Poetic musings on absent father an evocative, emotional downpour

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This article was published 12/04/2025 (549 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The title of Vinh Nguyen’s latest book The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse comes from a poem by Lee Young-Li.

The poem’s narrator climbs a hill to his father’s grave but never arrives. It ends:

and all of my visions and interpretations

depend on what I see,

and between my eyes is always

the rain, the migrant rain.

At the end of the Vietnam War, Nguyen travelled with his mother and siblings to a refugee camp in Thailand. His father stayed behind in case it became safe for them to come back, or in case his application for a U.S. visa was approved and they could start a new life in America together. After a period of waiting, when it seemed neither would come to fruition, his father decided it was time to join his family. He set out on the journey, and no one has heard from him since.

Did he die, as many did, in the boat crossing? Could he still be alive? What might have been had he made it to shore? What kind of man was he, what kind of man would he have been and what finally made him decide to leave that day?

Nguyen’s work is a coming-to-terms with the answer he finds: he will have no answers. It 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. He looks at it through the perspective of Ho Chi Minh, through an invented and impoverished boy in Ho Chi Minh city, through the eyes of a dog, a gun, the Presidential Palace, Jun Lin (murdered by Luka Magnotta) and others. His mother writes a section of the narrative, and another section details what he imagines his father’s life would have been like had he made it to America.

These stories, each drops of rain, reflect war and its aftermath, racism and hardship, love and the odd ghost flitting through the present before disappearing again. It is a story of grief and its many, many forms.

Themes and images recur and repeat, shifting ever so slightly with each new re-introduction, the holding up of a prism, looking through it from yet another angle. 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.

A reader of this book happily tilts her face to the darkening sky and feels the cool drops of rain sliding down her skin.

Jennifer Robinson is a Winnipeg writer and psychotherapist.