The desire to avoid topical novels is understandable during fraught times: So many readers turn to novels as an escape from our endless news cycle, and the last thing some might think they want is to dip into fiction grappling with dystopian themes.
But it’s all the more imperative to read such work when the line between contemporary events and fiction blurs. Storytelling grants readers the chance to linger long enough for the horror to subside and a greater sense of empathy and understanding to emerge.
To this end, I’d recommend Kevin Nguyen’s sophomore novel “Mỹ Documents.” Steeped in history and drawn from our terrifying present, it’s as much a coming-of-age story for its characters as it is for the United States, a country that is forever losing its innocence. The brutal phoenix of American history remains constant in Nguyen’s novel. Stuck in a vicious cycle of innocence lost, regained, then lost again, American history reveals itself to be a series of stories told by individuals dependent on inconsistent and unreliable sources.
Curiously enough, one could argue that all histories can be reduced to family histories — with all their inconsistencies and digressions. Here, Nguyen concentrates on the lives of a Vietnamese American immigrant family. This saga begins with hesitation: Matriarch Bà Nôi does not flee 1970s Vietnam in time to keep her family intact. Pressed by shrinking options, she sends some of her children safely away from the chaotic aftermath of war, one by one. At last, she escapes the country by boat with her youngest, a boy. Her flighty, academic husband, a man who “would rather risk everything, including the livelihood of everyone he cares about, than be told what he shouldn’t do,” fails to arrive on time for departure and is left to meet an untimely fate.
Or so family lore has always said was the case. Decades later, with death approaching, Bà Nôi reveals to her college-age granddaughter Ursula that she had never intended to take her husband with her. “Survival is a selfish act,” she stated. Considering life from “the cold distance of history,” Ursula gleaned that “in their family, people were always leaving.” Ursula’s grandmother’s stories had been the focus of countless essays and applications “which got her into several schools she had no business getting into,” but “adulthood meant creating your own narrative, not regurgitating the details of someone else’s.” It was inevitable that in a family whose heirlooms were stories, not material objects long lost in refugee camps, someone would become a writer. Ursula was determined to be a journalist.
The family drama didn’t end happily with American citizenship. Ursula’s father, Dan Nguyen, Bà Nôi’s youngest son, maintained a legacy of abandonment, leaving behind family after family. Born to a white mother, Ursula and her brother Alvin were raised as cousins to their half-siblings Jen and Duncan, the product of Dan’s marriage to a Vietnamese woman; that union did not last either. Despite their awkward relationships, the four half-siblings forged attachments at family reunions and over text and phone calls. When it came time for college, Jen left behind her mother and teenage brother in Indiana to attend NYU so that she could be closer to Ursula, six years her senior. It was a delicate bond; Ursula found that her family was “more of a source of misinformation than fact.”
This fragile balance was soon tested. After a series of brutal terrorist attacks across the United States were connected to a group of Vietnamese Americans, the Department of Homeland Security’s American Advance Protections Initiative (or AAPI — a nod to the acronym Asian American Pacific Islanders) rounded up Vietnamese Americans and placed them in internment camps in undisclosed locations. Alvin and Ursula were spared, but Jen, Duncan and their mother were sent to Camp Tacoma in Independence, Calif.
The reader experiences these plot developments as legal residents of the U.S. are being deported or detained by the current White House administration. Nguyen presciently captures the spark of outrage that dims as the news cycle moves on to the next crisis. News swirls, then dies down. Without any concrete facts, Ursula registered that her family “needed to know what their future looked like and wild speculation was more useful than admitting uncertainty.” Without any firm truth, “You might as well embrace a lie.”
Told in a close third person, the novel’s atmosphere mimics the charged pace of modern life. It’s marked by emotional fervor easily dissipated by distraction, ultimately landing somewhere in the realm of banal compliance with an intransigent devotion to the ghost of the late Sen. John McCain, a naval aviator tortured as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, whose presence lingers on every page of the book as terror moves from fear to revenge.
Rather than slide into polemic or tragic melodrama, Nguyen leans into the tension between the four half-siblings to unpack the complicated roles that surveillance, big tech and journalism play in our fractured modern state. Jen finds a way to leak news regarding camp conditions to Ursula, whose guilt is matched by her journalist’s ambition to rise beyond her work as a beauty writer. Spared thanks to the efforts of his employer, Google, Alvin stumbles upon secret information that reveals suppressed details about the camps. Risk and desperation give the book the fresh edge of a thriller while maintaining its larger focus as an entwined story of family and imperialist history.
Throughout the book, as years wear on and the camps fester, Jen and Ursula both reckon with tangible documents to unlock ugly secrets and forge a new future. Though Ursula rises as a journalist, Jen is the key to her success. Spiriting information to Ursula, Jen writes a propaganda rag to cover her tracks as she simultaneously writes an underground paper as a means of resistance. While each makes consequential compromises in the face of survival, it’s Ursula who never fully grasps the extent of the experience of life in the camps. No matter how skilled you are, there’s a vast difference between observing and exposing truth and living it. Jen, too, struggles to distinguish between clinging to facts and surrendering to feeling. Forgiveness is a final stumbling block for both women, whose independent streaks flatten out a desire for community when they need it most.
But it’s Alvin, engineer and historical enthusiast, who distinguishes that “every war story was a systems story, usually one of a breakdown. Intentions were always good; decisions made at scale.” Hence, history repeats itself when people participate in hateful deeds under the banner of fighting for “the soul of a nation.”
Nguyen laces “Mỹ Documents” with the varied ways memory is captured: government departments, maps and information curated by tech companies, plays, newspapers, newsletters, books, family stories, texts and jokes. Frustratingly, even this flood of concrete evidence struggles to serve as a bulwark against fascism and demonstrates the contradictory definitions of freedom and the privilege of feeling in America. Family is so often our greatest defense and comfort, but even that is not always enough when survival is on the line. The word “Mỹ” is the Vietnamese word for “America,” and its messy connection with personal possession and subjectivity isn’t lost in this rich, gripping novel that lands squarely as a mirror of our contemporary moral squalor.
LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.