The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memory of Vietnam [Hardcover]

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. Nguyen astutely shows how a refugee’s migration narrative can be at once forward-oriented and tragically regressive; the idea of refuge cannot be defined by legal or political considerations but, as he explains, 'something to be lived, something that is not yet over or that is still to come.' —Thúy Ðinh, NPR

An innovative account that foregrounds the creative process as it traces Nguyen’s quest to revive a missing parent and investigates his shifting identity . . . The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is a meditation on the devastation wrought by war and its lasting generational effects. It is also a celebration of human ties. Asl£,