Vinh Nguyen's memoir reflects on the complex legacy of the Vietnam War
The Toronto author shares how he wrote The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse
April 30, 2025 marks 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War. The historic conflict led to more than one million people being displaced — and forced to leave their home countries of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Canada accepted approximately 200,000 refugees from the region between 1975 and the 1990s. Born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vinh Nguyen was among those who fled Vietnam by boat along with his mother and siblings — but his father, who left separately, mysteriously vanished.
In his memoir, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse, he retraces his family's journey from post-war Vietnam to Canada — and how this moment in history resonates with experiences in the diaspora today.
The work is a genre-bending mix of real-life experiences, meticulous research and inventive history to explore the nature of family, immigration and identity.
Nguyen is a Toronto-based writer, editor and educator whose work has appeared in Brick, Literary Hub, The Malahat Review and more. The author spoke with CBC Books about how he wrote his memoir.
The elevator pitch
"I pitched The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse as a speculative memoir. It revolves around the mysterious death of my father and this process that I have had to kind of work around — the long road toward grief and figuring out any kind of resolution towards his unresolved death. And the book begins with memory, as most memoirs do.
It begins with memory and it moves forward. As it moves forward, it hit the limits of memory.- Vinh Nguyen
"It begins with memory and it moves forward. As it moves forward, it hit the limits of memory. And so increasingly, the book becomes speculative.
"I moved towards thinking about what could have been, what did I want to have happened? What are my desires to continue the narrative and to bring it towards something that feels right for me?
"And so the book really is about desire. It's about not necessarily what happened, but about the emotional and psychic life of desire."
LISTEN | Vinh Nguyen on The Sunday Magazine:
My father is fictional
"My father to me, right now, is an invention. The last time I saw him I was six.
"I have very fragmented memories and I have stories about him that other people tell. And so it's their memories, it's their relationship to him. So my relationship to him is very inventive, very speculative, very desire-based. It's a very fictional relationship with my father.
"And in some ways, one of the interesting things about the book — and writing the book and learning from it — is to understand how easy it is to occupy his absence.
My father to me, right now, is an invention. The last time I saw him I was six.- Vinh Nguyen
"He's not here and he can be anybody. Whereas my mother, I've had to live with years and years and years. I get annoyed at her and I yell at her and we fight and I love her. And it's complex. It's like living with any living individual, right?
"And so my father, he's this absence that I can do whatever I want with."
Life as a refugee
"Life in the refugee camp, for me, was freedom. I left Vietnam when I was six. I was in kindergarten. But in the refugee camp, I did not have school. There was no formal schooling — so I didn't actually have formal schooling until I was 10 when I came to Canada. And so for me in the refugee camp, I knew, of course, things were off.
"I knew something was wrong. I knew that my father wasn't there. I knew that there's this struggle, right?
"At the same time, I had a certain kind of carefree childhood. I roamed around with my friends. I didn't go to school. I played. I let my imagination run wild. I'm just thinking about my nieces and nephew and the children that I know now, it's like they're going to … school all day and their lives are packed full of activities and kind of life.
I knew something was wrong. I knew that my father wasn't there. I knew that there's this struggle, right?- Vinh Nguyen
"I didn't have any of that. I was just on my own. My mother and siblings had so much to deal with. I had a lot of time to myself and I played. So it's really interesting, right?
"Of course there is this sort of darker underside of being in a refugee camp. But at the same time, for somebody like myself, for a child like myself, it was a childhood."
Playing with time and location
"[I was exploring] a kind of thinking about the ethics of storytelling — thinking about telling the stories of others, thinking about history. I was thinking about what I want to reveal about myself. All of these things are the questions that actually stop a lot of people from writing nonfiction.
"I think you have to trick your mind. You have to trick yourself into almost feeling like nothing else exists ... But I think you have to get rid of some of these larger questions to even begin.
I think it was really important for me to not chase the truth: the truth of what transpired, what actually happened, what are the facts, what are the dates?- Vinh Nguyen
"People talk about writing family memoirs as a type of betrayal. But I do think you have to kind of be a bit of a bastard in order to write a family narrative. There's that meaning of bastard as sort of that kind of estranged family member. But I'm thinking bastard in the sense of letting go of this fidelity to or purity of the truth.
"It's such a weight on so many nonfiction writers. I think it was really important for me to not chase the truth: the truth of what transpired, what actually happened, what are the facts, what are the dates?
But it was really important for me to think about truth in a different sense: the truth of my own desire. It's an internal truth that I need to create into being."
The Vietnam War 101
"I definitely did not want to write a 'Vietnam War 101.' Those history books exist.
"The Vietnam War, according to one historian, is like the most over documented war in history. There's so much out there in terms of both historical narratives, personal narratives, cultural productions, films, books. There's just actually too much.
"I'm not a historian. I don't want the book to be a history lesson. It was really interesting: early on in the [writing and editing] process, there was an early reader who said that in order for my story to make sense, it has to be rooted in history. The Vietnam War is one of the most important world historical events in the 20th century. A personal narrative has to kind of have a stake in that and I think she's right.
I think it's true that my story is a small story. It's a little story. And I don't want to be a cultural guide.- Vinh Nguyen
"I think it's true that my story is a small story. It's a little story. And I don't want to be a cultural guide. I don't want to be a historian. I don't want to do the easy work of telling history for readers.
"And so there is the second part in the book that is called a made-up history. In some ways, I played with that idea that, in order for me to write my story, I had to rehash and rehearse history. I did it in the most fictional way and that part is the most fictional section of the entire book.
"The thing is, I did read a lot of books and did a lot of research to make things historically grounded. But my writing of it is via this fictionalized romance between my mother and my father ... because, as I write in the book, stories of war are love stories gone wrong. And the second section is this kind of movement through 20th century Vietnam in the history of the war.
"It looks nothing like how we want history to look like."
Caught the rain
"I have a full-time day job, which is being a professor. I wrote most of this through the latter end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024. It was a very quick process. I knew that I wanted this book to be released this year and this month because of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War.
There's a lot of rain in the book and it's on purpose. I think every chapter has some reference to rain and to water.- Vinh Nguyen
"Because I do think at the end of the day, I do want this book to have an anchor. I think the anniversary is the perfect framing for understanding a story like mine because it is a larger social historical story. I didn't want it to be floating alone. I wanted to have a vessel, which was this momentous anniversary.
"There's a lot of rain in the book and it's on purpose. I think every chapter has some reference to rain and to water. I hope that that image brings readers back some kind of understanding of their own relationships. We all have this relationship to loss.
"I want this book bring back their own relationship to loss and to grief — and what it means to be to be alive right now and be present."
Digital interview by Ryan B. Patrick. Vinh Nguyen's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
