Minh Nguyễn is a Vietnamese American architect and writer. He has spent forty years reading buildings, and the last several learning to read the one he grew up inside.
In 1975, Minh fled Vietnam by boat with his family at the age of eleven, eventually resettling in a small town in Minnesota that had never seen a family like theirs. He went on to become an architect, and for forty years has designed things for other people — practical, structural, load-bearing things.
He came to writing later in life, almost by accident, while trying to put words to a past he had spent decades moving past instead of through. What began as notes for his children became a memoir, and the memoir became a way of finally reading the structure he had been standing inside his whole life: the silence, the survival, the quiet architecture of a family that protected itself by never quite explaining itself.
He writes about memory, silence, fathers, mothers, and the particular inheritance of growing up between two countries that never fully agreed on who he was. He lives and works in San Diego.
Personal essays drawn from the same material as the memoir, each one a single room rather than the whole house.
A son finally asks his mother the questions he spent decades avoiding, and learns that her silence was never emptiness. Appears in the August/September 2026 print issue.
"It's a nice introduction to your memoir." Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer
On the 1975 Gallup poll that found most Americans opposed his family's resettlement, and the country that let them in anyway.
A memoir of fleeing Vietnam by boat in 1975, the long quiet work of rebuilding a life in a country that didn't ask for you, and the silence a family builds to survive — and the cost of living inside it long after the danger has passed.
This is not only an immigrant's story. It is an account of what gets inherited without anyone meaning to pass it down, and what it takes, decades later, to finally set it down.
New essays, news on the memoir, and nothing else. No more than a few times a year.