In “Mỹ Documents” Silicon Valley Surveillance Is a Family Problem

Nguyen’s Internment 2.0 has its own distinct flavor, defined centrally by the presence of technology—at the same time that contraband laptops and USB drives become lifelines to the outside world within the camps, Silicon Valley enthusiastically supplies the surveillance and signal-jamming technologies keeping the imprisoned in line. The world’s reaction outside of the camps, too, is frighteningly plausible—with Vietnamese-Americans making up less than .7% of the population, and exceptions carved out for the well-heeled professional class, it becomes easy for those on the outside to act like 2 million people didn’t just vanish; or worse, to pretend there’s a justifiable reason they did.

In fact, the only stark divergence from our reality in the world of Mỹ Documents is that its journalists seem a lot more principled, courageous, and effective than the ones currently standing by and shrugging as the breathing tube gets yanked out of democracy. Let’s just hope we don’t end up calling this book optimistic.

Tony Tulathimutte: The book takes a pretty satirical view of journalism and in interesting ways, a lot of the characters end up being journalists in one form or another, whether it’s the reporters at Top Story who are covering the internment of Vietnamese Americans. Or on the inside, the Camp Tacoma’s rival papers, Nhật Báo and Korematsu. I was interested in what the book had to say about the role of journalism vis-a-vis atrocities like this.

Ursula’s story reads almost like an allegory of opportunism, using other people’s stories for personal enrichment. The book begins with her getting praised and rewarded for telling her grandmother’s immigrant sob story, which ends up being partially untrue. And on the other hand, Korematsu seems to bring genuine aid and comfort to the interned people. Do you think that there’s something unavoidably exploitative about reporting on atrocities like this? Or is it more of a matter of how it’s practiced and incentivized?

Kevin Nguyen: I don’t even think it’s necessarily reporting on atrocities, specifically. I think the construct of journalism — and I say this as someone who works in it and admires the field and believes in the importance of a free press — that when a source talks to a journalist, the person that benefits the most in that interaction is always the journalist. The journalist is the person in a position of power.

And that ranges everything from people within the current federal government leaking stories about what’s going on with Elon Musk, all the way to people just telling their stories about the diaspora. I want those stories to be out there. But at the same time, the power dynamic of journalism always benefits the writer.

TT: Could you say it benefits the journalists even more so than the people who are reading the journalism? Because in a way, journalism does save the day in this book. It’s implied toward the end that it plays a part in rolling back some of the atrocity, right?

KN: Yeah, it does. I tried to thread the needle on that in the book. Journalism as a practice is very powerful. But there are still ways it is exploitative and there are still ways that the people who practice it can be selfish and can be power seeking while still doing the good work.

TT: Yeah. And I mean, I think it’s especially underscored in this book because Ursula’s getting all of her reporting, at least at first, from her own cousin who’s interned and actually doing all of the sort of legwork and sticking her neck out, and not really getting the credit for it. It’s like, “Oh, I just had somebody talk to me, but my own family member sort of risked life and limb to get the information to me and I’m reaping the rewards for that.”

KN: The construction of the book heightens that dilemma. I constructed a scenario in the fiction of the novel that kind of makes it the most extreme. So usually when a source talks to a journalist, they’re able to see the product quite immediately and the effect of it. And because of the setup of Mỹ Documents, the characters in camp don’t see the effect of the journalism until much later.

TT: The first thing I wondered even before I read the book was, why would Vietnamese people be singled out to be put in internment camps? There isn’t an immediate paranoia or legacy of Vietnamese guys specifically being domestic terrorists on U.S. soil. What I found interesting was that the book doesn’t actually really answer that. It lays out what they did and how they did it, but stays pointedly ambiguous about why they did it, Though there are some gestures at online radicalization and misinformation. But I’m curious about the choice to leave it ambiguous.

KN: In talking about this book, a lot of people have called it speculative fiction or dystopian, which I don’t think are inaccurate genres or frameworks. But the reality is, the scenario that happens in the book is one of policy. And whether you believe that thing would be enacted today, that’s up to you. But it was enacted during World War II, right?

TT: All it took was something like Pearl Harbor to make it happen.

KN: And it singled out Japanese Americans who had nothing to do with the attack on Pearl Harbor, right?

TT: Right.

KN: And so, in a way, it’s actually quite random who was affected. And it’s also interesting that it actually fell along basically ethnic and national lines. So in a strange way, the book kind of plays a little bit with the idea of Asian American solidarity. The universe of the book believes that Asian American solidarity and identity can be a real and useful thing. It’s also a construct. And that’s sort of the weird dilemma of solidarity in general.

TT: It was a construct devised explicitly for the aims of political solidarity, right? In the ‘60s by some Berkeley kids.

KN: And the usefulness of it just depends on the situation. In some ways, you and I have a lot in common because we’re both Southeast Asian Americans from Massachusetts, but in other ways it’s also kind of bullshit. What does Vietnamese culture actually have that much to do with Thai culture? And these are already, in a lot of people’s minds, two cultures that are conflated. There are just other ways to divide these experiences, along the waves of immigration, and we almost never do that. Instead, we just think about these former national or ethnic lines.

TT: Yeah. I mean, there’s a nasty historical irony in the conflation of the two, since Thailand was pretty much a de facto air force base for the US during the Vietnam War.

Now let’s consider the other side of the internment act. I thought it was very funny that you expect to see these evil mustache-twirling villains who’ve authored the policy, but they’re largely absent. Except for John McCain, or a kind of alt-historical version of him.

He’s only referred to as the War Hero. He’s one of the big proponents of the AAPI bill that institutes internment. So I guess it’s a two-part question. One, can you talk about the choice to generally leave the villains in the story faceless? And two, does the choice of John McCain as one of those few faces constitute a sort of payback? I mean the guy would not stop calling Vietnamese people quote-unquote gooks until his dying day. Is this a reckoning with that fact that never seemed to drum up that much outrage?

KN: “Payback” is maybe strong, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate. I think especially when I was writing this over the past five years, there was an emergence of this kind of “good” conservative Republican war hero type, and John McCain has come to represent that thing. Yeah, I obviously think that thing is bullshit.

TT: It’s almost not even fair to just single out Republicans. There’s also John Kerry, you know?

KN: Yeah. But I think to your earlier point too, I did want to balance some things where certain touch points would feel specific enough to make the world in the book feel grounded. But I also didn’t really want it to be about how Republicans are terrible and they’re the war hawks or whatever. More than that, I wanted this to be a family story more than it is about what caused instigating conflicts in the book. This is a story about the tensions between the characters rather than about how—or if—they get out of camp.

TT: A different angle on the notion of facelessness comes in the form of Big Tech’s role in the internment. In the middle of the camp there’s this giant obelisk called the Tower that blocks all sorts of incoming and outbound Wi-Fi and cell signals. The company who runs it is pretty much a fictionalized version of Palantir from what I could understand. But Google gets involved too, and they’re named outright in the book. So can you talk about how—especially vis-a-vis the recent tech oligopoly in government—tech becomes the executor of these government policies?

KN: The masks came off so fast and so hard this year that I think that things I was trying to get at are just… they’re really out there in the world in a way they weren’t a year ago. But a lot of the book too is a send up of very stereotypical Asian American ambition and assimilation. So I think a lot of Asian Zoomers, they really want to work at these big tech companies, right?

Because these are lucrative jobs, they’re prestigious and people don’t often think about the implications of what these companies are doing, hidden behind these guises of progressive values. As we’ve seen certainly in 2025, all those values went immediately out the window as soon as President Trump threatened tariffs. So that was a little bit about naming Google specifically. I mean, I also briefly worked at Google and it was really interesting being there, mostly because so many people in my family were like, “You made it. This is the job.”

It pays well. I wasn’t really that high up, so it just paid fine. But it was kind of the new Goldman Sachs in that way. Actually being there, it was a tremendously dim and boring place to work. So I think part of it was sort of reckoning with that gap. So I put a little bit of my personal life in there in that sense.

TT: It’s useful in thinking about that fissure in Asian American solidarity that you were talking about before. There’s no starker divide than, Are you one of the ones who has to go to the camp or not? And the ones who are spared are the ones who have jobs that are considered useful for the prevailing order, like how Ursula and Alvin work for journalism and Big Tech. Is this a comment on conditional privilege or how privilege for Asians is conditioned on work?

KN: Yeah, it’s conditional privilege. It has a lot to do with work. It’s also, I think Asian Americans do it to themselves as well, right? I think there’s a strong belief among Asian Americans that they can transcend identity or the way they are perceived by almost fulfilling the stereotype of what Asian Americans are supposed to be.

TT: I would not even necessarily restrict it to Asians in that I think that a lot of America or what we call the American Dream is premised on the idea that working really hard will make you the exception, will make you successful. You should not resent the ultra wealthy because you could be one of them as long as you grind. But it’s just that here, it’s focalized through whatever stigmas may exist, being an immigrant or looking different and so on.

KN: I think there’s just a very specific Asian American flavor of it that pervades the book.

TT: It’s this weird combination of doing an exceptional job, but not being seen doing it or expecting any commensurate reward, just stability. That seems to be the bargain.

KN: A lot of those jobs tend to be engineering jobs, which have been celebrated because they are so lucrative, but they’re actually quite vocational. Especially when you work in a place like Google, they tend to be very uncreative as well. And they don’t involve a lot of leadership or other things that tend to actually be evaluated in the workplace. It’s like engineers just tend to be very well paid worker bees by definition.

TT: To speak a little more on this idea of solidarity, there’s also the rivalry between Jen and Dennis or between the two sort of rival papers they run within the camp, Korematsu and Nhật Báo. One way to read it would be sort of a historical rhyme of the Vietnam War where you see this factionalism between people of the same culture, although obviously, it’s along different ideological lines. It’s not all that easy to interpret, though, because Dennis is so mysterious. We don’t know what’s in the paper. And he does seem to come as close as it gets in the book to a villain walking around that people have to deal with. 

KN: I read a lot about Japanese incarceration. And you can kind of tell part of the imagination of the book is evoking what that would look like today. The book is an echo of Japanese incarceration, right? And a lot of the book is also these Zoomer characters trying to live without the internet. But what actually ends up happening in some ways is they create a lot of the dynamics of the internet within camp. And I don’t even mean that in a negative way. I think human beings, they just like to make things, whether that is art or stories or garbage, it’s just kind of a necessity of being a person.

And so even when they’re constrained in these detention camps, they’re still doing that thing. And then from within that, especially when you tell stories, Jen ends up recreating the same power dynamics of journalism and what she does, and then in ways, what she’s creating is maybe valuable from one perspective. But then Dennis comes along with Nhật Báo and he believes what he’s creating is powerful too. And I think the lines are a little tricky or they’re just not that clear about when you create something that you feel like is doing good for a community of people or readers — at what point does the doing good justify selfish and power-seeking behavior?

TT: It’s not all that different from the zeal people get for nation-building projects or the idea of capitalism triumphing over communism. And by that token too, I guess a good note to close on is that the book seems to suggest that a lot of good that is done in the world and a lot of the life worth living occurs either in the cracks of institutions, or entirely outside of them. Some trace of this notion is in every plotline. Alvin is able to smuggle an important document out of Google through this kind of unethical move of taking the computer of the woman he’s been hooking up with. In the camp, a kid makes movies on his phone, and people watch K-dramas and Superbad on contraband USB drives. Korematsu gathers in the unused swimming pool to smoke these tiny, miserable little joints that are probably all seeds and stems. And then there’s El Paquete, which is an impressive organization that’s trafficking things in and out of the camp, but is by the standards of industrial commerce, probably pretty small and purpose-driven. The last example would be Jen and Dan, who drop off the grid altogether at different points. So is there an ethical way to exist in an institution, especially a really big one, like Big Tech or the government or media? Or is it the kind of thing where at best, you just sort of malinger and drag your heels?

KN: Yeah. I was reading a piece today that I would say quite ungenerously described all of Sally Rooney’s work as trying to be good under late capitalism. It’s not incorrect. I think her books do a little more than that. But yeah, I think this is a book that starts in a place where right and wrong seem fairly clear cut, and then quickly it’s clear that oftentimes doing the right thing is actually quite harmful to a lot of people. And then sometimes being selfish is actually an action that ends up helping a lot of people or doing a lot of good.

Everything in the book plot-wise is muddy in that way. The book is very un-prescriptive about moralizing these kinds of things. It’s more like wrestling with a heightened reality of what we’re living.

TT: It did seem to me, in different ways, that for Jen and Dan, it was what they needed, not what would be categorically good for everyone to do. Although, who knows? Things are getting very shitty.

KN: I’m kind of in that phase of pre-publication where I’m getting text messages and emails, and I think now they’re some strangers who are sending me DMs and everyone keeps talking about how “timely” the book is. They mean it kind of in a complimentary way. I definitely don’t write fiction to meet a specific moment and certainly not to predict this one.

TT: Yeah, I mean, it’s not really possible to be timely on the same reaction cycle as any other medium. If you sold a book today, it wouldn’t be out for two years.

KN: Right. Someone said the book was prescient, and I know again, it’s supposed to be complimentary, but this kind of thing has happened before. And just imagining it happening again is actually not a great stretch of imagination. A lot of the book is about these kids learning about Japanese incarceration for the first time by experiencing it. And I think if there’s actually a lesson here: it’s how that history has somehow been swept under the rug, even though it’s in plain sight.

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