Not One Vietnam, But Many: Vinh Nguyen on Capturing a Multifarious Country in Memoir

After several late nights scrolling through Instagram, I chance upon the perfect image for the cover of my memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse. Taken by a Vietnamese street photographer, the image is a long shot of an intersection; at the top, a truck is entering the frame while a car is exiting, and tucked at the bottom is a minuscule figure atop an old-fashioned bicycle. The bold lines of a crosswalk cuts through the center.

Dynamic and evocative of Vietnam without being “oriental,” I knew that there was no better visual representation of the story I was trying to tell about refugee longing.

When I reached out to the photographer, he asked to read the manuscript and, after some deliberations, graciously declined, telling my publisher that refugees is still a “sensitive” topic in the country. This decision was incredibly disappointing, but it also jolted me into the consciousness that my story might be illegible, or even banned, in my homeland.

It’s not that I was innocently unaware of the highly political nature of writing about refugees who fled post-war Vietnam during the seventies and eighties, but I had been so laser focused on crafting my narrative, on not getting things wrong, that I didn’t even stop to think about audience and reception, about the many contexts in which my narrative might exist and actually be read.

Having completed an entire book about leaving and returning to Vietnam, I was, for the first time, contemplating larger questions about whose memories can be honored, what stories are allowed to be counted, and how to hold the contradictions of a place my family and I escaped.

These questions are relevant for any displaced writer negotiating home and diaspora, but they are even more heightened for me because Vietnam is such a contested terrain. Half a century after the end of the war in 1975, Vietnam is still a site of multiple, often competing, significations: the current socialist state vs. the fallen democracy of South Vietnam, the failed American imperial intervention vs. the Third World anti-colonial victory, the communist country eagerly participating in capitalism vs. an anti-communist diaspora in the capitalist west, a people vs. a syndrome, liberation vs. loss.

Battles to claim “Vietnam” and to bring forth a vision of its future—as a nation, homeland, world-historical moment, lesson, and ideal—continue to be fought. To invoke Vietnam, then, is to enter into an already overdetermined space with expectations and demands arriving from disparate locations.

A Vietnamese Canadian writer once revealed to me that her novel was heavily criticized by community members for not being “anti-communist” enough. A colleague was told by Vietnamese government censors to scrub all traces of South Vietnam and the Americans from a keynote presentation he was about to give.

Growing up, my grandfather threatened to slap our mouths if we ever uttered the name “Ho Chi Minh.” Many of my leftist friends assumed I was proud of my country for being a symbol of anti-colonial resistance, not knowing that my father fought, and lost his life, against that very country they referred to. Other friends of mine looked to Vietnam, a place their parents lost or renounced, for a sense of cultural origin.

As I was shopping my book around, more than one publisher wanted me to tell a triumphant tale of gaining “freedom” in the west away from Vietnam, the only story they were able to see of that long, long war and the refugees it produced.

In the past fifty years, Vietnam has become a floating signifier, a meaning that shifts and turns. I myself drift through these meanings, never quite finding comfortable anchor.

With some time and reflection, I wonder if my mind intentionally avoided asking those meta questions about Vietnam while I was writing, saving me from being pushed and pulled in all directions at once. It was perhaps a protection mechanism, a way to find solid ground, if only temporarily, to put words down on paper.

For, I’m not so sure what Vietnam I wrote about in my book. I haven’t yet decided which Vietnam I believe in.

In The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse I began with what I remembered. But what I remembered is also transmitted from and filtered through my mother and other family members. I tried to reconstruct their Vietnam and then to make it my own.

And when memory reached its limits, proving inadequate, I turned to speculation to explore the truths not of what happened, but of what could have been. I wrote the stories I desired into being, to grope at the uncertainties and irresolutions of living in the ruptures of war.

But doing so, I now realize, was also a way for me to elude the pressing weight of “Vietnam.” An early reader of my writing said that my story needed history, that its significance derived from historical context. She wanted me to demystify Vietnam and the war.

For a long time, I resisted this requirement, exclaiming to myself and to others, “I’m not a historian!” But when at last I reached the outer boundaries of the personal story and things began to fray, I decided to fabulate a “history” of twentieth century Vietnam in the most fictional way possible, via a concocted romance between my parents—because stories of war are love stories gone wrong.

I condensed space and sketched composites, bringing people and events separated in time together, so they could draw the most meaning from each other. I made up a Vietnam from research and imagination, and used it to show how lives develop, transform, or are lost during wartime.

The Vietnam I conjured served as the only background I was willing to give, even if it won’t satisfy readers’ need to understand what really happened. It also allowed me to circumnavigate all that I didn’t know, and will never know, about Vietnam.

Salman Rushdie wrote that when those who’ve been away write about the places they left behind, they are creating “imaginary homelands,” cities and villages and countries only “of the mind.”

One particular place recurs with clarity in mine: Turtle Lake in the middle of Saigon, or what’s now called Ho Chi Minh City. It’s shaped like a turtle shell, symbolizing longevity: an octagonal roundabout with a shallow pond beneath a raised platform and blooming tower. This was the location my family—when we were not yet broken—gathered to take photos at every start of spring, bringing with it the possibility of change and renewal.

There’s a scene in my book when my father can’t take the misfortunes life throws at him anymore and grabs hold of his fate by the collar. Pushed to the edge, he decides to flee, to step foot inside a boat, not knowing that this decision would take his life. It happens in the early morning darkness at Turtle Lake. He gets on his bicycle and pedals down an empty street.

The last time I visited Vietnam, I saw the country through my own writing of it. I walked to Turtle Lake in Ho Chi Minh City and experienced the uncanniest recognition. My words describing the rustling leaves framed my view of the towering trees in front of me. I saw, or thought I saw, my father in his flipflops ascending a flight of stairs. I heard echoes of a wheel turning.

It was the most substantial Vietnam had ever felt to me.

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The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse by Vinh Nguyen is available via Counterpoint.