About

Join Vinh Nguyen and Jeremy Tiang for a conversation on stories of family and politics in the midst of two wars. In Nguyen’s memoir, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse, the author tells the story of his family’s journey from Vietnam at the end of the war, and his father’s disappearance. Mixing memories with imagination, Nguyen weaves together a story of what might have happened and shows a side of the Vietnam War readers might not have seen. In State of Emergency, Tiang’s novel taking place from the 1940s to present day, the story follows a journalist returning home years after a massacre known as ‘the Emergency’, to find the truth about her extended family’s experience navigating the choppy political currents of Singapore and Malaysia during that time.

Moderated by Nedra Rodrigo

The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse

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State of Emergency

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Vinh Nguyen

Vinh Nguyen is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Brick, Literary Hub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, The Criterion Collection’s Current, and MUBI’s Notebook. He is a nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing.

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Photo credit: Nam Phi Dang.

Jeremy Tiang

Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright and translator from Chinese. He was awarded the Singapore Literature Prize for his novel State of Emergency and for his translation of Zhang Yueran's Cocoon, and he recently won an Obie Award for his play Salesman之死.

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