Review of My Documents by Kevin Nguyen

*My Documents* by Kevin Nguyen (2025). Published by One World.

Welcome to my latest blog post! If you’re new here and stumbled on this blog through a random Google search, probably about this book and/or author, my name is Ashley. I started this blog while working as a film critic at an online outlet, then branched off to do my own thing because I saw my interests were diverging. If you’re one of my avid readers, I’m glad to have you back yet again.

The early half of 2025 is an unexpected one. For those who have been around on the blog for a bit longer, you know that I lost a job opportunity back in late 2024, and then I managed to not be able to find a job for a good chunk of the first half of 2025. Not a great time to live in the United States and focus on international and public policy, especially when it comes to development.

So I spent this time catching up on my blog. I am so grateful to be in the financial situation where I can sit back for a tiny bit and write for a while, focusing on my writing career and trying to plot out what the future has ahead of me when it comes to one of the few things it seems I can control in this moment.

I spent a lot of time at the library, checking out movies and books, but I also was sent a handful of advance copies here and there. While I do get direct emails from publishers asking about if I want a physical copy of a book here and there, I find that I prefer my advance copies to be sent straight to my Kindle.

While I appreciate free books, I want to be more mindful about what I’m consuming, as well as what I am bringing into my tiny childhood bedroom. There’s only so much room I can dedicate to books, and I have already crammed about 400 books into this small space.

My Documents is one of those books I got as an advance copy. This review is going to come out on publication day, as that’s how I tend to time my reviews for advance copies, but I received my advance copy through NetGalley a while back before it was released. It was a book I procrastinated reading because I had a pile of other books, and well as job applications, to wade through.

But man once I got to this book, I flew through it. I finished it in less than a day.

I don’t want to ramble in the introduction, so let’s get into the review! I am grateful for the publisher, author, and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. I truly do not take these opportunities for granted.

The individual perspectives of one Vietnamese family as racial internment begins in the United States.

I want to apologize in advance because in this review, I am unable to include the proper accent marks for Vietnamese names. I mean no disrespect, and I know accent marks are critical for being authentic to the language and power of a name, but my computer simply doesn’t have the capabilities of including all of the proper tones and marks.

With that said, this is a novel about liminal spaces in some ways. We open up the narrative about how a woman fled Vietnam during and after the war, slowly sending away all of her children so that they can get out, but then she was left with her husband and small child. She gets on a boat to leave with her child, but then her husband never shows up. Or so we think.

Years later, her son grew up to have many children in the United States, whose perspectives we get to see throughout the course of the novel. Ursula is half Vietnamese through her father’s side, but because he left them when her brother Alvin and she were young, she doesn’t really know anything about Viet culture and language. She wants to be a journalist, but finds herself in a dead end corner of a publication writing listicles.

Alvin is off in San Francisco trying to make a career at Google as an engineer, which is going to play more of a role in the story later on. And because their father left and had more children, their cousins (who are actually their half siblings) are Jen and Duncan.

Jen is in the same city as Ursula, New York, and is a freshman at NYU. While she hangs out with the Asian club on campus to find her people, she perpetually tries to message Ursula in an attempt to try and connect with her older half sibling. Ursula never really responds to these messages, creating an uneven dynamic between the two from the start.

Jen’s brother Duncan is the youngest, as he’s still in high school. He has immense talent as a football player and might actually be someone who goes far in the world, but everything is about to change. When a group of Vietnamese men lead a terror attack throughout the United States, the government passes a law to intern all Vietnamese Americans.

Jen and Duncan are taking away with their religious mother to a camp in Independence, California, but Alvin is spared thanks to Google’s connections, and Ursula is never sought out after the government. The kids’ father, Dan, also flees in his Land Cruiser and roams the United States with what little he has, contemplating how exactly he got into this situation.

We bounce between their perspectives, especially as Jen finds a way to smuggle information to Ursula, making her a top player in the journalism world because of her connection into the camp. The novel is slightly unrealistic in this sense to me, but I was willing to suspend disbelief for a bit and go with the ride.

The events of the novel then take place in the camp, where violence and tragedy are amped up, and the outside world where Ursula, Dan, and Alvin are trying to find their places and fight against the system in place. Ursula benefits the most from what happens, but Alvin and the others see the consequences of her actions at times.

Overall Thoughts

Reading this novel in March 2025 feels a bit surreal, as I was feeling the current political reality of the United States was mimicking what Nguyen was depicting in the world of the novel. I feel like a lot of people are like Alvin, who don’t know their history, and are unable to see the warnings signs that are happening all around them.

That said, I thought this was a fairly solid novel. The characters and writing are good, but I kind of wished we just focused on Jen and Ursula. I see why Alvin was included, and Dan, but the narrative got a little murky for me when we kept switching perspectives. It also begins to lose its tightness towards the end, even though the pacing is excellent.

I say pick this one up if it interests you for sure. I enjoyed reading it quite a bit, and I could see this being taught in Asian American literature courses in the future, especially when it comes to contemporary politics and the fear of being Asian American in general that’s happening right now.

So go to your local bookstore (preferably indie, but I understand not everyone has access to these kinds of stores) or library and pick up your copy once you have the chance!

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