambiguities of life as a refugee. It's a worthy experiment.
