In our interview, scholar and writer Vinh Nguyen unspools memory, grief, and longing through a deeply personal account of familial separation following the Fall of Saigon, as told in his memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse. Shaped by years of reflection and academic inquiry in critical refugee studies, Nguyen traces a journey that is at once individual and collective. He reflects on the literary influences that helped shape his writing, the challenges of naming a narrative that resists linearity, and how the self can act as both subject and lens in telling stories of displacement. Vulnerable, poetic, and unflinchingly honest, Nguyen’s work blurs the line between scholarship and storytelling, theory and feeling.
The search for one’s father is central in prominent literary works. It sounds like your memoir, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse, is also driven by the search for your father when he left separately from your family after the Fall of Saigon and then vanished. Were there any stories that you read early on in your English literature studies, or even recently, that helped to shape the final product of your memoir – whether that’s stylistically, thematically, or in other ways?
I think everything I’ve read—and liked or didn’t like—has shaped my writerly sensibility. When I first started writing this memoir, I didn’t think of it as a book; I didn’t think anyone would be interested in reading it. I started writing at a moment that was necessary for me, so the whole thing felt very personal and driven by experiences I’d needed to work through. I didn’t have a “model” that guided my writing—there was no practice, really, I just sat down when I could and put into words thoughts, feelings, and desires that had been brewing inside me, sometimes for decades. During this period, I did read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and André Aciman’s False Papers, the former being about grief and the latter about memory and nostalgia, which impacted me greatly.
The memoir’s title The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse itself is poetic, poignant — ‘rain’ recalling water that is central in diasporic Vietnamese studies, and ‘reverse’ expressing a break in time, concerning memory and the past. “The migrant rain” are the final words in the poem “Visions and Interpretations” by Li-Young Lee, which you meditated on in your essay titled “The Migrant Rain.” How did you select this title, and what made this feel like the best choice among other possible titles for your memoir?
The title was the hardest thing to pin down. There were some folks who didn’t like it at all and some folks who loved it. Dan Smetanka, my US editor at Counterpoint, fought for it. I wanted a title that wasn’t straightforward, that would make someone inside a bookshop stop and ponder for a second. I also wanted the title to be open to interpretation; your reading of “rain” and “reverse” is so lovely, and I think many of the Vietnamese diaspora will see that. My hope is that, after reading this book, readers will continue to think about what the title means—what is it to fall, to fall in reverse, to pass through the migrant rain?
I’ve enjoyed reading your earlier reflections on how the personal, the self, cannot be separated from your identity as an academic scholar of critical refugee studies. You’ve written about how personal experiences and histories are valuable and can serve as frames of analysis: “The self acts as scaffolding. The self is a prism.” How have your ideas of self as generative potential in critical refugee studies evolved or expanded over time?
Critical refugee studies has grown so much in the past few years, and what’s interesting is so many scholars in the field have some first-hand or familial experience of forced displacement and migration. I think for many of us, our work is so deeply personal and structured by the “self,” even if it’s not explicitly autoethnographic or autotheoretical. Everything I do (or am) is “scaffolded” by my experiences as a subject of war and as a refugee. Knowing this has helped me to bring my critical and creative practices together, to blur the lines between a “thesis” and a “feeling,” an “idea” and a “desire,” an “intellectual argument” and an “embodied experience.” It’s very freeing because I no longer have to follow the lines, and I use the self to enter into the infinite possibilities of the world.
Is there a place for ‘self’-care during and after the trauma and labor of the ethnographic reveal/retelling personal stories? What does that look like for you as you work on your projects?
It took me decades to find a safe ground to begin shifting through my past. Some people prefer to move on, to forget, and I often wonder if that’s not a better path. Part of self-care, I think, is knowing when to begin and when to stop; it is to pause and wait. To abandon a story or project if it’s too much at the moment. To reclaim time. Make a different decision. Forget. Walk away. Even now, as I’m about to bring this memoir into the world, I’m feeling nervous and vulnerable. I want to hide, honestly. What keeps me going is community, the amazing people I have around me, holding me up, and the conviction that the book will find the reader it needs to find. That’s why going to Viet Book Fest will be such a meaningful experience for me.
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This interview was conducted by Cathy Duong as part of the Author Spotlight series. All featured authors participated in Viet Book Fest 2025, a literary event presented by the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Association (VAALA). Held on Sunday, April 6, 2025, at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, the all-day festival celebrated Vietnamese diasporic voices in literature, culture, and storytelling.
