The migrant rain falls in reverse A memory of Vietnam

New Quarterly editor Nguyen (Lived Refuge) reflects on his father's life and his own experiences as a Vietnam War refugee in this inventive memoir. In three sections ("What's Remembered," "What Happened," and "What Might Have Been"), Nguyen takes a nonlinear approach to his family history. The first third focuses on the mysterious death of Nguyen's father at the end of the Vietnam War, and the author's resolve to track down the Thai refugee camp where he, his mother, and his siblings lived in the mid-1970s, after the war ended. In the next section, Nguyen delivers lyrical snapshots of his father's life before the war, blending various family stories to approximate the truth. In the final third, Nguyen extrapolates what his father's life might have been if he'd managed to flee Vietnam, immigrate to the United States, and live to old age. Toward the end, Nguyen locates the refugee camp, but finds that doing so leaves him cold and "without reliable truth," boldly denying readers easy catharsis. Instead, he nimbly transports readers to a blurry past and immerses them in the biographical ambiguities of life as a refugee. It's a worthy experiment. Agent: Emmy Nordstrom Higdon, Westwood Creative Assoc. (Apr.)

A Vietnamese Canadian writer and educator searches for his lost father. In 2019, when his beloved academic mentor died suddenly, Nguyen was pitched back into the maw of an earlier loss, realizing that "for almost three decades, I'd managed to avoid coming to grips with my father's mysterious death while seeking asylum." Nguyen's father spent years in a forced labor camp, returning home only to face the fall of the South Vietnamese government a few years later. At that point, Nguyen's mother took the kids and escaped by boat to Cambodia, then Thailand, where they spent several years in a camp before emigrating to Canada. "I don't know why he stayed behind. I've never been able to muster the courage to ask my mother." In the course of his lyrical, sorrowful memoir, Nguyen does not actually learn anything more about his father's life and death, but describes travels and imaginative projects inspired by his longing. At one point, he found himself binge-watching action serials from his Vietnamese childhood. "I want all the words to crowd my mind again. I'd happily erase Deleuze and Derrida to let them in." He wonders at his own trajectory--a person who had no formal education until the age of 10, later becoming a professor--and includes details about his current life as a gay man in Toronto. The memoir embraces its inconclusiveness through imagery--blurred images seen through slanting rain--and direct statements: "All the things that have troubled me--that my father is dead, that he died in unknown circumstances, that he might not actually be dead, that his afterlife lingers, that I have to live some of this life for him--all that, all this, will continue to trouble me until my time is up." Poignantly embodies a life marked by an unsatisfiable longing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.