Born in Saigon in 1977, Tuan Phan and his parents left for America via boat in 1986. Remembering Water includes depictions of the voyage including lengthy stops in refugee camps followed by acclimation to a new country and culture. It articulates struggles of exile and assimilation similar to many other diaspora experiences, but his story is unique because Tuan returns to live in Saigon as an adult and encounters a place significantly different from his childhood recollections. The memoir concerns itself not just with the changing city and his relationship with it, but also with more illusive ideas regarding the fallibility of memory and if one can feel more at home in the past than the present.

“Like an Instagram filter, my mind had turned segments of my childhood Saigon into prettier, more flawless versions, glossing over all imperfections,” Tuan notes after he realizes the tennis courts he had pictured as pristine, near-Olympic venues were in fact rundown and ramshackle. Most can relate to people, places and objects seeming more impressive when they were young, but growing up alongside them allows for a gradual easing into an adult understanding of them, compared to Tuan who has them thrust at him abruptly decades later. Rather than grow angry at the imprecise elements or abandon them for their inexactitudes, Tuan settles on an admirable approach: “But if the memory was imprecise, it still held some truth, for if the details I remembered were false, the bliss I felt had been preserved undiluted over the years.” In its juxtaposing of memory and reality, the book suggests the veracity of one’s memories is less important than the emotions ushered in by their conjuring.

Tuan Phan. Photo via Hidden River Arts.

To write the book, Tuan interviewed his mother and realizes that their memories differ; not just in what particular details she held onto and which she discarded, but in overarching feelings about entire experiences. He admits that his “memory seems hazy when it comes to the harsher details,” while his mother is haunted by the hunger that gnawed at them after leaving Vietnam and the patriarchal system that impeded her professional development. “Does memory work its muddled, incoherent way with my past, flecking it with happiness, with imagined joys, when all experiences on that boat for my mother were ones of horror, of dark anguish? I recall the beautiful moments of our escape with clarity, but I’ve locked away the fear she felt, the spectre of death that loomed throughout each day on that boat within her memory,” he writes. In acknowledging this, he underscores the sacrifices and bravery of his mother and reminds readers that trauma experienced is often greater than trauma passed down.

The fallibility of memory

While Remembering Water does devote careful attention to the catastrophic moments in Tuan and his family’s life, it gives equal space to smaller, more common experiences, whether it's the simple joys of teaching a childhood crush how to ride a bicycle or the visceral thrills of riding a motorbike during the city’s monsoon season. These deviations from a core narrative may be the book’s most enjoyable elements because of Tuan’s descriptive gifts. Because of them, one doesn’t need to be familiar with Thanh Đa to picture the crowded apartment blocks and the waters curling around them “like the tail of a resting cat.” Similarly, when the seeds of District 1’s cherished dipterocarp trees are “dropped in quiet whirls of leaf-winged descent, as soft as meditation,” the descriptions paint pleasantly familiar images in my mind as I picture scenes I have seen with my own eyes. For readers who have never been here, I predict the city comes across as chaotically charismatic as it truly is.

If the memory was imprecise, it still held some truth, for if the details I remembered were false, the bliss I felt had been preserved undiluted over the years.

Much prose of diaspora writers fit in the murky territory between fiction and nonfiction while adhering to the conventional structures and pacing of novel. Remembering Water is self-assuredly a memoir that embraces the genre’s room to drift across topics. In this, it resembles how one’s memory works. We all hold onto trivial scenes and anecdotes for no apparent reason. While this can be infuriating when considered against all the things we wish we could remember but do not, the errant recollections add a fascinating texture to the story of our lives we can tell ourselves. A few moments in Tuan’s book function this way, such as a brief aside about 1990s video game soundtracks or an extended tangent on the romcom Em Chưa 18. They may initially seem out of place against discussions more centrally important to the memoir, but ultimately tether the entire work to a true and singular human voice.

Past vs. now

“I hope you’re not writing about a nostalgic, lost Saigon… Are you? There’s enough of that in print already,” Tuan’s roommate says at one point regarding the then-in progress memoir. One assumes Tuan included the detail as an acknowledgment that he penned such a work knowing others exist. The book does indeed focus on a disappeared Saigon. But similar to how memories are impacted by decades of absence, he encounters the loss all at once, abruptly realizing that “the Saigon of my past had already disappeared, existing only in the loose tendrils of my memory that sever and drop upon the slightest tug.”

Tuan seems to channel his parents’ and Aunt’s bitterness towards cityscapes and lifestyles that no longer exist when he reflects on the changes to Saigon, even when confronted by young inhabitants of the city who question: “Would you want to go back to the years before đổi mới, when there were daily blackouts in every neighborhood? When there was a rice shortage and people were hungry? Why would we want to relive those years? Why would anybody?” But Tuan remains unconvinced, coming to the realization that ties together the book’s themes: “The Saigon I knew then was beautiful because it was the riverine city of my sheltered, protected childhood, and if I can partially live in it again through language, through sentence and reminiscence, then that serves as a salve and balm to my weary sojourning soul.”

The Saigon I knew then was beautiful because it was the riverine city of my sheltered, protected childhood, and if I can partially live in it again through language, through sentence and reminiscence, then that serves as a salve and balm to my weary sojourning soul.

Hopefully, in several decades Tuan will pen a follow-up memoir, perhaps exploring the city’s continued changes and his place within it. Absent a child’s innocent sheen will his memories of recent years be as lovingly recalled? As Saigon no doubt continues to change what emotions will he attach to the current and soon-to-be-disappeared cityscape? To what rises in its place? Regardless of what such a book might contain, if it is written with the same thoughtful examinations and skilled descriptions, it will be worth picking up.

Remembering Water is available for purchase here in paperback and Kindle format here.