“I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s.” This quote by John McCain is a provocative epigraph for the opening of Kevin Nguyen’s novel, Mỹ Documents especially as we are nation of immigrants and given current affairs in our nation.
Since “Mỹ” in Vietnamese can translate to “American” the novel’s title is a play on words alluding to both the affinity and alienation that not only immigrants and subsequent generations face, but anyone trying to find their place in modern America.
Four Vietnamese American cousins, Ursula, Alvin, Jen and Duncan are stepping into this morass. Ursula and Alvin are siblings with a Vietnamese mother and an Anglo father. Ursula looks white while Alvin does not. Ursula is just starting in journalism facing the “climb the ladder syndrome” to the kind of journalism she wants to do. Alvin just got a position at Google, ostensibly the golden key to his happiest future. Their cousins, Jen and Duncan, are Vietnamese looking siblings but their interests and involvements differ. Jen, an entering college freshman is facing her first serious intellectual challenges of Asian American identity. Duncan is a high school senior, a football star with testosterone-fueled aspirations, who is also sensitive to his family and upbringing.
All these spinning facets, and how the characters’ Vietnamese roots influence their attitudes and choices, offer a candid view of what diversity means.
On the first day of his new job at Google in Mountain View, California, Alvin arrives before the doors open. So he wanders into a nearby museum, which spotlights the Japanese Americans in the area and their incarceration in concentration camps during World War II. Alvin engages with the young Japanese American curator, and quickly has ulterior motive of getting her number for a date. But instead of her phone number on a piece of paper, she writes “know your history”.
This is a harbinger for the rest of the story.
When seven acts of large-scale terrorism occur and the perpetrators are all identified as Vietnamese, many Vietnamese, American born and naturalized, are incarcerated in government mandated “relocation camps.”
Prior to this, an editor at Ursula’s first job as a journalist says: “A good story always tells you something about people, how they live, and how they delude themselves.” That would play out in many ways through the four cousins and people around “the camps,” both inside and outside the barbed wire fences. It is intriguing to see how people deal with fear, injustice, ambition, loyalty and power, and to consider how we might act when faced with the same. It is unsettling how moral compromise becomes a recourse for even the most ethical of us in face of survival or the welfare of loved ones.
“Mỹ Documents” cues up its own soundtrack, Kanye West’s “Who Will Survive in America?” Yes, it drops rather tongue in cheek in a light hearted moment of the novel, but it begs the questions of our being: Does our background determine who we are? Do our issues define our identity? Do we really choose our path in life?
The search for truth and perfect love begins at our birth. But many abandon this journey. For it is fraught with distracting but tantalizing untruths, partial truth and imperfect love. Power and the illusion of it, further obscure the path. One must wonder if we so desire the original purity of love and truth, whether we fabricate substitutions in hopes that it still can be real and attainable. Perhaps we all are headed in the same direction.
