Book Review: ‘My Documents,' by Kevin Nguyen
As with many California high schoolers, my education in Japanese internment came from one book: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's memoir, 'Farewell to Manzanar.' My classmates and I quickly arrived at a troubling conundrum. How could a nation founded on freedom strip thousands of its citizens of their rights overnight?
'Mỹ Documents,' Kevin Nguyen's comically macabre sophomore novel, riffs on that perennial question. The photograph of an internment camp on the front cover, snapped by the legendary photographer Ansel Adams in 1943, underscores Nguyen's base assumption: Manzanar 2.0 is inevitable. The real question is what kind of culture will emerge when the camps return. (Ironic Big Dog T-shirts as a fashion trend, it turns out.)
At first, the book reads like a realist family novel. Four half siblings stare down their respective comings of age. Ursula, a disaffected young journalist, and Alvin, a fresh-faced Google intern, navigate the work force. Jen and Duncan are students on the edge of self-discovery, at N.Y.U. and an Indiana high school.
They share an emotional wound from the Vietnamese father who abandoned them. Despite their bond, cracks are visible early on: clashing personalities and outlooks on life, differences in class and ethnic identity (Alvin and Ursula are biracial). Nguyen's prose is wry but lively, and promises a sprawling story about the ordinary dramas that make a life.
Then, a delightful twist arrives, albeit in a horrifying package: A series of terrorist attacks lead to legislation that creates internment camps for Vietnamese Americans. Jen, Duncan and their Vietnamese mother are incarcerated; Ursula and Alvin snag exemptions. With such imaginative risks, Nguyen kicks what has turned out to be an alternate history of the 2010s into high gear.
The writer is a stellar satirist. (The title itself is an inside joke: 'Mỹ' is the Vietnamese word for America.) Take, for example, the fact that the legislation responsible for the camps, American Advanced Protections Initiative, shares an abbreviation with the demographic category it targets. An otherwise unassuming sentence takes on a much funnier, and politically astute, resonance: 'Being half white certainly helped but didn't always guarantee exclusion from A.A.P.I.'
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