PSB: Vinh Nguyen, author of The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse, with Lan Duong and Yến Lê Espiritu

Event Description

Porter Square Books: Boston Edition is thrilled to welcome Vinh Nguyen for the release of The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse. Authors Lan Duong and Yến Lê Espiritu will join Nguyen in conversation.

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ABOUT THE MIGRANT RAIN FALLS IN REVERSE

An unconventional memoir of conjuring the uncertain past and a long-lost homeland, and a vital document of one family’s journey through world history

With the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat were Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.

Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for the story of his father. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To come to terms with the past, Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for decades in broken hearts and guarded silences.

The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and the lives that could have been. As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, this powerful memoir is timelier and more important than ever, illuminating the stories, real and imagined, that become buried in the rubble of war.

PRAISE FOR THE MIGRANT RAIN FALLS IN REVERSE

"Inventive . . . [Nguyen] nimbly transports readers to a blurry past and immerses them in the biographical ambiguities of life as a refugee. It’s a worthy experiment." —Publishers Weekly

"Lyrical . . . Poignantly embodies a life marked by an unsatisfiable longing." —Kirkus Reviews

"Gorgeous and searching, mournful and luminescent, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse is a salve and a map. Nguyen has written a gorgeous meditation on being, remembering, and becoming: a stunning work through and through." ––Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Vinh Nguyen is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Brick, Literary Hub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, Current, and MUBI’s Notebook. He is a nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is the editor of the academic books Refugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada and The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, and the author of Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. His writing has been short-listed for a National Magazine Award and has received the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction for emerging LGBTQ writers. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Originally from Việt Nam, Yến Lê Espiritu is Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She has published extensively on Asian American communities, critical immigration and refugee studies, and U.S. colonialism and wars in Asia. A founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (CRSC), Espiritu is the lead author of Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies (University of California Press, 2022), written collaboratively by CRSC members.

Lan Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism. Dr. Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, examines transnational Vietnamese cinema and its engagements with history, politics and memory. Her book of poems, Nothing Follows, was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2023.