KEVIN NGUYEN's latest, MỸ DOCUMENTS, a near-future I do not want

MỸ DOCUMENTS
KEVIN NGUYEN
One World (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this sharp and touching novel about growing up at the intersection of ambition and assimilation.

Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family, but the truth about their family is much more complicated. As young adults, they're on the precipice of new ventures—Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naive freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America create a national panic, prompting a government policy forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions.

Cut off entirely from the outside world, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long dusty days in camp, forced to work jobs they hate and acclimate to life without the internet. That is until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this as an opportunity to tell the world about the horrors of detention—and bolster her own reporting career in the process.

Informed by real-life events from Japanese incarceration, the Vietnam War, and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own—much too close for comfort. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism in America, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to each other, and to ourselves, after tragedy.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: How awful for Author Nguyen to publish this trenchant story at exactly the moment it becomes predictive. He didn't tell it with that in mind (it's not a paywall yet, you can dismiss it), saying in the article linked above that "...I worried that in all of the conversation around Mỹ Documents being timely, that its actual conflicts and themes had been obfuscated by the emphasis on the news cycle".

Steamrolled by events you thought you were extrapolating? It has to be the ultimate first sex in your stateroom on the Titanic feeling: Will I get to do this again? He's done it before. His first novel, New Waves, came out in March...of TWENTY-TWENTY. Melpomene seems to have it in for this poor author.

All that out of the way, let's have a look at the storyverse Author Nguyen's made for us. An absent father unites Ursula and Jen, half-sisters born to white and ethnically Vietnamese mothers respectively. Each woman has a full brother. Their appearance mirrors their mothers' features, so the elder appears white. She is a journalist, exempted from being incarcerated because of her less-visible paternal heritage. She is also not interested in exposing herself to difficulties by claiming kin with her incarcerated half-sibs...a continuation of her uninterest in becoming close to these people...until their connection can be useful

As the internment camp's realities begin to bite her, no internet, limited contact outside the confines of the camp or even within it, no access to any communication technology. Jen becomes part of an in-camp samizdat operation called Korematsu. Ow, my nose. That gives her something Ursula the journalist needs: reliable intel from the inside of a buttoned-up space. The sisters, with poor grace on both sides, cooperate to tell The Truth About It. How that pans out, well...white people, even half-white people prosper in correlation to their willingness to become exploiters, says Author Nguyen of Ursula; glittering kudos, lucrative contracts rain on her. Jen, her source, is traumatized by hellish deprivation and the loss of the brother she loved and Ursula did not care a fig about.

And here is where I talk about the characters, not their arcs. The absent father was a rolling stone who was too damaged...by what?...to contemplate settling down. Why the hell he didn't use a condom instead of fathering kids he wasn't around to raise remains unaddressed. (Selfishness, of course, but it's unaddressed.) Ursula and her full sib are All American White People, Jen and her full sib are not. My, that's tidy. The mothers barely registered on me. That's why there's no part of a fifth star.

The ending of the story finds Jen and Ursula...Ursula's sib vanishes somewhere along the line...completing their trajectories as set. It's all pretty pat. What it isn't is poorly told. I'm not saying "described" here by considered usage. We are not centered in a physical locale. That is not the story being told. There's little scene-setting beyond what is needed to get the immediate point across. This is, for some readers, a huge flaw. To my read of the book it is the way to immerse you in (mostly Ursula's) development, and by extension, the entire exercise's purpose of indicting our culture for simply accepting injustice, for treating injustice as infotainment, and criticizing the people seduced by empty plaudits into betrayals of human bonds that are, by rights, sacred and cherished.

Pay attention to the people who wander, all unmoored. Ask yourself why that is the choice they made for a life spent among other humans. Is it a choice you can understand?

Listening to Ursula, I can do so better than before I read this book.