When eight-year-old Tuấn escaped Vietnam on a boat with his family, his parents told him he was just taking a different route to visit his grandfather in the Mekong delta. Twenty-one years after the departure, he returns to a country much altered. Remembering Water is a memoir of that departure as well as his family's subsequent returns. The book alternates between Tuấn's childhood memories, his year spent in the refugee camps, and reflections on his current life in Saigon.