Chúng Ta Cùng Nhau at LitFest 2025!

Chúng Ta Cùng Nhau is partnering with LitFest!

At Chúng Ta Cùng Nhau, we have a vision of unity: to bring together adult children of Vietnamese immigrants—and the broader Vietnamese diaspora—by creating spaces, both in-person and digital, where we can connect more deeply with our heritage. It speaks to the shared stories, struggles, and identities that bind us, no matter where we are. Which is why we are so excited to be partnering with Litfest for the Panel: Memoir Hour - What an amazing story! with Jessica (co-founder of Chúng Ta Cùng Nhau) as the Host!

The panel features three amazing memoirs that talk about the authors experiencing life-changing journeys, including Vinh Nguyen, Vietnamese writer, who writes about his family’s experience as boat people. See the panel details below and don’t miss a chance to hear excerpts and conversations from these wonderful storytellers!

LitFest is a celebration, a moveable feast of nonfiction. At LitFest, books about real life come off the page. Avid readers connect with writers through a series of live events, great conversations, and exciting gatherings every October in Edmonton, AB.

Sunday, October 19, 2025, 1-2:30pm

Panel: Memoir Hour – What an amazing story!

Featuring: Vinh Nguyen, Dan Rubinstein, and Sarah Boon
Moderator: Jessica Truong
Tickets: $5 (student/low income), $15 (regular)
Purchase tickets HERE

Meltdown: The Making and Breaking of a Field Scientist by Sarah Boon

In Meltdown, Sarah Boon tells us about field adventures in snow and ice, the tough decision of choosing an academic career over that of a writer, and the challenges she faces as a woman in science. Her story blends adventure and academia as she traverses John Evans Glacier on Ellesmere Island, builds weather stations in northern British Columbia, samples proglacial rivers, and scares away grizzlies with helicopters. Along the way, Boon finds inspiration in the stories of historic female explorers like Mary Schäffer Warren and Phyllis Munday, celebrating the tenacity of women in the field. But her path isn’t without obstacles. In addition to the physical and psychological rigors of fieldwork, Boon faces gender bias, departmental politics, and job insecurity in academia. Her journey is also marked by injury, struggles with imposter syndrome, and a serious mental health diagnosis. Meltdown is an honest and reflective narrative about the process of finding your identity, the need for open conversations around mental health and science, and one woman’s pursuit of balance between her career and personal life.

The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse: A Memoir by Vinh Nguyen

An inventive memoir about one family’s escape from Vietnam and the father’s mysterious disappearance along the way. This book is an intricate exploration of a searching mind, shedding light on the psyche of a grieving son, as he chases certainty and seeks elusive resolution. With the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat was Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.

Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for answers. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To find his father—and anchor himself in the present—Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for years in broken hearts and guarded silences.

As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and reimagined lives. Part fractured reminiscence, part invented history, and part fictional fabulation, Nguyen’s story is about learning to live with what’s already lost and the memories of what might have been.

Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage bu Dan Rubinstein

In June 2023, writer Dan Rubinstein lashed camping gear to his stand-up paddleboard and embarked on an improbable solo voyage from Ottawa to Montreal, New York City, Toronto, and back to Ottawa along the rivers, lakes, and canals of a landlocked region. Over 1,200 miles and 10 weeks, he explored the healing potential of “blue space” — the aquatic equivalent of green space — and sought out others drawn to their local waters. But the farther Rubinstein paddled, the more he realized that being in, on, or around water does more than boost our mental and physical health and prompt stewardship toward the natural world. He discovered that blue spaces are also a way to connect with the kaleidoscopic cross-section of people he met and the diverse geographies and communities he passed through.

Weaving together research, interviews, and an unmacho, malodorous, anticolonial adventure tale, Water Borne shows us that we don’t need an epic journey to find solutions to so many modern challenges. Repair and renewal may be close at hand: just add water.

SARAH BOON is a freelance writer and editor. She has published essays, book reviews, author interviews, and articles in a range of magazines and journals, including Science, Nature, Longreads, Flyway Journal, Electric Literature, and others. She trained as an environmental scientist and held a tenured position in physical geography before returning to her writing and editing roots. She is a member of the Creative Nonfiction Collective Society and the Federation of BC Writers, and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She was a co-founder of the Canadian science blogging network Science Borealis. She blogs at https://watershednotes.ca/ and lives and works on southern Vancouver Island, traditional unceded territory of the Quwut’sun people.

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. He is the author of the academic book Lived Refuge: Gratitude, Resentment, Resilience. His writing has been short-listed for a National Magazine Award and has received the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction for emerging LGBTQ writers.

DAN RUBINSTEIN is a National Magazine Award winning writer and editor, a contributor to publications such as Outside, The Walrus and the Globe and Mail, a former editor at Canadian Geographic, and prior to moving to Ottawa he lived in Edmonton for a decade, where he worker as an editor at several publications, including Alberta Views, Vue Weekly and unlimited magazine. His first book, Born to Walk: The Transformative Power of a Pedestrian Act, was a finalist at the Ottawa Book Awards and Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. He’s on Instagram at danrubnsteinsup and his website is www.waterborne.ca