Remembering Water is a gem of a memoir: poetic, honest, insightful, humorous, and captivating. Like water flowing back to its source, Tuan Phan’s voice is powerful yet gentle, sweeping yet intimate. This book is a must-have for anyone who has ever experienced loss and trauma as it offers the pathway toward healing and peace.

—Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, internationally best-selling author of The Mountains Sing and Dust Child

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. The memoir devotes careful attention to the catastrophic moments in Tuan and his family’s life but also gives equal space to smaller, more quotidian 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. For readers who have never been here, Saigon as described in the memoir comes across as chaotically charismatic as it truly is. 

– Paul Christiansen, author of the bilingual essay collection Beneath Saigon’s Chò Nâu

As much as this book is a memoir, intimately generous in its recounting of Phan’s escape with his parents from Vietnam by boat in 1986, to their eventual relocation in the US, it is also (and for me often more provocatively) a sensitive attempt to find meaning and stasis in a city and country ravaged by exit wounds. For Phan and his parents, and the many like them turned from Vietnamese citizens into refugees, that harrowing transition is only half of the story. The second part, gravidly filtered into Phan’s prose, has to do with what it means to go back to a place that is cruelly vestigial: a relic both of itself and of your former self. 

– Kevin Quinn, writer & editor @kevinquinnreads