Instead of constitutional checks or legal boundaries, we get loopholes, tech company workarounds, and executive orders
My Documents | Kevin Nguyen | One World (352 pages).
When I picked up My Documents, I didn’t expect a legal thriller, but I figured at some point someone would invoke the Constitution — some legal challenge, some courtroom showdown. This is a novel about mass detention on U.S. soil. It had to show up.
After all, back in WWII, the Supreme Court infamously upheld the mass internment of Japanese Americans. The case—Korematsu v. United States—remains one of the worst in the Court’s history. Decades later, Chief Justice John Roberts called it “gravely wrong the day it was decided… and has been overruled in the court of history.”
Quick sidebar: that ruling? Still technically on the books. It’s never been formally overturned. And I’m not exactly looking forward to the day it gets cited as precedent.
That legal dark shadow loomed large as I read Kevin Nguyen‘s excellent new novel, My Documents. I kept waiting for the Constitution to show up, for some legal challenge to the mass detention of Vietnamese-Americans imagined in his near-future world. Maybe just as an aside.
Minor spoiler alert: The Supreme Court doesn’t play a role. It’s like SCOTUS doesn’t matter anymore.
Instead of constitutional checks or legal boundaries, we get loopholes, tech company workarounds, and executive “temporary” measures that never expire. Chillingly plausible? Yeah, this time the cliché fits.
History, updated for the Internet Age
My Documents is a prescient yet still deeply grounded look at a Vietnamese American family pulled apart by fear-driven legislation after a wave of bombings hits several U.S. cities.
Kevin Nguyen —features editor at The Verge, author of the well-received debut novel New Waves — writes with sharp control and a dark sense of humor. For his latest work, Nguyen did extensive research on the incarceration of Japanese American citizens in the U.S. during the 1940s, and he doesn’t use his findings in a heavy-handed way.
Instead, he imagines what a mass detention program might look like in the age of the internet. What if the next wave of internment news came from your Facebook feed and a quietly updated policy in your Google employee portal?
That’s some chillingly plausible stuff right there. History’s blueprint for internment hasn’t changed much; only the delivery has.
The Unraveling
This novel isn’t a legal treatise. How policy affects Nguyen’s characters is complex and heartbreaking. Four cousins — Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan — are living their very normal American lives until the bill is passed.
Jen is navigating freshman year at NYU, and Duncan is a rising football star still in high school. Alvin is on the verge of launching his tech career at Google.
Ursula is a junior staffer at Top Story media, churning out beauty listicles like “32 Of Our Readers’ Holy Grail Skincare Products” while the newsroom’s political desk buzzes with stories about mass internment — news she watches from just a desk away.
Jen and Duncan are sent to Camp Tacoma — while Ursula and Alvin remain on the outside. Barely.
History isn’t repeating. It’s updating.
The American Advanced Protections Initiative (AAPI) legislation, coincidentally sharing an acronym with Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, had been introduced by Senate Republicans, and met with little resistance from Democrats. It suspended — only temporarily, of course — the constitutional rights of Vietnamese Americans while investigations are underway. The bill’s legal details remain deliberately vague.
“It Would Be Literally Insane If It Passed”
Nguyen’s satire hits hardest through Ursula’s lens, where the absurdity of her job — “22 Products From Sephora With Such Good Reviews You May Want to Test Them Yourself” — contrasts with the rising fear in her family.
As the political momentum builds for the AAPI bill, the media both fuels and softens the panic:
“Conservative cable media had been pushing hard for it, and though the editorial board at The New York Times had published a piece calling the idea of detaining hundreds of thousands of Americans unconstitutional, the paper had still published several op-eds in favor of it.”
At least The New York Times called the detainment unconstitutional. Someone noticed.
Ursula clings to hope from within the newsroom, where a colleague on the policy desk downplays the bill’s chances. “I know that you’re scared for your family,” Dara, the confident and clear-eyed immigration reporter, tells her, “but it would be literally insane if it passed.”
It passed.
Delivery, Interrupted
The unsettling realism of this updated version of incarceration hits hardest when Amazon becomes a factor. The very familiarity of a company that delivers our everyday needs, now intertwined with such a dystopian policy, grounds the unfolding events in a disturbing reality.This surge in demand, particularly in areas with large Vietnamese populations such as Houston and San Jose, resulted in one of Amazon’s best sales days outside of major shopping holidays.
However, the unexpected crisis exposed the limitations of Amazon’s supply chain, which isn’t designed for non-holiday overload. The surge led to tens of thousands of orders failing to arrive within the promised 48 hours. This left many detainees without their purchased goods.
One all-too-relatable example being a Texas family’s stoop piled high with undelivered, rain-soaked packages after they had already been taken to the camps.
Nomenclature: The Language of Incarceration
The novel pauses the narrative for several pages to reflect on the contentious terminology used to describe the rounding up of Vietnamese American citizens to camps.
Initially, the government pushed “detention,” a seemingly mild term echoing existing immigration policies. Some journalists favored “internment,” drawing parallels to the unjust treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
However, as the American Advanced Protections Initiative (AAPI) gained traction, even progressive media outlets shifted to “detention” for its broader public familiarity.
The most vocal protest groups, particularly Japanese Americans with their own historical trauma, insisted on “incarceration,” arguing it accurately reflected the true nature of these “camps.”
Despite the powerful protests and forceful arguments, the preferred terms like “imprisonment” eventually faded. That left the government and media’s preferred “detention” to shape the historical record. It’s a testament to how power dictates language and history.
Corporate Immunity
The novel offers an especially biting commentary on corporate exceptionalism through Alvin’s storyline, delving into the complex interplay of corporate power and governmental law.
On his first day at Google, Alvin arrives too early for work so visits the Mountain View history museum and meets Lily, the curator, who walks him through an exhibit on Japanese American internment. This scene provides a crucial historical and legal precedent for the novel’s present. When Alvin asks what “interned” means, Lily replies, “‘Well, ‘incarcerated’ is the more accurate word.”
“After the attack on Pearl Harbor,” she explained, “President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, a stark example of executive fiat, which authorized the mass removal of people deemed national security threats to concentration camps.”
Just when Alvin seems destined to follow history — he’s received notification to go to a camp — his employer intervenes, highlighting the legal grey area of corporate protection.
“I have some good news,” his manager Nathan says. “As you know, at Google, we’ve been working very hard to file a B-284 for our Vietnamese employees.” Their legal proposal is approved.
Alvin is safe — not because due process prevailed, or because the AAPI was found unconstitutional, but because of his employee ID badge. In Nguyen’s America, being employed by the right tech company is the new citizenship test, a chilling subversion of traditional civil rights and legal protections.
My Documents is as witty as it is devastating. With biting humor and chilling details, Nguyen reminds us that history doesn’t need to repeat — it just needs a rebrand, a viral hashtag, and a few corporate exemptions to happen all over again.
I reviewed Professor Melissa Murray’s fantastic new guide to the constitution recently. check out the review here.