Organizer: New York Public Library
Type/Location: Hybrid / New York, NY
Description:
The Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (CSER) and Asian American Diasporic Writers Series present a book talk by Kevin Nguyen about his 2025 novel Mỹ Documents, followed by a discussion with CSER’s Writer-in-Residence, Marie Myung-Ok Lee.
Dinner provided. Non-CU affiliates should email cser@columbia.edu to be registered for campus access.
About the Novel:
The paths of four family members diverge drastically when the U.S. government begins detaining Vietnamese Americans, in this “rich, gripping novel that lands squarely as a mirror of our contemporary moral squalor” (Los Angeles Times).
“Comically macabre . . . Nguyen [is] a stellar satirist who takes bold imaginative risks.”—The New York Times (Editors’ Choice)
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, THE NEW YORKER, ESQUIRE
Ursula, Alvin, Jen, and Duncan grew up as cousins in the sprawling Nguyen family. 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 naïve 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 creates a national panic, prompting a government policy that pushes 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, forced to work jobs they hate, Jen and Duncan try to withstand long, dusty days in camp 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 connection as a chance to tell the world about the horrors of camp—and as an opportunity to bolster her own reporting career in the process.
Informed by real-life events, from Japanese incarceration to the Vietnam War and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen’s novel gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism, Mỹ 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 one another, and to ourselves, after tragedy.
About the Speakers:
Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novels Mỹ Documents and New Waves. He is the features editor at The Verge and was previously a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean-American writer and author of the novel The Evening Hero, which looks at the future of medicine, immigration, and North Korea. She graduated from Brown University and was a Writer in Residence there before she began teaching in Columbia University’s Writing Division. She is one of the few journalists who have been allowed to travel to North Korea since the Korean War.
Her stories and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Conjunctions, Smithsonian Magazine, The Nation, and Conjunctions (where she is a contributing editor).
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please register here.
Non-Columbia University affiliates should email cser@columbia.edu to be registered for campus access.