{"product_id":"the-migrant-rain-falls-in-reverse-isbn-9781640097650","title":"The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse","description":"\u003cb\u003eAn unconventional memoir of conjuring the uncertain past and  a long-lost homeland, and a vital document of one family’s journey through world history\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDecades 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\"Nguyen astutely shows how a refugee’s migration narrative can be at once forward-oriented and tragically regressive; the idea of refuge cannot be defined by legal or political considerations but, as he explains, 'something to be lived, something that is not yet over or that is still to come.'\" —Thúy Ðinh, NPR \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"An innovative account that foregrounds the creative process as it traces Nguyen’s quest to revive a missing parent and investigates his shifting identity . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse\u003c\/i\u003e 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.'\" —Ruth Panofksy, \u003ci\u003eLiterary Review of Canada\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse\u003c\/i\u003e is is at once the story of the refugee experience, the immigrant experience, the grief experience, the outsider experience and the human experience. It is Odysseus longing for home, Penelope waiting by the shore, Telemachus setting out in search of his father. Nguyen’s writing is nothing short of masterful, the imagery stunning. He tells the story of his father’s disappearance through differing angles, interpretations and iterations, weaving each together seamlessly . . . Nguyen’s is a work of searching, of longing to see, of sight constantly obfuscated by the blurring effects of falling rain. His world is not one of dappled light, but of dappled shadows. It is a work of psychological depth and insight, the work of an artist who looks deeper and deeper as he sifts through the material of his life.\"—Jennifer Robinson, \u003ci\u003eThe Free Press\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eThe Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse\u003c\/i\u003e is a significant memory work that details Nguyen’s life far from Vietnam, marked by the ghost of his father. His imagery and descriptions shift between the tenderness of what he remembers of Vietnam and also the reality of what he and his family endured after they fled, while also navigating the present and offering a historical record of a place just outside his memories.\" —mónica teresa ortiz, \u003ci\u003eBookPage\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\" —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Lyrical . . . Poignantly embodies a life marked by an unsatisfiable longing.\" —\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Gorgeous and searching, mournful and luminescent, \u003ci\u003eThe Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse\u003c\/i\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eFamily Meal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Blazingly Brilliant.” ––Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of \u003ci\u003eHow to Pronounce Knife\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Guided by invention and memory, creation and fidelity, this unforgettable book puts words to what is lost and what survives, while existing, somehow, within all that cannot be salvaged by language. \u003ci\u003eThe Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse\u003c\/i\u003e is a work of extraordinary grace and beauty.” ––Madeleine Thien, author of \u003ci\u003eDo Not Say We Have Nothing\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Dreamlike and urgent, \u003ci\u003eThe Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse\u003c\/i\u003e captures a family history perforated by mystery, where there is no hard boundary between the real and the remembered, the present and the past, filial devotion and writerly betrayal. Every page of this ingenious book, written with tender artistry, filled me with wonder but what lingers is the unexpected love story at its core—the tale of a mother and son, committed to holding, knowing, and enlarging one another. Nguyen is a magical, dazzling writer. This book is a marvel.” ––Kyo Maclear, author of \u003ci\u003eUnearthing\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“In Vinh Nguyen’s tour de force memoir, crafted with fierce emotional intelligence and heartbreaking vulnerability, the past is a parallel world where his family can be made whole again. From actual journeys, like his quixotic return to a Thai refugee camp with the aid of social media, to the poignantly fabulistic flights courtesy of fiction’s alternative maps, here is a writer forthrightly reaching for all the survival tools available to him. In this homecoming of the self, Nguyen travels through doubt and desire to arrive at the terra firma of the here and now.” ––Monique Truong, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Book of Salt\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Vinh Nguyen’s writing blows me away. The talent jumps out. I need this book now, yesterday. We’ve been needing this book!” —Edgar Gomez, author of\u003ci\u003e High-Risk Homosexual\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eVINH NGUYEN\u003c\/b\u003e is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in \u003ci\u003eBrick, Literary Hub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, Current\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eMUBI’s Notebook\u003c\/i\u003e. He is a nonfiction editor at \u003ci\u003eThe New Quarterly\u003c\/i\u003e, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is the coeditor of the academic books \u003ci\u003eRefugee States: Critical Refugee Studies in Canada\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives\u003c\/i\u003e, and the author of \u003ci\u003eLived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience\u003c\/i\u003e. 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.","brand":"Counterpoint","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233713467621,"sku":"NP9781640097650","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781640097650.jpg?v=1767740508","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-migrant-rain-falls-in-reverse-isbn-9781640097650","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}