In April 1975, after the Southern Vietnamese capital city of Saigon was captured by the North Vietnamese Army, millions of people fled by boat, including Vinh Nguyen, author of The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memory of Vietnam. The book begins with Nguyen’s fragmented memories of his time at Phanat Nikhom, a refugee camp in Thailand. “In a black-and-white photograph documenting our first moment as refugees,” he writes, “my mother holds a placard with the number BT001401. Her lips are pressed together, sealing tension. Shallow eyes bear exhaustion, like something inside her had been snuffed out.” Eventually, the family settled in Calgary, Alberta. His father remained in Vietnam until he left on a boat to rejoin them. But he never arrived.
In 2020, we follow Nguyen as he navigates between his family’s past journey and his personal present one. After crossing oceans and landing in multiple places over the years, he vividly paints each in his prose, from the Vietnam of his youth to Calgary, where his mother still lives, to Houston for a reunion with his father’s side of the family. He tells us that “the migrant rain is what falls between the past and the present, the dead and the living. It is the screen through which everything that was is filtered.” The disappearance of Nguyen’s father haunts the family for decades, but there is no body, no physical marker of his death. He is only a “static fiction” that Nguyen has preserved.
The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is a significant memory work that details Nguyen’s life far from Vietnam, marked by the ghost of his father. His imagery and descriptions shift between the tenderness of what he remembers of Vietnam and also the reality of what he and his family endured after they fled, while also navigating the present and offering a historical record of a place just outside his memories. In the end, he realizes that “the answers I’m seeking cannot be accessed through the fact of things, but only by the residual sensations that linger in the body, the blurry images that fortify memory, and the searing truths that set feeling afire.”
