Forthcoming in May 2026 from Texas Tech University Press
Between Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora lies a vast chasm. Tuan Phan’s Gills and Other Stories, which dwells between memory and progress, myth and reality, while crossing time zones and borders, wonderfully bridges that chasm.
– Andrew Lam, author of Stories from the Edge of the Sea and Birds of Paradise Lost
In knowing, compassionate prose, Tuan Phan limns the lives of contemporary Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American people, refusing sentimentality in favor of gritty humor and truth telling. His stories will stay with you, especially his resourceful, cunning, flawed yet brave characters – and you will wonder, how, through compulsively readable narratives, he has managed to make these characters linger in your mind for years.
– Chaya Bhuvaneswar, author of PEN/Bingham Finalist and Kirkus Reviews Best of 2018 for Debut Fiction and Short Fiction, White Dancing Elephants: Stories
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