In Conversation with Kevin Nguyen

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which forcibly relocated approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent, many of whom were American citizens, to concentration camps, mostly spread out across the West. They would give up their properties and livelihoods and be incarcerated until the end of World War II in 1946.

In novelist and journalist Kevin Nguyen’s latest book, Mỹ Documents, history repeats itself. After a series of attacks on American airports perpetrated by a group of Vietnamese, the U.S. government quickly passes the Americans Advanced Protection Initiative (tongue-in-cheekily known by its acronym “AAPI”), which moves most Vietnamese Americans, including Jen, a college student, and her teenage brother Duncan, to camps across the country. Coincidentally, the duo’s biracial cousins (technically half-siblings), journalist Ursula and tech worker Alvin, find themselves exempt from AAPI. What follows is a surprisingly hilarious and biting satire about race and American xenophobia as well as a fascinating portrait of a family in extreme circumstances.

Though Mỹ Documents is fiction, that it was published at the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, one marked by an avalanche of anti-migrant policies, makes it jarring read. Yes, it’s fiction, we say as we read it, but also, it could happen here, it could happen now. Indeed, as history has shown us, it can happen very easily: just a simple signature would do it.

I spoke with Kevin Nguyen over Zoom about his novel, its publication at this moment in American history, and the role and state of journalism today.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

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Eric Nguyen: Mỹ Documents came out last year. It came out very early in Trump’s second term. Can you talk about the genesis of the book?

Kevin Nguyen: The original concept of the book I came up with in 2018. It was early 2018, so we’re in the midst of the first Trump presidency. And actually, even as far back as then, Trump had evoked the Alien Enemies Act, which is kind of this threadbare legislation that FDR used to justify the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. It ended up where a lot of Trump II’s policies are based on these very archaic things like the Alien Enemies Act to justify a lot of immigration policies, a lot of deportation policies, a lot of things happening with the Supreme Court. But just back then, he wasn’t really acting on it yet. We forget Trump I was a chaotic disaster. They obviously had all of these pretty horrible intentions toward immigrants, towards queer people, but they just weren’t organized enough to act on them in that term.So, I just imagined at the time, “Oh, what would happen if something that resembled Japanese American incarceration happened again?” In a totally separate vein, I was wanting to write a book a little bit more about generations of Vietnamese families.

I thought they were two separate projects for a minute, but then they intertwined and I came up with Mỹ Documents and the concept there is it imagines what if Japanese American incarceration came back under the Alien Enemies Act and this time it happened to Vietnamese Americans?

EN: Now that the book is out and we’ve lived through some of Trump’s aggressive policies against immigrants, what has the reaction been like to the book?

KN: The reaction critically has been really positive. The funny thing is I’m getting a lot of credit for predicting what would happen. None of it is really a stretch. One thing that has been surprising to a lot of people is just how big the Department of Homeland Security is. It’s, I think, the third-largest [Cabinet] department in the country and we’ve lived with it for two decades. Deportations are not new. ICE is not new. Customs and Border Protection is not new. But we’ve never seen them wielded in this way. And so, when I imagined the ways which it could be wielded, it wasn’t so far off from what seemed possible in 2018. It’s obviously horrifying to see it actually be realized now.

When I was writing it, I didn’t actually think that. I didn’t think Trump was going to come back for one. And then two, I didn’t think he would. Even if he did, Trump or a Trump-like organization wouldn’t have the capacity or the immoral backbone to wield it in such a way.

On one hand, I’m thankful and grateful for the reception. On the other hand, it’s just really horrible to see in real life as well.

EN: How has the reaction among Vietnamese readers and Vietnamese community? Because I feel like some Vietnamese people, like some in the older generation, are right-wing and they still seem to be standing behind Trump and his xenophobia.

KN: When I was writing the book, I wasn’t necessarily imagining this is a book for Vietnamese Americans. It’s a book about Vietnamese Americans, but there are definitely things about it where I imagined two kinds of readers who are Viet. One is an older conservative Viet, which there are many of. And I actually am sympathetic from where that comes from. There’s just this fear of communism. There is a confusion about immigration because immigration looks so different for Vietnamese Americans or for many of them. I also imagine this younger politically apathetic Zoomer Viet who has very little interest in their own history or just hasn’t been challenged by it yet because of some of the perceived privileges of being second or third generation in this country.

EN:As a Vietnamese American, when I first picked it up, I felt like it’s great to have Vietnamese representation, but I feel like at the same time, Vietnamese people in America are kind of a really small [compared to other groups]. Did you get any feedback pushback in terms of making this story about Vietnamese people in particular as opposed to maybe a more visible group in American society, like Latinx immigrants?

KN: I’ll say I feel very lucky in the sense I have a very supportive agent who understood the vision of the book early on. I even texted her the concept of the book before I really started writing much of it.

Then I also feel like more people run into issues at the publisher level, but I’m very lucky to have my publisher One World. They’re actually better known for their nonfiction. They published Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi. They obviously have a very racially aware progressive lens. What’s even more interesting is their fiction list, which has an awareness of that stuff, but the literature does not seek to be woke or whatever. It seeks to be complicated and acknowledge a lot of different identities and viewpoints and experiences. So, I actually didn’t get any pushback in the classic publishing funnel, which I know I’m very grateful for.

In terms of pushback, I didn’t get anything like that from reviews, which was nice. I kind of thought Japanese Americans might be like, “Hey, this is actually a uniquely Japanese American experience and you co-opted it in this text,” which is a little bit part of the provocation of the book. That would be fair to be irked by that, but I didn’t hear anything like that either.

Honestly, the closest thing I got to push back about it was from Goodreads readers. I know they always say, “Don’t read your Goodreads reviews,” but I read them all. A lot of people did not like the confrontation the book has about [the Asian American community], because one of the things the book is doing is it’s also challenging the solidarity of the Asian American community.

I think this really depends person to person. I identify as Vietnamese American. I know people have broader definitions of what that thing is, but I’ve just always seen myself as part of the Viet community. There’s a whole sea of things that separate us from Chinese Americans or Korean Americans or Filipino Americans. I just always felt that. And then as we’ve gotten older, and especially our generation has now just been unified under the banner of AAPI, we talk about it as if this acronym has been something we’ve just always been shouting and it’s a relatively new phenomenon. I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing and nor is it in the book, but the book is complicating that idea. So, the most pushback I got was about that. And I like that there was pushback a little bit.

It’s not exactly like a bomb I’m lobbing, but it’s definitely challenging some assumptions.

EN: I think your book does that. I feel like I went in expecting one thing and you twist those expectations and that’s the kind of fiction I enjoy.

KN: I’m curious, what did you expect?

EN: I felt like I expected a little bit more drama in a way. Not saying that there’s no drama in the book, but the humor really surprised me. With the book’s subject, I feel like there’s a heaviness that’s innate in it that you just go in expecting this is going to be heavy stuff. But there’s a lot of humor that you balance really well. Why did you choose humor in a dystopian kind of story?

KN: At a really basic level, I just like art that has a sense of humor. It shows a self-awareness. It’s also a great way to make something difficult accessible.

But I also think the book is, even though it is a work of fiction, is rooted in a lot of historical research I did.

Honestly, I did more research about Japanese American incarceration than I did in the Vietnam War, although I did a lot of both. The way Japanese American incarceration is talked about in a lot of these texts or these documentaries about Manzanar, they’re just about how depressed a group of people were when they were incarcerated, which is true. But at the same time, you read some of the journals and you read some of the memoirs, and even in these really dire situations, culture emerges. There was baseball in the camps, they were writing poetry, they were fermenting their own sake (that was probably not very good).

Creating. I think human beings inherently can’t stop making things and oftentimes that results in culture. That is both a need and also a survival capacity. And in a similar capacity, we can’t stop telling stories. I think most stories that people tell on a regular basis are jokes. We just can’t help it. The most human thing possible is to tell a joke. So that’s why I wanted there to be a lot of humor in the book.

EN: You touched on the stuff that they did inside the Japanese incarceration camps. You developed those in the novel as well. In the concentration camp in Mỹ Documents, there’s a newspaper, there’s a football league, I think there was a cappella group singing Linkin Park. I feel like I made that last one up.

KN: No, that’s in it.

EN: Those almost become plot points in the book— definitely the journalism part.  Your book has journalists as characters, Ursula is the professional kind outside the camp and then there’s Jen, one of the detainees who is assigned this task of being a propaganda journalist, but also latches onto this underground journal as a writer there.

What struck me was your depiction of modern-day newsrooms where the stories are partly chosen for their relevance, but also probably for their performance and views. In the book, for example, the newsroom puts out an article titled “These People Are Review-Bombing Detention Camps on Google Maps — and It’s Giving Us Life.’

So your novel, in addition to being a book about incarceration camp, it is also a novel about journalism. Can you expand on the role of journalism as you see it in the book, and also in today’s society?

KN: I work as a journalist as a day job and I feel lucky I get to both report and edit journalism and I get to also write fiction. I think of those projects in similar but different ways. What’s funny is they mostly involve me staring at Google Docs and my computer all day!

But the goal of journalism is to find things in the world and make them clearer for the reader. And then the goal of fiction is to take an assumption and muddy it up. So, in some ways, the incentives of great journalism and great fiction are actually quite different.

The new media publication that Ursula works at in Mỹ Documents is called Top Story. The first drafts of it, it was just called Buzzfeed. In 2018, Buzzfeed meant a very different thing than it does in 2025 or 2026. There was a moment where people really thought Buzzfeed is the future of journalism. They did a lot of great journalism. They had a whole news division that was really well-resourced, full of great reporters who were really young, very internet savvy at the same time. They knew how to package stories that The Times was doing, but to a more exciting and younger audience. At the same time, they were balancing the website with all this stuff—all the listicles, all the quizzes, maybe the stuff people today would call clickbait, but there was this vision for a minute, “Oh, this is the future of media.”

What’s funny is by the time I sold this book, Buzzfeed was running out of business. It had IPO’d and tanked and been sold as a lot of things had happened. The ad market collapsed for digital journalism. My agent was like, “You should probably rename Buzzfeed to something else because people are going to see Buzzfeed and they’re going to think about a very different thing.” The journalism moment in this book is really a 2018 to 2022 moment, which seems really specific but really important.

At the same time, the thing that extends past those dates are the dilemmas and conflicts of the kinds of stories that get told, how they get told, who’s assigned to report them. We still struggle with this in the news media industry. Usually, you drop in someone from nowhere who has no context for community to report on that community, so they get a lot of things wrong. I’m more understanding of how that happens. The solution isn’t necessary to have someone that belongs to every community report on that story necessarily. At the same time, the weird dynamic of journalism is like, who benefits from telling a story? And then the truth is the journalist does. It’s their job, they’re paid for it. Sources don’t get paid for a lot of ethical reasons. But the same time, a source talking to a journalist of any kind puts themself at risk and that risk turns into a benefit for the journalist.

I thought that actually is kind of a great literary construction. The incentives are very clear and ethically dubious. And in the book, Ursula applies that thing to get ahead in her career, but she’s also doing it to her family. I just thought that was a rich engine to create real tension between the two cousins.

EN: There was a quote in the book that asks, “Did shining a light on the oppressor really do anything for the oppressed?” The stories Ursula writes are showing what the oppressors are doing, but then people are not really doing anything with these reports and revelations. The camps still happen. That got me wondering: what are the limits of journalism, especially when bad things are happening?

KN: I run into this all the time and not everyone agrees with me, but I think foundationally the role of journalism is to speak truth to power. The way a journalist does that effectively is you go out into the world and you report on what you see. I identify as someone that’s progressive, but I don’t think my job as a journalist is to go necessarily find things that support my progressive worldview. It’s to present them as neutrally as possible, which we know is impossible, but the intention of doing it as well as you can neutrally and then letting readers really decide for themselves from the basis of that reality, how they feel—that is the project of journalism.

Internet platforms and social media have completely warped that foundation or the effectiveness of that foundation, and I don’t have a solution to that problem. I’ve heard people suggest, “Oh, well, you just need to start calling Trump a fascist more often because that’s what’s happening.” And I’m just like, “I just don’t think that’s the solution.” If there are fundamental things that are wrong with journalism, we would just have to entirely rewrite that relationship between the journalist and the reader.

Journalism is still effective even as it is under siege, as demonstrated by the book, by tech companies that are taking all the money that journalistic institutions need to make. It is under siege from a very aggressive and hostile Republican administration. In some ways, it’s under siege from readers who now have this expectation that everything they read should be free and that journalism is a commodity or it should just be sent to the phone. So, I don’t know. I earnestly believe in the core mission of journalism.

EN: What do you think of the state of journalism today, especially in the United States, seeing that it’s tied with corporate interest. Then there’s also the spread of distrust in the media, the spread of fake news, especially with AI, and then there’s this kind of both-siderism that we see a lot in journalism. What is the state of journalism in the U.S.?

KN: I can confidently say that it’s not great. I work at a tech publication called The Verge and it was a little less than two weeks ago acquired by a different media company. My job is in flux, but in some ways, it’s always been in flux. For as long as I’ve been in the industry, things have not been great. It’s been contracting a lot. The job I had before this was at GQ, and in the three years I was there, there were four or five different rounds of layoffs.

I’ve always had this perspective that I’m going to do this thing that I care about and that I think is important for as long as someone will let me do it. That said, I do think (a little bit of this is kind of in the book, even though the book’s not a history of media) people don’t realize the biggest change. People say, “Oh, the change was the internet.” And that’s a little true, but the biggest difference is that most publications made a lot of money on advertising revenue and classifieds.

So, Craigslist came along, took all the classified revenue that basically decimated all of your local newspapers. Then Facebook and Google would come along and they take all of the internet advertising revenue. They have a huge monopoly on it and that’s how your national magazines also made a lot of their money. There’s a very deliberate mechanical thing where the business model was stripped away from journalistic institutions. It’s not just that your favorite magazine did not understand that the internet was important. It’s like there were very powerful tech companies that were buoyed by their stock price that came in and just swept up all of this revenue that used to go to journalists. Everything that’s happened since then has been in a defensive protractive stance in response to that.

All that to say, the state of journalism is dire. It’s never been more important and I don’t know what the future looks like. I think things get really dark as soon as we squeeze these institutions even further.