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...