By Justine Trinh
While the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 signaled the end of the war in Vietnam, the refugee crisis soon followed, with many people trying to escape Vietnam (my own parents included). This mass migration lasted until the mid-1990s, and many families were separated from one another. One of those families was Vinh Nguyen’s.
While Nguyen’s parents were discussing their escape, it was decided that Nguyen’s mother would take the kids while his father would leave separately. However, his father mysteriously vanished during his departure and was assumed dead. In his memoir, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memory of Vietnam, Nguyen attempts to piece together what happened using his family stories. In this undertaking, he reconciles what is remembered with what actually happened. Nguyen concludes that he is unable to provide a history that his readers need and that would satisfy his uncles’ demand to “get our history right.” Thus, Nguyen offers his readers an alternative story that encompasses his desires and that resurrects his father in this imagined space.
At the2025 Viet Book Festival, Nguyen mentioned that the publishers wanted him to change the title of his memoir to I Lost My Father, But I Gained Freedom rather than The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse in order to appeal to mass readers. However, the proposed title, I Lost My Father, But I Gained Freedom, reduces the Vietnamese American experience to loss and freedom with such a simple title. Many Vietnamese families lost loved ones during this time, and tying this loss to gained freedom continues the colonial project, as if we owe our freedom to our savior nation. There is also something transactional with the proposed title, as if Nguyen had to lose his father to gain freedom from communist Vietnam. The proposed title also does not encompass the nuances of his story or what he does with his memoir.
Nguyen’s memoir plays with the idea of what is remembered and what is forgotten and how memories can haunt us. Not knowing is a haunting in of itself as he will never know what happened to his father just as he will never be able to get history right. I really appreciated his effort to “make history fit into [his] story” because Vietnamese/American stories are often overlooked. Memory is fallible as we cannot remember everything, and our memories change so what we are remembering is sometimes not exactly what happened. An example of this is when Nguyen describes a destroyed photo of him and his father. He cannot remember what kind of shirt his father was wearing or where it was taken. Because this photo no longer exists, Nguyen is able to imagine what could have been as he states, “the most useful thing about remembering is that you can make it up.” This reimaging recreates this photo back into existence as it now exists both in memory and in the pages of his memoir.
“The most useful thing about remembering is that you can make it up.” — Vinh Nguyen
Nguyen also writes a reimagined history with his father surviving and reconnecting with the family. There is something human about wanting to change the past to have a happier outcome, and Nguyen gives his father a life that was denied to him in reality. His father has a life with his family and works a factory job before moving into construction like other Vietnamese American men. His mother and father are able to have these conversations on where they want to go (Canada or New Orleans?), and it is a mundane existence that is beautiful. While this is a fantasy, Nguyen keeps this history within the realm of belief, but because of these bounds, his father still has to die because there is no reality in which we as humans do not die. This imagined history reminded me of movies that play with our expectations of a happy ending with the imagined such as La La Land and Atonement in which we must contend with what really happens with what we want. Regardless of the made-up nature, Nguyen’s father is still given a life in these pages both in memory and in the alternative what could have been.
Following Viet Book Fest, I hopped on a plane back to Pullman, Washington, a trip I make once per month. I often pack a book to read for the flight but more often than not, I end up playing Stardew Valley on my Nintendo Switch to pass time. However, this time, I pulled out Nguyen’s book to read the first chapter before I boarded my flight. One chapter became two and then three as I carried his book onto the plane and found my seat. As the flight took off, I was five chapters in, and by the time I got home, I only had the last part left. Even after I finished The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse, I could not stop thinking about it as I returned to specific passages that made me think about these ideas of memory. I was so into this book that I begged Audrey, our co-editor, to let me add one more book to my 50th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon Book List. There will never be enough words to convey how much I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
Justine Trinh (she/hers) is an ethnic studies instructor at Butte College. She currently serves as
book club leader on the board of Soapberry Review, a journal for reviews of Asian
American literature. Her research interests include critical refugee studies, memory studies,
family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.