Jen, Duncan, Alvin and Ursula Nguyen are just four of millions anxiously watching the news after a series of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil prompt the government to implement a new policy: the American Advanced Protections Initiative (AAPI), which mandates rounding up Vietnamese Americans and detaining them in internment camps. The cousins, all young adults beginning new phases of life in school or work, are soon split. Jen and Duncan are brought to Camp Tacoma, while Ursula and Alvin, through strokes of luck, are passed over. Author Kevin Nguyen grounds his second novel in the real U.S. history of the Vietnam War, Japanese internment, immigrant detention and much more, which means that though you could call Mỹ Documents a dystopian saga, it’s eerily reminiscent of historical fiction.
The grim contrast between Jen and Duncan’s life during internment and Ursula and Alvin’s freedom becomes the focal point of Mỹ Documents. While Jen and Duncan are stuck in a dry wasteland in California, with scant access to outside information, media and even medicine, their cousins experience as normal a life as can be lived while having a target on their backs.
Many interspersed chapters are formatted as newspaper articles on the status of the internment camps, seemingly written by Ursula, a journalist whose career is finally taking off. Sometimes, they reveal new background about the progression of the internment program; often, they expose how differently information travels within the camps versus outside. As the years go on under the policy, it is only the risky communication between Jen and Ursula—forged with help from El Paquete, Camp Tacoma’s underground distribution network for contraband—that’s able to make a difference in their lives.
The novel lags toward its middle, when the relationships between the characters can feel underdeveloped. Still, Nguyen’s intricate, striking and poignant plot is to be admired. Mỹ Documents portrays a vision of the country that is distressing in its realism, a memorable, unsettling reminder that both the conditions we allow and the ways in which we resist are crucial sides of the American story.
