Celebrate AAPI month with author Kevin Nguyen and his new book, Mỹ Documents. Nguyen will be in conversation with educator and AAPI activist Jennifer Heikkila Diaz.
This event is presented in partnership with AAPI Westport.
As an author, journalist, and editor at The Verge, Kevin Nguyen’s work often explores what happens at the intersection of technology, humanity, and culture. His incisive and darkly satirical new novel, Mỹ Documents, couldn’t be timelier—or more engrossing.
A moving speculative novel about a Vietnamese American family confronting ambition and assimilation during exceptionally troubled times, Mỹ Documents gives a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Nguyen, whose work grew from extensive research on the incarceration of Japanese citizens in the U.S. during the 1940s, imagines what a mass detention program might look like in the age of the internet.
When the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans amid a wave of national panic, half-siblings Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan find themselves coming of age during a harsh new reality. While Ursula fosters a nascent career in journalism and Alvin interns at Google, Jen and Duncan are forced into the unforgiving confines of Camp Tacoma, a chilling echo of America’s internment camps. When Ursula begins to use her detained siblings as a rare source of insider information about the camps, her career skyrockets and she is forced to contend with what it means that her success has come at the cost of her own family. As all four siblings have their lives upended, they must adapt to their strained realities and search for a way back to each other.
Mỹ Documents offers a striking commentary on the profound personal impact of political upheaval and tangles with the ethics of journalism and the uncomfortable boundaries of representation and solidarity within a community. Ultimately, this is a story of resilience and how we return to each other — and to ourselves — after tragedy. Nguyen deftly channels the uncanny worlds and emotional heft of some of other haunting contemporary novelists — Kazuo Ishiguro, Emily St. John Mandel, Ling Ma — while writing with alluring humor distinctly his own. (The title itself is a sly joke, with Mỹ being the Vietnamese word for “America.”)
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Kevin Nguyen is features editor of The Verge, and was previously a senior editor at GQ. He has edited stories that have been finalists for the National Magazine Award and the Pulitzer Prize. His debut novel, New Waves (2020, One World), was one of NPR’s Best Books of the Year in 2020, and was widely celebrated for its mordant humor, fierce intelligence, and stylish prose. Author Bryan Washington called it “a delight and a gamble and a treasure and a miracle.”
Jennifer (JHD/Jenny) Heikkila Díaz (they/she) is a professional learning coordinator for the Connecticut Council for the Social Studies and a facilitator of statewide teacher communities as a member of the Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Collective Steering Committee and as a UConn AAASI Activist in Residence. For nearly 25 years, JHD has worked as a K-12 public school teacher, school administrator, and educator coach in Baltimore, South Central Los Angeles, Long Beach, Echo Park, Queens, and across Connecticut. They are a New Havener and co-chair of the Asian Pacific American Coalition of CT (APAC). Their lifelong commitment is to backing youth, who envision an even more joyful and just world than they do.
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Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
Reading and Learning about Anti-Racism
Own Voices
