At the nexus of assimilation and ambition: Kevin Nguyen on MY DOCUMENTS

Photo by Robyn Kanner

Kevin Nguyen is a writer and editor in pursuit of urgent and enduring stories. He works across fiction and journalism.

His new novel, My Documents, is out now on One World. In this incisive and poignant story about growing up at the nexus of assimilation and ambition, the lives of four family members significantly change when the U.S. government starts detaining Vietnamese Americans.

Interview by Nirica Srinivasan

I found it really exciting to be reading a book that had this very sprawling quality, in terms of time span and characters and themes. I've been calling it a Great American novel when I'm recommending it to people. After your first book, what was it like to approach this kind of scale? What kind of effort did that take?

My first book has three point-of-view characters, but it really focuses on one. And I think for this book I wanted to do something different. I wanted to challenge myself a little bit. Structure is something that's really interesting to me. And I think the first book does something interesting, but I wanted to do something also different from that. I developed these four, arguably five, point-of-view characters. So yeah, all that to say it was quite challenging! It was writing something completely different. Even though the work itself was kind of the same—like, you sit down at the same computer with the same ambition and suddenly you just have a completely different project.

The thing that first caught my eye with Mỹ Documents is the title, because it’s such an interesting wordplay. I also thought of that while reading New Waves, where as I was reading it there were these different ways you could interpret it or different ways it recurred through the book. And with Mỹ Documents, you actually mention the title in the book itself. How did you come up with that? Did it come early on or in the writing?

It's funny with titles. With the first book, New Waves, I had a really hard time coming up with a title. I wrote it for a long time without having an actual working title. I'm really happy with New Waves as a title, because I think there's this kind of trend in Asian American literature for titles to evoke nature or some kind of proverb. I just felt like I had seen too much of that. And New Waves kind of sounds like it's doing that, but when you read the book, you know, it references a bunch of .wav files on a computer, which couldn't be further from evoking nature, which I thought was funny. I think I like titles that I think are funny. Maybe they're just for me. I don't know if they're actually helpful for the reader.

With Mỹ Documents, obviously “My Documents” is the name of a folder on every computer. And then “Mỹ” is the Vietnamese word for America. I came up with that [title], I guess it's a pun, kind of early, so I knew that was going to be the working title of the book from the beginning. I think I was just trying to spare myself from having to title it later! And if you're Vietnamese, you'd probably pronounce the book “Mỹ [pronounced like “me”] Documents,” and then if you're not Vietnamese, you'd pronounce it “My Documents,” and both would be correct. But I just like there being a secret little element for my people.

One World

I was actually curious about this, because I think on the official Penguin website and a couple of others, it doesn't have the diacritic. And I was like, that takes away the pun! How do you feel about that?

I wish the diacritic would show up everywhere, but I'm not going to email all these places [laughs]. And I think it's actually difficult for some websites to encode the “y” with the diacritic. So there are these technical hurdles that I honestly did not imagine when I titled the book, but also I think I'm just okay with it.

Some people ask me if my publisher cautioned me about using that or had any issues with it, and they were super into it from the beginning, which I really appreciate.

I'm generally curious about how you approach naming in this book. I thought names were really important. The ones I was thinking of were Korematsu, which is the underground publication Jen writes for, and how even at the end of the book she doesn't actually ever know the significance of the name. And then El Paquette being named for this actual real-life thing in Cuba. And then Paladine, the company that sets up the Tower. I was just curious about how you approached naming.

So Korematsu is named after Fred Korematsu, who was sued by the US government for not wanting to go to camp. I think it's just a funny element where a lot of the book is about the history that you don't get taught in schools, and then when Jen's in camp, she definitely cannot learn—she cannot Google who Korematsu is or what it references. I thought it'd be kind of funny later, even though she has evoked his legacy in her underground publication, to still not know who it was would kind of illustrate some of the dynamics of the book.

I think every Japanese American knows who Fred Korematsu is, but I bet very few Vietnamese Americans do, and that illustrates that divide—that even though we are all under the Asian American Pacific Islander umbrella, that our histories are very different, our cultures are very different. And our understanding of each other's histories and cultures can be quite divergent.  I think there are a lot of examples of that happening in the book.

El Paquette, that's named after the real network in Cuba, this asynchronous, bootleg internet. It's just one of the cooler stories that I've ever encountered. When I was in Havana, I could see it—though I'm not sure it exists quite in the same way. I also imagine too, that if the world ended and we're in some post-apocalypse, we would still use technology, but we would just be moving things around with flash drives because there'd be no infrastructure for the internet. But we'd still have individual laptops, and we'd still have movie files, and there'd be something kind of physical about the digital then, and that I think that's a very cool, interesting texture.

And then with Paladin, I think I just kind of loosely wanted to [reference] Palantir, this big private surveillance company. It's founded by Peter Thiel; it does lots of defense contracting.

I don’t know if people have been calling your book dystopian, or speculative, but I think maybe those are tags that could be considered relevant. But I am kind of fascinated by how it didn't feel like that to me when I was reading it, both because it seems so possible that something like this could happen in some way, but also because there's historic precedence for a lot of what you're talking about. You’re drawing from a lot of real-life history. Did you think of that kind of speculative, dystopian tag when you were writing?

It has been interesting. I don't read a lot of speculative or dystopian fiction, so I didn't necessarily have that in mind when I was writing, which I think is what you suspected. And as people have been reading it and some of the earlier reviews have come out, yeah, the tag of dystopian and speculative has been applied. And I don't think it's incorrect. It's just not necessarily how I think of it. Because I think for a lot of those stories, the animating thing has to be—not fantastical, but for dystopian literature, something has to have ended the world, right? You have to invent something that happens that causes the [end of the world]. Same with speculative, there's this new technology, or some kind of encounter that changes society.

But maybe it's not too far removed from what happens in Mỹ Documents. It's just a policy, you know. That's what happened during Japanese incarceration—it was an executive order signed by the president, and if you've been paying attention to our president, he's been signing a lot of executive orders lately. So in a way I do think it's close to our reality. And also, I want people to understand that it is a switch, basically. It can happen.

What was it like to look at these historical moments and then recontextualize them for the present?

I've been reading about Japanese incarceration off and on since college, so a couple decades now. I think I went into it wanting to write a book about Japanese American camps. I didn't get too far into it, because I just wasn't finding the story that felt urgent to me, or made sense for me to write. And you know, there's a lot of great literature about Japanese incarceration. Juliet Otsuka comes to mind. All her work is incredible. And then I had this dark thought of just, oh, what if this happened today? What would that look like? And starting to imagine that, I think the darkly funny thing to me was that it would suck to be sucked up out of your life and sent to a camp, but you probably day-to-day would just think about how much you miss the internet. It's just the gap between what's actually happening and then what you would be worried about or feel on a day-to-day basis—I think that's kind of where the story lives for me. And even though I think the themes of Mỹ Documents can be quite heavy, I think the way it's character-driven, it can be quite funny and quite light in some ways.

Yeah, I found that really added to the texture of it feeling like real life, because there were horrible things happening, and mundane things happening, and sometimes those things were also funny. Which is what real life is like! I laughed a lot while reading. Did you have a moment or a few moments that you thought were really fun to put in, or that you enjoyed writing?

I think I enjoyed writing quite a lot of it. The concept of the book is pretty heavy, but at the end of the day, it's less about the situation of how it happens and more about how one family deals with it. I think that made for a more compelling narrative, but it also made it more fun for me to write, and hopefully readers can feel that on the page.

I honestly just don't like books or film or music or art that isn't at least a little funny. I think everything should have a good sense of humor, even when the subject matter’s quite serious. That was important to me. I also just think humans are funny. Even in really dark situations or really stressful times. There is a kind of resilience—humor can be a form of adapting or a means of survival.

Another thing that I really enjoyed that I do think is one of those “humans will do this no matter what” moments is these two chapters that were Jen's assignments in the camp. And I actually think she's writing them for the propaganda paper, not even for her underground paper. I thought this was so fun, because of the range of things that were happening—she talks to someone making a video game; she talks to an a capella group. I loved those. I was wondering what it was like to think about those kind of mundane-but-not-quite-mundane things going on in the camp.

I think part of it is that human beings will just make art or create things, no matter what. I think there are a couple things I wanted to push back on—I think people are often like, oh, in dark political times, people create great art. I actually don't know if that's true, or if that even matters. I think the act of creation is very powerful and it's just something human beings are going to just do. I don't know, I had this theory that humans either make art or they make garbage, but they're always producing something.

And the other thing too is in reading a lot about Japanese incarceration, a lot of the narrative, if you do get taught it at all, is about how sad everyone in camp was. And that's certainly true. But at the same time, there were these baseball leagues in Japanese camps, people were writing poetry, there were newspapers or publications. So even in really tough situations where people are literally incarcerated, and don't know when they're going to get out, they still find ways to make forms of culture. And I think that's both that people can't help themselves, but also a means of adapting and surviving.

I really like what you said in the beginning, because it is true that some of the art or whatever that she's looking at is just, well, bad.

Yeah, I think in both my books, there's people who make art and I put pieces of it in the book, and then I think it's all depending on the reader. Especially in New Waves, I’ve been told some people think that Margot's sci-fi stories are great. And that was not necessarily my intention. [laughs]

There’s a throughline in this book of people appropriating, or claiming, or reclaiming someone else's story. That's most obvious with Ursula and Jen—Ursula’s journalism career taking off from what Jen writes to her from inside camp—but it also happens at times with people retelling their family or cultural history. I was wondering how you approached that idea.

There's obviously a lot of conversation that's already been had about, what right do we have to tell other people's stories? It obviously gets even murkier when it's within family. So on some level it's like, if you didn't experience a thing, can you really tell the story accurately? On the other hand, if we don't pass things down across generations, then how do we preserve these things?

At the same time, I think mechanically in media, in journalism, and I say this as someone that works in journalism and believes quite earnestly in the power of it, the constructs of it do demand that there is a journalist and then there's a source. And the journalist still maintains a lot of power in that relationship. Arguably all the power, right? They get to frame how the story is told, whether it runs at all, and they ultimately benefit more than the source does. That said, I really hope sources keep talking to journalists. There's no free press without that dynamic. But that's just the complicated relationship that I think the book explores. It's not really saying Ursula should not have told Jen’s story or that she should not have reported what Jen had told her. It's just murkier than that. But I do think it's pretty crystal clear that Ursula benefits the most in the end.

I also think it's really interesting that Jen is cut off from Ursula’s journalism, and still does her own reporting in the camp. And she does it in the propaganda paper, and in her underground paper—those are those two different efforts of journalism happening. And then there's also the Vietnamese newspaper, which adds a whole other really interesting layer to the journalism conversation.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of mistrust of what's called “mainstream media” now, and I think a lot of that is warranted. People should be skeptical of powerful institutions. At the same time though, gatekeepers are not always a bad thing, especially when it comes to information and truth. We have all these social platforms where it’s so easy to spread a rumor and misinformation on them. And it's what people eat up, you know? And then when everything looks the same, like everything on Facebook looks the same—you can't tell the difference between something that has been fact checked and reported and gone through a bunch of editors versus just some random thing someone made up and posted on a blog. It all kind of looks the same now. It's all on an equal playing field. It's so dangerous.

Yeah, for sure. I actually was thinking about this recently, because April Fools Day is one of my least favorite days to be on the internet. And I'm like, in this day and age, I don't think we should be doing this. There's already so much fake news!

Yeah, I agree. It's so funny. Do you read the New Yorker? They used to have this satirist named Andy Borowitz. He ran these headlines that were kind of like The Onion. It was really strange because it lived next to more serious journalism, which is fine, I think there can be a humor section, but when it was on the website, it was a little bit harder to disambiguate. And with the New Yorker, 95% of the things there are serious hard journalism and then 5% is just Andy Borowitz, and all that stuff would go super viral and it'd be very confusing to people. And they eventually had to label everything “Satire by Andy Borowitz” or something like that.

Something I found fascinating is that there were times in the book where you were writing about what it means to write as an Asian American, as an Asian, as a minority, and sometimes that came across or it could be read as commentary on the book itself. After I finished the book, I went back and reread the first chapter. There was a specific line I highlighted about how for a narrative “to be compelling, to be important, there needed to be a sacrifice. Something had to be lost.” And rereading that after the book, I was like, oh. I thought that was really interesting how there were many moments like that where it could be commenting on your narrative, on the book itself. I was wondering what that was like to write and how you thought of that when you approached the book.

That's great. You caught the trick! Something I really wanted to do early was have an opening that very quickly contained [the themes] of the book. Hopefully when you finish the book, if you go back and read it again, everything lines up in a way. So I'm glad you did that. I really hope more people do that. You can't exactly put an instruction at the end of the book, like, “Go back and read the first chapter again,” but I'm glad you did.

But no, you're totally right. All the things that Ursula is guilty of or is worried about are things that I'm also doing in the book. I think it's holding this sort of literature accountable as well and myself—not just Asian American literature, but just any, especially in fiction where we are using the experience of our parents, we are talking about identity in this way. All of it is very useful and powerful. I also want us to be skeptical of ourselves.

Did you ever read Tommy Orange's book There There? He does kind of a similar thing. He has a similar opening where it's quite different from the rest of the book. And I remember there was an interview with him where he said something like, “Whenever I got stuck in the book, writing it, I would just go back and revise the first chapter again.” That's the piece of the book that I worked on the most.

Was there anything you read or watched or listened to that had an influence on the writing of Mỹ Documents?

A lot of the direct literary references were more inspiring when I was thinking about the book in its early stages. Honestly, originally, I was rereading Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which is obviously a very different kind of book, but basically it's about this suburb colony on Mars. The structure of it is kind of unusual—it's lots of vignettes. So it's not a straight plot, but characters move in and out of these different stories. Originally I conceived that it would be a story about camp, but there would not be any central characters. That wasn't really working, and it wasn't actually that fun to write for me, because I actually am not that interested in building out a world necessarily. I think this will be a complaint some people have of the book and I think it's fair, but I think they'll want more explanation about the domestic terrorism in the book, more of the politics, more of the world itself. More of how camp works. I wanted it to be about a family that moves through these scenarios, but I think that's a fair thing to want. Yeah, so Bradbury was influential in an early draft.

At the time, because it was the pandemic, I was up really late listening to really weird ambient music, because it made me aware of the rooms I was in and the spaces. I think that's great, how music that's kind of tonal and textural fills a space, and that's what you focus on rather than the melody or the lyrics. Something about that was informing the tone of the book.

And then I think the pandemic was kind of an inspiration too. It’s not about the pandemic, but I think in camp they feel very trapped even though they're surrounded by lots of open space. I think that's a funny dynamic. And that's kind of how I felt, like in the pandemic you’d go outside and walk around, but you couldn't go see anyone. So you were isolated even though you were in a big area.

I think it's been really interesting in the last few years to see how the pandemic has influenced fiction in so many different ways because I think it's come out really differently in different people's writing.

I know, because you know, it takes a long time to write a book. The pandemic started five years ago. So I was kind of in the thick of drafting this, I got a lot of the writing done in the summer of 2020, I think. So I'm kind of curious what the pandemic did to my brain and did to my book.

The decision to not talk about the perpetrators or the attacks that kick off the start of the camps in your book was so interesting to me—it’s something I kept thinking of, how the attacks and attackers were just entirely offscreen. And then when you do bring it up, you do bring up also why that storyline wasn’t at the forefront. I just wanted to say I actually loved that decision. It was really impactful for me in reading the book.

Thank you. I will say that an earlier version of the draft explained a lot more of that. And then I realized it set up an expectation that that was what the book was about, instead of family. And so I pared it way back. So it is actually kind of interesting, because I actually have a lot of details in my head, of what happens and why, that I took away. My dad called and he hadn’t finished the book, but he was just like, “Wait, why is this happening? Why didn't you explain this?” I have the answer, but I don't want to tell him, because it's just not what the book is. And I actually really do think there's a very reasonable kind of reader that will wish there was more of that and I'm sorry that I'm not giving that to them [laughs]. That's just not what the project is.

Were you born and raised in India? I'm curious how the American history stuff hits for you. Like, was a lot of it familiar? Was a lot of it new?

A lot of it was new to me for sure. But we also have a long history of things in our own country that are just definitely not taught to us.

Yeah. I sort of make the point in the book, but yeah, I didn't learn about Japanese incarceration or the internment camps until I got to college. We did an entire year in middle school about World War II and the Holocaust. And that never came up at all. Like, not even for a day. And then in an American history class I took in high school, our unit on the Vietnam War was like two days. You know? So on one hand I want to criticize people for not knowing more of their history, but also, how do you find it if you're not taught in school? How do you just go out there and learn about these things?

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Nirica Srinivasan is a writer and illustrator from India. She likes stories with ambiguous endings and unreliable narrators.

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