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 and his writing has been shortlisted for a National Magazine Award and has received the John C. Polanyi Prize for Literature. In 2022, Nguyen was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Non-fiction for emerging LGBTQ writers and in 2024, he was a writer-in-residence at the Historic Joy Kogawa House. Born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, he lives in Toronto.
”Guided by invention and memory, creation and fidelity, this unforgettable book puts words to what is lost and what survives, while existing, somehow, within all that cannot be salvaged by language.”–Madeleine Thien (Do Not Say We Have Nothing)
An inventive memoir about one family’s escape from Vietnam and the father’s mysterious disappearance along the way. This book is an intricate exploration of a searching mind, shedding light on the psyche of a grieving son, as he chases certainty and seeks elusive resolution.
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 was Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.
Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for answers. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To find his father—and anchor himself in the present—Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for years in broken hearts and guarded silences.
As the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches,The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and reimagined lives. 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.
Starring Vinh Nguyễn. Hosted by Andrew Phung
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