The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memory of Vietnam
Vinh Nguyen. Counterpoint, $27 (272p) ISBN 978-1-64009-673-8
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. Agent: Emmy Nordstrom Higdon, Westwood Creative Assoc. (Apr.)
Details
Reviewed on: 02/04/2025
Genre: Nonfiction
Compact Disc - 979-8-228-59845-4
MP3 CD - 979-8-228-59846-1