I would like to know. It feels a little like fanfic (though, fanfic for a real guy who we know almost nothing about) and I mean that more or less in a positive way, where the author clearly loves her characters so much that she needs to write about them until they're out. But I think she also occupies an uncomfortable place vis a vis her Cambodian heritage and being a white-passing but still racialized Other in British society, and she wanted to address that. The result, though, is that she addresses it by having her British-Cambodian first-person protagonist fall hard for a British officer from the 1800s and then puts in a Black character who has a much more adversarial relationship with British government and society. The result is that you have, from an objective point of view, the titular Ministry being Bad, Actually, but also the people fighting back are also bad, and the only good and pure thing is (heterosexual, kinda) love. Which is, I think, not an intentional message at all, because I do think she set out to say something nuanced about race, class, and social mobility as it pertains to institutional structures.