Kevin Nguyen’s Mỹ Documents Feels Less Like Sci-Fi and More Like a Warning

Kevin Nguyen’s novel, Mỹ Documents, might be speculative fiction, but the world it imagines feels uncomfortably close to home right now. As immigration raids ramp up and ICE arrests of Asian immigrants triple this year, Nguyen’s story about a government rounding up Vietnamese Americans doesn’t seem too far-fetched after all.

During a recent appearance on The Daily Show, Nguyen talked about how the book blurs the line between fiction and history to expose the dangerous cycles America keeps repeating. The title itself, Mỹ Documents, sets the tone, a pun doubling as political statement. “Mỹ” (pronounced “mee”) means “America” in Vietnamese, so the title literally translates to “America Documents.” “It’s a secret little element for my people,” Nguyen told Interlocutor Interviews.

The novel reflects a near future America where the government detains Vietnamese Americans for no good reason. Nguyen traced the spark of the story back to 2018, during the Trump administration, when the Alien Enemies Act was briefly revived in political rhetoric. That same law, he reminded the Daily Show audience, was used by FDR to justify incarcerating Japanese Americans during World War II. His book asks the question, “Well, what if that happened again?”

As ICE raids dominate news cycles and fear spreads throughout immigrant communities across the country, the irony here feels pretty sharp. Fiction or not, Nguyen’s imagined America sadly isn’t too far off from the one we’re witnessing across today’s news cycles.

Mỹ Documents follows four Vietnamese American cousins whose lives are torn apart when the government starts building internment camps. Through their story Nguyen digs deep into intergenerational trauma and the dangers of historical amnesia. “The foundation of the book,” he said in a recent People article, “is what happens when you don’t learn your own history.” He’s speaking from personal experience, since he didn’t learn about Japanese American incarceration until college.

But the satire goes even deeper beyond the plot. The fictional policy in Nguyen’s story that justifies the mass detention is called the American Advanced Protectionist Initiative, or AAPI, a poke at the smoothing over of the Asian American identity and a way to, as he says, “challenge and muddy up” what that label even means. “The only thing that unites Asian Americans,” he said in his Daily Show interview, “is the experience of racism.”

For all its dark themes, Mỹ Documents isn’t humorless. Nguyen also works a day job as a journalist and jokes that he tries to balance his cynicism with some self-awareness. “When finding a therapist is impossible,” he said, “writing a 100,000-word novel is just way easier.”

In the end, Mỹ Documents feels less like a dystopian novel and more like a mirror. What happens when we forget our history and start to repeat it? As immigration raids terrorize communities and today’s policies echo old injustices, Nguyen’s fiction feels pretty prophetic. The question we should be asking isn’t whether that future could happen, it’s whether, in a lot of ways, it already has.

Watch Nguyen's appearance on The Daily Show below:

Photo by Penguin Random House