The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this;sharp;and touching novel about growing up at;the intersection of ambition and assimilation. Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family, but the truth about their family is much more complicated. As;young;adults, they''re on the precipice of new ventures--Ursula as a budding journalist in Manhattan, Alvin as an engineering intern for Google, Jen as a naive freshman at NYU, and Duncan as a promising newcomer on his high school football team. Their lives are upended when a series of violent, senseless attacks across America create a national panic, prompting a government policy forcing Vietnamese Americans into internment camps. Jen and Duncan are sent with their mother to Camp Tacoma while Ursula and Alvin receive exemptions. Cut off entirely from the outside world, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long dusty days in camp, forced to work jobs they hate and acclimate to life without the internet. That is until Jen discovers a way to get messages to the outside. Her first instinct is to reach out to Ursula, who sees this as an opportunity to tell the world about the horrors of detention--and bolster her own reporting career in the process. Informed by real-life events from Japanese incarceration, the Vietnam War, and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own--much too close for comfort. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism in America, <M&#7929; Documents <is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family.;The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to each other, and to ourselves, after tragedy.

Autorentext
Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novel New Waves. He&#160;is the features editor at The Verge and was previously&#160;a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn.

Leseprobe
Extended Family

Bà N&#7897;i’s story had everything: history, conflict, romance, loss—­all the elements of a compelling tragedy.

During the war, she’d been the one who kept the family safe. Whether it was bribing corrupt government officials or dealing with the sudden imposition of U.S. soldiers, Bà N&#7897;i paid off whomever and cooked meals for whatever foreigner, as distasteful to her as it was, if it meant not causing any trouble.

Her husband was a different story. He was a poet, a brave soul who never lied and held true to his beliefs. Not exactly ideal during a civil war, Bà N&#7897;i used to joke. But she admired his perseverance, even when his convictions put the burden of breadwinning and childrearing on her. Ông N&#7897;i made pitiful money teaching at the university. He was invested in the lives of his students, hosting late night “discussion groups” with them at the bar and returning in the early morning, just when Bà N&#7897;i was getting their own kids ready for school and herself for work. She loved him anyway.

Ông N&#7897;i had been warned by the police, who suspected he was distributing antiwar material. Which, of course, he was, despite Bà N&#7897;i’s pleading. Bitterly, she explained: a man would rather risk everything, including the livelihood of everyone he cares about, than be told what he shouldn’t do.

Saigon fell, and many of Bà N&#7897;i’s friends and extended family attempted to flee. What was the rush, though? The war was over, and the government she’d lived under had lost. But how much worse could this regime change be? The brunt of the violence had ended, and Bà N&#7897;i imagined that it would just be a new set of bureaucrats looking for payouts, and soldiers in different uniforms tromping around the streets. They could leave in time, and on their terms, rather than scrambling for the nearest exit. The French occupation of Bà N&#7897;i’s childhood had left Saigon with a number of cinemas, and with her a love of film. She hoped they could go to Paris.

The North’s sweep through the South had been more vindictive than she’d expected. The Communists seized all of her money and converted her savings into a new, worthless currency. Soldiers ransacked the home she had raised her four children in, taking everything of value, except for the small stash of jewels she’d hidden in a statue of Buddha.

Bà N&#7897;i felt foolish for not getting her family out sooner. Now it would take months to arrange safe passage out of Vietnam. She tried everything, but most of her attempts were thwarted by logistics or made unfeasible by cost. One arrangement involved purchasing a boat with a close friend. That ended in betrayal, the “friend” taking the vessel to sea without notice. Years later, Bà N&#7897;i told this story without a hint of anger in her voice. Maybe the decades since had softened her; maybe she just understood what was at stake. In desperate times, she said, the only thing left was family.

Eventually, Bà N&#7897;i recognized that getting everyone out of Vietnam at once was impossible. But vanishing one by one, that was less impossible. She schemed ways to migrate her children out of the country individually, so as not to be noticed. Paris was not an option without attendance at a French school, but the United States, perhaps out of American guilt, was easier. Her eldest son was granted a visa after enrolling in a university in the Midwest; another son she handed off to missionaries, who promised that he would have a rewarding and faith-­filled life in the States. The next, a daughter, school age, was gifted as a temporary servant to another family that had been granted transit to New England. Each departure took something of her with them, every missing child reducing the breadth of what she could feel. By the time the third had left, Bà N&#7897;i’s spectrum of emotion hadn’t narrowed but washed out, like photographs faded by the sun. Even at the movie theater, where she had most enjoyed laughing and sobbing in the dark, her sensations felt diminished. Bà N&#7897;i told herself she would be restored when she saw them all again, safe.

The last of her children was four years old, too young to be sent off on his own. Bà N&#7897;i arranged an escape for her young son, herself, and her husband by way of a commercial fishing boat—­a journey that she knew would be miserable and treacherous, especially with pirates so eagerly raiding ships now that the U.S. Navy had withdrawn. The hope was that the boat could make it far enough in the South China Sea to end up in a refugee camp in Malaysia, or perhaps Indonesia. This path wouldn’t take them to the U.S. directly, but for Bà N&#7897;i, it was drifting in the right direction.

The plan was to meet at the dock and leave together, as a family. The departure was late on a Tuesday evening, a getaway made less conspicuous by nightfall. But as the moon rose, Bà N&#7897;i still couldn’t locate her husband. She assumed that he was already there and took her four-year-­old aboard. She scanned the deck, but Ông N&#7897;i was nowhere to be found. An hour passed, and he never materialized. Bà N&#7897;i pleaded with the captain to delay, but every minute they lingered increased their chances of getting caught. If she wanted to wait for her husband, the captain said, she could do it on land.

After so many failed attempts to flee, Bà N&#7897;i knew she couldn’t leave opportunities on the table. She hoped that Ông N&#7897;i might eventually find his way to the U.S., to reunite with them later, after she’d tracked down their other three …