Seen in a soft light, Ocean Vuong’s life looks like a modern American fairy tale. In 1990, he and his mother came to this country as refugees from Vietnam. They landed in small-town Connecticut and began muddling their way through an existence limited by low-paying work and cultural and personal alienation. Vuong seemed destined to stay stuck on society’s margins. Until, that is, he discovered literature and his own enormous gift for writing.
Now Vuong is one of the country’s most esteemed poets, winner of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. a “genius grant”) and a tenured professor in the creative-writing department at New York University. His bittersweet debut novel, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” a marvel of emotional and narrative compression published in 2019, became a best seller and, over time, a bona fide millennial classic. All this, and he’s only 36.
But there’s another side to Vuong’s narrative, one that doesn’t resolve so neatly. It’s that side of his history that informs his new novel, “The Emperor of Gladness,” which will be published on May 13.
At 400-plus pages, with a large cast of characters and comedic set pieces and touching on fast-food jobs, elder care and the static nature of most American lives, “Emperor” is a bigger book in every way than Vuong’s first. It also provided the occasion for what turned out to be one of the most emotionally intense interviews I’ve ever done.
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Your new novel is based in part on your experiences working at fast-food restaurants. Where did you work? I worked at a place called Boston Market and a place called Panera. I was living in HUD housing with my mother and my brother. It was this situation where if your family income surpassed [a certain minimum], then you can’t live there anymore. In the summers, I worked on a tobacco farm, which was $9.50 cash, no Uncle Sam involved. You confront, as a teenager, this antithesis of American prosperity and upward mobility where it’s like, “Don’t make too much money, or we’ll be homeless.” So I went to Boston Market, which is a very eye-opening experience of American life.
What did you learn about people from working there? What I learned was that a huge portion of how this country is formed is through circumstantial family: labor, this arbitrary cobbling of strangers thrown together. Human beings, no matter where they are, will find relationships. A month in, you’ll start to know whose cough belongs to who. You’ll know when Joe’s deodorant will wear off. There’s nothing more intimate than that. But you’re also dependent on each other. Especially when you’re about to close and a bus pulls up and it’s a bunch of Catholic-school kids after their prom. There’s a kindness that arises out of that. There’s also a deep frustration.
What’s the frustration? Underneath it all, every employee knows this is not the way out. It’s the elephant in the room. The manager is paid a little more than us. At that time, they were paid maybe $13 to $15. We were paid $7.15, but the suffering that they went through showed us it wasn’t enough. I watched someone get promoted and then turn it down. It was a grand thing where the manager was like: “We’re going to promote Jennifer today. Welcome, Jennifer!” and she’s just like, “I don’t want it.”
I worked as a waiter for a catering company, and so much of what you just said paralleled my experience. You’re thrown in with this group of disparate people, but somehow you make it work. And you learn so much about people from the way they treat their presumed subordinates. The fast-food restaurant obfuscates the workers’ humanity, because everyone is in a uniform. Your most valuable asset is your hands, not your personhood. What I’m interested in, in this novel and in general, is when humanity breaches these moments. Until the end of my life, I will remember this one moment: I was being trained by this man. One day we were cleaning the freezer, and I don’t know what to do with this fact; I didn’t put it in the book, because sometimes life is both cornier and more dramatic than any fiction. It’s been haunting me for forever. I’m 19, we have our backs together — the freezer is maybe six feet wide — and we’re cleaning and talking about family. He stops and says, “This is something I can never tell my wife.”
Uh-oh. He says, “I have three sons, and I only love one of them.” I don’t know how to receive this. I said: “Oh, OK. Why?” He says, “I don’t understand it, but I knew it early on.” Why did that happen? Why in a freezer in East Hartford, Conn., does a man tell me something that I think has only been uttered in that freezer to this day?
That story and your book connect to a larger question I have about the country: What do you understand about places like East Hartford that doesn’t get communicated widely enough? As a culture, we always want this grand arc: rags to riches, gets the girl, gets the guy. I wondered if I could write a book that didn’t have improvement arcs, because it aligned with my observation of my communities. My brother has worked at Dick’s Sporting Goods his whole life. My stepdad works at this auto-parts company. For 25 years, he worked from 3 p.m. to 12 a.m. We want stories of change, yet American life is often static. You drive the same car, people live in the same apartment, but it doesn’t mean that their lives are worthless. This book — it’s not a spoiler to say that nobody gets a better job, no one gets a raise. So what happens? I’ve been interested in this idea of kindness without hope. What I saw working in fast food growing up in Hartford County was that people are kind even when they know it won’t matter. Where does that come from? I watched co-workers get together and dig each other out of blizzards. They could just dig themselves out and leave, go home sooner, hug their families, but they all stayed, and they dug each other out. What is kindness exhibited knowing there is no payoff?
Where do you think it comes from? I don’t know. My brother has it. I had a desire to understand goodness, but I never had it the way my brother does. I’ve been in dicey situations in my life where I realized early on, I just don’t have it.
Situations where you exhibited cruelty? I don’t know if it would be cruelty, but anger, rage, certain desires that would have never exhibited in my brother. There was a moment when I was 15 — I’ve been trying to articulate this for so long, and your question is putting me down the slippery slope. I’ve been trying to articulate it, because it’s important, but I’ve been ashamed. People ask me, why did you become a writer? I give the answer that makes sense: I went to Pace University, I tried business school because I wanted to help my mother. I couldn’t do it, and I went to Brooklyn College and to an English department, and then I became a writer. That’s not untrue, although I don’t know if it’s honest, and your question is now bringing me to this idea of cruelty and goodness. There was this one event when I was 15 that I think altered the course of my life, although at that time it was not an epiphanic moment. But the desire to be a writer probably started with the desire to commit myself to understanding suffering.
What was the moment? I’m trying to be eloquent. I don’t know if I will be. I’ll say it first, then describe it. When I was 15, I decided to kill somebody.
Oh, my God. I didn’t do it. Ah, my God. [Long pause.] I was working on the tobacco farm, and I rode my bike every day. It was five miles out. You wake up at 6 in the morning. I rode my bike, and I went to work mostly with migrant farmers. You’d get paid under the table, and if you show up every day, you get a $1,000 bonus at the end of the season. It was this hot July evening. I was in my room and I look out the window and see that someone has stolen my bike. It was someone I knew in our neighborhood. He was a drug dealer. You would put your bike outside on the stoop when you’re running in and out, and this guy was known to grab your bike, and there’s nothing you could do about it. But I snapped that day. I saw him, and I was so angry, because I knew: I’m not going to get this back, I’m going to lose my $1,000. For context: My mom made $13,000. I go outside and say, “Give me back my bike.” And essentially he said, “Eff off.” I lost it. I went across the street to my friend Big Joe’s house. I knocked on his window. I remember putting both of my hands on the windowsill. I have no shirt on. I’m sweating, I’m so angry, and I said, “Please let me borrow your gun.” [Vuong begins to cry.] I’m so sorry.
Can I give you a hug? [Vuong and I embrace.] I appreciate that you’re being honest, but if it’s too much, we can stop. OK? I think what I’m trying to get at is that I didn’t become an author to have a photo in the back of a book. Writing became a medium for me to try to understand what goodness is. Because when I was begging my friend, “Please give me your gun,” he said: “Ocean, I’m not going to do that. You need to go home.” What was so touching to me is that I was not responsible for that. Someone else’s better sense saved me. In Buddhism, we have this idea called satori.
Explain what that is. Satori is kind of enlightenment in life. These moments of illumination: Lying in bed at night, and all of a sudden you realize, I need to be a better partner, a better brother, be more patient, stop being petty. Then you wake up and life happens — a bad work email, someone’s being annoying — and you lose sight of all of that. So satori is a brief window, and the idea for Buddhists is to allow the understanding in that brief window to alter your life. I think I was spared because of Big Joe’s satori. You tell yourself you’re in control of your life, but moments like that happen and you’re just like: Wow. I don’t know that it was up to me that I got here. A week after that, I went to the public library. I would take my grandmother. She would go to the library and steal pictures of Buddha and frame it for her altars. I started reading Buddhism books. I was deeply interested in understanding suffering, and Buddhism was so enticing for me, serendipitously, because [in] the four noble truths is “life is suffering.” I was like, Oh, my God, yes. I wanted to be a monk. My guidance counselor persuaded me to go to community college. My first class there, the syllabus was Baldwin, Annie Dillard, Foucault. And I realized writing was not writing a respectable email to get a job. It was a medium of understanding suffering. That’s when it changed.
As we move forward, you tell me if you need a break or if anything feels too intense, because I’m looking at my questions and they’re not going to get easier. [Laughs.] I didn’t think I would be here this quick!
The central relationship of “The Emperor of Gladness” is between a young Vietnamese immigrant named Hai and an 82-year-old Lithuanian woman with dementia named Grazina. Hai winds up becoming her caregiver. The novel is dedicated to a real-life Grazina. Can you tell me who she was? She’s my partner’s grandmother. After I dropped out of Pace University, I lost housing. I hesitate to call myself homeless, because it was just two and a half weeks. I stayed in Penn Station for two and a half weeks. One day my partner and I got to Penn, and he was like, “Where are you going?” I was like, “Um, I’m here.” He was like, “Oh, my God.” And I was like, “Well, we don’t have to talk again, this is really weird, I’ll text you.” Then the next day he called me and said, “My grandmother, she lives in Richmond Hill, she will not go anywhere, but she has some kind of illness.” I ended up living there for two and a half years and helping take care of her. We kind of started a family. My partner, Peter, would start visiting more, and I’m like: “Are we dating, are we not, what is happening? I’m living with your grandmother.” [Laughs.] It was kind of beautiful in that we didn’t name it.
You also had the experience of being a caregiver for your mom when she was dying from cancer. What did it teach you? Because I think until we’ve gone through that kind of situation, we can look at it almost as something that’s solely to be endured. It certainly requires endurance, because you are in a heightened place of selflessness and giving with no determinate end. So there’s a kind of faith in the act itself: I’m just going to be here for as long as it takes. But it’s sad, because it should be what is possible without illness — giving your loved one your best self.
It’s not a world away from kindness without hope. Yeah, God, that’s good. Because there is no hope. When I was on my mother’s deathbed, often she was very poetical. She kept saying, “Raise me up.” We have this hospice bed, I’m like, “Mom, it’s the highest it can go,” and she’s like, “Yeah, but keep raising me up.” As a poet, all I could think about was the metaphor. I’m like: Raise you up where? Are you going up there? It changed everything for me.
Did it change the kind of writer you are? I don’t know yet. This is the first book I wrote from start to finish without her being alive. I told myself that I was this avant-garde counterformalist. I saw myself on this high horse. I thought, I write whatever I want, and I was very proud of that. But I realized after my mother passed that I was actually trying to do well in the world so that I could take care of my mom. Everything was strategic: I gotta get this job, I gotta be a professor, I gotta get tenure. And when my mom died, I was like, That was it. Everything was for her, and ultimately I’ve got to ask the question I didn’t want to ask: What would I write for myself? Existentially it’s like, Now what? When I finally got to do what I thought I was doing this whole time, which is writing on my own terms, it felt empty to me. But I don’t fetishize an identity of “writer.” To me, what you and I are doing is the same work. My teaching is the same work. When I give a talk at a university, it’s the same thing.
How do you characterize that work? A kind of sincerity, of figuring this out. I think that’s it. A Buddhist sutra says to engage the phenomena of the world with earnestness. I’ve always valued that.
I know that your mom had a sense of your accomplishments as a writer. But she was illiterate. Do you know if anyone ever read your work to her? I think it was hard for her to be in proximity of my reading and writing, because I was evidence of what she could have done if she had a normal life untouched by war. When I realized that, I stopped reading in front of her, because it was almost mocking. Also, where I’m from, reading itself is a class betrayal. Oh, you’re too good for us. You’re trying to read to go to college. You’re trying too hard to get out.
How did becoming more educated and changing your social milieu affect your relationships with people? David, I still don’t understand it, because I’ve met so few people who’ve gone through it. I tried to explain this to my mother, the loneliness of class movement. It’s a lot of grief. You enter these rooms, and even with my colleagues, they’re all lovely, but it’s hard to explain what we were talking about earlier. I never say that stuff, because I feel like it’s going to stop the room. I feel really alone in these spaces, and then when I come home, no one cares.
What do you mean? Two years ago I was bailing out my cousin. I get a call from my aunt saying, “Come to this 24-hour bail bond.” I’ve never bailed anybody out. MacArthur genius? Who cares? New Yorker? Who cares? In a way, that’s refreshing. I don’t come home as Ocean Vuong, the writer. I come home as Ocean, the nephew, the cousin who’s gonna bail me out, the cousin who’s gonna buy my new Yeezys.
Is there any way in which your awareness of the cruelty that you had inside yourself, which we talked about earlier, gives you an understanding of the strain of our culture in which cruelty has become almost fashionable? Yes. I was in a world where anger, rage and violence was a way to control the environment for people who had no control of their lives. A lot of them were hurt and wounded. Another memory, and I think about this often, was seeing a kid get jumped for the first time. I was maybe 12, 13, and there was a kid called D-Nice. I remember a group of 15, 20 kids, they went up behind him, pulled his shirt over his head and then went in — a flurry of fists. So much of that was close to me. I had to look at it. It behooved me to understand it. So when I see cruelty, I look closer and I say, Where is this coming from? A lot of times it comes from fear and vulnerability. You’re too scared, and you have to strike first. In a way, I have great compassion for that, because the doorway through violence has always been suffering. I’ve never seen anyone commit violence and feel joy after. But it’s almost like the doorway’s in the middle of a field, and you’re like, My goodness, I can take one step to the side and the whole world is before me. There was a threshold in front of me that day with Big Joe. In a way, my career so far has been a slow attempt at stepping back from that door.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
You can listen to an excerpt from Ocean Vuong’s new novel, “The Emperor of Gladness,” on the New York Times Audio App.
Director of photography (video): Tre Cassetta
David Marchese is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a regular series featuring influential people across culture, politics, business, sports and beyond.
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