Renison faculty member Dr. Vinh Nguyen has worked for years in the area of critical refugee studies. Throughout his academic career, he’s asked the question, “what is refuge?” and his award-winning 2023 book Lived Refuge, examined the lived dimensions of refuge via gratitude, resentment, and resilience. That work allowed Nguyen to turn his focus inward and examine his own experiences as a refugee in his memoir, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse. Nguyen, his mother, and his siblings were among the millions of asylum seekers who fled Vietnam after the end of the war in 1975.
Nguyen categorizes The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse as a “speculative memoir,” one that centres on the mysterious death of his father, who got on a boat to flee post-war Vietnam in 1989 and then subsequently disappeared. In some ways, it’s part memoir and part mystery; the book begins with recalled memories, but then slowly becomes reliant on speculation to explore what could have been, what should have been, and what Nguyen wanted to have happened. He calls this a book about “desire.”
The timing of the memoir is significant, both in its writing and its release. Nguyen says he started the book during the pandemic by “putting down words that needed to be put down, and some kind of story began to emerge.” During this time, he was grieving the death of a close friend and mentor, and that death opened up space for Nguyen to process the unresolved grief over the loss of his father decades earlier.
2025 is a significant year for Vietnam and those of Vietnamese ancestry—it is the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. From the beginning, Nguyen knew he wanted the publication of his memoir to coincide with the anniversary, placing it within a wider context with the goal of increasing the meaning for readers. The anniversary marks an important historical moment, the end of a long and contentious global war that shaped a generation and produced a refugee crisis with millions fleeing their homelands in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It’s a deeply personal story but, Nguyen says, “it’s not unique – many refugee families share the same arc, if not the exact details, of the story I’ve recounted.”
Nguyen hopes that readers will recognize that, at its core, his memoir is an anti-war story, a book that sheds light on the aftermath of war and displacement. Rather than a heavy-handed political tract, Vinh says the message of the memoir is: “Look at what war has done. Look at what it necessitates people to do, and live, and yearn for. Look at its ruins, its long-lasting imprint. It stains.”
The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse will be released on April 8, 2025. Book launch events are being held across Canada and the United States. Locally, the book launch will be held at the Waterloo Public Library’s Eastside branch on Tuesday, April 8, in partnership with Words Worth Books.
When: Tuesday, April 8, 2025, 7:00pm
Where: Waterloo Public Library Eastside Branch
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