Ripple Effect

For seven years, Vinh Nguyen’s father was interned in a Communist re-education camp in postwar Vietnam. Although he struggled valiantly to “protect what was inside him” during this period of prolonged punishment, Ngoc Can Nguyen ultimately was defeated. He emerged from detention heartbroken and unemployable and returned dispirited to his family. Another seven years later, in 1989, he disappeared. As Vinh Nguyen puts it in The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse, it was as if his forty-six-year-old father “fell from our lives.”

A literature professor at the University of Waterloo, Nguyen was born in 1982, not long after his father rejoined his mother and three siblings. The family lived as a unit in Ho Chi Minh City. But after six years of hardship and deliberation, his forty-year-old mother elected to flee Vietnam without his father, who remained behind in case the escape failed. She and her four children were smuggled via bus and boat across the border into Cambodia and somehow made their way to Thailand. There they spent three years in a series of refugee camps, the last of which was Phanat Nikhom, since replaced by military barracks and government offices.

Nguyen’s father was en route to reach them in Thailand when, presumably, he was lost at sea. “I had only five years with him, few enough to be counted on one small hand,” Nguyen writes. “My father got into a boat to join us at the refugee camp. We never heard from him again.” This chronicle is an attempt to come to terms with that enduring absence.

With “no official record, no certificate, no body to confirm his death,” Nguyen is haunted by the idea that his dead father could “return without warning in any shape or form, at any moment in time.” Actually, it is another death — that of his doctoral supervisor, mentor, and best friend, Don — that opens this book. Don’s untimely passing as a result of an aneurysm left Nguyen with “the sensation of being pierced by an icicle.” In the midst of grief, and as he grappled with the loss of this “soulmate, the closest thing I had to a father figure,” a long-neglected wound reopened. Suddenly Nguyen realized that his true father had become a disembodied haze of the imagination, that his persistent feelings of yearning, melancholy, and isolation stemmed from an inability to reconcile his parent’s “mysterious death while seeking asylum.” Thus, mourning Don awakened an urge to properly mourn his father — to probe a primal, unresolved calamity.

After joining Facebook groups of those who had spent time at the Thai refugee camp, Nguyen decided he would travel to the site, which “had taken over my waking life and animated my dream one.” But the COVID‑19 pandemic delayed his plans. Sequestered in his Toronto apartment, Nguyen turned instead to writing as a means of traversing time and distance. The effort, “psychic and emotional” rather than physical, was hampered by a dearth of circumstantial detail. Nonetheless, he worked to resurrect his father by seeking narrative coherence. He studied the ruin and aftermath of the Vietnam War, which so altered his father’s life and continues to mark his own. He solicited personal history from aunts, uncles, and cousins as far away as Calgary and Houston. Finally, he claimed the right to “bend memory” and “stretch facts” in service of his story, and he simultaneously resolved to “unstitch” his deeply rooted self-perception as a fatherless son.

The result is an innovative account that foregrounds the creative process as it traces Nguyen’s quest to revive a missing parent and investigates his shifting identity. Unable to muster his father’s presence, since he has very little recall of the man, Nguyen relies on a neighbour’s sighting, kindred lore, and his mother’s recollections. He also invokes cherished mementoes to confirm his father’s existence. The text incorporates two such artifacts. A reproduction of his father’s driving permit opens the volume, while a photograph of his parents, sisters, and brother before Vinh’s birth — suggestive of his continuing sense of lack — closes the book.

Nguyen’s narrative is driven by a central question — What happened to his father? — that begs for an answer. His artful response, crafted as much for the pleasure of his readers as for himself, is to contemplate alternative life trajectories for him. To counter the bald truth “that he was dead,” Nguyen offers “a made‑up history” that envisages a shared life for his parents. His telling embellishes how they meet and survive the bombings, gunfire, and terror of the Vietnam War; how once the conflict subsides, his father is summoned to a meeting with the new Communist government and does not return to the family home; how his drowning is awash with “regret for not knowing the future and what that future will do to the people he loves.” Alternatively, his father returns safely from fighting, immigrates to the United States, and then sponsors his wife and children. The family dwells for stretches of time in California and Texas, where his father toils at a string of jobs. He is a devoted husband and helps raise his two daughters and two sons. In retirement, he visits his grandchildren and takes fishing trips to Florida. He advances in age and dies peacefully in hospital.

Nguyen’s mother also features in this work. As a disciplined and practical woman, she believes “facts have to be true” and is suspicious of her son’s writerly speculation. Moreover, she has access to “many things my son doesn’t know.” By including her voice and inserting her own record of events and feelings alongside his fanciful renderings, Nguyen affirms a profound attachment to his mother, who was left to raise him and his siblings alone. At the same time, he is amplifying the self-reflexive nature and personal dimensions of this project.

In the end, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is a meditation on the devastation wrought by war and its lasting generational effects. It is also a celebration of human ties. As the memoir makes clear, the abiding love of his relatives, friends, and life partner sustains Nguyen. It allows him to re-engage with an enigmatic separation, to journey to Vietnam and Thailand — for Nguyen, places both real and imagined — and to move through a tale that writes his father “back into his life” and slowly proceeds to “let him go.” This return, however difficult, leads to a future that is less encumbered by the unknowable past. For it embraces irresolution and, despite his beloved mother’s distrust of fabulation, honours memory’s malleability.