Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Episode 108: Weird Era feat. Kevin Nguyen
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Episode 108: Weird Era feat. Kevin Nguyen
About Kevin Nguyen:
Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novel New Waves. He is the features editor at The Verge and was previously a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn.
About My Documents:
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.
View all episodes
By Weird Era
4.4
77 ratings
About Kevin Nguyen:
Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novel New Waves. He is the features editor at The Verge and was previously a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn.
About My Documents:
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.
More shows like Weird Era
View all
This American Life
90,855 Listeners
Ask Penguin
141 Listeners
Bookends with Mattea Roach
241 Listeners
Otherppl with Brad Listi
530 Listeners
Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry
476 Listeners
On the Media
9,257 Listeners
The Gray Area with Sean Illing
10,708 Listeners
Death, Sex & Money
7,747 Listeners
The New Yorker: The Writer's Voice - New Fiction from The New Yorker
2,134 Listeners
Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
1,467 Listeners
Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel
14,953 Listeners
City Arts & Lectures
396 Listeners
Culture Gabfest
448 Listeners
Critics at Large | The New Yorker
664 Listeners
Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud
285 Listeners